Herbert Read and Selected Works, 4-Volume Set 9781138913615, 9781315691275, 9781138914070, 9781315690971

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Routledge Revivals

A Coat of Many Colours

This book, first published in 1947, is collection of critical essays by Herbert Read that had not been previously published in book form. The essays cover several different subject areas, including literature, art, architecture, and film, from a span of twenty years. This title will be of interest to a variety of readers.

A Coat of Many Colours Occasional Essays

Herbert Read

First published in 1947 by Routledge This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1947 Benedict Read All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 45010341 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

13: 13: 13: 13:

978-1-138-91361-5 (hbk) 978-1-315-69127-5 (ebk) 978-1-138-91407-0 (Set) 978-1-315-69097-1 (Set) (ebk)

Ttsta di Moro

A COAT of MANY COLOURS OCCASIONAL

ESSAYS

BY

HERBERT READ

READERS UNION * ROUTLEDGE

THIS VOLUME was produced in 1947 in Great Britain, in complete conformity with the authorized economy standards. First published in 1945 by George Routledge & Sons Ltd., it is set in 9 pi. Baskerville, 2 pis. leading, and was reprinted at Frome by Butler & Tanner Ltd. It is one of the books produced for sale at a reduced price to its members only by Readers Union ltd., of 38 William IV Street, London, and of Letchworlh, Hertfordshire. Particulars of Readers Union are obtainable from either address

Contents PAGE i.

T H E G R E A T E S T W O R K OF A R T IN T H E

2.

ERIC GILL

3.

KLEE

4.

L A W R E N C E OF A R A B I A

5.

" THE

6.

A R T AND T H E P E O P L E

7.

H E N R Y JAMES

31

8.

A R T AND

36

9.

GEORGE HERBERT .

. .

.

.

.

.

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.

.

WORLD

1

.

5

.

16

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19

SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM "

24

.

27

WAR

10.

CÉZANNE

n.

THE

12.

BOSCH AND D A L I

13.

THE

14.

HAVELOCK ELLIS

15.

THE

.

"PRELUDE"

38 .

.

.

40

IN W A R T I M E

46

.

55

P A R A D O X OF ANARCHISM

59 67

.

F A I L U R E OF T H E W A R

72

BOOKS

16.

WILLIAM MORRIS

17.

B E N NICHOLSON

.

•

79

18.

ENGLISH PROSE

•

87

19.

H E N R I ROUSSEAU

20.

THE

FACULTY OF ABSTRACTION

104

21.

THE

L A S T OF T H E

i n

22.

A R T AND A U T A R K Y

23.

COLERIDGE

.

.

.

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115

24.

VULGARITY

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.

.

.

116

•

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76

99 BOHEMIANS.

114

Contents PAGE 25

SHELLEY

.

.

26

PROBLEMS OF PRIMITIVE A R T

27- M I L T O N

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2 8 . SICKERT

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29- FILM ^ESTHETIC 30- JAMES JOYCE 31.

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128

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132

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•

134

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139

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145

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T H E LANGUAGE OF T H E E Y E .

32. NATHANIEL

•

149

•

154

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160

HAWTHORNE

33-

GERARD MANLEY

34-

T H E P O E T R Y AND PROSE OF PAINTING

35-

D O C T O R FAUSTUS

HOPKINS

.

36.

TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

3738.

W O R D S W O R T H ' S REMORSE REALISM AND SUPERREALISM

39-

A

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. .

• .

166

.

.

177

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182 190

F U R T H E R N O T E ON SUPERREALISM . .

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199

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202 205

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43-

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208

44-

SOCIALIST R E A L I S M .

.

.

.

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212

454 6.

T H E SIGNIFICANCE OF W I L L I A M JAMES

222

T H E P O E T AND T H E FILM

225

2.

47- T H E MESSAGE OF 48. ETRUSCAN A R T 495o.

W A L T E R DE LA M A R E JEAN HÉLION

5 1 . KIERKEGAARD

.

RUSKIN

.

.

196 .

T H E L A T E R YEATS

4

A R T AND ETHICS

163

.

.

40. G E O R G E SAINTSBURY 4 i . M A X LIEBERMANN

119

.

. .

231

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. .

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237

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239

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.

244

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248

vi

Contents PAGE

52.

INDIAN A R T

•

259

53-

T H E ARCHITECT'S PLACE IN A MODERN SOCIETY .

261

H.

.

.

.

.

.

262

.

264

54-

D.

55-

MODERN CHINESE PAINTING

56.

WALTER

57-

T H E TRIUMPH OF PICASSO

58.

T H E INTERNATIONAL SITUATION FICTION . . . .

.

277

59-

ROGER F R Y

.

.

.

.

.

282

6o.

RAPHAEL

.

.

.

.

.

291

6i.

T.

.

294

62.

SEURAT'S " L A BAIGNADE "

•

299

E.

LAWRENCE . .

.

267

•

273

BAGEHOT.

Wí

HULME

.

.

.

.

AMERICAN

63.

STENDHAL

•

305

64.

GEORGES ROUAULT

.

308

65.

A

.

310

66.

PICASSO'S " GUERNICA " .

•

3*7

67.

MACHINE

.

320

68.

ANDRÉ G I D E

69.

T H E DUALITY OF LEONARDO

70.

T H E " AREOPAGITICA "

COMMUNITY OF INDIVIDUALS

^ESTHETIC .

.

.

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.

.

.

•

324

•

329

•

333

7i- ENVOY

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346

NOTES

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350

vii

Continuer à être étonné ; continuer à être neuf et jusqu'au bout devant ce qui est neuf : car tout est neuf pour qui est neuf Ne pas céder à l'habitude, qui est usure et usure progressive : et tout devient poussiéreux et gris, tout devient pareil à ce que nous sommes, tout se ressemble et tout se répète, parce que nous nous ressemblons et nous répétons. Il faudrait que Vhomme ajoutât à l'enfant sans se déprendre de lui, que F enfant subsistât au dedans de Vhomme, qu'il fût une base où construire par adjonctions successives, mais qui ne la détruiraient pas, comme il arrive. Il ne faut pas être seulement un primitif, mais il faut être aussi un primitif Rester "premier" en présence des choses premières ; élémentaire devant Vélémentaire ; être capable ainsi de toujours devenir et non pas d'être seulement : non pas immobile, mais en mouvement, au milieu de ce qui est mobile ; en contact incessant avec ce qui se transforme, se transformant soi-même ; livré comme l'enfant totalement à l'extérieur, mais avec ce retour à soi-même que n'a pas l'enfant, et vers un intérieur où on recueille, où on ordonne. C. F. RAMUZ : " Pages de J o u r n a l " , Fontaine, No. 33 (1944).

Vlll

i. The Greatest Work of Art in the World -FLORENCE was listless a n d oppressive in J u l y , 1939, two months before the outbreak of war. W e h a d come over the Apennines from U r b i n o , a primitive hill-city where we h a d found the exact magic of Luciano's architecture lying like the geometrical perfection of a crow's egg in its nest of untidy sticks. O n the way over we h a d m a d e a vain effort to see Piero della Francesca's Resurrection a t Borgo San Sepolchro, b u t it was already boarded u p , as if waiting for a war. At Arezzo there was a whole festival of Picro's work, a n d I was confirmed in my preference for this Italian painter, who alone h a d succeeded in making the difficult marriage between art a n d science. I n very different circumstances, Seurat was to repeat t h a t success. W e went on to Florence in a stilled mood. I myself h a d exhausted the novelty of its m a i n treasures on previous visits, b u t to m y fellow traveller it was all new. W e m a d e a systematic tour of churches a n d museums, palaces a n d picture galleries, b u t whether it was the heat or mere satiation, or some sense of impending doom, for whatever reason I brought to everything a tired, disillusioned eye. Never enamoured of the H i g h Renaissance, it now oppressed m e : I felt as if imprisoned in some endless maze of meretricious j u n k , from which no life, nothing vital or h u m a n , was reflected. T h e r e is a passage in one of Rilke's letters to a Young Poet which expresses a similar feeling a b o u t Rome. R o m e has a n oppressive a n d saddening effect during the first days because of the lifeless a n d unhealthy atmosphere of museums which it exhales, because of the numberless m o n u m e n t s of the past, which have been hauled out a n d laboriously restored, a n d from which a tiny present draws nourishment, a n d because of the I

A*

A Goat of Many Colours dreadful over-estimation of these deformed and ruined objects, which is supported by philologists and copied by the conventional Italian tourist, though at bottom they are nothing more than the chance remains of another epoch and of a life which is not, and should not, be ours. Finally, after weeks of daily self-defence, though still a little bewildered, one comes to oneself again and one says, " No, there is no more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects, which generation after generation has continued to admire and which the hands of jobbers have repaired and restored, mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value." In such a mood, and on the last day of our stay, I decided to re-visit the Museo Archeologico. Pushed into the background of the city, this unpretentious building houses the original art of Etruria, the art which obscurely emerged from the soil and the people of this region. It had thrilled me on my previous visit : would it now penetrate my fit of boredom, or would it too fail me ? Well, it did not exactly fail me : those bronzes, so lithe and alert, held my attention far longer than any of the sculptures in the Bargello, or any of the paintings in the Uffizi. I lingered in those cool, straggling rooms, and suddenly any impression the Etruscan bronzes had made on me was obliterated by a small object I had never seen before. It was not more than two or three inches high, and stood among a crowd of small objects, unlabelled and unhonoured, in one of those glass coffins with which museums are always furnished. It was also a bronze—the head of a negro boy, probably an African slave—and it seemed to shine there like a glowworm in the darkness of my mood. It was vital : I almost felt, as it fused into my consciousness, that it was alive. What it was—what period and what style—I knew not, and have never troubled to find out. It obviously belongs to that category of vague outlines which we call GraecoRoman, and I like to think it is contemporary with Lucian, 2

The Greatest Work of Art in the World one of those romantic exiles who brought some light and liberty into a proto-fascist world. I believe the artist was, like Lucian, a Greek ; and that it is merely odd that he should anticipate, in his stylistic treatment of the hair, for example, the bronzes and terra-cottas of West Africa— of Benin and Yoruba (not so odd, perhaps, if we remember that Frobenius found striking similarities between the Yoruba and Etruscan cultures and elaborated a theory of direct contact). Whatever he was, and whenever he lived, this artist created something without age or epoch, something so elementally simple and fresh that it had the power, in my sophisticated mind, to rouse the highest pleasure and to prompt—as an aftermath—the deepest questionings. These questionings were to race riotously in my imagination during the journey back to England, and then to persist through the busy and distracted years that followed. But it would be over-dramatizing the event to give it an apocalyptic significance. As a matter of fact, the little bust had merely jumped into its place as a ready symbol for an attitude which is innate : I have a characteristic preference for the miniature—for the epitome, the episode, the epigram. Rhetoric, everything mouth-filling and pretentious, the imposing and the pompous, everything orotund and ornate, intimidates me, and what is intimidating cannot be lived with. Art must be intimate if it is to be a personal possession. It belongs to a private world. Here we touch a paradox. I have confessed to an admiration for Piero, whose art we instinctively describe as impersonal, by which we perhaps mean impassive. " He loved impersonality," wrote Bernhard Berenson, " the absence of expressed emotion, as a quality in things," and that is true. It is a rare quality in things and in the representation of things, and perhaps only the Greeks and 3

A Goat of Many Colours the English 1 have possessed it fully. Further, w h a t is impersonal, in my sense of the word, can be heroic. But not heroic in the g r a n d m a n n e r , not grandiloquently heroic, in the m a n n e r of Rostand. And what is personal can, of course, be spiritual, even transcendental. R o m a n esque art, a n d early Gothic art, is personal—the communion of the person with his God. But always a communion in a still, small voice—not the magniloquence of Moses, or of Michelangelo's Moses, or Milton's Satan, or Nietzsche's Zarathustra. M o r e t h a n once some friend, knowing this predilection of mine, has d r a w n my attention to the perfect expression which Adalbert Stifter gave to such a philosophy of life (it is more than a theory of art) in his preface to the Bunten Steinen. I first came across this passage in Hofmannsthal's Lesebuch, a n d once tried to translate it, without success. I t says so well, in G e r m a n , w h a t I would like to say in English, b u t I cannot capture its simple tone. W h e n we are dealing with paradoxes, it is better to leave t h e m in the clothing they assume in our own thoughts. Jesus gave perfect expression to the ethical aspect of this paradox, but here I a m only concerned with the aesthetic. W h a t is greatest in art is also at the same time the least. O r rather, there is no " greatness " in art, nor " smallness ", for art is an act of creation, a n d what is created is not created great or small, b u t given simple existence. W h a t is thus " existential " cannot be measured by any scale we apply to the used a n d experienced ; it cannot have any pragmatic sanction. Beauty is truth ; not a measure of truth, nor measured by truth. T r u t h is beauty, b u t again, not a measure of beauty, nor measured by beauty. W h a t an object of beauty, or a statement of truth, does to people is another matter, a n d can be measured 1 Perhaps one should say the Normans, for in art it is a quality which the English share with the Northern French.

4

The Greatest Work of Art in the World by aesthetical or ethical standards. But these standards change, from age to age, country to country, person to person. Beauty, however, is changeless, a n d we only fail to perceive this because we invest the work of art with other qualities—we bury it in pomposity, or grandeur, rhetoric a n d vanity. W e inflate art a n d call it the G r a n d M a n n e r : but if we are truthful we have to confess that t h e G r a n d M a n n e r is really a Gigantic Boredom, t h a t its volume is only maintained by the pompiers of culture— schoolmasters, scholars, academicians, encyclopaedists, Sunday journalists a n d cynical politicians. T h a t is why, if asked to say w h a t is a great work of art, even the greatest work of art in the world, I think of a bronze bust two inches high, which with some difficulty might be found in a case crowded with indifferent objects in the least frequented m u s e u m in Florence.

2. Eric Gill A F E W days before he died, Eric Gill wrote a letter to me about my pamphlet, The Philosophy of Anarchism, in which he said : " I find it difficult to discover anything I d o n ' t agree with, a n d in spite of the appearance to t h e contrary I a m really in complete agreement with you about the necessity of anarchism, the ultimate t r u t h of it, a n d its immediate practicality as syndicalism." Any hesitation I might have h a d in revealing w h a t was a privately expressed opinion was dispelled when I read Gill's Autobiography. I n this sincere a n d noble book he makes quite clear that he was fundamentally a n anarchist—that he was one of the m a n y people who are anarchists in thought if not yet in n a m e . T h a t was already obvious in a n essay on " Ownership a n d Industrialism " which a p p e a r e d in his book Sacred and Secular, 5

A Goat of Many Colours an essay I would always recommend to people who want a first introduction to the principles of anarchism. But it is in his autobiography that Gill shows not only how he came to be an anarchist, but also how, with an integrity which I for one can only envy, he managed to live like one. As an exceptionally talented craftsman he was, perhaps, in an exceptionally favourable position : he had avoided the capitalist treadmill, and could live more or less where he liked and how he liked. But such freedom did not mean " escapism " for him : he did not retreat to the Côte d'Azur or California, but stayed in the place to which, as he might have said, God had called him. For those who had the privilege of knowing him, his example was an inspiration, his home a friendly light in the darkness. " What I hope above all things is that I have done something towards re-integrating bed and board, the small farm and the workshop, the home and the school, earth and heaven." So he writes towards the end of his autobiography. His whole life was directed to such a " re-integration ", and it is his life, and the philosophy upon which it is based, that will endure even longer than his art. The obituary notices treated Eric Gill chiefly as an artist, but that is not how he thought of himself. As his autobiography shows, his whole life was a protest against the distinction between the artist and the ordinary man. In any decent society, he would say, every man was a special kind of artist—in which case the term lost its significance ; but in the actual society in which we live, the man who calls himself artist is a false pretender of some sort—if he does not impose on other people, he imposes on himself. From the very beginning of his career Gill was determined to be honest with himself, and it is that determination which gives to his book the sincerity and significance of a PilgrirrCs Progress. At the end he 6

Eric Gill sums up in one paragraph what had been the aim of his life. Lettering, type-designing, engraving, stone-carving, drawing—these activities which had brought him fame were so many by-products of his real activity, which was " to make a cell of good living in the chaos of our world ". Every step in his life was governed by that aim. He gave up architecture and took up the more modest craft of lettering because it seemed more compatible with a good way of life ; he left London and helped to found an ideal community at Ditchling, and when the life at Ditchling was spoilt by unwelcome publicity, he went into the wilds of Wales. When life in Wales became too difficult, he came to Buckinghamshire and found what he wanted—a quadrangle of decent English brick buildings—" the only decent way to live "—and there he stayed until he died. It was not merely his way of life that was determined by this rational aim, but also what other people would call his opinions, which were actually aspects of an integral religion, embracing the whole of life. He has been called an eccentric, but in the usual meaning of the word, no man was ever less an eccentric. He was a rationalist. He began by discovering that fine lettering was rational lettering—exactly the opposite of " fancy " lettering— " and that was the new idea, the explosive notion, and, you might say, the secret ". Having thus discovered a reasonable basis for lettering, the next thing was to discover a reasonable workshop life, a reasonable life for workmen. That led him, as a first stage, to socialism, but not to the socialism of politicians and bureaucrats. Socialism as a political movement is, he soon discovered, " hardly more than an attempt to re-order the distribution of factory products and factory profits ". It did not tackle the evil at its root—the love of money—and there could be no hope for the revival of either good life or good work " until double-entry book-keeping is abandoned by all the 7

A Coat of Many Colours producing a n d the distributing trades " . It became clear to him that " the hateful world of the m a n of business a n d its hateful cruelties would never be abolished by those who profited by them " , a n d he gradually a b a n d o n e d all hope of reform by parliamentary means. H e began to realize that the essential evil arose somewhere in the sphere of religion. If men were really conscious of God, then these evils could not exist. T o a m a n conscious of God it should be " incomparably more horrible that m e n of business should rule us a n d impose their foul point of view on the world t h a n it would be if the whole race of m e n a n d women should rot their bodies with lechery a n d drunkenness " . So Gill returned to the worship of God, and his rationalism guided him to the only C h u r c h which can claim to be universal. His difficulties did not end there, for once within the C h u r c h he became a fierce critic of the timidity a n d hypocrisy of his fellow-Christians. T h e r e were honourable exceptions—" T h e Popes themselves have condemned m o d e r n capitalism a n d m a n y of the clergy have followed their example. But Christians in general, including Catholics in general, have quite notoriously not followed the Popes in this m a t t e r . " M y socialism was from the beginning [Gill wrote] a revolt against the intellectual degradation of the factory hands a n d the d a m n e d ugliness of all t h a t capitalistindustrialism produced, a n d it was not primarily a revolt against the cruelty a n d injustice of the possessing classes or against the misery of the poor. I t was not so m u c h the working class that concerned me as the working man— not so m u c h w h a t he got from working as w h a t he did by working. 1 1 Throughout Gill's social philosophy there is an equivocation in his use of the word " work ". " It was the peculiar achievement of the nineteenth century ", he wrote in Art and a Changing Civilization, " to separate, in thought and in practice, the idea of work from the idea of art, the activity of the * workman ' from the activity of the * artist ', and to make the artist a special 8

Eric Gill This shows the early direction of Gill's political ideas : he was w h a t I have been accustomed to call an individualist, b u t in the letter already referred to, he wrote : I think it would be good if you distinguished between the individual, as being the unit of a group whether of a n i m a t e or inanimate nature, a n d the person. I t is a p r i m a r y doctrine of Christianity that m e n are u n i q u e persons. I t is as persons t h a t they are unique, whereas as individuals they m a y not be. It is a distinction which I accept—it is, indeed, a distinction fundamental to anarchism, a n d the basic reason person, removed from and exalted above the common ruck of beings, a sort of priest, the expert in a mystery, a mystery not of craft or trade unionism but of spiritual remoteness." But there is a sense in which the idea of work should be separated from the idea of art. Work is really of two distinct kinds. The child who said : " First I think and then I draw my think " was wiser than Mr. Gill perceives ; because the child first thought, first " prefigured " the thing to be drawn. The maker of standard architectural mouldings, or even of standard bricks, no doubt has an image of some kind in his mind before he begins to make the moulding or the brick, but it would not be right to dignify this image by the name of thought, nor the moulding or brick (however well made) by the name of art. Indeed, tending a machine for making bricks is surely a job demanding more intelligence and even more " art " than making bricks by hand. Such work, and indeed the great mass of work, is better done by machines. What the machine cannot do is the " thinking " part, and what distinguishes the artist from the workman is the ability to " think ", a certain faculty which the Germans call Gestaltungsfaehigkeit, but which we, for want of a single word, might call the faculty of plastic configuration—the ability to " think " in plastic images. This is not a normal faculty, but the possession of those abnormal people we call artists. Unless we are clear on that point, we shall never be clear on the most pressing of problems connected with art in the twentieth century —the place of the artist in the machine age. Because his philosophy saw no function for the artist in the machine age, Gill, like Gandhi, was compelled to renounce the whole basis of modern civilization. There may be other grounds for rejecting the machine—economic grounds, for example—but it is quite clear to me that the machine does not necessarily exclude the artist. 9

A Goat of Many Colours for our rejection of all forms of collectivism and state capitalism. When Gill first entered the socialist movement, through the Fabian Society, he found that no one respected this distinction—the socialist movement was not moved or led, still less could it be said to be inspired, by any ideas of man or of man's life or of man's work other than those of the capitalist world against whose injustices and cruelties it was in revolt. . . . Socialism as a political movement is hardly more than an attempt to re-order the distribution of factory products and factory profits. Gill then concluded that " no merely political or economic rearrangement of the world was going to be effective to remove such horrors "—the horrors of capitalist society. The remedy, he felt, must lie in the sphere of religion and morals. The root of the social evil was a moral evil—the desire of money—and to Gill it was elementary that all Christians should condemn this evil, or give up pretending to be followers of Christ. H e resolved to keep clear of politics and politicians : he could not believe that political arrangements and re-arrangements were real. T o him it was all a confused business of ramps and rackets — " pretended quarrels and dishonest commercial schemings, having no relation to the real interests of peoples, neither to their spiritual nor their material welfare, and conducted upon no principles other than momentary self-interest ". In Gill's sense of the word, all anarchists are resolved to keep clear of politics. But politics in another sense— the politics of preaching and propaganda—of thought and of work—the politics which consist of trying " to make a cell of good living in the chaos of our world "—to such politics we must devote ourselves, and such are the politics which Gill practised with greater effect than he ever realized. H e belonged to that rare company of integral io

Eric Gill socialists, whose lives are a consequence of their socialism, their socialism a consequence of their lives. That rare company consists of all those people to whom it is evident that the evils of what is called totalitarianism —and the same evil is also called National Socialism, Fascism, and Bolshevism—can only be avoided or ended by a change of heart. And " change of heart " is too polite a phrase for what must be a spiritual and mental revolution in mankind. It is natural that those people who are honest Christians, like Eric Gill, should regard the Church as the appropriate agent for this spiritual reform. Most of the people with whom I discuss these fundamental questions take this view, and the more sincere such people are, the more they are driven to demand of the Church what is in effect a new Reformation. On the fundamental issue I agree with these people— a change of heart is necessary. I disagree with them because I cannot believe in a second reformation that would enable the Christian Churches to become the effective agents of such a change. Let us consider what it would imply : first, the reunion of the Churches, for there can be no effective action on a universal scale without unity. Secondly, the abandonment of all worldly power and a complete identity with the cause of the poor and oppressed. Thirdly, the abandonment of the medieval dogmas to which most of the Churches still cling, and the adoption of a new morality more in accordance with the permanent changes which three centuries of scientific discovery have wrought in man's conception of the universe and human destiny. Those are only three essentials of a New Reformation, but I do not think I am unduly pessimistic in regarding them as insuperable difficulties. Before these difficulties could be resolved the structure of the Churches as we know them now would have been entirely obliterated. I do not say that Christianity would 11

A Goat of Many Colours have been obliterated ; indeed, I a m saying that as the religion of love a n d brotherhood it must still pursue its revolutionary course in history. But it is obvious—and this was also the final conclusion of that profoundest of modern Christians, Soren Kierkegaard—that before Christianity can become a religion of love a n d brotherhood, the Churches as we know them now will have to disappear. I n a word, Christianity a n d the C h u r c h a r e incommensurable. T h e r e is little likelihood that the world will be saved by a return of heretics to the C h u r c h . As a cell of good living the C h u r c h simply does not exist. I t is because I cannot see salvation in this direction that I p u t my faith in a change of heart which is p a g a n or secular in its agency. Perhaps in some distant age anarchism a n d Christianity will come together again, as they were together in the early days of the Church. It will be said that such a supposition makes anarchism just as remote a contingency as a Christian community. I agree. Both are ideals, a n d both as such are not immediately realizable. I t is a choice between one ideal which is theistic a n d has a supernatural background, a n d another ideal which is h u m a n istic a n d has a background of reason a n d n a t u r a l law. I n the existing state of opinion, more people will be found, or could be found, to follow N a t u r e (and all that that word implies) t h a n to follow God (and all that that word implies). T h a t fundamentally they imply the same end is the only d o g m a which personally I find it necessary to accept. T o follow N a t u r e — t h a t is a vague phrase which needs more definition, though its meaning is relatively simple. T h e most common kind of association which the word has is probably " nature red in tooth a n d claw " ; a n d this is balanced by the more optimistic phrase, " the beauties of n a t u r e " , by which, however, is still m e a n t 12

Eric Gill something essentially wild a n d uncultivated. But that is not the meaning which we attach to n a t u r e in the phrase " the laws of n a t u r e " , a n d it is to nature in this biological or scientific sense that I refer. For underlying the a p p a r e n t riotousness of nature, its luxuriance, a n d the violent changes which pass over its face like a fever, are certain universal laws—a formal structure of matter a n d a calculable behaviour of energy. 1 T o illustrate m y meaning I would like to quote a parable from the writings of the Chinese philosopher, C h u a n g T z e : Horses have hoofs to carry t h e m over frost a n d snow ; hair, to protect t h e m from wind a n d cold. T h e y eat grass a n d drink water, a n d fling u p their heels over the champaign. Such is the real n a t u r e of horses. Palatial dwellings are of no use to them. O n e d a y Poh Loh appeared, saying : " I understand the m a n a g e m e n t of horses." So he branded them a n d clipped them a n d pared their hoofs, a n d p u t halters on them, tying them u p by the head a n d shackling t h e m by the feet, disposing t h e m in stables, with the result that two or three in every ten died. T h e n he kept t h e m hungry a n d thirsty, trotting them a n d galloping them, a n d grooming, a n d trimming, with the misery of the tasselled bridle before a n d the fear of the knotted whip behind, until more t h a n half of t h e m were dead. . . . Nevertheless, every age extols Poh Loh for his skill in m a n a g i n g horses. . . . Those w h o govern the empire m a k e the same mistake. N o w I regard government of the empire from quite a different point of view. T h e people have certain natural instincts :—to weave a n d clothe themselves, to till a n d feed themselves. These are common to all humanity, a n d all are agreed thereon. Such instincts are called " Heaven-sent " . A n d so in the days when natural instincts prevailed, *" Il y a u n ordre contre lequel il est vain de lutter. On doit obéir à la loi des mondes qui dirigent de la même main le roulement de Betelgeuse et le tremblement de la semence des hommes. Le social ne doit être que le naturel." —JEAN GIONO : Les Vraies Richesses.

13

A Goat of Many Colours men moved quietly and gazed steadily. At that time, there were no roads over mountains, nor boats, nor bridges over water. All things were produced, each for its own proper sphere. Birds and beasts multiplied ; trees and shrubs grew up. The former might be led by the hand ; you could climb up and peep into the raven's nest. For then man dwelt with birds and beasts, and all creation was one. There were no distinctions of good and bad men. Being all equally without knowledge, their virtue could not go astray. Being all equally without evil desires, they were in a state of natural integrity, the perfection of human existence. But when sages appeared, tripping people over charity and fettering with duty to one's neighbour, doubt found its way into the world. And then with their gushing over music and fussing over ceremony, the empire became divided against itself. . . . Horses live on dry land, eat grass and drink water. When pleased, they rub their necks together. When angry, they turn round and kick their heels at each other. Thus far only do their natural dispositions carry them. But bridled and bitted, with a plate of metal on their foreheads, they learn to cast vicious looks, to turn the head, to bite, to resist, to get the bit out of the mouth or the bridle into it. And thus their natures become depraved—the fault of Poh Loh. In the days of H o Hsü the people did nothing in particular when at rest, and went nowhere in particular when they moved. Having food, they rejoiced ; having full bellies, they strolled about. Such were the capacities of the people. But when the sages came to worry them with ceremonies and music in order to rectify the form of government, and dangled charity and duty to one's neighbour before them in order to satisfy their hearts,— then the people began to develop a taste for knowledge and to struggle one with the other in their desire for gain. This was the error of the sages. 1 What Chuang Tze opposes to all those people who demand a programme for reforming the world is a doctrine of inaction. In other words we should seek the natural 1

Trans. Herbert A. Giles (Chuang Tzü, London, Quaritch,i889).

Eric Gill conditions of existence, and this brings us back to Gill's phrase—" to make a cell of good living in the chaos of the world ". Only a cell—a microscopic unit in the immensity of the world : but the world is made up of such units and upon the health of each individual cell depends the health of society. I do not suggest that the reader should emulate the Chinese mystic and " sit like a corpse while his dragonpower is manifested around ". What I wish to suggest is that the man who adapts himself to natural conditions of existence will have a principle by means of which he can give an answer to most of the problems of life. I will only give one example, but it is very practical and very immediate. We know the general history of the trade unions—how they began some hundred years ago as associations of workmen whose object was to agitate for certain specific social and economic reforms. We know how they slowly acquired legal and political rights and became established over the whole industrial world. This growth was rather haphazard and embodied a contradiction which has never been resolved, and which at any time in the immediate future might become the dominant question of the day—the question whether the unions should be organized according to craft, so that all engineers, in whatever industry employed, should be in one union, and look after the rights of engineers ; or whether the unions should be organized according to industry, so that all the workers engaged on the production of a particular object or commodity should be in one union, and look after the rights of that industry. Socialists and trade unionists the world over are divided on this question, but for the anarchist there can be no question. The end must determine the means. Men must be united by the natural conditions of work. There is little in common between the conditions of an engineer in a shipbuilding yard in 15

A Coat of Many Colours Glasgow a n d an engineer in a motor-works in Oxford. But the engineer in the shipbuilding yard is in daily contact with the carpenter a n d the d r a u g h t s m a n a n d a thousand other people engaged in a c o m m o n task—the building of a ship. T h e y work together a n d live together, a n d together they should be at liberty to create those workshop conditions which make a cell of good living in the chaos of the world. So the anarchist favours industrial unions and regional collectives a n d feels certain that their creation would bring the world a step nearer to the perfection of the natural law. Anarchism, therefore, is a philosophy, not a system of politics ; but once its principles have been accepted, they can be applied at any point. Anarchism does not rely on plans, which are rational constructions that tend to leave out the imponderable a n d elusive factors of h u m a n feeling a n d h u m a n instinct. T h e r e is only one p l a n — t h e plan of nature. W e must live according to natural laws, a n d by virtue of the power which comes from concentrating upon their manifestation in the individual h u m a n mind. Anarchism asserts—it is its only assertion—that life must be so ordered that the individual can live a natural life, " attending to w h a t is within " . But once we begin to work out the implications of this principle, we shall not end until we have abolished the state. For if people began to live by natural laws, there would be so little need for m a n - m a d e laws, a n d no need at all for a complex machinery of government to enforce such laws.

3. Klee P A U L K L E E ' S death in 1940 was almost unnoticed amid the din of war. It was a war that fell like a gradually darkening screen over the art of the between-war years. 16

Paul Klee When that screen has lifted again, we hope that it will reveal a stage transformed beyond all recognition. Some of the players may be the same, but they will be wearing different costumes, and living in a different atmosphere, and behaving in an altogether different way. Only one thing will have survived from the wicked past—Cinderella's glass-slippers, the infinitely precious symbol of the beauty and truth whose crystal brightness no catastrophe can destroy. I believe that the art of Paul Klee is part of that crystal brightness. He lived in our kitchen-midden world, with strife and despair all around him. But like William Blake, to whom he was temperamentally akin, he lived with the immunity of a mystic. That does not mean that his art had no relation to the world about him—that he was, as we inelegantly say, an " escapist ". It is only an unintelligent and superficial realism that demands of the artist a mechanical reflection of the objects which lie in his field of vision. Nor is it much more intelligent to restrict the artist to what is called an interpretation of those objects—the running commentary of the impressionistic journalist. What history demands in its long run, is the object itself—the work of art which is itself a created reality, an addition to the sum of real objects in the world. Such objects can only come from the artist's own world, the unique world of his own subjective existence. That, of course, is not a vacuum—it is the most crowded receptacle in the universe, and psychology has never plumbed its depths. It is deep enough, at any rate, to contain, not only all that the senses can drain into it, but much else that wells up from hidden springs. It is out of this horn of plenty that the artist must snatch his objects, with nothing but his sensibility to guide him. His sensibility ! There you have the keyword, however we define it, in Klee's case or in the case of any great 17

A Goat of Many Colours artist. The sensibility—perhaps sensitivity is a more precise word—of Klee was infallible, and from the beginning expressed in that most sensitive of plastic media, the line (here again, Blake comes into comparison). His earliest drawings and engravings were influenced by Aubrey Beardsley's work—he comes directly out of that tradition of precise fantasy. But he could never have remained in a world of artifice and literary inspiration. He escaped by way of nature, and there is a whole phase of his work— round about 1908-12—which might be described as impressionistic. But he knew the truth of that saying of Meister Eckhart : " I f you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. And likewise if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence." Thereafter every painting by Klee becomes an attempt to express this inner essence. But it is just at this point that he miraculously avoids the pitfall of almost all artists who seek to express the metaphysical. He does not for a moment surrender his artistic integrity—his sensibility. He knows that he has to bear witness, not with the tongue, which is the instrument of ideas or conceptions, but with his pen and brush, the instruments of his perception and imagination. He never falters. He feels the limitations of his instruments, but he does not abandon them : he strives to perfect them, to give them greater precision and subtlety. He explores the world of colour, he co-ordinates it with his sensitive line, and creates the subtlest counterpoint that the plastic arts have ever known. In this experiment he is greatly aided by his musical sensibility—he was born into a musical family and was himself a fine violinist. It is not merely a question of analogy. Many of Klee's paintings are translations or transformations of musical images ; or rather, he uses his feeling for melody and harmony to 18

Paul Klee co-ordinate his line and colour. It is not a confusion of the arts ; it is the creation of a new art which is a unity of painting and music. This art, we must admit, has one limitation. Its scale is miniature. It is the lyric, not the epic. It is Chopin, not Wagner. Personally, I am against the grandiose in art. If it does not merely bore me, it intimidates me. I do not believe it is necessary. The greatest truth was ever spoken in a still small voice. The great mystics are not long-winded. Great poetry is not sustained beyond a page or two of print. The greatest painting can be contained within a square foot of canvas. The greatest is never the grandiose. Klee must have died unhappy, for his painting had been banned in the country which he had honoured with his presence for the most active part of his life. But I am sure he did not despair. I am reminded of an entry in his diary, dated June 1905. He describes how in his search for a full comprehension of all the technical possibilities of his art, he one day tried scratching a blackened sheet of glass with a needle. " The medium ", he writes, " was no longer the black line, but the white. White energy against a nocturnal background beautifully illustrates the saying : Let there be light." The whole of Klee's life-work was a white energy against the dark background of modern Germany.

4. Lawrence of Arabia TAME is the focus of all the misunderstandings which gather about a new name." This was said by Rilke of Rodin, but it applies with peculiar force to T. E. Lawrence. No great figure of our time has been so misunderstood ; and the more the misunderstanding grew, the more famous 19

A Goat of Many Colours he became, until it was suspected that he had a perverse genius for publicity. Now for the first time we can discover the truth about his strange personality. Before the war, as his early letters show, Lawrence was " an ordinary archaeologist ", and but for the war would have remained an archaeologist, completely unknown to the man in the street. He had a modest ambition to run a private printing press ; and there are signs of that self-dissatisfaction which was later to become pathological. But no determined ambition ; no stirrings of a social conscience, of an idealistic mission, or any of the feelings which prompt men to exceptional actions. When the war came, he did not respond in any dramatic way ; he went into the War Office and helped to draw maps. In due course he was sent out to Egypt, still in the map department. But between Egypt and the scene of war there were vast stretches of country about which Lawrence knew as much as any man. H e not only knew the terrain, but in his archaeological expeditions he had observed the inhabitants and grown sympathetic towards them. H e had intelligence—rather more intelligence than the average Staff officer—and he conceived a plan. The course of the war made his plan not only feasible, but imperative. H e was entrusted with the organization of a revolt among the Arab tribes, and not only succeeded in persuading the Arabs to unite in a Holy War against their Turkish oppressors, but led them in a series of brilliant manoeuvres. H e did no more than a score, perhaps a hundred, other officers who conducted campaigns or strategic operations during the war. But the scene was Arabia, and Arabia is a glamorous word. And guerrilla warfare is a comparatively romantic occupation, in the eyes of the newspaper public. After four years of grim hysteria, the newspapers were very much in need of romance. In this mood they discovered Lawrence and made him a mob 20

Lawrence of Arabia hero. In 1919 an American lecturer, Lowell Thomas, sprang into the limelight with Lawrence of Arabia as his theme. Only the Albert Hall was big enough for his audiences : he drew over a million people in this country alone. The legend was established, and, like all legends, improved with time. Meanwhile the ex-archaeologist was immersed in the dirty game of international politics, as played at Versailles —a game from which he retired disillusioned and for the moment defeated. H e and the Arabs whom he had led, and to whom he had pledged British honour, were betrayed. H e felt, therefore, that he had no further place in the imperial scheme. H e returned to his home in Oxford and " would sometimes sit the entire morning between breakfast and lunch in the same position, without moving, and with the same expression on his face ". H e had already begun to write the history of his war experiences which he called The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A revision of the Middle Eastern position was soon seen to be inevitable and Lawrence was eventually called to the Colonial Office by Winston Churchill to advise on a new settlement. His advice was to a considerable extent adopted and by the end of 1922 Lawrence felt that " England was out of the Arab affair with clean hands ". He himself, like a tired lion, could retire from an arena which he had never willingly entered to lick his sixty wounds. Here comes the crux of his career, and the deepest cause of mystification. At this point Lawrence could have chosen almost any position of leadership in English life : he could have chosen the position of leadership, the leadership of the war generation. But that is assuming he was the stuff of which leaders are made. Instead he immured himself in what he thought was the nearest modern equivalent to a monastery of the Middle Ages ; he became a private in the Air Force. 21

A Goat of Many Colours There are many explanations of this strange action, including his own. H e himself said, in the most intimate confession he ever made (his letters to Lionel Curtis) that " self-degradation " was his aim. " I haven't the impulse and the conviction to fit what I know to be my power of moulding men and things : and so I always regret what I've created, when the leisure after creation lets me look back and see that the idea was second-hand." The most superficial view attributes this feeling of fatuity to the privations and sufferings of the war years, and to the serious air crash he experienced in 1919. Alternatively, it is suggested that the bitter disillusionment of the Peace Conference " warped " his mind. But it is to be doubted whether, on any profound interpretation of the word " mind ", consciously experienced events of this kind have any effect. In other words, the warp is in the make of the man, and he can only become what he is—is by birth and breeding. Happiness, on this assumption, can only come to a man who lives along his grain—who drees his own weird ; which is the conclusion Lawrence came to : . . . perhaps in determinism complete there lies the perfect peace I have so longed for. Free-will Tve tried, and rejected : authority I've rejected (not obedience, for that is my present effort, to find equality only in subordination. It is dominion whose taste I have been cloyed with) : action I've rejected : and the intellectual life : and receptive senses : and the battle of wits. They were all failures, and my reason tells me therefore that obedience, nescience, will also fail, since the roots of common failure must lie in myself—and yet in spite of reason I am trying it. Such is Lawrence's own explanation of himself. His nature was (he uses the ugly word himself) masochistic ; a psychological state of which we find, not only the overt symptoms, but also the secondary characteristics. Every22

Lawrence of Arabia thing in his life fits the interpretation. A frigidity towards women was balanced by an impulse towards art. " Artists excite and attract me, seduce me, from what I am." He was not an artist by nature, but had a sick longing to be one. The Seven Pillars is a straining after this aesthetic grace, and is an artificial monstrosity, as he himself so freely and so repeatedly admitted. Masochism explains, too, his disinclination to rebel. Perfect pessimism, such as his, implies acquiescence in the immediate. He saw through the pretence of our social system. " All the subject provinces of the Empire to me were not worth one dead English boy." But the governors of these same provinces were his friends and associates, and he would not come out against them. " The ideals of a policy are entrancing, heady things : the translating them into terms of compromise with the social structure as it has evolved is pretty second-rate work. . . . A decent nihilism is what I hope for, generally." What remains ? Something very precious. Not, as some would claim for the Seven Pillars, a great masterpiece of literature (and as one who has read The Mint I would advise no one to have great expectations of that odd document) ; not a final achievement in politics (everything is still in the melting-pot) ; but simply this revelation of a man. His letters are a great confession—like the letters of his namesake, D. H. Lawrence, like Van Gogh's letters. The very depth and sincerity of the confession were imposed on Lawrence by the conflict between his fate and his personality : the personality did not match the fate that was being imposed on it ; and so he was forced into the bleak agony of explanation, and endless expiation.

23

A Coat of Many Colours 5.

" The Seven Pillars of Wisdom "

1 HE Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a difficult book. N o t difficult to read, in the ordinary sense, b u t difficult to bring into any definite focus. So m u c h of it is vivid, b u t the author's mind behind it all is dark, a n d obscured by divided aims. It is this core of darkness which more t h a n anything else puts one in d o u b t as to the essential greatness of the book. G r e a t books are written in moods of spiritual light a n d intellectual certainty, a n d out of any other m o o d there only emerges a n imperfect work of art. It m i g h t be less uncompromising to say that out of any other m o o d there only emerges a romantic work of art, but about t h e best romantic moods, moods held openly a n d consistently, there is a positiveness which relieves t h e m from the c h a r g e of darkness a n d doubt. I d o not, however, see this openness in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The story of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is splendid " copy " , but is it anything more ? If it is, it is so by virtue either of its matter or its m a n n e r . By virtue of its matter, because if a story is of epic quality it will transcend its m a n n e r , passing from one story-teller to a n o t h e r until it perhaps receives that most immortal m a n n e r — t h e anonymous tradition. But in the present case we begin with a d o u b t — w h o is the hero of the story : Colonel Lawrence or the Arabian Army ? If Colonel Lawrence, then the story fails to reach epic quality because Colonel Lawrence, however brave a n d courageous he m a y h a v e been, is not heroic. About the epic hero there is a n essential u n d o u b t i n g directness : his a i m is single a n d unswerving ; he questions neither himself, his aims, nor his destiny. H e m a y share his glory with his chosen b a n d , his comitatus, but essentially he is self-possessed, self-reliant, a r r o g a n t a n d unintelligent. Colonel Lawrence was none of these 24

" The Seven Pillars of Wisdom " things ; in all these things he was at the contrary pole— full of doubts a n d dissemblings, uncertain of his aim, his pride eaten into by humility a n d remorse, his conduct actuated by vague a n d eccentric motives. It is no disp a r a g e m e n t to say that out of such stuff no hero is m a d e . O u t of such stuff we only get a case of conscience, a problem of personality. Such problems, though of profound interest to the contemporaries a n d co-sufferers of a m a n , tend to dissolve with the circumstances which produced them. T h e y are only saved from such a fate by their universal elements, as when the personality of H a m l e t stands for the general mood of the Renaissance, or, in a lesser degree, as when Rousseau seems to embody the spirit of an epoch. But even Rousseau is a pathological case rather t h a n a hero, inciting our curiosity rather than arousing our admiration. T o this limited extent Colonel Lawrence is representative : a lame duck in a n age of lame ducks ; a soldier spoilt by introspection a n d self-analysis ; a m a n with a load on his mind. But if Colonel Lawrence is not the " hero " of this epic, can we discern one in the A r a b nation ? Surely not. W e learn from this book, as from Arabia Deserta, that the Arabs have qualities which we can admire, such as a capacity for hardship a n d endurance : the possibilities, at least, of fine perceptions ; a n d a real religious force. But these qualities cannot for long blind us to the overwhelming venality, pettiness, fanaticism a n d ignorance of the mass of them. This realization is present in Colonel Lawrence's own mind, a n d acts as a blight on whatever there is of epic quality in that fine effort of strategy a n d cunning which culminated in the fall of Damascus. But let us realize this fact, too : the Palestine C a m p a i g n was merely the romantic fringe of the war. I n France and Belgium m e n of infinitely finer quality than these Arabs 25

B

A Coat of Many Colours were enduring day after day, without the inspiration of the open horizon a n d all that that conveys of a d v e n t u r e a n d surprise, the dull a n d dispiriting agony of trench warfare. N o one will be fool enough to m a k e out of that horror an epic story, or to see in our armies a race of selfreliant heroes ; but this Arabian adventure was no m o r e t h a n a dance of flies in the air beside the magnitude of that terrific earthy conflict. T o see one of these adventurers, then, " get away with " the heroic b u n c o m b e in a literary press mostly in the hands of non-combatants, inspired a contemporary like myself with a certain bitterness of which I ought perhaps to have been ashamed, but which at any rate I was not ashamed to confess. Perhaps this is all beside the point. I can still read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom with keen interest, a n d what more can m a n want ? Nothing, if you will leave it at that. But if I a m expected to pay the book the lip service I willingly pay to Arabia Deserta, then I revolt. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not in the same category. Doughty fills m e with wonder, with reverence, a n d gives me unfailing enjoyment. " W h o touches this book touches a m a n " — a n d at every page : a m a n who was a great mind, a great patriarch a m o n g men, a great enduring character, pensive but self-possessed, inquiring but full of certainty. I n The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I a m only conscious of an uneasy adventurer ; of an Oxford g r a d u a t e with a civilian a n d supercilious lack of the sense of discipline ; of a m i n d , not great with thought, but tortured by some restless spirit that drives it out into the desert, to physical folly a n d self-immolation, a spirit t h a t never triumphs over the body a n d never attains peace.

26

Art and the People 6.

Art and the People

JxusKiN, who is still the wisest philosopher to w h o m we can turn for the truth about this subject, once said t h a t a work of art, in addition to looking well, must also speak well a n d act well. These homely words express in a phrase the threefold n a t u r e of an activity which is usually discussed as if it h a d only a single nature. Critics w h o emphasize the need of art to look well, a n d neglect its other aspects, are called aesthetes, a n d since Oscar Wilde's time (for he was a typical representative of this attitude) they have been out of fashion. Nevertheless, they expressed a third of the truth about art. People who emphasize the need of art to speak well are usually moralists of some kind. Their greatest representative was Tolstoy, b u t with a different morality in mind, they have more recently been represented by the " socialist-realists " in Russia, who believe that the function of art is primarily to further the cause of socialism. Art, for such people, is merely an effective way of saying or illustrating some idea (a religious or political ideology), and the importance of art, therefore, corresponds to the importance of its message. T h e third set of people believe that art is primarily a way of making or doing something useful, a n d that its value corresponds to its functional efficiency. Good architecture, they say, is found wherever you have a building which is fit for its purpose—strong, convenient a n d commodious. T h e y go so far as to say t h a t when the work of m a n has these qualities, the other aspects of a work of art are automatically present—that w h a t works well, looks well a n d speaks well. W e m a y regard these as the three tests of a work of art, but it is not equally easy to apply them all. W h e t h e r 27

A Goat of Many Colours a building, for example, works well can be determined by use : but it is not so easy to agree that a painting or a piece of sculpture " acts " well. W e all think that we know when a building or a picture " looks " well, b u t we admit that it is a matter of taste, a n d we say that one m a n ' s meat is another m a n ' s poison. Even scientifically it can be shown that the reactions of different people to the same work of art vary according to their temperamental disposition, which in its turn is due to complex factors like heredity, environment, even the functioning of the individual's glands. T h e only way out of this difficulty is to say that the visual qualities of art are absolute, t h a t is to say, that they depend on the possession of beauty, which is not a question of individual judgement, but the effect of certain natural laws—that the question whether a thing is beautiful or not (and it does not matter whether it is a flower, a face, a painting or a building) is determined by its possession of certain harmonious proportions, which are present in nature, a n d which are imitated in works of art. But if we can solve this difficulty by an appeal to " laws of nature " , what are we to do about the question whether a work of art speaks well ? This is the trickiest problem of all, a n d even a very great m a n like Tolstoy did not reach a satisfactory solution. Tolstoy said t h a t a work of art is only good when a m a n expresses sound feeling (or when he is perfectly sincere), b u t that involved a definition of soundness as well as of feeling—when is a feeling " s o u n d " ? Tolstoy replied : " Only when a m a n is living a life in all respects natural a n d proper to m a n " , b u t that does not get us m u c h farther, because we cannot agree on w h a t sort of life is in all respects n a t u r a l a n d proper to m a n . Tolstoy's ideal was simplicity, a n d therefore he condemned the art of Beethoven a n d Wagner, the poetry of Baudelaire, the d r a m a of Ibsen, the paintings of

Art and the People the Impressionists. He didn't think much of Shakespeare. It was all upper-class art—the art of an artificial society. Worse still, it was essentially secular art—art without uplift. " Universal art (the art he contrasted with all this decadent art) has a definite and indubitable internal criterion—religious perception ; upper-class art lacks this, and therefore the appreciators of that art are obliged to cling to some external criterion." Therefore Tolstoy was bitterly opposed to aesthetics, which he regarded as a false science. He did not see, or was not willing to admit, that the canons of beauty are derived from nature. Beauty, as a matter of fact, was a word he avoided, and he obstinately denied that there could be any objective definition of such a term. He ignored Plato's philosophy of beauty, and the aesthetics of Plato's medieval followers, which is the basis of the " natural " theory of art. Tolstoy was right in supposing that the kind of art a people gets is determined by their social organization : the Marxists are also right in putting forward what is essentially the same theory, although disguised in a lot of their ideological jargon. But it is a simple logical error, committed by both philosophies, to imagine that the art which corresponds to their particular social ideal is the best kind of art or the only kind of art. It is an error which arises from concentrating entirely on one of the three aspects of art. Similar errors arise from an exclusive devotion to the other two aspects—the aesthetic error (art for art's sake) and the functional error (" the house is a machine to live in ", etc.). The complete work of art expresses at one and the same time all three functions— it speaks, acts and looks well. But when it is complete in this sense, has it general qualities upon which we could base a more precise definition ? I believe that the answer is No—that the more precise we become about art, the more we have to particularize. 29

A Coat of Many Colours Nevertheless, we can venture a few generalizations. W e can say that art is a language, a m e d i u m of communication. Both Wordsworth a n d Tolstoy defined it in this sense a n d in almost identical terms. " T o evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced a n d having evoked it in oneself then by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others express the same feeling—that is the activity of art " (Tolstoy). But the trouble about such a definition is that it uses another undefined t e r m — in this case the word " feeling " . W h e n it comes to the point, Tolstoy wants to censor the artist's feelings, a n d he is back again to his social or political prejudices. I think it will be found that the only universal quality in a r t is beauty, but we must be careful to a d m i t that this is a purely formal quality a n d in no sense a moral one. It is this quality in art which causes it to outlast the social systems a n d religious motives in whose service it originated. O n this aspect of the question the great historian J a k o b Burckhardt has written the final words : " F r o m the world, from time a n d nature, art a n d poetry d r a w images, eternally valid a n d universally intelligible, the only p e r d u r a b l e thing on earth, a second, ideal creation, exempt from the limitations of individual temporality, an earthly immortality, a language for all the nations." This does not m e a n that we must neglect the ideological a n d functional aspects of art : these are, indeed, the essential stimuli without which no art will come into being. But as Burckh a r d t also said : " Art bound down to facts, still more to thoughts, is lost." Alas, that so m a n y theorists, especially on the political left, should now be busy binding art down either to thoughts or to facts !

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Henry James 7. Henry James IN one of his letters H e n r y J a m e s contemplated a volume which would unite all the prefaces which he wrote for the definitive New York Edition of his works. " T h e y ought, collected together . . . to form a sort of comprehensive m a n u a l or vade mecum for aspirants in our arduous profession. Still, it will be a long time before I shall want to collect t h e m together for that purpose a n d furnish them with a final Preface." H e was fated never to do so, b u t twenty years after his d e a t h it was done for him by a young American critic. 1 As the story of a story, each preface has its dramatic interest a n d those who have not read the stories in the light of each preface have missed half the enjoyment to be got from them. T h e recognition of the germ of a story—in some casual encounter, some dinner-table anecdote, some observed incident ; the growth of the germ in the w a r m t h of the imagination ; its attraction to itself of sidelights a n d reflections ; its miraculous expansion into the very stuff of life, quickened with emotion, vital, vivid—all this makes the d r a m a t i c interest of a type of narrative u n i q u e in the history of literature. O t h e r writers have gossiped about their books ; only J a m e s has m a d e interest beget interest, form reflect form, to create in the end a new genre. W h e n one further considers the enormous opportunities which such a task offers for selfconscious posing, for conceit a n d self-pity, for all the capering a n d posturing which a h u m a n being naturally assumes before a mirror, we can only gasp at the delicacy a n d decency with which J a m e s approached his own image. T h e themes which preoccupy J a m e s in these prefaces 1 Henry James : The Art of the Novel : Critical Prefaces. Edited by R. P. Blackmur. London (Scribners), 1935.

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A Coat of Many Colours relate either to art in general, or to the art of the novel in particular. It would seem that art in general must be considered on the plan of life in general, for art, whatever its form, derives its substance from life. But the phrase " i n general " must not be interpreted too inclusively. Art claims the whole of life as its field, but once in the field it is selective. Art delimits, particularizes, formalizes. Such, at least, was the faith u p o n which J a m e s acted ; a n d the whole problem was for him the problem of carrying out this necessary operation without killing the patient. T h e patient, indeed, h a d to be given new life—life lucid, intelligent, a n d reformed. In a word, life was, by means of art, to be given a meaning. T h e r e was life of a sort in The Newcomes, The Three Musketeers, or War and Peace. But w h a t [he asked] do such large loose baggy m o n sters, with their queer elements of the accidental a n d the arbitrary, artistically mean ? W e have heard it maintained, we will remember, that such things are " superior to art " ; but we understand least of all w h a t that m a y mean, a n d we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid a n d tell us. T h e r e is life a n d life, a n d as waste is only life sacrificed a n d thereby prevented from " counting " , I delight in a deep-breathing economy a n d an organic form. I t is magnificently said, a n d to all his explanations of how he achieved his economy a n d form the world is willing to listen a n d learn. O n the c o m m a n d i n g centre as a principle of composition ; on d r a m a t i c construction ; on the nouvelle or long short story as a form ; on development a n d continuity ; on antithesis of characters ; o n foreshortening ; on narrative in the first person ; on these a n d on m a n y other technical matters J a m e s is admittedly the highest authority. But critics w h o are willing to accept his authority in these matters are in the habit of somewhat illogically questioning his right to sweep aside 32

Henry James the works of Thackeray, Tolstoy a n d D u m a s . T h e y return to the question o f " life ", a n d in the n a m e of this undefined entity they are willing to condemn, not only H e n r y J a m e s , but the whole tradition of art for which he stood. Since this question, u n d e r the increasing pressure of social events, tends more a n d more to occupy the critical consciousness of a younger generation, it deserves a closer examination in the light of the mobilized intelligence of H e n r y J a m e s . Life, for his critics, is rightly associated with economic realities ; these realities, they declare, have determined all our values, aesthetic no less t h a n ethical a n d social. Their materialistic determinism spares nothing, a n d though they m a y experience some difficulty in explaining the actual morphology of art in economic terms, they are ready to assert t h a t though some forms are relatively static, the public estimation or appreciation of t h e m varies from age to age. This is the dialectical method in all its casuistical subtlety, but those w h o use the method in the interests of a particular conception of society sometimes forget t h a t it is a double-edged tool ; it merely reduces all our judgements to the same level of sceptical relativity, a n d if we are unwilling to remain in such a state, sets us off on a new search for a conception of h u m a n i t y more in accordance with the ground base of history. I n one such work inspired by the method of dialectical materialism, H e n r y J a m e s was described as " a n American aristocrat who h a d fled from his savage compatriots, settled in the more hospitable land of monarchs a n d lords, a n d given full vent to his minutious analysis of the most inconceivably petty incidents of life " . This, which reads like an extract from a comic " potted " history, is offered to us in all seriousness, a n d w h a t must interest the critics, a n d w h a t would have set H e n r y J a m e s himself off in eager speculation, is the nature of the alternative conception of life and its profundities held by the critic. T h e r e are, in 33

A Coat of Many Colours art's relation to life, profundities of imaginative symbol a n d allegory which J a m e s did not a t t e m p t because he knew instinctively that they were not his genre ; b u t these are not alternatives likely to be suggested by our critic, who is a Russian. W e can only conclude that he has in mind " the more formidable mass a n d weight of things ", a n d t h a t he would have these imported, raw a n d heavy, into the art of fiction. But it would be a mistake, and evidence of a most superficial knowledge of his work, to assume that H e n r y J a m e s h a d not faced u p to this problem, a n d given his most definite reasons for rejecting what might be called the Zolaesque method. T h e preface to The Princess Casamassima is perhaps the most forceful statement of his point of view, for in that novel he h a d come as near as he was ever to come to the proletarian world a n d its revolutionary ferment. His sense of detachment, of exclusion, h a d to be justified ; for it would not be like James to pretend to a sympathy which he did not feel. H e freely admitted that there existed " mysteries (dense categories of dark arcana) for every spectator, a n d it's in a degree an exclusion a n d a state of weakness to be without experience of the meaner conditions, the lower manners a n d types, the general sordid struggle, the weight of the burden of labour, the ignorance, the misery a n d the vice " . But it is not mere fastidiousness in the artist, not in any sense a conscious or unconscious class disdain, which leads him to exclude such mysteries from his work, b u t rather a n honest recognition of his limitations, which limitations make the honesty a n d perfection of the art he practises. I n the immediate field of life, for action, for application, for getting through a j o b , nothing m a y so m u c h matter perhaps as the descent of a suspended weight on this, that or the other spot, with all its subjective concomitants quite secondary a n d irrelevant. But the affair of the painter is not the immediate, it is the 34

Henry James reflected field of life, the realm not of application, b u t of appreciation—a truth that makes our measure of effect altogether different. Between application with its specific task—ethical, economic, or whatever—and appreciation with its purely personal logic of intensity, lies the whole difference between the outlook of the artist a n d of all those w h o in the n a m e of dogmatic belief (and it matters not whether it is Marxism at one end of the scale or Catholicism at the other end) would bend the artist to some purpose or p r o p a g a n d a . T h e intelligence of H e n r y J a m e s never, in all its brilliance, shines out more clearly t h a n in his anticipation of this problem, which political circumstances have since m a d e the most urgent problem for writers in every country. T h e r e is, of course, a sense in which the whole philosophy of individualism is involved ; but to sacrifice individual values is to sacrifice the very concept of art such as it has existed since the beginnings of civilization. T o keep a r t , a n d to keep individualism, is to keep the sense of limitation, of partiality, of non-participation. T h e preface already mentioned concludes with w h a t J a m e s calls a defence of his " artistic position " ; it might be quoted as a defence of the artistic position : Shouldn't I find it in the h a p p y contention that the value I wished most to render a n d the effect I wished most to produce were precisely those of our not knowing, of society's not knowing, b u t only guessing a n d suspecting a n d trying to ignore, w h a t " goes on " irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface ? I couldn't deal with that positive quantity for itself—my subject h a d another too exacting side ; but I might perhaps show the social ear as on occasion applied to the ground, or catch some gust of the hot breath t h a t I h a d at m a n y a n h o u r seemed to see escape a n d hover. W h a t it all c a m e back to was, n o doubt, something like this wisdom — t h a t if you haven't, for fiction, the root of the matter in you, haven't the sense of life a n d the penetrating

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A Coat of Many Colours imagination, you are a fool in the very presence of the revealed a n d assured ; b u t that if you are so a r m e d you are not really helpless, not without your resource, even before mysteries abysmal.

8. Art and War I T is a curious fact that war, which has inspired some of the greatest literature of the world, from H o m e r to Tolstoy, has never been the preoccupation of a great painter. T h e r e are a few famous battle-pieces, but with the possible exception of Uccello's " R o u t of San R o m a n o ", they h a v e played no important part in the history of art. Even Uccello's picture is significant as an exercise in perspective, a n d not as a comment on war. Leonardo applied all his unique intelligence to the subject, a n d painted at least one great battle-piece, but as one can see very clearly from the remarks he m a d e in his Notebooks, his interest was entirely technical a n d strictly objective. " Show the figures in the foreground covered with dust on their hair a n d eyebrows a n d such other level parts as afford the dust a space to lodge " — a n d so on. O n e feels that Leonardo is rather more interested in the dust of battle t h a n in its terror, and, indeed, his directions for representing blood, pain a n d death are equally matter-of-fact. I t is not until the beginning of the seventeenth century, a n d then in the anomalous figure of J a c q u e s Callot, that the attitude of the artist changes, a n d we get a rendering of a subjective reaction to the " miseries " of war. I do not know w h a t circumstances caused Callot, rather late in his short life, to desert his m a n n e r e d fantasies for a m o r d a n t realism. O n e would like to think that it was the reaction of a m a n who h a d been too often importuned, by his royal patrons, to give an adventitious glory to their military achievements. O r is it merely that from the grotesque, for which he always

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Art and War had a talent, it is only one step to the tragic ? For whatever reason, Gallot established himself as the first consistent realist in the depiction of war, and his etchings of " The Miseries of War " remain one of the greatest indictments of man's inhumanity to man. Further, Callot had made a technical discovery—simply that, to do justice to the horrors of war, an incisive medium like the etcher's needle or the pen was necessary : and looking forward to the outstanding achievements in this same genre of the succeeding three centuries, we can see that for some reason neither the plasticity of paint, nor the permanent exhibition for which the painted canvas is intended, were suited to such a subject. It would be good for humanity, perhaps, if representations of its periodical descents into bestiality could be hung permanently in their private rooms and public galleries : but obviously only a masochist would get any pleasure from such a décor. Such ascetic revelations are secret, and best worn next to the skin, like hair-shirts. Etchings and drawings are therefore appropriate because we can keep them in portfolios, and go to them, as the faithful to the confessional—and as frequently. When we come to the next, and to the greatest exposer of war's horrors, it is again the swift and acid line of the etcher which proves to be the appropriate medium. Goya's " Désastres " are not only the most relentless, the most true, comments which a genius has ever made on the irrational nature of war : they are also the highest perfection which the art of etching has ever reached. The plate seems to be bitten with the tragic essence of the theme rather than with a watery acid. I do not wish to suggest that war, two centuries after Gallot's time, had grown in its power for evil. War has been equally horrible from its inception, and the distance between pain and the release of death cannot be indefinitely 37

A Coat of Many Colours prolonged. It is a question of the artist's power of observation—Goya observed more t h a n Callot : observed subtler details—not the level parts which afford the dust a space to lodge, but the savage twists of agony in h u m a n limbs a n d the still more savage twists in atrocious h u m a n minds. Goya lived to see w h a t he might possibly have conceived to be a more enlightened age, a more pacific era. But before he died another artist who was to continue his tradition was already at work—Honoré Daumier. D a u mier, profound observer as he was of h u m a n nature, was not so specifically an observer of the realities of the warfare waged by h u m a n beings as was Goya or even Callot. Daumier's lithographs devoted to the subject of war are p a r t of a social satire of far wider scope, a n d though they can be horrible enough, they are generalized—are even, in a sense that need not be derogatory, journalistic. T h e y are m u c h more—to use a word from the jargon of our time — " ideological " t h a n Goya's etchings. Marvellous as technical achievements, they do not so m u c h reveal the nature of war, as the motives of those who wage war. W a r for Daumicr was essentially political, his subjects mainly d r a w n from civil conflicts. Not that the ferocity is thereby abated : civil war has horrors all its own, as we saw but recently in Spain.

9.

George Herbert

C O L E R I D G E , who did so m u c h to restore Herbert's reputation as a poet, gave him as an example of the " neutral " style, by which he m e a n t a style common to both prose a n d verse. This did not imply any condemnation of the poetic quality of the poems, which Coleridge rightly considered " exquisite of their kind " ; it was merely that, for a proper appreciation, the kind needed to be defined.

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George Herbert Epithets like " homely ", " quaint " , a n d " simple " , which have often been used in connection with Herbert's poetry, h a d led to the quite erroneous assumption that the style was artless. T h e most often quoted of his poems, " Virtue " , aided this assumption, for it is not representative. So did the pious devotion of J o h n Wesley, who, an enthusiast in a century of neglect, " cut down Herbert's intricate metrical patterns to the Procrustean bed of C o m m o n , Long, a n d Short Measure, all of them iambic, to fit t h e m for singing to familiar tunes " . Coleridge p u t an end to this fallacy, a n d since Coleridge's day, a n d particularly in our own time, a just appreciation of Herbert's craftsmanship has become fairly general. W e can best define Herbert's kind of poetry by a few contrasts. H e is usually described as a follower of Donne, but he has none of Donne's intensity, a n d little of his metaphysical complexity. Herbert's ideal of life, as set forth in one of his prose works, is that of " the country parson " , of one who is " exceeding exact in his life, being holy, just, prudent, temperate, bold, grave in all his ways " , a n d these same words might be used to describe the spirit of his verse, while the parson's knowledge a n d preaching are its content. But again we must not suppose that the virtues a r e aspects of personal simplicity. H e r b e r t h a d thought deeply a n d originally on religious issues. T h e simplicity was an ideal to be achieved in expression, not in the mental processes themselves. T h e simplicity of his style is due, first to an economy of imagery, a n d then to a conversational ease of diction. It is the m o d e r n habit to crowd as m a n y images into a p o e m as raisins into a p l u m - p u d d i n g . Herbert, by contrast, will take a single image a n d exploit all its potentialities in a p o e m of considerable length. Indeed, the whole of his poetry is b u t the extension of one image, the T e m p l e , or C h u r c h , its furnishings a n d usages. 39

A Goat of Many Colours Partly as a result of sustaining a single image over a n u m b e r of stanzas, the diction of the poem tends to be sequential, linked to the logical development of an argument for which the long sentence, compact with relative or qualifying clauses, is most appropriate. Such sentences, a n d such arguments, are convincing in the degree that they are direct a n d intimate. It is for this reason that Herbert's poems are very good to recite, by anyone w h o cares to discover their inherent melody : Deare Friend, sit down, the tale is long a n d sad : And in my faintings I presume your love Will more complie then help. A Lord I had . . . T o him I brought a dish of fruit one day . . . It is " delicious " , as Coleridge said of one of these poems. And yet sometimes very subtle, as in the poem Coleridge had in mind, " T h e Flower " : H o w fresh, O Lord, how sweet a n d clean Are thy returns ! ev'n as the flowers in spring ; T o which, besides their own demean, T h e lãte-pãst frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in M a y , As if there were no such cold thing. N o other poet until Hopkins came would have ventured to place four successive stresses in a line, thereby achieving such a pleasing and unexpected variety of r h y t h m .

io. Cézanne C E Z A N N E was a m a n of a very clear a n d definite intelligence, who early in life decided to devote himself to particular aims a n d w h o from that time allowed nothing to interfere with his career. Certain things he deliberately excluded from his life—politics, for instance, a n d almost 40

Cézanne every kind of personal attachment. It is true he procured a wife, but " procured " is the only word for a convenient alliance which he never allowed to stand in the way of his painting. He made a few friends—Camille Pissarro, for example, and Gasquct and Vollard ; but it is typical of the man that his best friends were two or three schoolfellows, the chief of these being Zola. One of the earliest letters which Zola wrote to his friend from Paris shows clearly how well Zola understood his friend, but how little he appreciated the significance of his qualities. " Shall I tell you something ?—above all don't get angry—you lack character ; you have a horror of exertion of any kind, in thought as well as in deed ; your great principle is to let things slide, and to pick them up again at random." Zola wrote a fuller analysis to their common friend Bailie, which is even more to the point : To convince Cézanne of anything is like trying to persuade the towers of Notre Dame to dance a quadrille. He might say yes, but he would not budge a hair's breadth. And remember that age has increased his stubbornness, without giving him reasonable material to be stubborn about. He is made all of a piece, rigid and hard ; nothing bends him, nothing can drag a concession from him. He will not even discuss his thoughts ; he has a horror of arguments, firstly because talking is tiring, and also because he might have to change his opinion if his opponent were in the right. . . . I had hoped that age would modify him a little. But I find him the same as I left him. So my line of action is very simple : never to impede his fancy ; at most to give him advice very indirectly ; to put the fate of our friendship at the mercy of his own good nature, never to force his hand to clasp mine ; in a word, to efface myself completely. . . . But Zola could not efface himself—the self which he became under the drive of the " character " which he possessed in abundance, but which Cézanne so evidently 41

A Goat of Many Colours lacked. For there is no contradiction between Cezanne's lack of character, a n d the consistency of his personality. Cézanne knew that he possessed what he himself called " t e m p e r a m e n t " ; a n d he knew that " it is only the initial force, id est temperament, that can carry one to the goal one is seeking " . His genius lay precisely in his realization of that fact, a n d in his determination to preserve his " temperament " from all the fixations of a m a n of character such as Zola. But it is only by virtue of such fixations that worldly success can be gained. Zola gained it—gained it to such a degree that Cézanne no longer felt comfortable in his house. T h e great friendship c a m e to an end in i886, a n d there is still no first-hand evidence to account for the break. Vollard's story rings true, however. H e quotes Cézanne as saying : N o harsh words passed between us. It was I w h o stopped going to see Zola. I was not at my ease there any longer, with the fine rugs on the floor, the servants, a n d Emile enthroned behind a carved wooden desk. It all gave me the feeling that I was paying a visit to a minister of state. H e h a d become (excuse me, M o n sieur Vollard—I don't say it in b a d part) a dirty bourgeois. All Cezanne's qualities—his stubbornness, his morbid fear of entanglements, his respect for authority, his timidity in the presence of women—all were a reflection of his inward sensitiveness, his respect for his own sensations, his determination to " realize " these sensations, in all their uniqueness a n d integrity. At the age of thirty-five he wrote to his mother : I a m beginning to find myself stronger than any of those around me, a n d you know that the good opinion I hold of myself has not come to me without good reason. I must go on working, but not in order to attain a finished perfection, which is so m u c h sought after by imbeciles. And this quality which is commonly so m u c h 42

Cézanne admired is nothing but the accomplishment of a craftsm a n , a n d makes any work produced in that way inartistic a n d vulgar. / must not try to finish anything except for the pleasure of making it truer and wiser. If that last sentence which I have italicized is meditated upon, it will be found to contain the whole secret of Cézanne — t h e reason why in his quiet way he gave birth to the greatest revolution in art since Giotto ; a n d the reason why his friend Zola gave birth to nothing but a m o u n t a i n of dead literature. If we a r e to measure the greatness of artists by their influence on their successors, it is already sufficiently clear t h a t Cézanne surpasses all his contemporaries, a n d that by means of Cézanne France m a d e one of the decisive contributions to modern civilization. Cézanne was the founder of a new epoch in painting. T h e general n a t u r e of his achievement has been called " neo-classicism " , a t e r m which conveys a notion of revivalism a n d reaction quite foreign to Cezanne's nature. It is true that Cézanne used certain phrases which seem to indicate that he preferred the methods of Poussin to those of the Impressionists, b u t when we look carefully at these reported sayings, they are seen to involve a criticism of Poussin no less t h a n of Cezanne's contemporaries. " Vivifier Poussin sur n a t u r e ", for example, implies that Poussin's method must be vivified, m a d e more vital, by means of the study of nature. " Redevenir classique p a r la n a t u r e , c'est-à-dire p a r la sensation " implies that classicism, as commonly understood, fails to make a direct sensational approach to n a t u r e . T h e ideal of perfection which is the ideal of classicism—that Cézanne accepted ; but the ideal must not be conceived intellectually, nor is it to be attained by academic rules. I t must be a direct product of the contemplation of nature. Cezanne's problem was in the first instance a per43

A Coat of Many Colours sonal one. As a youth he was w h a t is commonly called " romantic " — t h a t is to say, his thoughts were directed to a world of ideal creatures, mostly derived from imaginative literature. O n e of his early pictures is a copy of a very Byronic " Prisoner of Chillón " in the local museum at Aix : another composition of the same time represents a winged figure (Inspiration) kissing the brow of a sleeping poet. According to the superficial view, such paintings represent a n adolescent phase which the poet gradually outgrows ; b u t actually similar subjects, treated in a very different manner, crop u p at every stage of Cezanne's career ; the series of " Baigneuses " which he painted in his last years are directly related to the romantic compositions of his youth. T h e truth is that there existed in Cézanne, as in every great artist, a strain which m a y b e called variously romantic, or idealistic, or transcendental. But when he began to paint, Cézanne found that this strain, in itself, did not induce a good technique of painting. I t led to fluidity, sentimentality, artifice a n d compromise. H e therefore began to paint objectively—to paint inanimate objects (still-life), landscapes (more particularly rocks a n d buildings, things with a definite structure) a n d portraits. H e soon discovered that he was committed to a n endless discipline—that the task of " realizing " the objective nature of natural objects in terms of paint a n d canvas was one which h a d scarcely been begun by the artists of the past. M o r e particularly, h e discovered t h a t there was an intimate link between form a n d colour in n a t u r e — that the painter could not contemplate n a t u r e u n d e r these two aspects separately, b u t t h a t h e must design in colour. I n other words, precision of design does not exist as a thing in itself, b u t depends on h a r m o n y of colour. Such is the n a t u r e of the revolution which Cézanne brought about—perhaps in itself a technical m a t t e r which only painters a n d connoisseurs can fully appreciate. But 44

Cézanne C é z a n n e did not imply that painting should stop with the solution of this problem. H e wished to apply his basic technique to the painting of ideal compositions ; a n d the great art of the future, as he conceived it, would be one which employed this technique—based on the objective study of nature—in the painting of poetic or literary subjects in the m a n n e r of Poussin. Cézanne himself did not live to achieve such a complete a r t ; a n d though his work has h a d a n incalculable influence on the art of his successors, it is certain t h a t none of t h e m has come any nearer to it, with the possible exception of Picasso. Ironically enough, it was one of the superficial aspects of Cezanne's art which was to have most influence. His reduction of objects to their essential planes a n d the harmonization of the colour relations of these planes produced a geometrical effect which was then imitated for its own sake a n d resulted in the phase known as Cubism. From Cubism has developed the present school of abstract or constructive art, a n d by way of reaction to this development we have h a d the extreme romanticism of superrealism. T h e ideal still remains the same : a synthesis of these two extremes. It is unlikely that we shall ever return to the poetic themes which inspired Poussin ; b u t if an essentially m o d e r n poetry could b e realized with the acute sensational lucidity which Cézanne felt before nature, a new stage in the history of art would have been reached. T h e significance of Cézanne is that he m a d e such an eventuality credible. T h e r e remains a charge which must, in spite of all his greatness, be brought against Cézanne : the charge that he lacked, in life no less t h a n in his art, inventive imagination. I n general (and a rare exception like the " Scène fantastique " only makes the fact more evident) Cezanne's fantasy is completely derivative ; it is even devoid of what, in the work of a painter like Giorgione, we m a y call poesy. It is irrelevant to argue that these are non45

A Goat of Many Colours plastic or literary qualities. Criticism which limits itself to the m e d i u m is merely elementary. I n the end we are concerned with the interpretation of experience, a n d from this point of view we are entitled to object that the very notion of " nature " or " reality " to which Cézanne confined himself was an arbitrary one, typical of the scientific a n d social ideology of his time.

11.

The

cc

Prelude " in Wartime

I T would be hypocritical of m e to suggest that I have habitually turned to Wordsworth's Prelude for solace or inspiration in a time of universal horror a n d despair ; as a matter of fact, I a m too sadly busy to turn to any book in the leisurely m a n n e r implied in such a claim. But I a m continually aware of the presence of this poem ; I have several editions of it at h a n d , a n d certainly there is no other poem in the English language to which I would so confidently refer m y friends for that reanimation which only the best philosophical poetry can give us. I do not suggest that the p o e m has any particular bearing on the war, on the problems of m o d e r n politics, or on the future of the world. Its philosophical message is at once too individualistic a n d too universal for such ready application. T h e poem has, of course, its historical significance. It stands at the midpoint of a revolution as significant as the one we are now enduring. It is the autobiography of a poet w h o was then a revolutionary, a n d nothing that Wordsworth could subsequently do to the poem could alter its revolutionary significance. Wordsworth, in fact, more t h a n Shelley or Byron, represents the revolt against the literary a n d political ideals of a century. But equally he can be described as looking forward over a century, a n d giving that century, the nineteenth, new poetic a n d philosophical ideals. 46

The " Prelude " in Wartime T h e Prelude occupies an integral position in the period which saw the rise of the R o m a n t i c Tradition. Begun by Wordsworth in 1798 a n d completed in 1805, it was not published until 1850. I shall consider presently the reasons which led Wordsworth to hold back the poem, b u t it should be realized that the Prelude was never p u t aside as in any sense unworthy of publication. During the whole of the fifty years between the first a n d final version, the poet went on revising his manuscript, a n d there exist no less t h a n five almost complete versions, besides several drafts of separate parts of the poem. All these m a y be studied in the great critical edition of the Prelude edited by Ernest de Sélincourt, a volume which is indispensable for anyone who would understand not only this poem a n d its author, but also the workings of the poetic mind in general. It is natural to ask which of these versions of the Prelude is the best one to read. Well, outside Professor de Sélincourt's edition, there is not m u c h choice, for it is always the 1850 version that is printed ; a n d Professor de Sélincourt himself is of the opinion that this version is as a whole the best one. But " a s a whole " implies that in parts the other versions are superior, a n d Professor de Sélincourt admits that the ideal text of the Prelude . . . would follow no single manuscript. It would retain from the earliest version such familiar details as have any autobiographical significance. Of purely stylistic changes from that text, it would accept those only which Wordsworth might have m a d e . . . h a d he prepared the p o e m for the press in his greatest period, changes designed to remove crudities of expression, a n d to develop or clarify his original m e a n i n g : b u t it would reject those later excrescences of a m a n n e r less pure, at times even meretricious, which are out of key with the spirit in which the p o e m was first conceived a n d executed. Most firmly it would reject all modifications of his original thought a n d attitude to his theme.

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A Goat oí Many Colours T h e Prelude is a poem of epic length ; it has the structure a n d scale of Milton's Paradise Lost, b u t whereas Paradise Lost sets out to justify the ways of God to M a n , the Prelude has no other a i m b u t to justify William Wordsworth to himself. It was not, of course, the first time that a poet h a d brought himself into his work ; that is a general tendency which began with the Renaissance, a n d Milton was largely concerned with himself a n d his personal experiences in a poem like Samson Agonistes. But Milton, it might be said, h a d the decency to objectify his selfobservation—to embody it in a myth, so that we a p p r o a c h it indirectly. A n d that, it might be said, is in general the way of art. I n classical art, at any rate, the personal reference is always oblique, implied rather t h a n stated openly. Wordsworth himself admitted t h a t " it was a thing unprecedented in literary history that a m a n should talk so m u c h about himself ", but the d e p a r t u r e from precedent was deliberate, a n d implicit in his theory of poetry. I n the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads you will find the new principle clearly enunciated. Another circumstance which distinguishes these poems, he says, is that " the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action a n d situation, a n d not the action a n d situation to the feeling " . If this principle of the primacy of feeling is followed to its logical conclusion, then the fountain of feeling—the poet's own mind—becomes the most natural of all themes. T h e subtitle of the Prelude is " T h e G r o w t h of a Poet's M i n d " , a n d that theme can only be developed by describing the actions a n d situations which h a d been responsible for the mind's growth. N o n e of the usual epic themes from mythology or national history could be relied on to generate the same degree of feeling. Beyond the poet's experiences there was, indeed, another t h e m e to which this poem was, as its title indicates, but a prelude ; that larger work was to be " a moral a n d philosophical 48

The " Prelude " in Wartime poem, the subject whatever I find most interesting in Nature, Man, and Society "—but it is still a personal theme—what /, the poet, find interesting, my moral and philosophical ideas on Man, Nature and Society, my personal vision of the universe. One has only to compare this conception—a conception which includes not only the Prelude', but the greater philosophical poem that was never completed—one has only to compare this conception of Wordsworth's with Dante's Divine Comedy to see what some people would call the originality, and others the enormity, of the undertaking. Dante, it is true, also introduces himself into his epic—that only makes the comparison more interesting. But Dante is merely there as a spectator, as an eye-witness. His aim as a poet is not to express his personal vision of the universe, but to incorporate in one inclusive and unified allegory all the diverse elements of the thought and aspirations of his times. His poem is therefore a synthetic view of the universe, and he himself only obtrudes to give unity of perception and feeling to this synthesis. He does not altogether succeed ; his poem, as a great Italian critic, Francesco de Sanctis, has said, " is too largely composed of thought—crude scholastic thought, or else ornamented, indeed, by imagery, but by imagery without sufficient strength to overcome its abstractness ". Dante's very shortcomings, insignificant as they are in view of the magnitude of his achievement, are nevertheless an adequate excuse for a poet, five hundred years later, trying out another method. But let us realize very fully how different that method was ; let us realize, too, that it was a complete failure. Neither Wordsworth nor any other poet of the Romantic Movement ever succeeded in expressing in a poem what Coleridge used to call " the totality of a system ". What Coleridge demanded of such a poem was " the colours, music, imaginative life, and passion of 49

A Coat of Many Colours poetry ; b u t the matter a n d arrangement of philosophy ; not doubting from the advantages of the subject that t h e totality of a system was not only capable of being h a r monized with, but even calculated to aid, the unity of a poem " . But that is precisely what we must d o u b t — w e must d o u b t whether the rational processes involved in t h e elaboration of a system of philosophy can ever be reconciled with the emotional processes involved in the creation of a poem. T h e truth is that poetry—indeed, all a r t — accepts contradictions ; it is an irrational activity whose only object is to seize and enhance the objective sensuous elements of life in a reality which is organic, a n d not in a wholeness which is logical. W e must therefore fall back upon the purely a u t o biographical significance of the Prelude, a n d though it m a y incidentally express a philosophy which was Wordsworth's own, we need not consider it as in any sense a philosophical poem. I t is a poem about the childhood, adolescence a n d early m a n h o o d of a poet. It teaches us more about the psychology of the poet t h a n about M a n , N a t u r e a n d Society. And if it is read from this point of view, it is, a p a r t from all its poetic values, a fascinating document, equal in interest, I would say, to the Confessions of Rousseau. But that, perhaps, is another comparison which is worth pursuing for a minute. T h e r e is one particular in which the Prelude falls short of the Confessions— it is not so frank. Both these authors were m e n of strong moral inclinations. Both h a d committed w h a t they regarded as moral indiscretions, if not crimes ; both were tortured with feelings of remorse. But whereas Rousseau exposed himself relentlessly, if not always truthfully, Wordsworth played a game of hide a n d seek, not only with the world, but with his conscience. T h e original version of the Prelude included a disguised account of Wordsworth's liaison with Annette Vallon. Wordsworth 50

The " Prelude " in Wartime evidently felt that this episode, in the body of his a u t o biographical poem, was too revealing, so he deleted it, and published it separately in 1820 as the story of Vaudracour and Julia. This is not the only evasion in the published version of the Prelude ; by m a n y small but subtle changes Wordsworth sought to disguise his youthful ideas on politics a n d religion. W e can have no objection to W o r d s worth's change of opinions—it is a natural process in a m a n who lives so long. W e cannot object to the appearance of these revised opinions in his later work ; but w h a t is inexcusable is that in a n autobiographical work a n old m a n should falsify the feelings a n d aspirations of his youth. H e r e let m e say a few words about those feelings a n d aspirations. I believe that in his deepest intuitions Wordsworth reached a position nearer to Eastern philosophy t h a n that of any other European poet. T h a t philosophy is perhaps expressed more completely in The Recluse a n d in Ode : Intimations of Immortality, but there is an early expression of it in the first book of the Prelude, which is short enough to q u o t e : Wisdom a n d Spirit of the universe ! T h o u Soul that art the eternity of thought, T h a t givest to forms a n d images a breath A n d everlasting motion, not in vain By day or star-light thus from m y first d a w n Of childhood didst thou intertwine for m e T h e passions t h a t build u p our h u m a n soul ; Not with the m e a n a n d vulgar works of m a n , But with high objects, with enduring things— W i t h life a n d nature—purifying thus T h e elements of feeling a n d of thought, A n d sanctifying, by such discipline, Both pain a n d fear, until we recognize A g r a n d e u r in the beatings of the heart. This early philosophy of Wordsworth's is usually described as pantheistic, a n d this ambiguous word must perhaps suffice to describe w h a t is a very personal vision. 51

A Goat of Many Colours Pantheism is the doctrine that divinity is i m m a n e n t in the universe, but Wordsworth's mysticism is more positive, more constructive than this. T h e spirit i m m a n e n t in the universe is formative, dynamic, even aesthetic. " T h e m i n d of m a n ", Wordsworth wrote in the early version of the Prelude " is fram'd even like the breath a n d h a r m o n y of music " ; a n d in the final version this passage took the form of those famous lines beginning : Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like h a r m o n y in music ; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society. " I n one society " — t h a t is the point. At the beginning of the century Wordsworth h a d reached by intuition a conception of the harmonic structure of the universe for which the scientific basis has been provided by m o d e r n physics. I t is possible that he was inspired to some extent by a theologian of whose works he was to express strong disapproval when he became more orthodox—I m e a n William Paley, whose Natural Theology was published in 1802, just at the time when Wordsworth was writing his first version of the Prelude. A study of Wordsworth's relationship to Palcy would, I suspect, be very rewarding. But w h a t I would like to suggest here is that a n a t u r a l affinity exists between Wordsworth's mysticism a n d the religious conceptions of Taoism a n d Buddhism. I d o not suppose that there was any direct connection, though through the m e d i u m of Coleridge almost a n y religious or philosophical influence in the world might have been brought to bear on Wordsworth. Let me now turn rather abruptly to another aspect of the Prelude—what might be called its technical achievement. Wordsworth h a d meditated very profoundly on the technique of verse—his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 52

The " Prelude " in Wartime is the greatest contribution to poetic theory in our language. W e m a y therefore be sure that his choice of blank verse for his principal work was very deliberate. Now blank verse—the very n a m e is forbidding—is a tricky m e d i u m of expression. It very easily degenerates into prosiness, banality a n d insipidity, or into a n artificiality d u e to a desire to avoid these faults. Wordsworth did not avoid any of these faults, b u t it is remarkable in so long a p o e m how rarely the diction descends to flatness a n d bathos. For the most p a r t it pursues a course of heightened expression which, while not inspired, is w h a t he aimed a t — " a selection of the real language of m e n in a state of vivid sensation . . . " a d a p t e d to " metrical a r r a n g e m e n t " . But frequently it becomes something more than this. T h e metre remains the same, the words are not noticeably different, b u t by gradual a n d imperceptible degrees a new tone or intensity is developed. W e might apply to Wordsworth a remark Coleridge once m a d e of D r y d e n — t h a t his genius " was of the sort that catches fire by its own motion ; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast " . But light, rather t h a n heat, is the quality generated by Wordsworth. M a n y famous passages could be quoted in illustration, but here I would like to d r a w attention to a few lines which m a y not be so familiar because Wordsworth discarded t h e m from the final version of the Prelude (Book IV) presumably because they expressed an animal delight of which h e h a d grown ashamed. H e is describing a walk by night along a public road, which in its deserted silence seems to assume a quietness deeper t h a n pathless solitudes. H e slowly mounted u p a steep ascent Where the road's watery surface, to the ridge O f t h a t sharp rising, glitter'd in t h e moon, And seem'd before m y eyes another stream Creeping with silent lapse to join the brook T h a t m u r m u r ' d in the valley. . . .

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A Goat of Many Colours H e then describes how his exhausted mind, worn out by toil, was in a listless state, a n d all unworthy of the deeper joy that awaited him. T h e n comes the passage to which I a m referring : T h u s did I steal along that silent road, M y body from the stillness drinking in A restoration like the calm of sleep, But sweeter far. Above, before, behind, Around me, all was peace and solitude, I look'd not round, nor did the solitude Speak to my eye ; but it was heard a n d felt. O h a p p y state ! what beauteous pictures now Rose in harmonious imagery—they rose As from some distant region of my soul And came along like dreams ; yet such as left Obscurely mingled with their passing forms A consciousness of animal delight, A self-possession felt in every pause And every gentle movement of my frame. This is not so absolutely poetic as a passage which occurs a page earlier, in which Wordsworth describes a n early walk home across the fields after a night of dancing, gaiety and mirth : Magnificent T h e morning rose, in memorable p o m p , Glorious as e'er I h a d beheld—in front, T h e sea lay laughing at a distance ; near, T h e solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, Grain-tinctur'd, drenched in empyrean light ; A n d in the meadows a n d the lower grounds Was all the sweetness of a c o m m o n d a w n — Dews, vapours, a n d the melody of birds, A n d labourers going forth to till the fields. T h a t is one of the supreme moments of English poetry, inspired in every syllable a n d accent ! But I would ask the reader to study the first passage I have quoted, a n d others like it. It is not so bright, b u t then it is not describing such concrete things. It is subjective, expressing a 54

Bosch and Dali state of mind. And therein lies Wordsworth's uniqueness a n d the source of his enduring influence. I could find m a n y a passage in English poetry to rival the description of the morning walk—in Spenser, in Shakespeare, in Keats. But I know of no poet who could describe so well that " distant region of the soul " which was moved by the mystery a n d solitude of the midnight walk.

12. Bosch and Dali HosGH, w h o was active between 1470 a n d 1510, seems to have a fair claim to have invented a type of fantasy which Brueghel was to popularize. Brueghel, no d o u b t , gave this fantasy a broader basis of h u m o u r a n d h u m a n i t y , a n d was in other respects a greater artist t h a n Bosch ; but this particular kind of fantasy of which I a m speaking has a m u c h more positive a n d original character in t h e works of its originator. T h o u g h always full of exquisite invention, the majority of Bosch's pictures belong to t h e realistic school of that time ; that is to say, they represent their themes (generally religious themes) in the lowly terms of the painter's own life a n d environment. A scene like the " Adoration of the M a g i " is set outside a dilapidated D u t c h b a r n , the landscape in the background is N o r t h Brabant, and though the D u t c h town in the distance m e a n t to represent Bethlehem has a fantastic temple in the middle of it, in front of the temple is a very Dutch windmill. T h e various personages in these scenes (except, perforce, Balthasar) are local peasants, selected with an obvious bias towards the grotesque. This bias, this itch to caricature h u m a n i t y , is no d o u b t present from the beginning. Caricature is perhaps always based on a cont e m p t for the world or for the mass of humanity, and such a contempt for this world, we might expect, would 55

A Goat of Many Colours lead to a corresponding belief in the world beyond. But to a realist of Bosch's type, the most real p a r t of t h e world beyond would be the Devil a n d all his works. I n any case, w h a t we m a y fairly assume to be the later work of Bosch shows a preoccupation with themes which give full vent to the world of evil—the T e m p t a t i o n of St. Anthony (his favourite subject), St. J e r o m e in the Desert, St. J o h n on Patmos, the Last J u d g e m e n t , Hell itself—these are the subjects which inspired his most characteristic works. A vivid realization of the supernatural world was, of course, c o m m o n to the whole of the Middle Ages, b u t most of the pictorial representations of it stop at t h e grotesque a n d the horrible. Bosch went beyond, to t h e irrational. Most of his paintings of this kind are too detailed to reproduce well, b u t a mere enumeration of some of the incidents is enough to convey the exceptional n a t u r e of his fantasy. T h e best example to take is the large altarpicce in the Escorial, a triptych showing a Venusberg or G a r d e n of Delights in the centre, with Paradise on the left a n d Hell on the right. I n the middle panel, for example, we find in one section a scene by a river bank ; u n d e r the water is an egg from which a r o u n d window has been cut, out of which a m a n peers down a tube of glass at a mouse just entering the tube. F r o m the other end of the egg grows a strange plant whose flower expands into a veined bubble within which is seated a pair of naked lovers. At the side of the flower another figure caresses a giant owl, whilst above, other naked figures sit in attitudes of despair on giant woodpeckers, bullfinches a n d other birds. I n Hell we see a naked figure spreadeagled on a h a r p ; the h a r p grows out of a lute, r o u n d which a snake twines a n d binds in its coils a naked m a n . I n a pulpit a bird-headed monster is seated, its feet in jugs, eating a naked corpse from which fly off black birds ; the feet of the corpse grip w h a t looks

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Bosch and Dali like a n inverted powder-horn. Below the pulpit hangs a bubble, from which a figure half-emerges above an open pit. A m a n caressing a pig is disturbed by a fabulous insect with h u m a n limbs a n d a crest from which a severed h u m a n foot is hanging. This is only a h a p h a z a r d selection from literally hundreds of equally fantastic details. By comparison the fantasy of Salvador Dali is feeble, or, shall we say, sparing. Those w h o are not inclined to take Dali seriously will probably d r a w a distinction between the n a t u r e of t h e inspiration in each case. It is doubtful, however, if such a distinction is worth m u c h . Dali, for example, paints a lady's shoe with a glass of milk standing inside it—he often uses the lady's shoe motive. Those who are familiar with the writings of psychoanalysts will remember that the shoe is one of the most frequent of the sexual symbols that occur in dreams ; a n d most of Dali's motives are recognizable symbols of this sort. It will be said, therefore, that Dali is constructing deliberately, objectively, the kind of fantasy which came to Bosch naturally, subjectively. Only Dali himself could say to w h a t extent he is deliberately making use of Freudian symbolism ; b u t I doubt if his use of it is any more deliberate than Bosch's use of similar symbolism (for no psychoanalyst could fail to characterize m u c h of Bosch's symbolism as sexual). I think the most we could say is that Bosch would not have h a d a psychological vocabulary to describe w h a t he was doing, a n d that to the extent to which our thoughts depend on our vocabulary Bosch was innocent of his intention. But in the m o d e r n j a r g o n , both Dali and Bosch are resorting for their lantasy to the unconscious ; it does not seem to matter very m u c h how they got there. T h e similarity between the two artists is still closer. T h e aim of the superrealists, as M a x Ernst has recently declared, is not merely to gain access to the unconscious 57 c

A Coat of Many Colours a n d to paint its contents in a descriptive or realistic way : nor is it even to take various elements from the unconscious a n d with them construct a separate world of fancy ; it is rather their aim to break down the barriers both physical a n d psychical, between the conscious a n d the unconscious, between the inner and the outer world, a n d to create a superreality in which real a n d unreal, meditation a n d action, conscious a n d unconscious, meet a n d mingle a n d dominate the whole of life. I n Bosch's case, a quite similar intention was inspired by medieval theology, a n d a very literal belief in the reality of the Life Beyond. T o a m a n of his intense powers of visualization, the present life a n d the life to come, Paradise a n d Hell a n d the World, were all equally real a n d interpenetrating ; they combined, t h a t is to say, to form a superreality that was the only reality with which an artist could be concerned. I a m not suggesting that what in Dali takes the place of Bosch's theology is an equally a d e q u a t e sanction for his kind of painting ; a p a r t from a desire to " d e b u n k " w h a t they call the legend of the artist's special genius or talent (for apparently anybody with an accessible unconscious can become a superrealist), a n d a p a r t from a desire to destroy the whole of the bourgeois ideology of art, t h e Surréalistes cannot be said to have any theology, a n d their beliefs, in so far as they profess any, are materialistic. It is true that in his recent autobiography, Dali suggests t h a t E u r o p e can only be saved by a return to Catholicism, b u t one is reminded of Péguy 's remark : " A religion is necessary for the people—this is, in a certain sense, the deepest insult t h a t was ever offered to our faith " .

58

The Paradox of Anarchism 13.

The Paradox of Anarchism

1 HE highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.—PROUDHON. It has been the fashion, especially a m o n g orthodox Marxists, to hold in contempt any theory of politics which did not justify itself in action, a n d this emphasis on action has often led to a confusion of means a n d ends—the means too often overshadowing the ends a n d becoming a substitute for them. T h e dictatorship of the proletariat, for example, at first p u t forward as a means towards the classless society, becomes stabilized in Russia as the sovereignty of a new class. Anarchism does not confuse means a n d ends, theory and practice. As a theory it relies on reason alone, a n d if the conception of society which it thus arrives at seems Utopian a n d even chimerical, it does not matter, for w h a t is established by right reasoning cannot be surrendered to expediency. O u r practical activity m a y be a gradual approximation towards the ideal, or it m a y be a sudden revolutionary realization of that ideal, b u t it must never be a compromise. P r o u d h o n was often accused of being an anarchist in theory, b u t only a reformist in practice : he was, in fact, an anarchist all the time, who refused to commit himself to the hazards of dictatorship. H e would not play the g a m e of politics because he knew that economics were the fundamental reality. A n d so to-day it is conceivable that a change in the control of financial credit, or a new system of land tenure, might bring us nearer to anarchism t h a n a political revolution which merely transferred the power of the state into the hands of a new set of ambitious gangsters. Anarchism means literally a society without an arkhos, t h a t is to say, without a ruler. It does not m e a n a society without law and therefore it does not m e a n a society with59

A Coat of Many Colours out order. The anarchist accepts the social contract, but he interprets that contract in a particular way, which he believes to be the way most justified by reason. The social contract, as expounded by Rousseau, implies that each individual in society surrenders his independence for the common good, with the assumption that only in this way can the liberty of the individual be guaranteed. Liberty is guaranteed by law, and law, to use Rousseau's phrase, is the expression of the general will. So far we are on common ground, not only with Rousseau, but with the whole democratic tradition which has been built up on the theoretical foundation laid by Rousseau. Where the anarchist diverges from Rousseau, and from that aspect of the democratic tradition which has found expression in parliamentary socialism, is in his interpretation of the manner in which the general will should be formulated and enforced. Rousseau himself was not consistent on this question. He was quite convinced that some form of state must exist as an expression of the general will, and that the power invested in the state by general consent must be absolute. He was equally convinced that the individual must retain his liberty, and that upon the individual's enjoyment of liberty depended all progress and civilization. He realized that as an historical fact the state and the individual had always come into conflict, and for a solution of this dilemma he fell back upon his theory of education. If every citizen could be brought up to appreciate the beauty and harmony of the laws inherent in nature, he would be as incapable of establishing a tyranny as of enduring one. The society in which he lived would automatically be a natural society, a society of free consent in which law and liberty are but two aspects of the same reality. But such a system of education implies a pre-existing authority to establish it and that authority must be absolute. 60

The Paradox of Anarchism T h e system of government recommended by Rousseau in The Social Contract is a n elective aristocracy rather t h a n a true democracy, a n d to control this aristocracy he imagines a state so small that every individual within it would be able to watch a n d criticize the government. H e probably h a d something like the Greek city-state in mind as the ideal unit. H e certainly h a d no prevision of the vast complexes of millions of individuals which constitute most m o d e r n states, a n d we can be quite sure that he would have been the first to a d m i t t h a t his system of checks on authority would not work u n d e r such conditions. But his theory of the state, which has h a d such a profound influence on the development of m o d e r n socialism, has been taken over as applicable to these vast conglomerates, a n d it then becomes a justification for the most absolute kind of authoritarianism. This danger was recognized as long ago as 1815 by Benjamin Constant, who described The Social Contract as " l e plus terrible auxiliaire de tous les genres de despotisme " . If w h a t Rousseau calls a n aristocratie form of government is more or less identical with m o d e r n democracy, w h a t he calls democracy is more or less identical with the m o d e r n theory of anarchism, a n d it is interesting to see why h e rejects democracy. H e does so for two reasons— first because he regards it as an executive impossibility. A people cannot be continuously assembled to govern itself ; it must delegate authority as a mere matter of convenience, a n d once you have delegated authority, you no longer have a democracy. His second reason is a typical example of his inconsistency. If there were a people of gods, he says, they could govern themselves democratically, b u t a government so perfect is unsuitable for men. But if democracy is the perfect form of government, it is not for one w h o has proclaimed his faith in the perfectibility 61

A Coat of Many Colours of m a n to restrict it to the gods. W h a t is good enough for the gods is all the better for man—as an ideal. If the ideal exists we must recognize it and strive, however approximately, to attain it. But the fundamental question in all this sophistry is ignored by Rousseau. It is the unreality of the notion of the general will. T h e r e is probably only one issue on which a people ever expresses unanimous or general will : the defence of their physical liberty. Otherwise they divide according to their temperaments, a n d though these are limited in n u m b e r , they are sufficiently diverse and so mutually opposed that in any given geographical area they will give rise to incompatible groups. O n that very account, say Rousseau a n d m a n y other philosophers, a democracy is impossible. T h e y are forced to this conclusion because they a d h e r e obstinately to the arbitrary boundaries of the m o d e r n state—boundaries established by rivers, seas, mountains a n d military treaties, a n d not by reason. Suppose we were to ignore these boundaries, or abolish them. T h e realities are, after all, h u m a n beings with certain desires : with certain primitive needs. These h u m a n beings, according to their needs a n d sympathies, will spontaneously associate themselves into groups for m u t u a l aid, will voluntarily organize a n economy which ensures the satisfaction of their needs. This is the principle of m u t u a l aid, a n d it has been explained a n d justified with m u c h historical a n d scientific evidence by Kropotkin. I t is this principle which the anarchist makes the foundation of his social order, a n d upon which he believes he can build that democratic form of society which Rousseau felt was reserved for the gods. It is not necessary here to repeat the empirical evidence for this belief : Kropotkin's great book can now be obtained for a shilling in the Penguin Series, a n d it is a work whose 62

The Paradox of Anarchism scholarship is acknowledged by sociologists of all schools. T h e difficulty is not to justify a principle which has sound psychological a n d empirical evidence to support it, b u t to apply this principle to the existing state of society. This we do tentatively by taking the voluntary organizations which already exist a n d seeing to w h a t extent they are capable of becoming the units in a democratic society. Such organizations are trade unions, syndicates, p r o fessional unions a n d associations—all those groups which crystallize a r o u n d a h u m a n function. W e then consider the functions which are now performed by the state, a n d which are necessary for our well-being, a n d we ask ourselves to w h a t extent these functions could be entrusted to such voluntary organizations. W e come to the conclusion that there are no essential functions which could not thus be transferred. It is true that there are functions like making w a r a n d charging rent which are not the expression of an impulse towards m u t u a l aid, but it does not need m u c h consideration of such functions to see t h a t they would naturally disappear if the central authority of the state was abolished. T h e mistakes of every political thinker from Aristotle to Rousseau have been d u e to their use of the abstract conception man. T h e i r systems assume the substantial uniformity of this creature of their imaginations, a n d w h a t they actually propose are various forms of authority to enforce uniformity on m a n . But the anarchist recognizes the uniqueness of the person ; a n d only allows for organization to the extent that the person seeks sympathy a n d m u t u a l aid a m o n g his fellows. In reality, therefore, the anarchist replaces the social contract by the functional contract, a n d the authority of the contract only extends to the fulfilling of a specific function. T h e political unitarian or authoritarian conceives society as one body compelled to uniformity. T h e anarchist con63

A Coat of Many Colours ceives society as a balance or h a r m o n y of groups, a n d most of us belong to one or more such groups. T h e only difficulty is their harmonious interrelation. But is it so difficult ? It is true that trade unions sometimes quarrel with one another, but analyse these quarrels a n d you will find, either that they proceed from causes outside their function (such as their different conceptions of their place in a non-functional, e.g. capitalist, society) or from personal rivalries, which are a reflection of the struggle for survival in a capitalist world. Such differences of aim bear no relation to the principle of voluntary organization a n d are indeed excluded by that very concept. I n general, trade unions can agree with one another well enough even in a capitalist society, in spite of all its incitement to rivalry a n d aggressiveness. If we go outside our own time to the M i d d l e Ages, for example, we find that the functional organization of society, though imperfectly realized, was proved to be quite possible, a n d its gradual perfection was only t h w a r t e d by the rise of capitalism. O t h e r periods a n d other forms of society, as Kropotkin has shown, fully confirm the possibility of the harmonious interrelationships of functional groups. Admitted, it m a y be said, that we can transfer all the economic functions of the state in this way, w h a t about other functions—the administration of criminal law, relationships with foreign countries not at the same stage of social development, education, etc. ? T o this question the anarchist has two replies. I n the first place he argues that most of these non-functional activities are incidental to a non-functional state—that crime, for example, is largely a reaction to the institution of private property, a n d that foreign affairs are largely economic in origin a n d motivation. But it is agreed t h a t there are questions, such as certain aspects of c o m m o n law,

64

The Paradox of Anarchism infant education, public morality, which may be outside the province of the functional organizations. These, he argues are matters of c o m m o n sense, solved by reference to the innate good will of the community. But the community for this purpose need not necessarily be anything so impersonal a n d so grandiose as a state—in fact, it will be effective in inverse ratio to its size. T h e most effective community is the smallest—the family. Beyond the family is the parish, the local association of m e n in contiguous dwellings. Such local associations m a y form their courts a n d these courts are sufficient to administer a common law based on c o m m o n sense. T h e m a n o r courts in the Middle Ages, for example, dealt with all crimes a n d misdemeanours save those committed against the artificial entities of the state a n d the Church. I n this sense anarchism implies a universal decentralization of authority, a n d a universal simplification of life. I n h u m a n entities like the m o d e r n city will disappear. But anarchism does not necessarily imply a reversion to h a n d i craft a n d outdoor sanitation. T h e r e is no contradiction between anarchism a n d electric power, anarchism a n d air transport, anarchism a n d the division of labour, anarchism a n d industrial efficiency. Since the functional groups will all be working for their m u t u a l benefit, a n d not for other people's profit or for m u t u a l destruction, the measure of efficiency will be the appetite for fullness of living. T h e r e is a further consideration of a more topical and more pressing nature. I n a remarkable book published recently, The Crisis of Civilization, Alfred C o b b a n has shown t h a t the disasters which have fallen on the Western world are a direct consequence of the adoption by G e r m a n y of the theory of popular or national sovereignty, in place of the theory of natural law which h a d been evolved by the rational movement of thought in the eighteenth century 65

A Coat of Many Colours known as the Enlightenment. M r . Cobban,

G e r m a n thought, writes

substituted historical rights for natural rights, a n d the will of the nation, or the Vol/:, for reason as the basis of law a n d government. . . . T h e ultimate result of the theory of popular sovereignty was thus the substitution of history for ethics. This tendency was present in the contemporary thought of all countries. It has only achieved a complete triumph in G e r m a n y . T h e distinguishing mark of modern G e r m a n thought is the dissolution of ethics in the Volkgeist ; its practical conclusion is that the state is the source of all morality, a n d the individual must accept the laws a n d actions of his own state as having ultimate ethical validity. I will not repeat the detailed evidence which M r . C o b b a n , who is a professional historian, offers in support of this statement, but its truth is obvious enough. " Sovereignty, whether it adopts the democratic, nationalist, or socialist disguise, or some a m a l g a m of all three, is the political religion of to-day." It follows that if we are to rid E u r o p e permanently of the menace to peace which G e r m a n y represents, we must first of all refute the G e r m a n conception of sovereignty. So long as this conception remains, as a national religion, there will be a continual resurgence of the instruments of such a policy—armed might a n d arbitrary aggression. I t was a great G e r m a n , already alarmed by the tendencies then taking shape, as an immediate reaction from the French Revolution, who warned his countrymen against the monster they were creating. It is thus [wrote Schiller] that concrete individual life is extinguished, in order that the abstract whole m a y continue its miserable life, a n d the state remains for ever a stranger to its citizens, because nowhere does it touch their feelings. T h e governing authorities find themselves compelled to classify, a n d thereby simplify, the multiplicity of citizens, and only to know h u m a n i t y 66

The Paradox of Anarchism in a representative form a n d at second h a n d . Accordingly they end by entirely losing sight of humanity, a n d by confounding it with a simple artificial creation of the understanding, whilst on their p a r t the subject classes cannot help receiving coldly laws that address themselves so little to their personality. At length society, weary of having a burden that the state takes so little trouble to lighten, falls to pieces a n d is broken u p — a destiny that has long since attended most E u r o p e a n states. T h e y are dissolved in what m a y be called a state of moral nature, in which public authority is only one function more, hated a n d deceived by those w h o think it necessary, respected only by those who can d o without it. 1 I n these prescient words Schiller stated that antagonism between organic freedom a n d mechanical organizations which has been ignored in the political development of modern Europe, with results which we see all round us now. Anarchism is the final a n d most urgent protest against this fate : a recall to those principles which alone can guarantee the h a r m o n y of m a n ' s being a n d the creative evolution of his genius.

14. Havelock Ellis JVIOST thoughtful people would include Havelock Ellis a m o n g the significant figures of the last fifty years. H e was born, as he often reminded us, in the year that saw the first publication of The Origin of Species. His first book appeared in 1890 a n d his last one followed exactly fifty years later. As a scientist he is identified with one rather narrow a n d disturbing subject—the psychology of sex. As a humanist his interests include the whole range of h u m a n endeavour, a n d he wrote well on a n immense variety of literary a n d philosophical subjects. H e was never a 1

Letters upon the ¿Esthetical Education of Man,

67

VI.

A Coat of Many Colours popular a u t h o r (though the Dance of Life was a best-seller in America) b u t he h a d a big following. H e was, in fact, a m o d e r n prophet, a n d since his god was Eros he never lacked disciples. T o o m a n y people have a claim to be regarded as the last of the Victorians, b u t it is difficult to imagine a life more remote t h a n the one which is so intimately self-revealed in Ellis's autobiography. I t is the life of a natural historian of the old school—not essentially different from that of a village botanist collecting his specimens on his solitary walks and patiently classifying them in a home-made herbarium. Havelock Ellis's specimens came from the most obscure regions of h u m a n behaviour, a n d merely to a p p r o a c h t h e m with a scientific mind involved the violation of our strongest moral a n d legal taboos. Ellis shrank from such a public challenge ; after the first charge of obscenity, he published his scientific work elsewhere—in America a n d France ; a n d it was not until comparatively recently t h a t it became possible to obtain his Studies in the Psychology of Sex in his native land. H e seems to have been timid by nature, a n d perhaps for this reason did not take u p the normal career of a general practitioner for which he was trained. H e never in his life m a d e a public speech a n d rarely appeared at a public function of any kind. H e refused pressing a n d lucrative invitations to visit the U n i t e d States. But like other timid men, he h a d his compensating vanity. H e was p r o u d of his appearance, a n d tells us with complacency that he reminded some of his friends of the god Pan, others of Jesus Christ. H e was also conceited a b o u t his literary style, a n d certainly it is a clear a n d workmanlike instrument. But it has no affinity, as he imagined, with the " exquisite " prose of N e w m a n ; a n d it can be as b a d as this : " But while M a l a g a ostentatiously proclaims its really magnificent claims on the health-seeker, there was not, then at all events, a single hotel in the city which could 68

Havelock Ellis even on the surface be acceptable as a liveable residence for any but hurried business men." He was forced by the nature of his work to invent many neologisms, some of which have passed into general currency ; others, like the verb " to germ ", we may hope will quickly die. Carefully written as it is in general—it was written at leisurely intervals over forty years, the author reserving his " finest moments " for the purpose—his autobiography is nevertheless frequently redundant and altogether shapeless. But with all its faults we may still accept Ellis's suggestion that it is " the most perdurable piece of work " he left behind. H e himself gave reasons for its failure to attain the same degree of general interest as the three most famous autobiographical documents in literature—the Confessions of SL Augustine, the Confessions of Rousseau and the Memoirs of Casanova : The very qualities of sanity and reasonableness, of critical impartiality, of just analytical precision, which made the task fascinating and possible for me, were incompatible with those qualities which had assured the success of Rousseau and Augustine and Casanova, not one of whom had so much as conceived the scientific spirit applied to life. Here, unconsciously betrayed, is the clue to the sense of unreality which is the final impression left by his Life. It is not that it is not an intensely sincere document ; both Ellis and his wife were intensely sincere people. But their very sincerity includes a contradiction, a contradiction which perhaps explains the wider crisis of our civilization. In general this is the clash of rationality and instinct ; or, as Mrs. Ellis expressed it in one of her American lectures, the problem of " how to combine sane eugenics with a fine spirituality ". The background from which Havelock Ellis and his wife emerged was nineteenth-century rationalism : the rationalism of Darwin and Huxley, of the 69

A Coat of Many Colours Fellowship of the New Life a n d the Fabian Society. But rationalism, for m a n y of these earnest seekers after truth, was not enough ; a n d they found compensation in sentimentalism. T h o u g h Ellis himself did not altogether avoid this reaction, he h a d sufficient philosophical knowledge a n d sufficient artistry to give it a clean façade : and it is only in his confessions that we see what havoc it wrought in his own life no less t h a n in the minds of his disciples. W h a t is there told at great length a n d with unusual frankness can only be glanced at in this note. At the age of thirty-two Ellis married Edith Lees, who was then secretary to the N e w Fellowship. She was a small but extremely vital w o m a n , expressing her energy in a score of ways : social organization, lecturing, writing, farming, furnishing, etc. T h e marriage was entered into very deliberately, very " rationally " , by both parties, a n d there is no reason to d o u b t the genuineness of their m u t u a l attraction. But Ellis confesses his lack of passionate sexual feeling for his wife, a n d she for her p a r t soon revealed a predominantly homosexual temperament. After a few discordant years " marital relationship in the narrow sense " was permanently brought to an end. But their marriage lasted for twenty-five years, until Mrs. Ellis died a distracted a n d indeed a mentally unstable woman. O u t of this discordant relationship Havelock Ellis constructed his philosophy of love—a philosophy to which he gives very eloquent expression in this book : Passion transcends sex. I shall never belittle the great roots of sex in life. I know 1 could not love any m a n as I have loved this woman. But I have discovered that the sexual impulse of physical attraction m a y pass away and give place to a passion that is stronger than it. T h a t is a discovery with a signiíicance for life a n d for the institution of marriage which has not yet been measured. A n d I smile when I see the ephemeral creatures of a day sneering at love. W e who are not the 70

Havelock Ellis creatures of a day, who live greatly, a n d do the work of t h e world, we are moved by love so that, rather t h a n belittle love, we would even see a sense in the final extravagance of Dante, a n d end, as he ends, on the omnipotence of love, " L ' a m o r chc move il sole c l'altrc stcllc " . But D a n t e , whose doctrine of love is so acceptably spiritual, knew nothing of scientific eugenics. H e m a y have h a d to transcend his animality, which is a natural process of sublimation. But those who, while attempting sublimation, still cling to a rationalization of their animality are doomed to the Calvary which Ellis says he has endured. At the end he has to confess that in spite of all the joy a n d ecstasy t h a t has been his, he " could almost echo the words of Ninon de Léñelos : ' If I h a d known what my life was to be I would have killed myself V Havelock Ellis's experience of love was by no means confined to this tortured marriage, but the timidity which assailed h i m in his social contacts seems to have persisted in his more personal relations. " But in that form (excitability) sex seems little to have troubled me. . . . I am regarded as a n authority on sex, a fact which has sometimes amused one or two (though not all) of my more intimate women friends." At the same time he thinks of himself " only as a lover—a lover w h o has fallen far short of perfection " . But in the end the world will probably value this m a n for other qualities : for his reasonableness, his intellectual enterprise, his courage. It is for others to j u d g e the value of his contributions to science. Havelock Ellis h a d as his exact contemporary Sigmund Freud, a n d though he never allowed himself to be jealous of his fellowworker, there can be little d o u b t that Ellis's old-fashioned " natural history " has been eclipsed by the brilliant analysis a n d speculation of the rival method. However this m a y be, in the wider field of h u m a n culture, Ellis has 71

A Goat of Many Colours a variety a n d a grace which would never have been a p p r o priate to a specialist like Freud. As I look back [he writes towards the end of his Life] I seem to see one who was, instinctively a n d unconsciously a n artist in living, one who used, honestly a n d courageously, the material of such mixed quality t h a t was p u t into his hands at the outset a n d slowly wrought the work that N a t u r e a n d his own nature—they seemed to him one—had set him to do, together with his own life, into one large a n d harmonious whole, so that all he lived he wrote a n d all that he wrote he lived. Beginning with few advantages, satisfied with modest rewards, without worldly ambition, he nevertheless persisted in the way he h a d chosen, which was the way of his own inclinations. His happiness was his work, a n d he did the work for which he thought himself best fitted. T h o u g h his scientific work m a y gradually be superseded a n d most of his literary work perish for lack of the final grace, this book will endure as the self-portrait of a singularly intelligent h u m a n being. It is nearer to Montaigne, w h o m he never mentions, t h a n to St. Augustine or Rousseau ; a n d its greatest lesson is one which no author has ever so well revealed : " T h e weaknesses a n d defects were overcome, not by any effort of masculine protest to create artificially w h a t was not there, but by accepting the facts of constitution a n d temperament as they come from N a t u r e and making of them an act by which failure could be woven into success."

15.

The Failure of the War Books

Y O U N G writers who took p a r t in the last war came back with one desire : to tell the truth about war, to expose its horrors, its inhumanity, its indignity. T h e y knew that it was no good crying over spilt blood, no good trying to 72

The Failure of the War Books console themselves or their contemporaries. But at least they might w a r n the coming generations. " All a poet can do to-day is w a r n , " wrote Wilfred O w e n . " T h a t is why the true Poets must be truthful." It took a few years for a new generation to grow u p a n d become war-conscious. I n the m e a n t i m e there was no public for w a r poetry or war stories. Between 1918 a n d 1928 it was almost impossible to publish anything realistic about war. T h e n c a m e the reaction. It was slowly mounting when R e m a r q u e wrote All Quiet on the Western Front. R e m a r q u e , like O w e n , wanted to w a r n the new generation. H e did w a r n them ; so did the film which was based on his book. So did scores of books that floated to success on the tide of All Quiet, which itself quickly became the best-selling novel of our time. At first it looked as though the w a r n i n g h a d taken effect. After the spate of anti-war literature, there was the famous debate at the Oxford U n i o n at which an overwhelming majority of undergraduates declared that u n d e r no circumstances would they ever take u p arms. T h e Peace Pledge U n i o n sprang into existence a n d its membership reached hundreds of thousands. It began to look as though our warning h a d taken effect, but from the beginning there was something specious about this youthful pacifism. It was based on a negation, whereas a true belief is always positive a n d affirmative. Further, this negation was the negation of a n abstraction— war. W a r , thanks to the w a r books, was vivid enough to the imagination of these young men : it was a nightmare of senseless killing. But w a r acquires its reality from psychological a n d economic forces, a n d it is useless to protest against war unless at the same time there is some understanding of the workings of these primary forces a n d some attempt to control them. But there was no such understanding. 73

These forces

A Goat of Many Colours gathered m o m e n t u m a n d ten years after the publication of All Quiet we were at war again. O u r books may have created a few extra conscientious objectors, but in their m a i n purpose, the prevention of another war, they h a d failed. I n asking the reason for this failure it is easy to be wise after the event a n d say that our books were not good enough. It is said of All Quiet, for example, that it was sentimental. T o some extent the criticism is true, but sentimentality was not, for effectiveness, a fault. T h e nearest parallel to All Quiet in the past is Uncle Tom9s Cabin. T h a t was a m u c h more sentimental book t h a n All Quiet, yet for that very reason it was largely instrumental in bringing about one of the greatest reforms in the history of m a n k i n d — t h e abolition of slavery. T h e abolition of war is no doubt a bigger problem, but if books are to play a p a r t in its solution, they will be books at least as sentimental as All Quiet. W e must look for a deeper cause of this failure. I believe it can be found in that impulse which is loosely known as sadism, b u t which is surely something r a t h e r broader t h a n that form of sexual perversion. W h a t e v e r we call it, there is no doubt that there exists in m a n k i n d a love of vicarious suffering a n d violence. F r o m an early age we delight in stories of strife a n d bloodshed, a n d any a t t e m p t to eradicate this interest in children only seems to lead to compensatory complexes of a no less disagreeable nature. I n writing our w a r books we were unwittingly ministering to this hidden lust. I have myself been struck by the fact that one a n d only one of m y w a r poems has been extensively quoted in anthologies a n d reviews—a simple b u t very bitter a n d horrible poem called " T h e H a p p y Warrior " . From a literary point of view I a m sure it is by no means the best of my war poems, but it has h a d a terrible fascination for m a n y people. It expresses in an extreme degree the horror of war, a n d it, a n d other 74

The Failure of the War Books poems a n d stories of the same kind, should have been an effective warning. As it is, the suspicion now grows upon me that such writing was fuel to the inner flames of the war spirit. If we h u m a n beings have an irresistible urge to destruction, including an urge to self-destruction, then the imagination will feed ravenously on any vivid description of the process of destruction. W a r is not a spirit that can be exorcised by any form of incantation. It is an impulse that must be eradicated by a patient course of treatment. T h a t treatment will be partly social a n d partly psychological. T h a t is to say, the necessary psychological treatment cannot take place in the present order of society, which does everything to perpetuate the impulses of competition a n d power. It can only take place in a society based on the impulses of m u t u a l aid a n d service—an order of society where all the tendencies are against rivalry a n d the domination of groups or individuals. If these tendencies, which are by no means against the order of nature, could be established, then we might reasonably hope to eradicate the destructive impulse itself, a n d to provide a d e q u a t e alternatives for the expenditure of the latent psychic energies of mankind. I d o not underestimate the power of p r o p a g a n d a , whether in the form of books or periodicals or the spoken word. O n c e it is in the hands of a single centralized authority, it can mould mass opinion to almost any kind of belief. It can do almost anything short of changing h u m a n nature. It cannot alter the basic instincts of men, and for that reason the uniformity it establishes remains insecure, a façade of stucco without any supporting wall. Human nature can only be changed by environment, genetics a n d other long-term physical factors. If we w a n t to make m a n k i n d a more peace-loving animal, we must first create the right kind of social mould, the right kind of family life, 75

A Coat of Many Colours the right kind of education ; a n d all these things must be provided on a world scale, because peace must be universal. We must continue to tell the truth about war, as about all things. But the telling must be a confession of shame a n d failure. After a second world war either we perish as a civilization or a new generation will create a new literature. Not a literature of reportage, of pride in experience, of vicarious suffering. But a literature of constructive imagination, of social idealism, of positive morality. T o learn by experience—that is the method of the animal. I n so far as we hope to be more than animals we must learn by w h a t is greater t h a n passive experience—by imaginative experiment.

16.

William Morris

T H E centenary of the birth of William Morris in 1934 called forth an unexpected fervour. Perhaps this c a m e mainly from people who were old enough when Morris died in 1896 to have been influenced by his living example, b u t I feel that even people of my own generation, who if born then were still in their cradles, look back on this great Victorian figure with a keener interest than we give to most of his contemporaries. Perhaps we feel that he at least was exempt from the prevailing vices of t h a t age—hypocrisy a n d complacency : a n d however little sympathy we m a y have for the actual things he m a d e , or for the style he created, we yet recognize in the m a n n e r of his life a n d in the principles he lived by, a n idealism which is more t h a n ever necessary. W e realize that Morris rediscovered the artistic conscience, the most essential of all qualities in art. H e was the son of wealthy parents, a n d was educated at M a r l b o r o u g h a n d Oxford. During his first year at Oxford,

76

William Morris Ruskin published The Stones of Venice^ and that event (for it was more than a book) determined the rest of Morris's life. When we have traced the workings of Ruskin's doctrines in the robuster mind and frame of Morris, we have explained the general course of his life ; any differences are temperamental, not intellectual. But though Ruskin did sometimes apply his doctrines in an eccentric and wasteful fashion, the virtue of Morris is that with all his enthusiasm, and in spite of his financial incapacity, he was essentially a practical genius, carrying theory into action, embodying beauty in the things of use, giving organization to opinion. It is customary to consider Morris in his threefold aspect as poet, craftsman, and socialist. In this way we break down the fundamental unity of the man. Perhaps he was too normal in his psychology to possess that particular concentration of faculties and sensibilities—always a onesided concentration—which makes the great artist. His purpose was rather to show how art entered into the life of a normal man, and entered in no merely passive or receptive way. The best joy, he felt, was the joy of making things, and knowing that you made them well. In this spirit a man should be able to make all that he needs, not only his house and his furniture, his tools and utensils, his tapestries and pictures, but even his music and his song ; and he believed that the necessary faculties existed in every human being, and only needed a right ordering of society to educate them and make them adequate. With such ideals he was led inevitably to oppose the development of machinery, and the ugliness and social degradation that was everywhere accompanying that development. Such unreality as we now associate with the name and the works of Morris is due to the defeat he suffered in this unequal struggle. The machine has triumphed, and only now are we beginning to accept 77

A Coat of Many Colours that inevitable fact, and to work out an ¿esthetic and social philosophy based on that fact. W h a t Morris actually achieved, in the design of fabrics, wall-papers, and, above all, in typography a n d books, did have its influence on machine-made products ; it was a good influence, b u t essentially a superficial one. It was mainly in the sphere of applied o r n a m e n t a n d decoration, a n d did not touch the more fundamental problems of form. Towards the end of his life, when he h a d been brought so closely into contact with the realities of the industrial situation through his socialistic activities, Morris h a d to modify his attitude towards the machine. These almost miraculous machines, [he wrote in Art and Socialism] which if orderly forethought h a d dealt with them might even now be speedily extinguishing all irksome a n d unintelligent labour, leaving us free to raise the standard of skill of h a n d a n d energy of mind in our workmen, a n d to produce afresh that loveliness a n d order which only the h a n d of m a n guided by his own soul can produce ; w h a t have they done for us now ? But that is still the wrong attitude. Machines are more t h a n scavengers a n d coal-heavers. Properly conceived, they are tools of a precision a n d power never d r e a m t of in the days of handicraft (the h a n d which is powerless without a tool), a n d using t h e m intelligently we may yet produce a truthful a n d original style. T h e r e is one further comment to make on Morris's own faith. H e once summarized his ideals for art in a " golden rule " , which has often been quoted : " If you w a n t a golden rule t h a t will fit everybody, this is it. H a v e nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." W h y , I wonder, did he use the conjunction " or " , thus making a division between a knowledge of the useful a n d a belief in the beautiful ? Does there not lurk under this alternative a false conception of art, a con78

Ben Nicholson ception of a r t as decoration rather t h a n as form, a conception at the root of all the dreary ugliness of the age in which Morris lived ? T h u s we m a y criticize the actual doctrines of William Morris ; but w h a t is more fundamental in h i m — a conception of life as a n aesthetic whole—that is still an ideal for which we m a y a d m i r e him greatly, working out our salvation in the idiom of a new age.

17.

Ben Nicholson

J J E N NICHOLSON is the most important painter of the modern " abstract " school now working in England, a n d with H e n r y Moore he m a y be fitly held to represent our contribution to the movement which includes Picasso, Gris, Braque, Léger, M o n d r i a n , Miro, G a b o , Pevsner a n d Brancusi, to mention a few significant names. W e may, therefore, take his work as a test case for considering the value of this movement a n d its relevance to the future of painting. His development, though it shows some sudden leaps, has been continuous. Beginning as an artist, concerned, like any other impressionist, with an objective relationship to the world a r o u n d him, he gradually became more a n d more absorbed in the purely formal relations of planes, shapes a n d colours, until finally any direct contact with the world of appearances was lost. I n one of his phases he has excluded even colour, being satisfied with the inexhaustible subtleties of whites a n d greys, a n d their harmonies in relation to areas, outlines a n d depths. These works are not so m u c h paintings as reliefs, carved out of woods like walnut a n d mahogany, or out of synthetic board, a n d then painted white. It is often objected to abstract or constructivist art t h a t 79

A Coat of Many Colours by definition it must lead to a kind of stalemate. T h e r e is a logical development from representational art to cubism, a n d from cubism to constructivism, b u t with constructivism we seem to be at a dead end, with only a limited n u m b e r of variations to be played on a single theme. T h e r e is a story of a composer who committed suicide because he suddenly realized that the n u m b e r of notes in the scale being fixed, an end must come to the n u m b e r of permutations a n d combinations in which they could be a r r a n g e d — a n end, therefore, to the art of music. If he h a d been mathematician enough to work out the figure, he might have h a d more courage. T h e elements of graphic art are not so limited, but there is a n academic kind of abstract art which deliberately restricts itself to fixed elements, a n d by playing variations on these, would seem to exclude both personal sensibility a n d social reality. This mechanical manipulation of geometrical elements has nothing in common with the constructive vision displayed in the work of an artist like Ben Nicholson, a n d only the ambiguity inherent in the word " abstract " could have given rise to such an impression. If the word is quite rightly used to indicate an art that has renounced any intention of reproducing the natural appearances of phenomena, it does not necessarily imply a loss of all contact with reality. T h e basic confusion is between two very different things : reality a n d realism. Art, the critics of constructivism say, cannot safely depart from nature. But what do they m e a n by n a t u r e ? Actually, a philosophical question is involved. N a t u r e is either a n aggregate of facts—the sum of all organic things ; or it is the principle of life which animates these things. If wc think of n a t u r e in the first, a n d w h a t we m a y call the objective, sense, a n d consider the function of art in relation to such a conception of nature, then we can conceive art only as reproducing in some way the specific facts. T h a t 80

Ben Nicholson is, indeed, the kind of relation between art and nature which most people seem to want ; but they should realize that what they thus get is not the reality, but merely the appearances of nature. If, on the other hand, we take the subjective conception of nature, and then ask the artist to express this conception in the materials of his craft, he will not imitate the specific appearances of nature, but, taking the sense he has of the underlying spirit, he will try to create works which embody this spirit in their form and colour. These works will have a kind of cousinship with the phenomena of nature, but, being moulded not by sun and soil and all the elements which determine the specific forms of natural organisms, but rather by the senses of the artist reacting to a plastic material, they will have an original appearance reflecting nothing but the reality experienced by the individual. If such individuals lived in cells apart, without any communication or mutual influence, their works would be practically incomprehensible to other people. But, living in societies which mould the individual to a cultural pattern, the chances are that each artist's work will enter into a certain community of feeling and imagination. When that community exists, communication of the artist's experience and emotion takes place. There is no other basis of communication. Whilst I consider that the most general and most accessible of these intimations of reality are of the organic type, and intimately linked to the essential forms of life, there are other aspects of reality of a more mathematical and crystalline nature which may equally form the basis of the artist's creations. Perhaps Ben Nicholson's intuitions tend in this direction ; whilst Henry Moore's, for example, are more obviously organic. But it would be a mistake to make any hard and fast distinction, because the reality is a unity, of which organic and inorganic forms are but different aspects. 81

A Coat of Many Colours Ben Nicholson who, like all the great artists of the past, is something of a mystic, believes that there is a reality underlying appearances, a n d that it is his business, by giving material form to his intuition of it, to express the essential nature of this reality. H e docs not draw that intuition of reality out of a vacuum, but out of a mind attuned to the specific forms of n a t u r e — a mind which has stored within it a full awareness of the proportions a n d harmonies inherent in all natural p h e n o m e n a , in the universe itself. I must once more refer to the analogy of music, which cannot be shirked in this connection. T h e r e is absolutely no reason in the world why the visual intuitions of a n abstract painter should not have every bit as m u c h value as the aural intuitions of the equally abstract musician (and in this sense all great music is abstract). 1 T h e analogy of architecture is even more to the point, but in this case there is a functional aspect which introduces a certain complication. Admittedly such an abstract art cannot appeal to everybody ; the music of Bach does not appeal to everybody, but we do not therefore deny its social relevance. W e can say, of course, that for the secular culture of to-day Bach's music has lost its real social significance, which was originally religious. But that is tiresome casuistry. Bach's music is socially relevant because it is universally enjoyed a m o n g people sensitive to music. I t m a y be objected that even so the whole process of appreciation, music included, is limited to a small a n d insignificant n u m b e r of people. But when, in the whole of 1 The objections which even a great critic like Sir Donald Tovey makes to this comparison are based on an ambiguous use of the word " abstract ". Abstract in this context means " nonrepresentational " (devoid of any reference to phenomenal appearances) ; the works of art themselves are, of course, executed in the concrete materials of paint, wood, stone, sound-vibrations, etc.

82

Ben Nicholson history, has the finest culture of a period been, at the time of its first creation, anything but the affair of a small minority ? I d o not deny that there is a social problem involved. T h e complete M a r x i a n would d a m n Bach as well as Ben Nicholson, a n d to him there is only one answer. Until we have a new social integrity such as he envisages in his ideal of a classless society, we cannot have a great a n d p o p u l a r movement in art ; a n d in this age of transition we must, if we are to indulge our aesthetic sensations at all, indulge t h e m in this relatively dilettante fashion. I insist, however, on the qualification " relatively " . T h e art of a n abstract painter is not so dilettante in practice as it seems to be in the isolation of a " one-man show " . I t is, in fact, intimately linked by sympathy a n d common understanding to the m o d e r n movement in architecture. T h e m o d e r n movement in architecture is in its t u r n intimately linked to the necessity for a scientific transformation of our cities, our dwellings, the whole structure of our future existence. T h e connection is seen clearly enough by the architects a n d painters themselves ; time will m a k e it clear to everyone. It must be admitted that abstract art, if it is to retain the interest of the general public, must allow for a subjective element—not only in the artist, but also in the person looking at the picture. A n d this, for all its severity, is precisely w h a t the art of Ben Nicholson does. H e was, from the beginning, essentially a sensitive artist, a n d those people who, whilst admiring his early work, " see nothing in " his later a n d more abstract work, are surely blind to its essential quality. Even at its severest, in the white reliefs whose purity has been called puritanical, there is a sensitivity of line a n d a play of light a n d shade which are anything but geometrical or mechanical. I n some of the more recent coloured compositions the organization of forms is more geometrical, but that is only, as it were, the counter-

83

A Coat of Many Colours point for a free melody of colour. Now that form has been freed from its representational functions, colour too is released for experimentation. T h e h a r m o n y of the old masters, often daringly anti-natural (even in such a n academic artist as Poussin) always has naturalistic limitations : these limitations still linger on in cubism, though freely interchanged (the colours of a guitar, a newspaper a n d a table m a y be transposed, b u t the colours are nevertheless suggested by these objects). But when colour is completely emancipated from naturalism, completely new possibilities emerge. Colour becomes a value in itself, a n d intensity, saturation or brightness, rather t h a n tonality, is the measure of its value. A composition in tone relations is a reduction of intensities to a c o m m o n denominator or value : a composition in intensities is an exaltation of individual values to their highest h a r m o n y of contrasts. W e might even say, to their highest dynamic unity. T h e colours which in themselves might clash, are balanced a n d resolved in formal synthesis. All this implies a very personal estimation of the elements involved. Colour in this sense is a n imaginative process, exactly as sound is in music. Perhaps to complete the musical analogy, the picture should have continuous movement, as in certain abstract colour films ; but when I see such films I have always a strong desire to arrest them, to fix t h e m at selected moments. I would therefore prefer to have a static picture a n d to continue its movement in m y own imagination—or, better still, a series of static pictures which I connect in imagination. This is j u s t w h a t Ben Nicholson provides. An art which deals in concrete non-representational materials, a n d is not continually redressed by changing functional needs, as is architecture, always runs the d a n g e r of stagnation. T h e artist tends to be satisfied with the intellectual approval which his work earns, a n d to forget

84

Ben Nicholson that the sensibility which created the work of art was artificially arrested, for that moment and that material (the sensibility is like the film, in continuous movement). In a more obvious sense, once an artist—an artist of any kind, poet as well as painter, even a pastrycook—finds his public, there is a great temptation for him to stand still. It is more than a temptation : it is a line of least resistance. For the public, having made its conquest (and in the case of modern painting it is a hard-won battle) feels entitled to a little intellectual peace. It only asks the artist to go on repeating himself—producing exactly the same kind of picture to suit the new extension of sensibility. The history of art is full of these melancholy figures—successful artists, but successful in a particular " line ", who only at the cost of their livelihood dare depart from the line, to experiment, to advance into new territories of sensibility. They are not so much successful artists as successful business men ; they have become part of the " trade ", willing underlings of the dealer and his patrons. But the sign of an independent artist—an artist with at least the potentiality of greatness—is that he refuses to submit to such bullying. Indifferent to wealth, to social success, to the taste of his patrons, he follows the dictates of his own creative impulse, and only on his death-bed makes his last experiment. Ben Nicholson has more than once shown this disconcerting restlessness, this dissatisfaction with his own achievement, this ever-present desire to use one style as a stepping-stone to the next. The changes are no doubt due to external influences—to the knowledge, that is to say, which he derives from the experiments of his contemporaries ; that, again, is a sign of the potentially great artist. But the |more significant changes are physical changes : that is to say, they arise in the course of action, they are dictated by the way materials behave under the artist's hand. 85

A Goat of Many Colours Surface was always an essential quality in Nicholson's painting. I n the first phase it was, as usual, a painterly surface : a n exploitation of the qualities of paint. T h e n he played with the idea of a diversity of surface qualities, for which he would bring in the aid of collage. But this was too easy a solution ; it was an addition to the original surface, not a n exploration of that surface. T h e artist then began to scratch the surface—to treat it, not merely as a brushed surface, but also as an engraved surface. T h u s layers of paint were revealed, one buried below the other. Against the soft r h y t h m of the brush emerged the h a r d bitten r h y t h m of the scoring point. Actually the pictures were painted with both ends of the brush—the bristles a n d the sharp wooden point. But this business of surfaces below surfaces must be explored more thoroughly. W h y stop at surfaces indicated by layers of paint ? W h y not cut out, excavate, the very background of the picture ? T h e flimsy canvas must be a b a n d o n e d in favour of the wooden panel ; b u t it is not t h e first time that the surface of the panel has been used in painting. O n e must, however, keep within the limits of thickness we expect in a picture : otherwise, we have n o division between painting and sculpture. Actually, there will be no division between this new kind of painting a n d bas-relief ; but why should there be divisions between the plastic arts ? Categories are for historians a n d critics, n o t for artists. So Ben Nicholson began to vary the level of his painted surfaces—to cut out areas of the panel's surface at varying depths. These surfaces at varying depths m a d e the p a t t e r n , the composition. T h e colour was in the depths. O n e d e p t h against another gave the artist all the play of tonality he needed for his composition. A uniform surface p a i n t of white or grey became the only necessary pigment. T h e means, t h a t is to say, became very simple : a counter86

English Prose play of areas a n d depths, revealed against light. Like sculpture, a three-dimensional art. But, unlike sculpture, a three-dimensional a r t with o n e face. T h e composition changes slightly, subtly, as we move across the room. But there is no need to walk round the composition. I t is n o t a composition in mass, b u t in opposed planes. T h e nearest analogy is in architecture : t h e façade. But n o t façades for a functional building—that was t h e baroque fallacy. Façades divorced from function, free façades—that is t h e briefest possible description of Ben Nicholson's reliefs. T h e y sometimes remind one of t h e ground-plans of Egyptian temples—no longer vertical façades, b u t area designs a t once logical a n d sensitive. T h e y need space a n d light—they cannot have too m u c h light, so long as it is variable in its direction. T h e y a r c the only kind of paintings that can look the sun in the face.

18. English Prose ¡SIR

ARTHUR

QUILI.ER-COUCH'S

anthology,

despite

its

defects, has now for m a n y years been h a n d e d o u t as t h e official p a t t e r n book of our native prose. T h e r e it stands, a structure of a thousand pages ; a n d though in o u r most leaden doubts we d o n o t wish t h e thing u n d o n e , yet w e do feel that it is legitimate to hedge t h a t authoritative security with definitions a n d qualifications. T h e r e a r e two kinds of anthology : one merely gathers into a b u n c h the flowers that attract us on our literary way ; the method here is private a n d h a p h a z a r d . I t is not a method to which, in so solemn a concern as a n Oxford Book, a n anthologist would lightly resort ; a n d quite clearly it is not the m e t h o d to which Sir Arthur has resorted. A p a r t from this wayw a r d florilegium, there is n o alternative b u t a purposive selection ; a n d when your field is t h e whole expanse of

37

A Coat of Many Colours English prose (rather than the individual cats a n d dogs, the gardens a n d flowers, or other features of that expanse), then that purpose must resolve itself into criticism. Your anthology must be an anthology of what in all good faith you consider to be good prose. A n d " w h a t you consider " implies not what merely takes your fancy but whatever has a goodness you are prepared to defend by an appeal to critical principles. Sir A r t h u r frankly a b a n d o n s this intention. " I have very sedulously included all sorts of our prose, choosing often a passage quite pedestrian." On what principle ? W h y , like the geologist, unfold every stratum when your business, if you once a d m i t that prose is a n art, is to follow the vein of ore ? T h e present a n t h o logist is ready with an answer : for he has m a d e it as clear as possible, in his preface, that it is precisely in following a vein that he has struck so m a n y levels : I claim here, a n d with all emphasis, that m y book is not one of specimens : that a critic will mistake its p u r pose who starts j u d g i n g it by the a m o u n t of space, the n u m b e r of extracts, assigned to so-and-so ; as that he m a y likely be mistaken in deeming m e ignorant of an author not included or, in his opinion, insufficiently represented as against one of acknowledged importance. . . . T h e anthologist, as I understand his trade, must have a " notion " of his own, a " pattern in the carpet " , though he cannot easily define his pattern. Sir A r t h u r then confesses that his purpose has been to make the anthology as " representatively English " as possible. T h e first thing to be noted in this apology is t h a t in shifting the emphasis from the word prose to the epithet English Sir A r t h u r has surrendered the critical position. I shall presently examine his interpretation of the quality of Englishness ; but, in the first place, I must make clear the possibility of that severer task declined by Sir A r t h u r . T h e whole difficulty hinges on the definition given to 88

English Prose prose. Sir Arthur begins with one that seems arbitrary and inadequate. It is a development of a distinction made between prose and verse by Arthur Glutton-Brock, who argued that while the cardinal virtue of verse is Love, the cardinal virtue of prose is Justice. Sir Arthur prefers to regard Persuasion rather than Justice as the first virtue of prose, whether in narrative or in argument ; Defoe's art in telling of Crusoe's visits to the wreck is all bent on persuading you that it really happened and just so ; as Burke, in pleading for conciliation with the American colonists, is bent on marshalling argument upon argument why conciliation is expedient besides being just. In argument, to be sure, the appeal lies always towards an assumed seat of absolute justice to which even in the Law Courts every plea is addressed ; Persuasion is, after all, as Matthew Arnold says, the only true intellectual process. . . . But in substituting Persuasion for Justice, and in developing his idea he has quite departed from Clutton-Brock's original intention, which, though it cannot be accepted as ideal, was at any rate more than a definition by function. If we refer to the context we find Clutton-Brock expanding his idea of Justice : " By justice here I do not mean justice only to particular people, or ideas, but a habit of justice in all the processes of thought, a style tranquillized and a form moulded by that habit." It is those little words " form " and " style " that Sir Arthur has relinquished, and by doing so has relinquished all pretensions to a definition of prose, and thereby any criterion that would guide a serious anthologist. The truth which it seems necessary to affirm is quite simply that prose is an art—a particular form of the art of writing. It may be that there is only one form of the art of writing, and that the qualities which make for style appear indiscriminately in prose and verse. This was the opinion of Remy de Gourmont, and is the critical justifi89 D

A Goat of Many Colours cation of those modern experiments in writing which wilfully discard any structural distinctions between prose a n d verse. As for this particular question (which is not really irrelevant to our present inquiry, for we have to decide whether certain intermediate types—prose-poems, " purple patches " , a n d ornate m a n n e r e d prose generally—have a place in our ideal anthology) another French critic, Albert T h i b a u d e t , has m a d e a useful distinction (in his Vie de Barres), which is subtle enough to characterize whatever subtle difference there m a y be in the essential forms of prose a n d verse. " I n prose each phrase creates for itself the law of its r h y t h m , whilst in verse each phrase creates for itself a personal reason for submitting to a law which already existed." T h e validity of the distinction depends on our acceptance of the existing law, or rather, as in the organization of society, on the consonance of that law with our intellectual development—its general capacity for a d a p t i n g itself to new forms of sensibility a n d intelligence. T h e art of writing, whether in prose or in verse, depended, in de Gourmont's opinion, on a rare union of visual a n d emotive m e m o r y : " Si, à la mémoire visuelle, l'écrivain joint la mémoire émotive, s'il a le pouvoir, en évoquant u n spectacle matériel, de se replacer exactement dans l'état émotionnel qui suscita en lui ce spectacle, il possède, m ê m e ignorant, tout l'art d'écrire." This is to say t h a t in the creative act of writing there are two elements—the visual image a n d the emotions associated with this image. T h e good writer—the artist, if you like—sees the image clearly, a n d is driven by the mere emotive charge of the image to find for it a fit m a t i n g of words. T h e image is there, stark, visible a n d real ; to find the right words, a n d only the right words, to body forth t h a t image, becomes in the writer a n actual passion. T h e image evokes the words ; or if it fails, if to the visual memory there comes no corresponding emotive or expressive memory, then there is no art. A 90

English Prose good writer must then be silent ; a n d only the b a d writer will accept the approximate expression—the first expression t h a t comes into his head, which is usually a stale expression, for it is always m u c h easier to r e m e m b e r phrases t h a n to evoke words. These m e m o r a b l e phrases press invitingly round the would-be writer ; they are the current coin a n d counters of verbal intercourse ; a n d to refuse t h e m , a n d to deal only in freshly minted coin, is possible only to a few autocrats. But these are the rulers of literature, the creators of style ; a n d they only should find a place in a n anthology of the best prose. I t would perhaps be as well, before we proceed further, to analyse these differences in selected examples. W e will take, in the first instance, a passage from the Oxford Book ; it is a passage from a m o d e r n writer, a n d here I suspect t h a t the anthologist, not being able to resort to the unanimity of time, too readily accepted the fashionable opinions of his own age : W h e n , two days previously, the news of the approaching end h a d been m a d e public, astonished grief h a d swept over the country. It appeared as if some m o n strous reversal of the course of n a t u r e was about to take place. T h e vast majority of her subjects h a d never known a time when Q u e e n Victoria h a d not been reigning over them. She h a d become a n indissoluble p a r t of their whole scheme of things, a n d that they were about to lose her a p p e a r e d a scarcely possible thought. She herself, as she lay blind a n d silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all thinking—to have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she h a d her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called u p once m o r e the shadows of t h e past to float before it, a n d retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history—passing back a n d back, through the cloud of years to older a n d ever older memories. . . . This is not a n altogether b a d piece of prose : it is not 91

A Coat of Many Colours sufficiently b a d to repel the reader. I t has, indeed, attracted a great m a n y . But contrast the passage with the following, from the work of a contemporaneous author not represented in this anthology : T h e grainy sand h a d gone from u n d e r his feet. His boots trod again a d a m p crackling mast, razor-shells, squeaking pebbles, that on the u n n u m b e r e d pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost A r m a d a . Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing u p w a r d sewage breath. H e coasted t h e m , walking warily. A porter-bottle stood u p , stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel : isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore ; at the l a n d a m a z e of dark cunning nets ; further away chalkscrawled back-doors a n d on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. T h e r e is evidently a great difference between these two passages, which is not the difference between two kinds of goodness b u t between one quality a n d its opposite. T h e first causes us the less surprise : we are scarcely conscious of the kind of prose we are r e a d i n g — a p a r t from a certain ironic affectation ; but we are, as a matter of fact, reading a prose densely packed with images a n d analogies, none of which we actually visualize. " Approaching end " , " a s t o n i s h e d grief", grief sweeping over the country, " monstrous reversal " , " the course of n a t u r e " , " t o take place " , " vast majority " , " a n indissoluble p a r t " , " the scheme of things ", " a scarcely possible thought " , " divested of all thinking " , to glide into oblivion, " the secret chambers " , " fading mind " , " the shadows of the past " , " to float before (her mind) " , " the vanished visions " , " through the cloud of years " — h e r e in eighteen lines are eighteen images or analogies, not one of which is original, not one of which is freshly felt or sincerely evoked, a n d consequently not one of which evokes in the m i n d of the reader the definite image it actually portends. Now examine the second passage : there is not a single phrase 92

English Prose which does not evoke—which does not force the mind to evoke—the image it expresses. Art, after all, is a question of effect ; and does anyone give a second thought to the death of Queen Victoria as our author has described it ? But merely to read of Stephen Dedalus walking on the beach is to have come into contact with the vibrating reflex of an actual experience. There are two kinds of prose ; they are, I think, the only two possible kinds of prose, and one is good prose, the other bad prose. I do not pretend that the solidity of what I am calling good prose is always possible to sustain, or, indeed, necessary to sustain. We must admit a prose of expediency ; counters are legitimate as tokens of exchange when what we want is not truth, or beauty, but the vague generalizations that suffice us for the ordinary business of life. But the prose of expediency is not the prose of art ; and even exact utilitarian or scientific prose is only good prose to the degree in which it is sailed with vital imagery and an emotional content. The unit of good prose is either the image or the idiom. Good prose is a mosaic of these units arranged with some regard for rhythm, which is a physical quality, ensuring ease. The image is the closest verbal counterpart of the thing seen : a clean word, fitting closely like a glove, a word with no ragged edges of vagueness or indecision. Such words are placed in some illuminating relationship one with another : they may be in simple metaphorical juxtaposition, as in " razor-shells ", or in more deliberate, analogical forms, as in " crucified shirts ". In both these examples, however, there is an effect of compression which perhaps complicates the issue. Good prose in a more normal form is more direct, less metaphorical, and depends not so much on new analogies as on stark visualization. The image is evoked by the bare relation. And it is this kind of prose that is most permanent in its appeal, since it 93

A Coat of Many Colours involves almost no element of fancy a n d therefore no element of fashion. T h e following description of the m u r d e r of T h o m a s à Becket from Caxton's edition of the Golden Legend does not contain a single m e t a p h o r : T h e n one of the knights smote h i m as he kneeled before the altar on the head. A n d one Sir E d w a r d Grim, that was his crossier, p u t forth his a r m with the cross to bear off the stroke, a n d the stroke smote the cross asunder and his a r m almost off, wherefore he fled for fear, a n d so did all the monks, that were that time a t compline. A n d then smote each at him, t h a t they smote off a great piece of the skull of his head, that his brain fell on the pavement. A n d so they slew a n d martyred him, a n d were so cruel that one of them brake the point of his sword against the pavement. A n d thus this holy a n d blessed Archbishop S. T h o m a s suffered death in his own church for the right of all holy church. A n d when he was dead they stirred his brain, a n d after went into his c h a m b e r a n d took away his goods, a n d his horse out of his stable, a n d took away his bulls a n d his writings, a n d delivered them to Sir R o b e r t Broke to bear into France to the king. A n d as they searched his chamber they found in his chest two shirts of hair m a d e full of great knots, a n d then they said : Certainly he was a good m a n ; a n d coming down into the churchyard they began to dread a n d fear that the ground would not have borne them, a n d were marvellously aghast, b u t they supposed that the earth would have swallowed t h e m all quick. A n d then they knew that they h a d d o n e amiss. A n d a n o n it was known all about, how that he was martyred, a n d anon after they took his holy body, a n d unclothed him, a n d found bishop's clothing above, a n d the habit of a monk under. A n d next his flesh he wore h a r d hair, full of knots, which was his shirt. A n d his breech was of the same, a n d the knots sticked fast within the skin, a n d all his body full of worms ; he suffered great p a i n . It m a y possibly be objected that such prose is too violent : that it gets its effect by the uninspired record of c r u d e horror. I t is more likely t h a t our sense of horror, if it 94

English Prose actually exists, is the qualm of a too acute sensibility. This was certainly not a violent prose for the fifteenth century. And apart from the question of a different sensibility, is there really any difference of technique, of art, in so typically modern a passage as this ? : Everything had come to a standstill. The throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming through an entire body. The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor-car had stopped outside Mulberry's shop window ; old ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black parasols ; here a green, here a red parasol opened with a little pop. Mrs. Dalloway, coming to the window with her arms full of sweet peas, looked out with her little pink face pursed in enquiry. Everyone looked at the motor-car. Septimus looked. Boys on bicycles sprang off. Traffic accumulated. And there the motor-car stood, with drawn blinds, and upon them a curious pattern like a tree, Septimus thought, and this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way, he thought. Was he not being looked at and pointed at ; was he not weighted there, rooted to the pavement, for a purpose ? But for what purpose ? Images are the rudiments of a literary art, but, as these passages show, there is another element. An aggregation of fresh images would not of itself constitute a prose style ; it would be a rocky, glittering material, too graceless and uneven for the mind's absorption. This other quality which is added to the moments of imagery has for its unit the idiom. An idiom is literally a way of expression peculiar to a person or a language. But we sometimes talk of the genius of a language, so possibly the word " idiom " might be reserved for the more restricted aspect of the question. An idiom then becomes the unit of style ; 95

A Coat of Many Colours it is the outcome of those hereditary and environmental influences which determine in any man his individual predilections and fancies. It is an index to his personality. As the events were received into each individual mould of sensibility, so the cast of those events which we evoke in writing emerges with all the sutures of this mould. Idiom is the sum of those influences which determine, not only our choice of words, but also their arrangement in a personally appealing rhythm. It is the expression in words of what Remy de Gourmont called the emotive memory ; it is the element which, joined to a visual memory, determines style. But the invention, or rather the evolution, of an idiom operates in two ways ; it is either personal, a part of the individual and adapted to his sense of things : or it is the idiom of a tradition. In the latter case the individual almost suppresses his personality and submits to a common rule. We can apply to these two kinds of idiom a distinction similar to that made by M. Thibaudet between prose and verse : the personal idiom is its own law and exists for its own sake ; the impersonal idiom seeks to identify itself with the general idiom of contemporary speech. Sir Thomas Browne is a typical example of the creator of a personal idiom, as, among modern writers, is Henry James. Defoe and W. H. Hudson serve as examples of the acceptance of a common standard. It is tempting at first to imagine that the two types of idiom react on one another : that the slowly evolving consensus of national idiom is accelerated or inspired by the outstanding accents of a great personal idiom ; and that a personal idiom is but a variation on the characteristic excellences of the national idiom. But, in fact, the eccentrics seem to mount their lonely towers without to any sensible extent deflecting the common trend. The truth is, perhaps, that only a weakminded or characterless writer would condescend to imi96

English Prose tate, or even to be influenced by, anything so little his own as the personal idiom of another writer. And fame has a very summary fashion of dispensing with such reflected graces. But to adopt a common discipline is a different affair, especially since the discipline is not to be learnt by any mechanical paces but must be in the nature of an intuition into the essence of things. Before passing on to consider the essence of our native idiom it would be well to make one qualification : the assumption of a discipline need not, and perhaps must not, destroy the capacity for a private or licensed style. In the best writers we may look with confidence for both ; and it would be a sorry critic who sacrificed The Journal to Stella for the sake of his categories. But there is no need ; and the good sense that a writer shows in his perfected style is generally evidence of the humanity that we shall find in his journal or letters. As a basis, in every genuine writer, there is his intimate talk or self-communion ; it is merely a question of psychological disposition whether you seek a direct aggrandizement of that intimacy by an exaggerated exposure of it in writing, or whether you shrink from that personal exposure and manifest your impulse to expression in the accepted terms of your own age. With the definition of image and idiom we have not quite completed the analysis of good prose : there is another element which we must call ordonnance. Idiom has given us a unity, but it is the unity of a material. To complete the process of perfect writing there must also be structure. Structure, it would seem, is the product of logical thought, whether exercised in argument or in narrative. It implies progression ; and good prose is never for long or consistently good without this element of progress. Good prose must have a pace : it must step like a well-bred horse : each word must strike with clean precision and must advance with a continuous rhythm. It is this princi97

A Coat of Many Colours pie that brings in doubt the stray purple passage, the disjointed prose poem, and the excerpt generally. These can have all the qualities of good imagery and good idiom, but without ordonnance they are ruins rather than buildings, and a prose anthology can only be justified with thi s limitation in mind. Image, idiom, ordonnance—is that all ? Not quite. " Images, however faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only so far as they are modified by a predominant passion, or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion." These words of Coleridge's strike to a deeper reality than any we have so far considered ; and to them we might add these equally significant words of Henry James's : " There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together ; that is in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer." In great prose, as in great poetry, a fine sensibility is not enough. The quality of a mind, its predominating passion, is often difficult enough to define. Who would venture confidently to define Swift's, or Newman's, or Emily Bronte's ? Yet these are among the greatest masters of our prose, and among those most evidently dominated by a great passion. But among their more discernible qualities —it is also a passion—is one we describe as English : " A sense of wonderful history written silently in books and buildings, all persuading that we are heirs of more spiritual wealth than, maybe, we have surmised or hitherto begun to divine." So this " subdued and hallowed emotion " is designated by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ; and in default of a critical intention, this is the sanction he has sought for his labours as an anthologist. It would have been a 98

English Prose graceful amend, at the conclusion of this review, to have acknowledged his success in this venture ; but I am too conscious of a quality in the true tradition of English life and literature to be sure of its presence in this anthology. There is a spirit that runs through all our great writers, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Jonson to Swift, from Sterne to . . . we do not know whether it will yet revive. But it is a spirit antithetical to the spirit so fully represented by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which is the spirit of Puritanism and Quietism, of subjective joys and passive aspirations. There is, over against this spirit, sometimes woven in with it, but essentially a part of our national heritage, the spirit of open candour and of active enjoyment, the life of deeds and of zest in the sensuous quality of our flesh. Not the dreamy sensuousness of the South, but the gross gaillardise of the North. It might be objected that in its gross state this is not fit matter for literature, though Sir John FalstafT and the Wife of Bath are there to disprove it. But this spirit can be elevated into wit and gaiety ; and though Sir Arthur has given us a fair specimen of Sterne, he leaves us aghast at the total omission of Congreve—in whom not only does this spirit attain its highest sublimation but in whom also the English tongue attains its subtlest levity of diction and fine force of aptitude. Other writers, Dryden and Berkeley, Swift and Landor, support the tradition of our national prose ; only writers like Congreve and Sterne can be said to adorn it.

19. Henri Rousseau I T is a hundred years since Henri Rousseau was born, and this man who lived all his life in poverty, and received little but ridicule from his contemporaries, is now honoured as one of the great masters of the nineteenth century. His 99

A Goat of Many Colours paintings are beyond the reach of all but American museums and international millionaires, a n d he could have lived in comfort all his days on the price which a single canvas would now fetch in the art market. It is a familiar story, a n d there is no special moral to be d r a w n from it. No conceivable form of patronage would have been kinder to Rousseau, H e worked as a minor official in the customs for about twenty years a n d then retired on a tiny pension a n d painted to his heart's content for another twenty-five years. T h e r e m a y be m o d e r n states which would give such an artist a somewhat better pension, but only on condition that he conformed to some recognized s t a n d a r d or style. Rousseau was condemned to poverty, b u t at least he was free to realize his own vision. H e was free, too, to play his violin a n d give musical evenings in his studio (which was also his living-room a n d bedroom). H e seems to have been a h a p p y m a n . O n e or two misconceptions a b o u t this great artist a r e not yet dispelled. H e is sometimes called an a m a t e u r , or a " S u n d a y painter " . It is implied that his painting was a hobby. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rousseau always described himself as artiste-peintre, which means a professional painter. I t was his ambition to become a n academician, to rival the perfect " finish " of Bouguereau or Courtois, to be accepted (as he might have said) in the best circles. W h e n he saw the Cézanne m e m o rial exhibition in 1907 he was distressed. " I could have finished these paintings for h i m , " he said. Rousseau does not belong to " the m o d e r n movement " , though he has no d o u b t h a d an influence on painters w h o do—even on Picasso a n d Braque. T h e r e has been m u c h talk of his naïveté, but the word is misleading if it implies anything childish or incompetent. Rousseau was not even spontaneous : h e was a h a r d worker, a meticulous craftsman. " I have been told that m y work is not of this 100

Henri Rousseau century," he wrote in a letter to the art critic, André Dupont, in 191 o. " A s you will understand, I cannot now change my manner which I have acquired as the result of obstinate toil. . . . " I would rather call Rousseau a natural painter. His nearest affinities are with folk-art— with the glass-paintings, illustrated chap-books, painted pottery which represent the natural expression of untaught people throughout Europe. This is not, properly speaking, a " tradition ". It is a common language, with common characteristics. It develops organically from the basic sensibilities and laws of perception of the human being. It is a basic visual speech. Before an organized system of education interfered with its natural growth, " child " art matured into " folk " art. Folk-art is merely child-art which has become adult. It becomes adult by becoming more objective—children below a certain age (12-14) are wholly subjective : they paint symbols to express their inner emotional or sensational being. When social pressures of various sorts and a maturing physique compel them to observe the objective world, a decisive struggle takes place. The mind may become wholly a slave to the objective world, and then the personality, as a unique sensitive organism, dies—the poet and the artist dies in man. Education has been generally speaking a system for perfecting this process of objectification. Rousseau was one of the exceptional people who escaped this process. His mind did not become conventionalized. At the same time, he did not remain a child, wholly confined to a subjective world. H e became an adult, like any peasant. But instead of becoming a peasant-carpenter or a peasantweaver, he became a peasant-painter. Of course, it is improper to describe a Paris customs-official as a peasant ; but we can hardly call Henri Rousseau a proletarian or even a petit-bourgeois. H e was what the sociologists call a " marginal " man. 101

A Coat of Many Colours This marginal m a n worked h a r d to become w h a t he himself called " one of our best realist painters " . I n a n autobiographical sketch which he p r e p a r e d for a dictionary of painters, he wrote : H e has perfected himself more a n d more in the original m a n n e r which he adopted a n d he is in the process of becoming one of our best realist painters. As a characteristic mark he wears a bushy beard. H e has been a m e m b e r of the Independents for m a n y years, believing that complete freedom of production should be given to any initiator whose m i n d aspires to t h e Beautiful a n d the Good. 1 W h e t h e r w h a t Rousseau m e a n t by " realism " corresponds to the generally accepted meaning of the word is doubtful. Certainly he was not a naturalistic painter, intent on reproducing the exact image recorded by his visual perception of the outer world. H e m a d e a deliberate study of n a t u r e , b u t so does Picasso or H e n r y Moore, or any genuine artist w h o would not normally describe himself as a realist. It would be more logical, perhaps, to call a n artist who confessedly " aspires to the Beautiful a n d the Good " a n idealist. I t has been said t h a t the tropical jungles a n d exotic landscapes which Rousseau painted were not reminiscences of the four years he spent in Mexico as a regimental musician, but that he m a d e accurate studies of the vegetation in the J a r d i n des Plantes in Paris. But a Chicago professor, who has studied photographs of several pictures, reports that " the plants are conventionalized a n d most of them are difficult to identify " . It is only about a b u n c h of b a n a n a s that he feels any certainty. 2 Rousseau, in fact, was faithful to the basic forms of n a t u r e , 1 Quoted from R. H. Wilcnski's Modern French Painting, which gives the best account at present available of Rousseau's career. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, has more recently published a well-illustrated monograph by Daniel Catton Rich which is fully documented and contains an excellent bibliography. 2 Quoted by Rich, op. cit., p. 64.

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Henri Rousseau but these forms he took and varied and recombined in accordance with the laws of his aesthetic sensibility. The form and organization of the picture was the determining factor. And that form was " initiated " by the artist's imagination, and in the realization of the form imagined, the artist claimed " complete freedom ". Rousseau's achievement is primarily something to be enjoyed—simply and sensuously and by as many people as possible. But it is possible, without being too priggish, to point out " the significance of Rousseau ". If what I have said above is true, he is essentially a people's painter, in a sense in which one would never apply that condescending phrase to Cézanne or Picasso. But it is not likely that the people to-day would accept and like Rousseau's paintings ; they would probably feel that they were being " got at " in some way, as did the people of Paris fifty years ago. They might accept the flower-pieces and some of the landscapes, but they would demand more verisimilitude in the portraits and would recoil from the superreal magic of " The Sleeping Gypsy " or " The Hunter ". And what would a crowd at Wembley make of " Les Joueurs de Football " ? But it is the people that is sick—sick with sophistication and conventionality, their sensibilities atrophied and their imaginations dead. This state of mental sickness in the people is due to causes which Rousseau miraculously escaped : to a social consciousness which suppresses spontaneity in the individual, to an educational system which kills the sensibility of children, to deadening labours and devitalized environment. Rousseau may not be a great artist, in the sense in which we recognize Raphael or Rembrandt or Picasso as great artists. I would not, however, so easily admit that he is not a great artist in the sense in which we recognize Giotto, or the great Byzantine mosaicists, or the great Chinese artists as " great ". But he is greatly significant 103

A Coat of Many Colours in that he measures very exactly the dividedness of our civilization, our schismatic culture. A true culture is indivisible. Art, in a true culture, emerges like spring water on every hillside. Rousseau was an oasis in our desert.

20.

The Faculty of Abstraction

A L L w h o have given any careful or consistent thought to the subject of so-called abstract or non-objective art know t h a t it leads to problems of psychology a n d philosophy of the subtlest difficulty. These problems cannot be discussed in the n o r m a l course of art criticism, because in general they depend on the use of a philosophical terminology with which the general public cannot be expected to be familiar. T h e present essay, while not pretending to treat the subject in a m a n n e r satisfactory to the p r o fessional philosopher, will carry art criticism on to a p l a n e which it generally avoids in this country. Indeed, I would say that the discussion of this subject, abstract art, has reached a condition of deadlock which can only be liberated by the use of ampler philosophical terms. W e must begin with certain assumptions a b o u t t h e development of consciousness in m a n k i n d . T h e r e is n o space for a critical review of the various theories which have been advanced by anthropologists a n d psychologists, but I would venture to say that there is a general agreement on certain broad lines which will suffice for our present purpose. W h a t we now know as intellection or abstract reasoning is peculiar to m a n , a n d only becomes evident in m a n at a relatively late stage of evolution. T h a t reasoning of a kind takes place even in animals is not to be denied, but such reasoning is always particular a n d concrete. I t seems as evident to m e [wrote Locke] that they do, some of them, in certain instances, reason, as t h a t they 104

The Faculty of Abstraction have sense, but it is only in particular ideas, just as they received them from their senses. They are, the best of them, tied up within these narrow bounds, and have not (as I think) the faculty to enlarge them by any kind of abstraction. 1 This subject, as I have already warned the reader, bristles with all the classical problems of philosophy, and it is only by the nimble use of certain stepping-stones that we shall avoid getting bogged. Those stepping-stones are of a solid materialistic or empirical nature, but I cannot stop to describe them. But in brief the theory I would support regards this faculty of abstraction as due to progressive stages in the use of classification. Man, as an animal, is presented through his senses with a mass of phenomena. Merely to carry on the business of life, to exist, he is compelled to arrange these phenomena in a certain order. At first that order will be determined by affective (emotional) reactions, and such is the classification of phenomena we find in primitive man. Everything at this stage of development is fused into one view, and superstition and fear dominate existence. Phenomena which we as civilized human beings regard as discrete— and if connected, connected by explicable links—are for the primitive mind inextricably interpenetrated. LévyBruhl has called this state of mind in the primitive " collective representation ". Their mental activity [he says] is too little differentiated for it to be possible to consider ideas or images of objects by themselves apart from the emotions and passions which evoke these ideas or are evoked by them. Just because our mental activity is more differentiated, and we are more accustomed to analysing its functions, it is difficult for us to realize by any effort of imagination, more complex states in which emotional or motor elements are integral parts of the representation.2 1 2

Am Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. X I , s. 11. How Natives Think, p. 36. 105

A Coat of Many Colours The evolution of reasoning we may regard as the progressive attempt to divorce this emotional element from the process of representation. Over a long period of trial and error, and ever driven on by the necessities of combating natural forces (the so-called struggle for existence) mankind was led to make, first a utilitarian or technical classification of phenomena, and then, as the need for connecting or explaining such a pragmatic classification became apparent, a conceptual or scientific classification. We have to imagine mankind as first forming a vast structure of pigeon-holes, into which he sorted the confusing mass of phenomena presented by his senses ; then as giving to the contents of each pigeon-hole a general name or " concept " by means of which he could refer to the contents. This name or concept is, in effect, a symbol which saves us the trouble of doing the sorting and pigeon-holing every time we want to speak about or think about the phenomena in question. We must leave aside the very interesting problem of why a particular word should become the symbol representing a particular set of phenomena. The further, and final, stage of development comes when man acquires the ability to manipulate these symbols or concepts without reference back to the actual objects or phenomena which they denote. He " reasons " with the symbols as abstractions. In mathematical reasoning this is obviously true, but dialectical or metaphysical reasoning is no less abstract. To see how extensively and with what almost dizzy prestidigitation this can be done one has only to look at the metaphysical systems of German philosophers like Kant and Hegel—systems which, long after they have been discredited as true deductions from experience, will be admired as abstract works of art. This process of development so briefly and inadequately described must now be related to the parallel development 106

The Faculty of Abstraction of art. Art begins, so far as we can trace its beginnings in the Old Stone Age, with the reproduction of eidetic images —that is to say, of images of objects (actually almost invariably animals) which for mystical or emotional reasons have been vividly impressed on the memory of the artist. Art begins as a purely affective or emotive activity, and as such it remains in the most primitive types of mankind still existing (the Bushmen of South Africa, for example). It begins to change when, with the growth of classification, man requires a symbol to express a particular group of phenomena. We have already seen how a word or concept may be chosen to express such a group of phenomena. But alternatively a sign or graphic symbol may be selected. At first such a sign or symbol will be based on the vividness of the eidetic imagery in the mind of the artist, but in time the sign will be reproduced with increasing carelessness, with less and less reference to the memory of actual phenomena, and eventually will become divorced from reality. In this way most alphabets arose and developed, and in some of them we may still find traces of their pictorial origins. In my book, Art and Society, I have argued that such symbolic art, gradually divorced from immediate imagery and from the emotional associations of the object, inevitably loses its vitality and declines. I will not repeat the overwhelming evidence which the history of art offers in support of this contention. I think it would be well to note here, however, an apparent exception, best represented in Byzantine art. I should be the last to deny the supreme aesthetic appeal of certain symbolic representations of Christ or the Madonna which we find in the mosaics and illuminated manuscripts of this period. But here I would contend that the artist was in no sense using a symbol as the representative of a generic concept. He was actually trying to represent, with all the emotional awe which such 107

A Coat of Many Colours a daring attempt implied, the superhuman form a n d features of the godhead. W e have only to observe how the representation of t h e M a d o n n a degenerates at t h e hands of a more rational or more commercial type of artist to have this t r u t h confirmed. W i t h the growth of rationality a n d a logical type of mind, art tended to become more a n d more differentiated as an activity. It was no longer, as in primitive times, a n activity integral with life itself—as accepted a n d as n a t u r a l as any other practical activity. I t became a specialized activity, appealing only to a minority. I n the same way, reasoning or intellectual activity developed a p a r t from the normal life of mankind, a n d became a specialized activity appealing to a minority. By the nineteenth century it was possible for a philosopher like Hegel to regard art and intellect as two distinct a n d incompatible elements in h u m a n life ; a n d as a n intellectual, a n exponent of the idea, to treat art as an obsolescent feature of life. A n d from his particular point of view, Hegel was right. This incompatibility between art a n d intellect does exist ; art cannot become conceptual, an affair of symbols, a n activity conducted without relation to objects. Art is always a perceptual activity, a n activity of the senses in relation to plastic materials. T h a t is to say, a r t must now as ever rely on w h a t LévyBruhl calls " the law of participation " . For the artist as for primitive m a n there always exists a " mystic community of substance ", a " pre-logical " identification of thought a n d object, of concept a n d percept. But this does not imply that the artist must revert to the primitive stage of mentality. T h e identification which is now required of h i m lies beyond the concept. T h a t is to say, he must now reclothe the concept in visible a n d vital raiment. H e must accept the orderly universe of philosophy, the pigeon-holes of science. But he must m a k e t h e m real a n d vivid. I n 108

The Faculty of Abstraction the place of the single concept, he must now put the single phenomenon, the work of art. I do not pretend that there is any one way of doing this. It seems to me, on the contrary, that we are at a stage of experimentation, trying in various ways to discover a new law of identification. I believe that superrealism, no less than abstract art, is engaged on this all-absorbing and all-important task. The superrealist believes, or acts as if he believed, that parallel to the development of a conscious method of reasoning, there has taken place, below the conscious level of the mind, an organization of latent perceptions (images), and that what is required of the artist is the materialization of this unconscious activity. He would argue that consciousness, intellection and reasoning generally have not developed without unconscious compensations ; that against the transcendental edifices of a Kant or a Hegel we must balance the subliminal fantasies of a Lautréamont or a Picasso—-just as, in another age, the theological system of a Thomas Aquinas was balanced by the imaginative structure of the Gothic cathedral. The only problem is to discover methods of circumventing the intellect—of releasing the compensatory images of the unconscious in plastic and poetic form. The method of the abstract artist is more direct. His aim is, in effect, to construct a plastic object appealing immediately to the senses and in no way departing from the affective basis of art, which shall nevertheless be the plastic equivalent of the concept—or, to use the dialectical term, its antithesis. Indeed, we may go further and say that he accepts the position of absolute opposition between art and idea declared by Hegel ; and proceeds to resolve the contradiction by creating the synthesis—the work of art which translates the concept back again into perceptual form, while retaining the unity of the original concept. 109

A Goat of Many Colours " Space " , for example, is a typical concept. As a concept it is very evident in the work of a superrealist painter like Dali ; Dali contradicts the rational concept of space in a fantastic m a n n e r , giving to his pictures w h a t we might call " a d r e a m perspective " . But this very contradiction of space makes us vividly aware of its reality. An a b stract artist like M o n d r i a n attacks the same concept frontally. H e presents us with a bare a r r a n g e m e n t of lines a n d two or three p u r e colours which create a n d affirm the concept " space " in the most direct a n d unequivocal m a n n e r . T h e p u r e r a n d more fundamental the elements which are used, the acuter a n d p u r e r is our emotional awareness of " space " . T h e very fact that naturalistic motives are excluded, a n d that a naturalistic quality like shading is not imitated, makes our physical awareness of the concept more direct, more exact. I d o not suggest that all concepts can be treated in this m a n n e r . T h e word " dog " is a concept. If we picture a dog, it is always a particular breed of a dog, a n d perhaps only a superrealist could paint a conceptual dog, or give a n a d e q u a t e plastic equivalent of all t h a t is implied when we use the symbolic word " dog " , b u t actually we d o not need such a plastic equivalent ; it would, as we say, serve no useful purpose. T h e activity which m o d e r n art is engaged on, of translating concepts into plastic percepts (plastic objects which can be perceived), is determined by necessity—the necessity of our social evolution. At a n y stage in history (since the a p p e a r a n c e of h u m a n consciousness) certain concepts are created or preferred, which concepts form the typical ideology of a period. If we a r e dialectical materialists we regard t h e m as the reflection of that particular stage of economic development. But essential to the creative life a n d development of each period is the translation of these concepts into objects of aesthetic contemplation. T h e Greek temple, the Gothic cathedral, no

The Faculty of Abstraction the Renaissance palace, are but the major types of such translations. To-day we are in the process of creating such another type in architecture. But subordinate to these major types are thousands of minor types, all illustrating the ideological concepts of each period. The difference in our own period is that we have become more conscious of these historical processes, and can attack directly what other ages could only discover accidentally. Just as superrealism makes use of, or rather proceeds on the assumption of, the knowledge embodied in psycho-analysis, so abstract art makes use of, or proceeds on the basis of, the abstract concepts of physics and dynamics, geometry and mathematics. It is not necessary for the abstract artist to have a knowledge of these sciences (nor is it necessary for the superrealist to have a knowledge of psycho-analysis) ; such concepts are part of our mental ambience, and the artist is precisely the individual who can make this ambience actual. He can make it actual in detached and non-utilitarian works of art ; or he can make it actual in architecture and the industrial arts. In either case he is serving the highest interests of humanity, which is never to halt in a genetic deadlock, never to revert to an easier path, never to acknowledge defeat when confronted with a contradiction ; but ever to negate the negation, to proceed to fresh synthesis, to new paths, to whatever new awareness his evolving consciousness shall lead.

21.

The Last of the Bohemians

P A U L VERLAINE is often given this title, but a comparative study of the lives of many poets before and after his time might reveal that he had little claim to any such distinction. What we agree to call Verlaine's failings are the general characteristics of a certain kind of temperament, in

A Coat of Many Colours and though various accidental circumstances give local or temporal colour to Verlaine's actual existence (congenital syphilis and the accessibility of absinthe being the most important) there is no reason to suppose that in essentials he was very different from a poet like Baudelaire who came before him or (to take someone who is safely dead) a poet like Essenin who came after him. Verlaine himself was of this opinion, and called such chosen spirits Saturnians : Or ceux-là qui sont nés sous le signe SATURNE, Fauve planète, chère aux nécromanciens, Ont entre tous, d'après les grimoires anciens, Bonne part de malheur et bonne part de bile. L'Imagination, inquiète et débile, Vient rendre nul en eux l'effort de la Raison. Dans leurs veines, le sang, subtil comme un poison, Brûlant comme une lave, et rare, coule et roule En grésillant leur triste Idéal qui s'écroule. Such Saturnians, Verlaine concludes, must suffer and die according to the predetermined logic of an evil influence. This is, of course, a melodramatic interpretation of the psychological facts ; and Verlaine, who could be realistic about himself, knew these facts. Unless a biographer reveals his standards of criticism, I cannot trust him in his presentation of facts. He may claim that he has given us all the facts and nothing but the facts, but that is absurd, for no one can know all the facts of a man's life, and anything less than everything is a distortion unless controlled by an acute sensibility. In this case it should be a poetic sensibility. I would not trust a critic who dismisses Rimbaud as an " inspired charlatan " and admits that he is baffled by just that aspect of Rimbaud's poetry which has most appealed to his successors. A lack of sympathy for Rimbaud's work inevitably leads to a certain prejudice against his character. There are no standards by which I would care to defend that character, 112

The Last of the Bohemians but if a youth at the age of seventeen has produced some of the most absolute poetry ever written by a human being, I am more interested in that fact than in his moral conduct. A poet's poems are facts far more essential in his life than his sexual adventures or his financial difficulties, and the biography of a poet should therefore be primarily an account of his creative activity, the life of his muse, and the other facts are only important in so far as they contribute to an understanding of this process. In one of his letters Verlaine said : " I lack judgement, despite all my good sense. I don't at all like the moral to be drawn from this because it stinks of pseudophysiology : I am a feminine—which would explain a lot of things." That confession is the clue to his personality— and to the personality of all genuine poets. Verlaine is merely claiming that quality which Keats called " negative capability "—" that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ". How exactly Verlaine affirms this quality in his " Art Poétique " : De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela préfère l'Impair Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air, Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose. Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise : Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint. It by no means follows that this vicariousness of the poet's spirit necessarily leads to the moral depravity of Verlaine's life. It is largely a matter of chance. Up to his meeting with Rimbaud, Verlaine had not shown anything but amiable weaknesses ; he was, in fact, a good little bourgeois clerk who had just contracted a marriage with a very decent woman of his own class, and though it is probable 113

A Coat of Many Colours that his inherited disease would finally have driven him to drink, there is no reason to suppose that he would have ever become an active homosexual. Towards the end of his life, when his fame had spread beyond the narrow circle of the intelligentsia, Verlaine was allowed a certain licence ; the police were told to let him get drunk with impunity, and when he could no longer support himself he was taken into the public hospital, where he was treated with a certain consideration. When he died the Ministry of Education sent 500 francs towards the funeral expenses. But neither this belated recognition, nor the eulogies which were pronounced over his grave by his distinguished contemporaries, can disguise the misery of his existence. " Tels les Saturnions doivent souffrir et tels mourir . . . " He would not have us moralize on his life. But we must insist that the quality of his poetry is the quality of the man, and the poetry is immortal. Poets need not take that fact as a positive invitation to lead the same kind of life as Verlaine, but at least it might suggest to us all that poetry is a mystery which does not enter into the narrow categories of our morality and reason.

22. Art and Autarky A R T is a product of autarky—that seems to be the lesson of history, and if in the future we wish to recreate those political and economic conditions which make for a natural and spontaneous culture, it seems that we should aim at the division of the world into relatively small and almost wholly self-sufficient units. From a cultural point oí view I do not think it can be established that these units must necessarily be national—certainly not, as Hitler has argued, racial. The fundamental link is that between art and work, people and the soil. There must be peace, stability, 114

Art and Autarkyeven—as the Chinese philosophers taught—passivity. But how will that be possible in a world shrinking under a network of high-speed communications ? It may not be possible—we may be leaving an epoch without taste to enter an epoch without art. But there may be another possibility. One cannot meditate too often on the profound fable of the hare and the tortoise. It may be that as the speed of travel increases, we shall grow less aware of its effects. To fly above the clouds is less of an " experience " than to be carried through towns and fields : it is extremely boring and " empty ", at any rate for the passenger. Meanwhile, under the air and between the autostradi the country grows deserted. The grass grows between the stones in the by-passed village as it has never done since the eighteenth century. And where the grass grows a culture is possible.

23. Coleridge T H E R E is a good case for regarding Coleridge as potentially the greatest intellect, certainly of his own time, that England has produced in the allied realms of poetry and philosophy ; and yet his life was a tragic failure, and his work a vast chaos. When we consider the psychological problem which he presents, the conviction grows that it was in some way connected with his garrulity. A man who talks so much will never write well or consistently. An endless flow of speech dissipates that energy which is required for the concentrated act of writing. For a good writer writes, in a very literal sense, with the tip of his pen. Through that narrow channel thoughts flow from the brain in an ordered sequence. If, however, they have been previously divulged in conversation, the pressure falls, the pen falters. Thoughts spoken are like glowing coals that turn to ashes when scattered in the wind. "5

A Coat of Many Colours 24. Vulgarity 1 HE antithesis of Beauty is Ugliness, b u t if art, as I h a v e consistently maintained, is a wider concept t h a n beauty, a n d m a y even include ugliness, it is only proper to ask w h a t is then art's antithesis. Obviously, I think, it is vulgarity. Vulgarity, as Oscar Wilde said (or ought to have said), is the only sin. T h e opposite point of view is taken by George Robey, who confessed in his reminiscences (Looking Back on Life) : " I believe in honest vulgarity. So did Shakespeare—and if he d i d n ' t know w h a t was w h a t nobody on earth ever did. . . . Honest vulgarity is t h e finest antidote I know to present-day hypocrisy." So apparently it is not a simple matter ; vulgarity is not a merely negative affair. T h e r e is honest vulgarity, a n d there is another kind of vulgarity, presumably dishonest. A n d honest vulgarity consists in knowing, like Shakespeare, w h a t is what. Perhaps a consideration of the subject from the point of view of the plastic arts will enlighten us. Vulgarity in its original sense means the taste of the vulgus, the common or uneducated mass of people. But there is good taste a n d b a d taste, a n d that the taste of the common people is not always b a d taste is proved by all kinds of folk-art, which are generally not only in good taste, b u t in certain periods far superior to the debased products of cultured taste. Vulgarity, therefore, cannot be m a d e a class distinction ; it is b a d taste in any grade of society, a n d I d o u b t if any period of history has been free from it. But mercifully most vulgar art perishes, though perhaps there might be something to be said for preserving specimens of it in some M u s e u m of Horrors, in which everyone engaged in the production of objects of use a n d o r n a m e n t would be compelled to spend a penitential (or propaedeutic) period. Actually such a m u s e u m exists, or did exist, at Stuttgart in G e r m a n y ; it was only 116

Vulgarity one section of the Museum, and the choice of objects was not faultless (there were more appropriate ones in the other sections of the Museum). But ash-trays in the shape of water-closets, toilet-rolls printed with patriotic mottoes, beer-mugs in the shape of Bismarck (or Hindenburg) were some of the more memorable exhibits. Inappropriateness is perhaps the basis of our objection to this kind of vulgarity. Psychologically I think we should find that the motives behind such types of expression have much in common with the motives behind laughter. Vulgarity is often desperately serious, but some of the theories used to explain laughter could be adapted to vulgarity. Vulgarity is, like humour, a convenient method of draining off superfluous energy ; " contrast " and " incongruity " are characteristics of its mode of operation, and psychological explanations of humour which lay emphasis on the elements of superiority, contempt or hostility could find ample support in vulgar objects. That a sexual tendency is present is shown, not only in the usual type of music-hall " vulgar joke ", but in many of the specimens of so-called works of art assembled in the Stuttgart museum. Perhaps this amounts to no more than saying that vulgarity is often humorous, but actually some general psychological theory can be found which would explain all these departures from human dignity. But vulgarity, and the laughter it involves, has its social value, as Mr. Robey realizes. As he says, it is the finest antidote to hypocrisy. But that is " honest " vulgarity, or shall we say vulgarity justified by the abuses it corrects. There remains dishonest vulgarity, and I think we shall find that this is simply vulgarity badly presented. Even on the music-hall stage, we prefer vulgarity to be expressed by an artist, and a joke made by George Robey is not quite the same when it is made by someone else. And though Ruskin thought that this quality had rendered "7

A Goat of Many Colours " some of quite the greatest, wisest, a n d most moral of English writers now almost useless for our youth " , no one nowadays would condemn C h a u c e r or Shakespeare for their vulgarity. V u l g a r they certainly are on occasions, but with such vigour a n d artistry that anyone not wholly i n h u m a n accepts the m a t t e r for the sake of the m a n n e r . It is possible that there are certain grades of vulgarity which no artistry could redeem, b u t perhaps the ideas they express could never by any chance enter a sensitive m i n d . Most of us are compelled almost daily to wait a n d stare a t hoardings covered with advertisements, ninety per cent, of which are frankly a n d even obscenely vulgar ; but if o n e asks oneself, could a good artist render the same idea in an acceptable m a n n e r , I think in most cases one has to confess that he could. W h y , in spite of that, advertisement agents go out of their way to find artists w h o a r e so excessively crude that they must be quite rare, is one of the mysteries of the commercial age. Like film producers a n d theatrical managers, they must be actuated by false a n d fantastic notions of w h a t the public wants. Some of the larger advertising agencies should be able to test the m a t t e r statistically, but it is not sufficient to c o m p a r e w h a t they would call high-brow advertisements with the vulgar a n d undoubtedly effective ones. W h a t we need is a comparison of vulgarity well done a n d vulgarity badly done. T h e results might surprise the wiseacres of the advertising world. W e m a y conclude, then, t h a t vulgarity is synonymous with b a d taste, a n d that it is an affair of the sensibility. W e are vulgar, not because of w h a t we say, b u t because of our m a n n e r of saying it. It is a m o d e of expression, determined by the sensitiveness of our feelings. W h e t h e r we wear a loud tie, or speak in a loud voice, or with a b a d accent ; whether we m a k e r u d e noises when eating or complete our toilet in public ; whether we have cushions of screaming satin (complete with tassels) or receiving-sets in

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Shelley the shape of cathedrals—it is always a failure in sensibility. Whether a fine sensibility is inherited or acquired is another question ; but granted a modicum of it, it seems educable. The unfortunate fact is that it rarely accompanies whatever other qualities make for success in the modern world.

25. Shelley X H E truest thing ever said about Shelley was said by his wife, Mary. " Shelley," she wrote on a note on The Revolt of Islam, " possessed two remarkable qualities of intellect— a brilliant imagination, and a logical exactness of reason." Imagination and reason—people are accustomed to regard these two faculties as in some sense contradictory, and for more than a hundred years there has been a tendency to exalt, or deplore, Shelley's imaginative gifts to the neglect of his metaphysics. This is natural, because the appeal of poetry—of pure poetry—is direct. We might even say, it is magical. It works on the senses through the immediate impact of visual and auditory images. The visual images are literally seen, if only by the inward eye ; the auditory images, embroidered in words, are literally heard, like notes of music. It is true that the words may at the same time convey a rational meaning, but this is not strictly necessary, and those critics who analyse one of the more musical of Shelley's lyrics to prove that it is nonsensical are wide of the mark : meaning, in such a context, is largely irrelevant. Take, for example, these six fragmentary lines which describe the waning moon : And like a dying lady, lean and pale, Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil, Out of her chamber, led by the insane And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, The moon arose up in the murky East, A white and shapeless mass— 119

A Coat of Many Colours The image is vivid, but it is very nearly ludicrous ; and under no circumstances does the moon appear as " a white and shapeless mass ". But it does not matter : the words are magical, and once read, always remembered. The imagination, in poetry, is an arbitrary and independent activity, capable of shocking us by its irrationality, its illogicality, and its coldness, or lack of what we call humanity. Nothing could be more typical of this quality in Shelley's verse than those Lines which were printed in Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book in 1823 : 1

The cold earth slept below, Above the cold sky shone ; And all around, with a chilling sound, From caves of ice and fields of snow, The breath of night like death did flow Beneath the sinking moon. 11

The wintry hedge was black, The green grass was not seen, The birds did rest on the bare thorn's breast, Whose roots, beside the pathway track, Had bound their folds o'er many a crack Which the frost had made between. m Thine eyes glowed in the glare Of the moon's dying light ; As a fen-fire's beam on a sluggish stream Gleams dimly, so the moon shone there, And it yellowed the strings of thy raven hair, That shook in the wind of night. rv The moon made thy lips pale, beloved— The wind made thy bosom chill— The night did shed on thy dear head Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie Where the bitter breath of the naked sky Might visit thee at will. 120

Shelley When it was first published, this poem was dated November, 1815, and modern editors suggest that this must be a mistake for November, 1816, since the verses " evidently ", as they say, refer to the tragic suicide of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, which did not take place until the later date. That assumption shows the curious workings of the editorial mind, always anxious to find a material or circumstantial explanation for something which cannot be explained : the magic of poetry. If the poem has any reference to Harriet's death, I would rather assume that, like some other poems of Shelley's, it was prophetic in its vision—he more than once, for example, anticipated his own death by drowning. Such " prophetic vision " may in its turn submit to a reasoned psychological explanation, but that is not the point. In the moment of inspiration the poet is not reasoning, in any ordinary sense of the term : he is seeing and recording vivid imperative images. And in these Lines it is the accumulation of such images, of ice, of desolation, of darkness, of thorns and roots and raven hair, with the wind of night blowing over them, and the yellow light of the moon giving them an unearthly pallor, which impresses this picture of death so deeply on our minds. The mind of the poet in that moment of creation was not musing over a tragedy personal to himself, was not stirred by feelings of remorse or pity. It was recording as exactly and automatically as a machine—a miraculous machine, no doubt, but machine nevertheless, driven by a more-thanhuman, more-than-mortal, energy. But Shelley himself has described the process : Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aèreal kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. He will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, 121

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A Coat of Many Colours Nor heed, nor see, what things they be ; But from these, create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality. We should read and re-read those well-known lines, and not let their meaning escape us through over-familiarity ; for they contain a very precise and adequate account of the nature of the poetic imagination. Already we see, in this quotation, the close union of poetic imagination and exact reasoning. But this kind of reasoning, which is rather a record of psychological perception, is not quite what Mrs. Shelley referred to in her note on The Revolt of the Islam. She had in mind what she alternatively describes as " metaphysical discussions ", and says that the poet " deliberated at one time whether he should dedicate himself to poetry or metaphysics "—to metaphysics, that is to say, as a philosophical pursuit or profession. Actually, no such choice was possible. A man is born a metaphysician just as naturally as he is born a poet, and Shelley, like Dante before him, and like his contemporary Goethe, was naturally both poet and metaphysician. Unfortunately, that is a very rare combination, and there are relatively few people capable of appreciating both aspects of such metaphysical poets. I doubt if the philosophy of Dante, as distinct from his poetry, would have been so much appreciated but for the fact that he chose to be the exponent of the orthodox Christian philosophy of his time. Shelley's philosophy was defiantly heterodox, so in addition to the initial difficulty of being a philosophy of any kind, it has had to contend with the opposition and studied neglect of critics who, in so far as they were philosophical, were orthodox—of whom Matthew Arnold was the most typical as well as the most snobbish. Shelley's metaphysical researches aimed at nothing less 122

Shelley than a rational explanation of the universe and of human existence. It is the very magnitude of his undertaking which has baffled his critics, for the philosophers have assumed that a poet could not be professional and the literary critics that his philosophy could not be profound. I am not aware of the existence of any serious attempt to come to terms with this philosophy before Carl Grabo began in recent years to publish his studies of Shelley's thought. I myself, who have never been inclined to depreciate the quality of Shelley's philosophy, had no conception of its range, depth and coherence until I had read this Chicago professor's patient exposition of the ideas underlying Shelley's poems. 1 What I once attempted to do on a modest scale and by the psychological analysis of Shelley's personality, Professor Grabo has done by a complete and objective analysis of Shelley's works, and more particularly of these works in relation to the social, scientific and religious background of his age. Shelley's ideas have been traced to their source, related to each other and to their common background, and revealed as a coherent intellectual system. That his poetry must thereby gain immensely in significance should at once be obvious ; for the common complaint has been that Shelley lacked precisely such coherence. Indeed to-day [to quote from the Preface to this book] more than a hundred years after his death, Shelley remains no more than the " beautiful and ineffectual angel " of Matthew Arnold's singularly unperceptive characterization. The limitations of Arnold's intelligence could scarcely better be intimated than by a phrase so inept. Inept as Arnold was, the real villain of the piece is Mary Shelley, who, however difficult she may have found her 1 Carl Grabo : The Magic Plant : The Growth of Shellefs Thought. (University of North Carolina Press, 1936). 123

A Coat of Many Colours husband in life, did nothing but sentimentalize him in death. It was she who, in the notes she affixed to the posthumous edition of his Poems, created the image of a whimsy Ariel which has ever since been so dear to superficial critics and romantic biographers. The decidedly scientific even if Platonic poet-philosopher whom Professor Grabo substitutes will not be such a popular figure, but he is demonstrably nearer the truth. No one would claim that Shelley was to any great extent an original thinker. He had two masters, from whom he derived most of his ideas, and his originality, such as it is, consists in trying to reconcile their apparently contradictory systems. One of them, William Godwin, was a realist ; the other, Plato, was a mystic. If we have only a superficial knowledge of Shelley's thought, we are tempted to assume that he began with a youthful admiration for the doctrines of Godwin and gradually abandoned them in favour of the mysticism of Plato. This simplification is based on the false assumption that realism and mysticism are inconsistent. It is one of Professor Grabo's finest achievements to expose this false assumption. " Only to simple souls ", he writes, " are realism and mysticism mutually exclusive philosophies or attitudes of mind. Indeed, it may plausibly be argued that only as the mind perceives the boundaries of the visible and tangible world is the invisible world intelligible." In that sentence you have the key to Shelley's philosophy. From Godwin he derived a rational understanding of man and society ; from Plato, an insight into the transcendental universe, the pattern underlying experience and determining thought. H. N. Brailsford, who wrote a brilliant little book on Shelley, Godwin and their Circle for the Home University Library, said that " to attempt to understand Shelley without the aid of Godwin is a task hardly more promising than it would be to read Milton without the Bible ". Shelley's 124

Shelley bible was Godwin's Political Justice, first published in 1793, and a book which had an immense vogue in its day. Like Montesquieu's UEsprit des Lois, Rousseau's Contrat Social, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Marx's Capital or Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, it is one of the classics of political theory. It has been unduly neglected for the past hundred years, because it is completely against the grain of those economic and political developments which are associated with the Industrial Revolution. In that sense it stands at the opposite pole to Marx's masterpiece. The doctrine it preaches has been called " philosophical " anarchism, but it is difficult to know why anarchism, as distinct from monarchism, conservatism, collectivism or any other political theory, should be labelled " philosophical "— presumably because it is held to be impracticable. But certainly neither Godwin nor Shelley regarded their political theory as merely theoretical ; on the contrary, they put it forward as the most rational and common-sense View of men and society. Since it has not yet been proved that the collectivism to which the Western world has now apparently committed itself is necessarily an ideal solution of the social problem, it is too early to conclude that Godwin and Shelley were absolutely wrong. Godwin's political theories are not read to-day, and his books are unprocurable ; but fortunately the substance of them is to be found in Shelley's Queen Mab, which Brailsford described as " nothing but Godwin in verse, with prose notes which quote or summarize him ". These notes, incidentally, give a good indication of the extent of Shelley's scientific interests at this time, interests astronomical, geological, physical and mythological, as well as historical and philosophical. He was then eighteen. But Godwin was not a passing enthusiasm for the youthful Shelley : his greatest poems, Prometheus Unbound and Hellas, are permeated with the same ideas. That last great fragment, 125

A Coat of Many Colours The Triumph of Life, though so Platonic in its imagery and meaning, is still faithful to the ideals of his first master. Shelley's Hellenism is another subject too big to trace even in outline here. He was, I believe, both in spirit and knowledge, a profounder Hellenist than any other English poet, profounder even than Goethe, and only rivalled by his great contemporary, the German poet Hõlderlin. He made a translation of one of Plato's works, the Symposium or Banquet, and in a Preface to that translation paid a tribute to his master. Plato [he wrote] exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendour and harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musical impressions, which hurry the persuasions onward, as in a breathless career. His language is that of an immortal spirit, rather than a man. . . . His views into the nature of mind and existence are often obscure, only because they are profound ; and though his theories respecting the government of the world, and the elementary laws of moral action, are not always correct, yet there is scarcely any of his treatises which do not, however stained by puerile sophisms, contain the most remarkable intuitions into all that can be the subject of the human mind. Those words which Shelley used of Plato, we in our turn might apply to Shelley. In his longer poems and in his brief and fragmentary prose writings, Shelley gave expression to what we sometimes call a synthetic philosophy, meaning by that a fusion, in the unity of his personality or vision of the world, of such apparently disparate elements as Platonism, anarchism and contemporary science. It is a very subtle and profound philosophy, which has often been condemned by people who have not taken the trouble to understand it, and who in some cases have not had the mental power. In our own scientific pride we sometimes forget that 126

Shelley Newton and Davy preceded Darwin and Einstein, and that the natural philosophers of Shelley's time had a theory of the material universe no less consistent and no more final than ours. The same conflict between matter and spirit, determinism and free will, existed then as now, and then as now the supreme effort of philosophy was to establish a monistic theory of the universe " in which matter and being—all the phenomenal world—are conceived as but manifestations of thought ". The scientific speculations of Shelley's time were not less materialistic than those of to-day ; on the whole they were more naively mechanistic than at any time since then. But Shelley was not long in perceiving the inadequacy of a purely rationalistic interpretation of the universe, and the synthesis to which he was logically driven has perhaps a good deal in common with Bergsonism. Whatever we may call it, the synthesis of understanding and intuition, of perception and representation, of reality and dream, remains the central problem of all speculations—of all dialectics. Both Christianity and Marxism are equally synthetic resolutions of this same problem. Professor Grabo calls Shelley " the greatest of Protestants among modern poets and thinkers ", so probably, to a world which has not yet dared to conceive Marxism as a reintegration of Christianity, Shelley is to be classed as a prophet rather than a disciple. We speak of these philosophies—Platonism, Christianity, Marxism—in abstract intellectual terms, but all alike are firmly based on human experience, and are profoundly ethical in their practical teaching. Shelley, too, was moved primarily by his acute sense of the else unfelt oppressions of this earth, by the desire to alleviate the sufferings of mankind. Carl Grabo would not have us ignore this zealous aspect of the poet. " I feel for the recognition of Shelley's philosophic greatness the passionate 127

A Coat of Many Colours concern which he felt for the recognition of ideas needful to the regeneration of the world ; and the same impatience with a world blind to him as to them." There is no promise that such impatience will be assuaged in our time ; but Shelley's intellectual reputation is redeemed, and by that act the world itself is a step nearer redemption. His philosophy would have received its supreme expression in The Triumph of Life, a noble Dantesque fragment, written like Dante's own great poem, in terza rima, and designed to tell, like the Divine Comedy but with a difference, . . . the wondrous story How all things are transfigured except love. But though The Triumph of Life promised to be a maturer poem than Prometheus Unbound, it is in this great epic that the best of Shelley's thought receives sublime poetic expression. There are passages in it of somewhat pedestrian blank verse, and at times the rhetoric strikes the sophisticated modern ear much too forcibly, but it is an immense imaginative conception, carried out with the confidence of a supreme poetic technician, and conveying a complete and coherent vision of human destiny.

26. Problems of Primitive Art T H E French have a phrase, " l'art rupestre " (Latin rupes, a rock), which very conveniently covers all those types of art which are engraved or drawn on rocks or in caves by primitive races of men. We tend to distinguish between " cave drawings ", by which we mean the art of prehistoric men of the Stone Age, and " rock paintings ", by which we mean the more recent art of the bushmen of Africa and Australia ; but these types of art show not only a close aesthetic similarity, but even historical continuity, 128

Problems of Primitive Art so a generic term is desirable. Until one is invented, we must make use of the rather ambiguous word " primitive ". Such art, however, is only primitive in the historical sense ; from an aesthetic point of view it often far surpasses the art of later and more civilized communities. The general features of the prehistoric art of the Stone Age become more familiar every day. The caves, particularly those in the Dordogne district in France, are visited by thousands of tourists every year. They are lit up by electricity, and provided with guichets, entrance fees and guides like any other historical monument. There are now some sixty of these sites in France and Spain, most of them discovered in the last forty years. It is still possible that more sites may be discovered in Europe, but interest has now shifted to Africa, where, particularly in the Sahara region, important discoveries are being made. Details of what are said to be very remarkable rock paintings at Tibesti on the eastern side of the desert are not yet available ; but Count F. de Chasseloup Laubat has published a very interesting account of his discoveries in the Hoggar district to the north-west of the desert.1 The engravings and drawings vary considerably in composition and style, from a large isolated engraving of a lion, quite schematic and symbolic in style, to very lively and naturalistic representations of hunting scenes. The newly discovered engravings and drawings are similar to the palaeolithic art of the French and Spanish caves. Before drawing any conclusions from this similarity, we must freely admit that the human mind at any given stage of development is likely to express itself in a similar way given similar conditions of environment. But there are certain characteristics in the Hoggar art which have led Count de Chasseloup Laubat to form a wider hypothesis. He suggests that we may be concerned with an art which 1

Art Rupestre au Hoggar. Paris (Librairie Pion), 1938. 129

A Coat of Many Colours was brought into Northern Africa by palaeolithic man as he retreated from the glacial climate of Europe, and that when the Hoggar civilization was dispersed by the increasing aridity of the Sahara, one branch of it moved eastward and influenced the pre-dynastic art of Egypt. This hypothesis involves dating the earliest of the Hoggar paintings and engravings to the remote period of the Stone Age, and the arguments are fairly convincing. In the first place, some of the subjects are so naturalistic and display such an accurate observation of the subject that they are not likely to be memorized impressions of distant scenes ; that is to say, they depicted the life surrounding these hills, and therefore revert to a period when the Sahara was inhabited by elephants, ostriches and herds of cattle, and had a climate and vegetation to support such animals. As we find giraffes among the animals represented, the author argues that the vegetation must have been of a considerable luxuriance and height. Climatic conditions of such a nature have not existed in the Sahara within historic times. Secondly, the engravings, which were executed by means of a flint tool, imply a race able to make and manipulate such tools. Finally, though the expedition had neither the time nor the equipment to make scientific diggings, a stone implement of the neolithic period was actually found on the site. Whatever their age, it is certain that the oldest of these African rock paintings are continuous with the much more recent and even contemporary art of the bushmen. If in the other direction they can be linked up with the art of the Stone Age, then the significance of the paintings for the bushman of to-day may throw some light on the mystery of the earliest artistic activities of mankind. For the prehistoric cave drawings still divide scientific opinion into two schools, one affirming that the drawings were inspired by and ministered to a magical cult, the other seeing in 130

Problems of Primitive Art them nothing but the free expression of an artistic impulse. Of late years the magical school has been winning. It is difficult on any other hypothesis to explain why the drawings and engravings should so often be hidden in the depths of long subterranean caverns ; and the association of arrows and masked dancers with the animals also seems to point to magical practices. On the other side it is argued that the Stone Age drawings are not always in caves ; they occur on open rock surfaces often only a few miles away from the caverns. Arrows would naturally be associated with hunting scenes of no magical significance ; and as for the so-called masked dancers, these may be merely hunters. I have always felt that the famous " Sorcerer " in the cave of Trois Frères in the Pyrenees district, which depicts a human being wearing a stag's pelt, might just as readily be interpreted as a camouflaged stalker as a dancing medicine-man. And this particular drawing is the strongest piece of evidence brought forward by the magical school. What is certain is that among the bushmen and among the more settled natives of the African continent, there are drawings which have a magical significance and others which are free expressions of the artistic impulse. But magical, which is apt to convey all kinds of ritualistic and supernatural complications, is perhaps not the right word to use in this connection. Animistic would be better. The native's world is dualistic. He believes that not only every human being has a soul, but also every animal ; and he is very worried, to say the least of it, if a disembodied soul is left at loose. The cult of the mask, an object which accounts for such a large proportion of native African art, is due to this belief. The mask is a depository for some wandering soul—for some soul not properly disposed of by the obsequies which attend a normal death. Such masks are generally kept in a secret and obscure place. 131

A Coat of Many Colours The analogy is obvious. The cav.s of the Stone Age were the secret places where the hunters of the period disposed of the souls of the animals they had slain. So much we admit. But it is too much to claim that the artists who engraved or painted such animals in the depths of a cave did not use their talents in other places and for other purposes—or for no purpose at all. The artistic quality of the drawings implies a human being of considerable sensibility—above all, a human being. It is only human that the artist of the Stone Age, like the bushman artist of a later age, should exercise his talent whenever he found himself with nothing much to do and a tempting rock surface at hand. For though primitive man believed that every soul must be provided with a permanent restingplace, and that an image would serve the purpose, I know of no evidence which suggests that he had to provide a soul for every image he made. We may be quite sure that the soul was not lodged in the image without due ceremony ; an image, therefore, which had not been subjected to such a ceremony would possess no particular significance. It would be simply a work of art.

27.

Milton

JVLILTON'S rank as a poet was never secure ; Addison said that " our language sunk under him ", and Johnson's famous " Life " of the poet is full of censure. His dismissal of Lycidas as " easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting ", its diction " harsh ", its rhymes " uncertain " and its numbers " unpleasing ", is one of the curiosities of literary criticism. But to-day there are many of us who hold that his praise of Paradise Lost is no less extravagant—" a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance the second, 132

Milton among the productions of the human mind ". There are no statistics available and literary merit is not determined by suffrage ; but the number of people who now read the whole of this epic from free choice rather than academic duty must be exceedingly small. This may be partly explained by the general neglect of poetry, but no unprejudiced critic can defend the vast tracts of dull and involved rhetoric which give the poem its epic bulk. In detail, too, the poetic style or diction, with its inversions, latinities, and obscure allusions, cannot but be regarded as a sluggish backwater in the swift and clear stream of English poetry. But the poem has many virtues to outbalance these defects—dramatic coherence, moral fervour, and a resounding music which stays in the mind long after prettier tinklings have faded out. The main hindrance to the general appreciation of Milton's poetry is a certain artificiality, which is, however, quite distinct from the artificiality of Dryden or Pope. Milton, to whom we owe the very phrase " unpremeditated verse ", is known to have composed in gusts of inspiration. It follows that this quality of artificiality, which is present in Lycidas no less than in Samson Agonistes, is rather a reflection of his mind and constitution than a slow and deliberate construction of his intellect. If it were not present in his early poems, it might have been ascribed to his blindness ; as it is, we must suppose that it is due to abstract or metaphysical habits of thought, and as such it reappears in the similar case of Shelley. The advantage in this kind of poet is that he will have a more considerable influence on the minds of his fellow men ; for in civilized communities the mind is apt to be more accessible than the senses.

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A Coat of Many Colours 28. Sickert O U R reactions to a work of a r t are not necessarily aesthetic ; however much the purists may resent it, people are accustomed to demand from pictures, and artists generally supply, information of various kinds, anecdotes, illustrations to their vague thoughts. This is sometimes called the intellectual element in art, but I feel that " intellectual " is at once too fine and too forbidding a word to use in this connection. What we are expecting from the work of art is an illustration ; just as we frankly expect a book illustrator (usually regarded as an inferior type of artist) to make a graphic representation of characters or scenes in a book, so we expect the painter and the sculptor (usually regarded as superior types of artist) to make a graphic representation of general ideas, historical events, topographical views, or living people. For many people—I suspect for most people—that is the only demand made on the artist, the only function assigned to him. Perhaps unconsciously they respond to the formal arrangement of the picture, but that this formal response is very weak can be demonstrated by psychological experiments which prove that only in exceptional cases is there any constant sense of form. That sense, like any other latent sense, can be educated and trained ; but such possibilities apart, art is for the few, illustration for the many. Sickert had a somewhat cynical realization of this truth. H e once confessed in a letter, Mrs. Woolf tells us, 1 " I have always been a literary painter, thank goodness, like all the decent painters ". But there are more ways than one of being literary, and I am not convinced, to come at once to the point of these remarks, that Sickert's literariness 1 Virginia Woolf : Walter Sickert : a Conversation. London (Hogarth Press), 1934. 134

Sickert has much in common with the literariness of the decent painters. Sickert was so determined to be literary that he ended by being literal ; he resorted to books and to book illustrations, and gave us on canvas an enlarged version of what he found there. He no longer invented a theme ; he did not even trouble to invent the illustration of a theme. He gave us, in delightful colour but in a technique of scamped brushstrokes on coarse canvas which will surely wear badly with the years, what is no more than a pastiche. I don't suppose that Sickert intended it to be more, and as such it is charming enough. But we should not confuse such pleasant fancies with the serious business of art— which has something in common, surely, with the serious business of life. For Sickert, the whole of the post-impressionist movement has been "spoof", " t h e biggest racket of the century ", imposed on the ever-gullible public by clever dealers. As for Cézanne, history must needs describe him as " un grand raté, an incomplete giant ". Sickert grants him a tiny percentage of successes, but the technical methods he used were just those which seemed to Sickert least likely to produce fine painting. " Cézanne less than anyone achieved significant form. What is the first gift needed to achieve significant form ? A sense of aplomb. Cézanne was utterly incapable of getting two eyes to tally, or a figure to sit or stand without lurching. . . . Cézanne will only be remembered as a curious and pathetic by-product of the Impressionist group." And much else to the same effect. As for the Post-impressionists who followed Cézanne—again, it is all " spoof ". " Picassos and Matisses could be painted by all the coachmen that the rise of the motor traffic has thrown out of employment." Progress, Sickert emphasizes in a string of capitals, is the slow unfolding of a profound and comprehended conservatism. And again : 135

A Coat of Many Colours There is no new art. There are no new methods. There is no new theory. The old one is great. It prevails, it has prevailed and it will prevail. There can no more be a new art, a new painting, a new drawing, than there can be new arithmetic, new dynamics, or a new morality. . . . The error of the critical quidnunc is to suppose that the older things are SUPERSEDED. They are NOT superseded. They have been ADDED TO. That is all. But that is more or less what Cézanne said, and neither Matisse nor Picasso, nor any of the critics who support them, is likely to deny this truth. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose is true of all the transformations of art. T h e test of a free sensibility is that it can always perceive the eternal through its temporal dress. Sickert, like so many painters who turn critic, failed in this respect. Such people are so conditioned by their own technical habits that they cannot conceive that the truth can be expressed in any other way. More than that, they cannot see the truth for the technique. Sickert is always admirable as an exponent of the technique of painting, whether it is his own or that of an old master. Take the following passage, for example, from an essay he wrote in Art and Letters (1918) : The instrument of oil-paint contains two distinct resources, the combination of which alone can display to the full the abundance of its wealth and the extent of a region in which no other medium can touch it. . . . The two resources are : firstly, the tones selected and compared as opaque ; and secondly, their effect as spread thinly, and playing thus a semi-transparent rôle, on the colour of a given preparation. . . . It is on the interaction of such grounds with the painting proper that the complete master of the medium relies. T o use the housepainter's expression, the ground " grins through ". This observation, so illuminating as the explanation of the technique of Franz Hals, David, Constable, Renoir or Whistler, and of Sickert himself, does not, of course, neces136

Sickert sarily explain the technique of all painters—of all the painters who painted before the invention of oil painting and of all who find that the juxtaposition of pure colours is also a medium of expression which has its own justification. There may be no new art and no new methods, but Sickert's mistake is to assume that there is only one type of art, only one method of painting. Within his conventions, he is a perfect painter and a just critic ; but it is almost incredible that intelligence should be at once so acute and so narrow. It is all the more strange when one considers the breadth of Sickert's human sympathies. " Taste ", he wrote in one of his memorable New Age articles, " is the death of a painter. He has all his work cut out for him, observing and recording. His poetry is in the interpretation of ready-made life." There is something very profound in the wholeness of Sickert's conception of art—not the human figure isolated, not the landscape isolated, not the still-life isolated, but the whole of creation in its organic unity. If the painter can place himself within this existential flow, and make his art part of its living continuity, then his art has a social relevance far greater than any pattern " abstracted " from that reality. The real subject of a picture or a drawing is the plastic facts it succeeds in expressing ; and all the world of pathos, of poetry, of sentiment that it succeeds in conveying, is conveyed by means of the plastic facts expressed, by the suggestions of the three dimensions of space, the suggestion of weight, the prelude or refrain of movement, the promise of movement to come, or the echo of movement past. It is in such words as these that Sickert reveals his profound understanding of art, and we must conclude that he was prevented from acknowledging the immense contribution which Cézanne made to the expression of precisely such plastic facts by some personal prejudice. Sickert's 137

A Coat of Many Colours bitter contempt for certain aspects of modern art was no doubt due to the feeling that he personally, and all he stood for, had been unduly neglected by contemporary critics. I think we must admit that the personal element in this resentment was justified. Sickert always seemed to be forgotten in the excitement of making and unmaking reputations ; or, if not forgotten, he was not taken seriously. It was felt—Roger Fry once said as much—that Sickert was too fond of pretending that this business of art is all a joke. There is, of course, some justification in the charge—Sickert was not only a considerable wit, in speech as well as in paint, but he was in revolt against that tradition of high seriousness into which, in the year i860, he had been born. We must also remember that he could hardly be described as a full-blooded Englishman. His father was Danish and he himself was born in Munich and lived there for the first nine years of his life. And what is more to the point, he was a pupil of that very un-English painter, James McNeill Whistler. From Whistler he inherited an attitude, but not a style, and in his restless unsettled life it was the attitude, the pose and affectation of the man himself that attracted most attention. For on the whole it was the most original thing about him. His style or technique he took from Degas, and it was his misfortune to rest under that mighty shadow all his days. But under the shadow of Degas there is room for a considerable artist, and if Sickert's lack of originality deprived him of contemporary interest, in the long run the qualities he shared with Degas will tell. H e had not the scale and scope of the great French impressionist, but he had the same passionate devotion to painterly virtues and the same zest for humanity. By painterly virtues I mean the expressive qualities of his medium—oil paint. Sickert believed, and we can hardly deny the logic of his belief, that the art of painting is based on the accumulated wisdom 138

Sickert of generations of practitioners ; he was, that is to say, first and foremost a craftsman, and that is why he despised more recent schools of painting which have been content to sacrifice craftsmanship for other virtues—immediacy of inspiration or speed of production. As for his humanity, this was simply a belief that every picture should tell a story. This quality should have made him a popular painter, the ideal of those political theorists who assume that art has only to be realistic to be acceptable to the masses. But Sickert disproved the theory, for what the masses want is not realism but sentimentalism. And Sickert was not sentimental : his colour is pitched too low for popular taste and his stories are too mordant. His life is one more chapter in the sad history of art in England. When that history takes a happier turn, Sickert, we may be sure, will be more honoured than he ever was in his own lifetime.

29. Film ¿Esthetic T H E aesthetic of an art is always resented by the practitioner, and perhaps there is a particular reason why theory should not obtrude itself on the art of the film. That art is not yet formed, and to theorize about something which is not yet fully in being may seem the height of pedantic indiscretion. But one kind of aesthetics is essentially a priori : it is the discovery of universal laws of art, and if the film is to be an art, then these theoretical considerations are as relevant to it as to any other art, and can guide its line of development. If thefilmis an art—but what else can it be ? A technical process ? But so is etching, for example ; so is every art which uses a tool. To determine whether a given process is an art or not, we need only ask one question—does it 139

A Goat of Many Colours involve selection ? For selection implies (à) a standard for which selection is made ; (b) sensibility to distinguish according to this standard. The exercise of sensibility in the interests of a standard is an elementary definition of art. Selection, I think it can be shown, is the very first principle of the film ; the film is therefore essentially an art. The film is visual. That fact immediately links it—from the point of view of aesthetics—with the visual or, as they are more commonly but less accurately called, the plastic arts. " Moving pictures "—the Movies—that is the most descriptive title which has ever been given to the Film. Picture plus Movement : that is the definition of a film, and if we can introduce into the aesthetics of pictorial art the modifications required by this new factor, then we shall have an aesthetic of the Film. But it is not so simple as it sounds. To introduce this new factor into the picture involves conditions which almost entirely separate pictorial art (let us say painting) from the film. This is the essential distinction—even opposition— between the painting and the film : the painting is composed subjectively, the film objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer—in actual practice it is rated very low—we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world. Painting is a synthesis (I ignore the crude notion that it is imitation) ; the film is essentially analysis. The painter composes within his mind (that is to say, makes a synthesis of) selected elements of his visual experience. (In the actual process of composition he goes beyond his experience, guided by imagination and sensibility.) The director of a film begins with the same visual experience, but he is anchored to his material. To make his material significant 140

Film ^Esthetic —significant of more than its actuality, its news value—he must break the continuity of his vision—-jump from one stepping-stone of significance to another. He must analyse the scene for its significant aspects. (For example, in films like Rain or Fièrement the camera's motto is " Say when ". The producer goes about like a ferret for significance, crying " Now ! ") The film purists insist on the mechanical nature of the process (as though a paint-brush, an engraving-tool, a piano, were not also pieces of mechanism). The true inspiration for the film, they say, is to be found in its technical possibilities. " Der Apparat ist die Muse " (Bela Balázs). But it is necessary to distinguish between the tool and the material (the medium), between the " Apparat " and that which is operated upon. The sculptor's muse is not his chisel, but the marble ; perhaps more accurately it is the impact of these two factors, creative inspiration depending on a sensuous reaction to the feel of the chisel against the marble. There is the same sensuous factor in the application of a charged brush to canvas ; and the same factor is obvious in music. The camera is the film-director's tool, his medium is light, or rather the impact of light on solid objects. It might be better still to regard the camera as a chisel of light, cutting into the reality of objects. In any case, light is the muse. We might abandon the word selection, because it is too static in its implications. We need to emphasize the mobility, the plasticity of the film. For this is the quality by virtue of which the film becomes an art. I have used these two words, mobility and plasticity, as interchangeable. But note that in sculpture, for example, an object is moulded, made plastic, to arrive at an immobile, absolute, eternal status ; in the film the immobility (even when moving !) of objects is, as it were, unmoulded, made plastic, to arrive at a mobile, relative, and transitory object. Sculpture is 141

A Goat of Many Colours the art of space, as music is of time. The film is the art of space-time : it is a space-time continuum. There are at least three directions (or dimensions) in which movement may take place : (i) movement of the camera, (2) movement of light, (3) movement of the object photographed. Combinations of such movements produce almost endless possibilities of plastic form. The true plasticity of the film, the plasticity which gives the film its uniqueness, is a plasticity of light. An essential film would be an abstract film, a " pure " creation of light and darkness, just as an essential painting is an abstract painting. But such films are only for the purists. The question of form is difficult. Even in painting we must distinguish between closed form (form determined by the frame and plane of the painted surface) and open form (form which ignores these limits and prolongs itself into the space about the painting, typified in Baroque art). We may select " stills " for their closed form—for their pictorial composition—but the film itself is essentially open form. It continually implies the space around the objects represented and beyond the limits of the screen ; it endeavours to make the part represent the whole. It is an art of " cuts "—economy cuts. Its freedom threatens the film ; it is a runaway. The problem of the film as an art-form may be reduced to the invention of proper conventions. It must reject the unities proper to the drama (nothing is so feeble as the filmed play) but it must discover the unities proper to a space-time " continuum ". Perhaps its only possible unity is the absence of any unity ; the film is essentially alogical. In the film events can occur simultaneously ; they can be represented in more than one unit of dimension ; time itself can be controlled. Its only unity is continuity. How easily this continuity may be destroyed is seen in the average talkie. The talk interrupts the continuity of 142

Film ^Esthetic the movement, or at least delays it. We begin to listen, instead of looking. But once we consciously listen in the cinema, we might as well be in the theatre. It is difficult to see any distinct art-form evolving out of the talkie. But we must distinguish between the talkie pure and simple, and the film with " effects ". Even speech may be an effect, as we see most clearly in René Clair's films, where speech is used sparingly, and never interrupts the continuity of the film. Speech must keep time with the film, but the normal film annihilates time. Therefore it must annihilate speech. The same observations may be made of musical accompaniment. It must keep time with the film. Therefore the film must either be a direct transcript of the music (as a film of a dancer dancing to music might be), or the music must be composed for the film (as Edmund Meisel's music for Potemkin). This does not imply that the talkie has no future. But its laws will not be the laws of the pure film, and the sooner it works out its own salvation the better. Rudolf Arnheim x uses the following analogy. A piece of music may be composed as a solo for the piano. It may afterwards be transposed as a duet for piano and violin. It will remain essentially the same piece of music, but both the piano part and the violin part taken separately will not represent the original music ; each has been modified to make a unity when played together. So both speech and film must be modified to make a perfect talkie. Ignoring the plasticity of the filming process itself, we may still find a justification for the film as an art-form in the process of montage. Montage is mechanized imagination. The producer deliberately interferes with the anonymity, the impersonality of the camera. He takes its mechanical products (how little mechanical they need be y Film. London (Faber & Faber), 1933. 143

A Coat of Many Colours we have already seen) and arranges them as freely as the painter arranges his forms and colours. It is the most important stage in the whole process of film-production, aesthetically considered. This has been realised by film theoreticians like Pudowkin and Timoschenko. Arnheim, in the book already cited, examines their principles and reduces them (or rather extends them—they occupy four pages !) into a logical order. There are four main principles : (i) the principle of cutting itself, (2) time conditions, (3) space conditions, and (4) relations of content. The first principle is concerned with questions of rhythm (a series of relatively long and equal scenes securing a peaceful rhythm, a series of alternate long and short scenes securing a quicker rhythm, and so on), with questions of scenes within scenes, scenes running concurrently, and with all ways of combining the part and the whole, closeups and concentration, etc. The second principle is concerned with securing effects of contemporaneity, effects of memory and foresight, causal effects, annihilation of time effects, etc. The third principle secures the same kind of effects by showing different events in the same setting, or by jumping from one space conception of a scene to another space conception of the same scene. The fourth principle secures parallelism or contrast of effects, or both together (e.g. Timoschenko : the shackled feet of a prisoner in his cell, followed by the legs of a ballet dancer at the theatre). The more we insist on the plasticity of the film (that is to say, on its artistic possibilities) the more we require the imaginative artist in the process of production. This is quite against the present trend, which is to reduce the rôle of the scenario-writer to insignificance. But when the film has exhausted its technical élan, then it must inevitably return to the poets. For the quality of an art always depends finally on the quality of the mind directing it or 144

James Joyce producing it, and no art can survive on a purely mechanical inspiration. There will always be a place for the recording film, for the scientific film, the news film ; but finally the public will demand the film of imagination, of vision. And then will come the day of the poet, the scenario-writer, or whatever we are to call him. For actually this artist will be a new type of artist—an artist with the visual sensibility of the painter, the vision of the poet, and the time-sense of the musician. Instead of doubting the artistic possibilities of the film as a medium, we should rather doubt the artistic capability of man to rise to the high opportunities of this new medium. It is a new Pandora's box that the movie-man carries about, from which he has already released all kinds of evils, but at the bottom of which hope still remains.

30. James Joyce 1 o explain the significance of James Joyce it is necessary in the first place to make a distinction between two literary publics. This is difficult, because any such division seems to imply some kind of snobism : the kind of snobism ridiculed as " high-brow ", for example. But the distinction between high-brow and low-brow really begs the question ; from the point of view of the music-hall comedian and his friend, the man-in-the-street, all serious writing is high-brow. For the purpose of this enquiry I would like to assume that we are all high-brows. Then we still need a distinction between what we may call a craft-conscious public, and a public merely out for instinctive enjoyment. The latter forms the majority, and to it most works of art are addressed. But there exists this other public, perhaps only numbering a few hundreds in any country, for whom literature is not a question of the direct absorption of a 145

A Coat of Many Colours synthetic product, the work of art, but rather the analysis of it. Some people like a machine because it runs smoothly, and ask no more ; others will be seeing how it works. It is to this latter type that the art of James Joyce appeals. The two kinds of enjoyment are essentially different, but I do not think that there is any aura of intellectual superiority attached to either. The explanation is probably psychological ; to one type the work of art appeals as a unity : they like to see the world of appearances reduced to a static definiteness ; their enjoyment is contemplative. To the other type, for whom stability and order are perhaps matters of course, the work of art appears as a harmony of distinct parts, and the harmony cannot be appreciated until the parts are seen in disjunction ; enjoyment is dynamic. So far so good ; but in making this distinction we assume the identical nature of all works of art. The author of a novel does not stop to consider whether he should write for this kind of public or for that ; his business, if he is a serious artist, is to create a work of art. That is to say, his object is always synthetic, and he does not care what kind of aesthetic enjoyment his work induces. But this is where the peculiarity of Joyce's method becomes evident. He is writing deliberately for the analysing public, and in his later work at any rate we may fairly say that the enjoyment is proportionate to the analytical power which his readers can contribute. In almost any single paragraph they will, if they persist, find a hundred shifting lights. There is an underlying warp which is the idle chatter of two washerwomen washing linen in the River Liffey. Into this warp is woven a weft which is every kind of association aroused by the running river in the very well-stored brain of the author. These associations may be conscious and are often erudite—references to Greek myths, to the Vedic religion, to obscure languages, to local legend or historical 146

James Joyce events ; or they may be associations springing from the subconscious mind—puns, verbal distortions, thinly disguised obscenities, or merely euphonic or euphuistic word-play. To the first kind of reader I described, it will all look and sound like so much gibberish. But those who are analytically minded will get a good deal of enjoyment from the mental effort of keeping up with the agile acrobatics of the author. It is a legitimate form of enjoyment, but how, it will be asked, does it differ from the enjoyment of a really difficult and erudite crossword puzzle ? Here I must confess that I am not sufficiently a partisan of Joyce's methods to answer with any confidence. I only know that if this gibberish is read aloud it does acquire an odd sort of impressiveness, akin to the impressiveness of poetry read in a foreign language we do not understand. Beyond this there may be some kind of formal structure analogous to the structure of a fugue in music, but it is not in any way obvious. A comprehensive explanation of Joyce's art would have to follow his development as a writer. I think I have read everything that he published, and to me the extravagances of his later works did not come as a surprise. I see them as a gradual development from his earliest work. I see them also as an outcome of his innate romanticism. I know that Joyce has been hailed as a classical writer, particularly by his commentator, Stuart Gilbert, 1 but that is a classification which I cannot accept. It rests on the fact that Ulysses, Joyce's masterpiece, is based throughout on a close structural parallelism with Homer's Odyssey. The notion rests on a fallacy which identifies form and content ; just as though we were to say that water poured into a vase takes on the form and properties of that vase. All the 1 Stuart Gilbert : James Joyce's Ulysses. London (Faber & Faber), 1930.

147

A Goat of Many Colours evidence, it seems to me, goes to show that Joyce is really a romantic. His first stories, Dubliners,. revealed that romantic interest in realism which comes from Norway rather than Greece ; and his only play, Exiles, is a psychological drama far removed from the canons of classical drama. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, is a work of great lyrical beauty, but it also belongs to that introspective mode of self-projection which is the very type of romantic literature. Even if we read into it a certain ironic detachment, we must still remember that irony is only perverted sentiment, and the recourse of disillusioned romantics. But the most complete evidence ofJoyce's romanticism is to be found in his verse— Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach. For example : The moon's grey-golden meshes make All night a veil, The shorelamps in the sleeping lake Laburnum tendrils trail. The A And A

sly reeds whisper to the night name—her name— all my soul is a delight, swoon of shame.

Mr. Gilbert quotes this poem as evidence of Joyce's classical spirit, presumably because it is written in regular iambics ! It is the same assumption as that which led him to claim Ulysses as a classical work. The truth is, that what matters in the distinction between romantic and classic is not the form, but the informing spirit. The only tolerable distinction between romanticism and classicism is that which relates itself to the distinction drawn by psychologists between introspective and objective types of personality. Romanticism is the expression of personal values, classicism the expression of universal values. It may be true that all classicists are, or have been, in some degree romantic (they would not be human otherwise), and 143

James Joyce it is therefore possible to admit the early romanticism of Joyce, and still claim a classical spirit for Ulysses. But I do not think this claim can be allowed, because the necessities of objectivity imply an ever-increasing tendency towards clarity, simplicity, and universality. There is profundity in classical art, but no obscurity. That, if anything, is its main disadvantage, for the mind is so constituted that it likes to encounter a certain measure of resistance in its perceptions. Therein lies one of the justifications of romanticism. By accusing Joyce of romanticism, I am not condemning him. It is not the business of the critic to take sides in this everlasting opposition of romantic and classic. His business is merely to identify and classify. With no other than a scientific intention, I find Joyce to be a romantic poet of the most extreme kind ; he is so romantic that he has reduced his egocentricity to its last refinement, and evolved an art of which only he himself can be the full participant. But in the process he has so revitalised the current use of language, that no one interested in the art of writing from a craft-conscious point of view can afford to neglect his example and achievement.

31.

The Language of the Eye

I T is sometimes assumed that wars interrupt the course of art, and that after a crisis such as Europe is now undergoing, some startling new development may be expected. But in modern history there is no evidence for such a belief. The war of 1870 made singularly little difference to the development of Impressionism in France. Cézanne went on painting, indifferent to the turmoil around him, anxious only to escape his call-up. Pissarro fled to England and continued to paint his exquisite pictures. Monet went 149

A Coat of Many Colours to Holland where he painted windmills and canals. Bazille was killed—a serious loss but not one which, so far as we can teil, made any difference to the evolution of modern painting. It was the same during the war of 1914-18. People prophesied that it would kill Cubism and Futurism. It only served to consolidate those movements, and the decade which followed the war brought to full maturity the art of Matisse, Picasso, Maillol and Klee. Our modern wars have been a more serious interruption to the work of painters in belligerent countries, but a few have carried on their serene art uninfluenced by the insane strife around them ; and many more only await the day of peace to take up their brushes or chisels and continue where, a few years ago, they left off. Modern art is a challenge : a challenge to lazy habits of thought, to tired senses and uneasy minds, above all a challenge to what might be called complacency of vision. There is a conventional way of seeing, just as there is a conventional way of eating or talking. There is a conventional way of looking at nature. An artist is a man who looks at nature with unclouded vision. He is continually gathering material from his experience of things seen. In this material he finds forms and qualities which start him off, excite his ideas and stimulate his emotions, and cause him to play with these forms and qualities, reconstruct them and recreate them until they become images which express the reality of his visual experiences. But this process which goes on in his mind is a severe test of his sincerity. He may be satisfied with a transcript of the appearance of the things he sees, and so may his public. But every honest artist knows that appearances do not necessarily correspond to the reality. Most likely it may only be possible to represent the reality by some kind of symbol. As a modern painter has expressed it : " I found that I could express what I felt only by paraphrasing what I saw " (Graham 150

The Language of the Eye Sutherland). Wordsworth, in one of his most memorable passages, speaks of " a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being ". That is the artist's feeling in the presence of nature, and his art is an attempt to render that sense in clear and definite images. It is an activity which requires the willing collaboration of the spectator. I do not mean that the appreciation of art involves intellectual effort. It is not a question of thought or even of understanding. That kind of effort in front of a work of art only produces an inhibition in the spectator, like the common experience of being unable to remember something the harder we try. The true approach is open-minded. If we meet a stranger, we do not know what his voice will sound like, nor even if he will speak our language. We wait expectantly. In much the same way we should wait for a work of art to speak to us. We should give our senses a chance—a chance to react without prejudice to the language of form and colour. A work of art is something we can see : something we can touch : in music, something we can hear. Sensation is the basis of it all. Not every critic of art will agree with me, but to ask people to begin looking for profound human emotions, tragic experiences, religious consolation or political enthusiasm in painted canvas or carved stone seems to me like asking them to indulge in a new kind of crystal-gazing. And it leads to the same kind of illusion and disappointment. I realize that there is such a thing as religious art : there is also metaphysical poetry and even music which is said to express the subtleties of dialectical materialism. But in the end there is only good art and bad art. And good art is something at once very simple and very profound. It is simple because it is sensuous : its pleasures are as primitive as the pleasures we get from the contemplation of a flower in the field or a shell picked up on the seashore. We do 151

A Coat of Many Colours not go far astray if we keep to that simple level of appreciation. But of course there is something more—that capacity which Blake described as being able " to see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower ". But that is obviously not an intellectual capacity. In aesthetics we call it an act of intuition, and beyond the innocence of sensation there is in art only the intuition of absolute values. Does that seem to make the artist a very special kind of person ? That is far from the impression I wish to give. Rather I believe that artistic potentialities are born with every human soul ; it is only afterwards that our civilization destroys every trace of those potentialities. Nevertheless, artistic feeling cannot be altogether suppressed, and out it will come in all sorts of unrecognized ways— in the way a woman arranges a bunch of flowers in a vase, in the way a girl matches the colours of her clothes, in the way a man makes something (a radio-cabinet or a gardenseat) for his own use. The first thing to realize about art is that the artist is doing exactly the same kind of thing— arranging objects, matching colours, making something with his hands. What he makes may be something useful— a chair to sit on, a carpet to walk on, or a house to live in ; but more often what we mean by art—a painting or a piece of sculpture—is not so obviously useful. W e can, after all, " do without " pictures and pieces of sculpture in a sense in which we cannot do without chairs and carpets. But " doing without " something is an economic question. The fact that people who have the money are willing to pay hundreds and even thousands of pounds to possess works of art means that they are paying for a pleasure or a satisfaction which they consider worth the price. What is this pleasure ? What is this deep satisfaction ? Fundamentally it is the pleasure we get from the sight of a wellarranged bunch of flowers or a well-dressed woman—that pleasure refined and intensified and made permanent on a 152

The Language of the Eye square of canvas. But it may be more than that. Even animals may be presumed to have sensations and to get joy from them ; but we human beings have also all those emotions and aspirations which arise from what I have called an intuition of absolute values ; and serving these emotions and aspirations we have a faculty which we call the imagination, by means of which we can re-create the past and see far into the future. All these mental or spiritual images and ideas can be expressed in pictures ; indeed, although they can also be expressed in words, they are never so clear and never so universal as when expressed in pictures. Words are peculiar to one country or race, and to one period of time ; but the picture is free from these limitations—it is a language which can be understood in all places and at all times. Look at pictures, therefore, as a language of the eye. The artist is trying to say something to you. Above all, he is trying to say something to you which cannot be expressed in words. He is trying to say, not only " This is a bunch of flowers " or " This is the head of a girl " or " This is an Irish landscape " ; he is also saying something beyond the reach of ordinary language—indeed, he is no longer " saying " something to us but " doing " something to us. The colours he has put on his canvas in certain quantities and intensities are vibrating along our nerves, creating a sensation of pleasure in our minds. He has not merely recorded what the camera can record of a person or a landscape ; his imagination has pierced the superficial veil of appearances and revealed the inner structure of what the eye sees. He has done more : with his acute senses he has felt what we call the spirit of a landscape or the personality of a human being, and these immaterial qualities he has incorporated in the form and colour of his work. Sometimes he has turned away from the external world and has looked deep into his own mind, 153

F

A Coat of Many Colours a n d then tried to represent the images which arise spontaneously before " the inner eye " . T h e records he brings back from his spiritual journeys are works of art no less " real " t h a n the plain image of a flower or a face.

32. Nathaniel Hawthorne IN any general view of the whole range of American literature, the first peak we discern is H a w t h o r n e . T h e r e are, of course, m a n y important writers of earlier d a t e . T h e r e is the bulky theological literature of Puritanism, a n d there is an important political literature best represented by the names of T h o m a s Jefferson a n d Alexander H a m i l t o n . M o r e difficult to exclude is that first g r o u p of purely professional writers born in the eighties a n d nineties of the eighteenth century—Washington Irving, J a m e s Fenimore Cooper a n d William Cullen Bryant. W h e t h e r justly or unjustly, none of these three authors is nowadays m u c h read outside the country of his origin. T o justify the exclusion of Emerson a n d Longfellow would need more ingenuity. T h e y were almost exact contemporaries of Hawthorne's—all three were born between 1803 a n d 1807. Longfellow's reputation has declined disastrously during the past fifty years, a n d I doubt if even his Hiawatha would survive h a d not Coleridge-Taylor set it to music which makes it a suitable subject for a m a t e u r choral societies. Longfellow, Emerson, Irving, Bryant—there is perhaps some c o m m o n quality in all these early American writers which explains why they have so little appeal to m o d e r n readers. I imagine it has something to d o with their complacency, their serenity, their air of self-satisfaction. T h e y are out of key with our unsettled a n d tragic existence, in a sense which is not true of H a w t h o r n e a n d Poe. These two writers strike a more sombre note : we feel that they 154

Nathaniel Hawthorne m a y have some message, some consolation for the modern world. At least, there is a very pertinent message in H a w t h o r n e . Poe m a y still appeal to us, b u t for a very different reason. H a w t h o r n e is often called a Puritan, sometimes a Calvinist. W h a t is implied in such a statement needs a little more definition. A m o d e r n American writer has expressed the truth of the m a t t e r very neatly : H a w t h o r n e " did not need to believe in Puritanism, for he understood it. H e saw the empirical t r u t h behind the Calvinist symbols. H e recovered w h a t Puritans professed b u t seldom practised—the spirit of piety, humility a n d tragedy in the face of the inscrutable ways of G o d . " *• I t must be emphasized t h a t H a w t h o r n e is in a very fundamental sense a Christian writer. H e is not a n artist for art's sake, like his contemporary E d g a r Poe : he is a m a n using his artistic gifts to convey a certain philosophy of life. It is perfectly correct, it seems to me, to describe this philosophy not only as Christian, but as specifically Puritan. H e was profoundly influenced by the greatest of our English Puritan writers, J o h n Bunyan, a n d wrote at least one story in the m a n n e r of Pilgrim's Progress. T h e r e is no evidence that he h a d m a d e any deep study of Calvinist theology : b u t that, we might say, was not necessary—Calvinist theology was the inescapable environm e n t of his New E n g l a n d youth. F r o m this theology he took two doctrines for illustration a n d elaboration—the doctrines of Original Sin a n d of Predestination. I n their full austerity, both doctrines are gloomy a n d terrifying. O n e teaches that the h u m a n race has a n innate tendency to sin, that it is involved in a curse from which no individual is wholly free, a n d for which every individual must suffer : the other teaches t h a t all our actions are pre-ordained by 1

Herbert W. Schneider : The Puritan Mind.

1930), p . 262.

loo

(New York,

A Goat of Many Colours an omnipotent a n d omniscient God, a n d that no effort on the p a r t of the individual can affect his destiny. T h a t H a w t h o r n e accepted these doctrines in something like their original theological severity is shown, not only implicitly in his imaginative writings, but explicitly in various statements m a d e in his letters a n d prefaces. I n one letter, for example, he writes : Vengeance a n d beneficence are things that God claims for Himself. His instruments have no consciousness of His purpose ; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are not His instruments. T h e good of others, like our own happiness, is not to be attained by direct effort, but incidentally. All history a n d observation confirm this. . . . Now if H a w t h o r n e h a d used his talent merely to construct fables illustrating these doctrines, we might have rated h i m high as a moralist, but he would not have been one of the world's great imaginative writers—he would not have been, using the word in its most general sense, a poet. W h a t saved h i m was his objectivity—one of the essential aesthetic faculties. H a w t h o r n e affirmed the objective existence of good a n d evil, but he did not distort reality to make the good always triumph, or the evil ever suffer punishment. T h e course of destiny is inevitable, but it is not rational. T h e very purpose of life is obscure, a n d all the careful constructions of the h u m a n intellect are vain. Feeling is more important t h a n understanding, a good heart m o r e to be desired t h a n a keen m i n d . T o his objectivity, H a w t h o r n e a d d e d another quality, perhaps equally essential to the artist, his sympathy. W i t h o u t sympathy, even evil cannot be faithfully depicted, a n d H a w t h o r n e ' s evil geniuses—Chillingworth, J u d g e Pyncheon a n d Hollingsworth—like Milton's Satan, are his most convincing creations. Objectivity a n d sympathy are, as it were, the m a i n 156

Nathaniel Hawthorne spring of Hawthorne's artistic method, motive powers which are not obviously on the surface of his tales and novels, but contained in their substance. The visible machinery, so obtrusive that some people would say it audibly creaks, is their symbolism. There is symbolism in the literal sense—the " scarlet letter ", for example, ai the symbol of adultery—and Hawthorne's work is full of just this kind of allegorical device. It was one of the things he took over from Bunyan. Most of his " tales ", as distinct from the longer " romances ", are in reality fables in which the symbols are of more importance than the characters who, so to speak, manipulate them. There is one such tale, " The Artist of the Beautiful ", which is not only a typical example of this symbolical writing, but by implication criticizes it. A watchmaker has succeeded in creating a mechanical butterfly, more beautiful and more permanent than any of Nature's butterflies. He takes it as a bridal present to " the friend of his boyish years ", now married to a blacksmith, himself a symbol of " main strength and reality ". There is already a child of this marriage, another symbol compounded half of innocence and half of scepticism. The butterfly represents, in its creator's own words, " the intellect, the imagination, the sensibility, the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful ". When released the butterfly makes various symbolic flights, alighting on the hands of those present and reacting in appropriate fashion to their characters. Finally it makes for the infant. It is no ordinary infant : there is " a certain odd expression of sagacity " in its eyes, and the butterfly, as if conscious of something not entirely congenial in the child's nature, alternately sparkles and grows dim. It flutters away and seems to be avoiding the child : but while it still hovered in the air, the little child of strength, with his grandsire's sharp and shrewd expression in his face, made a snatch at the marvellous insect and 157

A Goat of Many Colours compressed it in his h a n d . . . . T h e blacksmith, by m a i n force, unclosed the infant's h a n d , a n d found within the p a l m a small h e a p of glittering fragments, whence the mystery of beauty h a d fled for ever. As for the artist who h a d created this miracle, he looked placidly at w h a t seemed the ruin of his life's labour, a n d which was yet no ruin. H e h a d caught a far other butterfly t h a n this. W h e n the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he m a d e it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in t h e enjoyment of the reality. I believe that this particular tale of H a w t h o r n e ' s is t h e author's deepest comment on his own work. H e realized that he was only creating symbols inconsistent with his sceptical outlook on life. H e realized t h a t his works of art would not bear the test of reality. But nevertheless they did reveal, if only through the reactions they provoked, the reality of men's souls, the truth of the h u m a n heart. Works of art, his own works a m o n g them, are bright glittering toys which have imbibed a spiritual essence— " call it magnetism or w h a t you will " . O n l y the innocent can accept t h e m for w h a t they are : the rest of h u m a n i t y must be j u d g e d by them, finding in their partial enjoyment a n index to the coldness or impurity of their hearts. H a w t h o r n e wrote four longer " romances " , as h e preferred to call them, a n d a large n u m b e r of shorter tales a n d sketches. His own favourite r o m a n c e seems to h a v e been The House of Seven Gables, b u t the general verdict would probably be in favour of The Scarlet Letter. H a w thorne wrote nothing more intensely vivid t h a n the final scene in The Scarlet Letter. Dickens a n d T h o m a s H a r d y were to write famous scaffold scenes, b u t H a w t h o r n e ' s is the supreme one, completely dignified a n d immensely tragic. The House of Seven Gables is the most " finished " of 158

Nathaniel Hawthorne these romances : it has more variety, both in the writing and in the characterization. But I would p u t in a special plea for The Blithedale Romance, which I believe was R o b e r t Browning's favourite. I t is less imaginative : it is, in fact, the perfectly realistic description of one of those ill-fated attempts to found an ideal community in an imperfect world. I t was based on the history of a socialist experiment at Brook F a r m in which H a w t h o r n e himself h a d participated. Like all his works, it has tiresomely facetious passages. But it is the least gloomy a n d t h e least satirical of H a w t h o r n e ' s stories, the one most directly relevant to life, a n d in spite of its tragic ending, it is suffused with some quality of brightness or serenity which is a n effect, I believe, of its style. H a w t h o r n e ' s prose style is by no means infallible. I n some of his more descriptive sketches it is heavy, angular a n d full of those elegant variations which are the m a r k of a provincial writer. A n d H a w t h o r n e was at times a provincial writer. H e saved himself by his clear realization of the primacy of feeling. I t is sometimes said that the secret of a good style is clear thinking. It is true t h a t a logical m i n d inevitably avoids m a n y of the pitfalls of b a d writing, b u t other qualities are necessary for the art of prose : a keen eye, for example, which is quicker even t h a n thought, a n d a sensuous feeling for the individuality of words—their sound a n d size a n d history. A n d there is something more still—something which implies a perception of the wholeness a n d integrity of a situation, so t h a t not only words a n d sentences, b u t the orchestration of these into a greater a n d more sustained unity becomes possible. H a w t h o r n e h a d this kind of sensibility—not infallibly, I have said, a n d perhaps not very frequently. But h e is secure in his m a i n achievements : a rare transformation of the moral sense into the objective reality of art, a n d the addition to that reality of the unique products 159

A Coat of Many Colours of a mind expressive.

" magnificently

33.

haunted " and

hauntingly

Gerard Manley Hopkins

1 ONCE expressed the opinion that no poet of recent times is likely to exercise such a potent influence as Hopkins— meaning by that an influence on the structural development of English verse. That was before I had read his letters to Robert Bridges, Canon Dixon and Coventry Patmore, which so fully reveal the purposiveness of his experiments in prosody. Now that I have read these letters, I feel no inclination to modify my statement. Hopkins understood the technique of English poetry as no poet since Dryden had understood it ; Dryden whom he described so well in one of these letters as " the most masculine of our poets ; his style and his rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked thew and sinew of the English language ". Such a description looks innocent enough, but it implies the great realization that poetry must start from the nature of a language—must flow with a language's inflexions and quantities, must, in a word, be natural. Such was the secret of Greek poetry, and of Anglo-Saxon poetry ; and it is the virtue of most of our poets that they instinctively reject Italianate rhythms, and other foreign impositions, and fall into this natural rhythm, which Hopkins called sprung rhythm. " Presumptious jugglery ", Bridges called it, misspelling in his indignation. Hopkins replied that he used sprung rhythm because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems to me, opposite and, one wd. have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness 160

Gerard Manley Hopkins of rhythm—that is rhythm's self—and naturalness of expression. But Bridges was never convinced ; I doubt if he ever really saw the point of the discovery—his own later experiments in the measure were feeble ; he certainly never realized the importance of it. The possibility that through Hopkins a renaissance of English poetry would come about would have seemed fantastic to him ; but now that possibility is being realized, and before another generation has passed I doubt if any other measure but sprung rhythm will be in use. Hopkins was a man of quite exceptional nobility of mind, a man, too, of tender feeling and frank impulsive affection. His real quality was that chastity of mind which he describes in one of his best letters (Letter XGIX to Bridges) : . . . if a gentleman feels that to be what we call a gentleman is a thing essentially higher than without being a gentleman to be ever so great an artist or thinker or if, to put it another way, an artist or thinker feels that were he to become in those ways ever so great he would still essentially be lower than a gentleman that was no artist and no thinker—and yet to be a gentleman is but on the brim of morals and rather a thing of manners than of morals properly—then how much more must art and philosophy and manners and breeding and everything else in the world be below the least degree of true virtue. This is that chastity of mind which seems to lie at the very heart and be the parent of all other good, the seeing at once what is best, the holding to that, and the not allowing anything else whatever to be even heard pleading to the contrary. But Hopkins realized that this was " no snatchingmatter ". " The quality of a gentleman is so very fine a thing that it seems to me one should not be at all hasty in concluding that one possesses it." His own humility was perfect, but he knew that there was an injunction on all poets and artists to let their light shine before men. " I 161

A Coat of Many Colours would have you a n d C a n o n Dixon a n d all true poets r e m e m b e r that fame, the being known, though in itself one of the most dangerous things to m a n , is nevertheless the true a n d appointed air, element, a n d setting of genius a n d its works." But for himself it was different ; in joining the Society of Jesus he h a d deliberately renounced fame. I n 1881 he told Dixon that he h a d destroyed all he h a d written before he entered the Society, a n d that at first he h a d m e a n t to write no more. T h e n his superior suggested t h a t he should write a n ode on the wreck of the Deutschland, which he did with the results we know. H e doubted the wisdom of writing any more poetry unless, so to speak, ordered to d o so ; b u t came to a compromise : However, I shall, in my present mind, continue to compose, as occasion shall fairly allow, which I a m afraid will be seldom a n d indeed for some years past has been scarcely ever, a n d let w h a t I produce wait a n d take its chance ; for a very spiritual m a n once told me t h a t with things like composition the best sacrifice was not to destroy one's work but to leave it entirely to be disposed of by obedience. It is easy to regret that Hopkins's conscience would not allow him to spend time on poetry, but we must remember that the poet was the m a n — t h a t his poetic make was complementary to his religious make, a n d that to ask for a different m a n is to ask for a different poet. If he h a d not been a priest, Hopkins would undoubtedly have written more verse—perhaps as m u c h as Bridges or Browning or Swinburne. But he would not necessarily have been a better poet, a n d as it is, his small harvest is so rich a n d golden, that we would not exchange it for all the pallid stacks of verse piled u p by his contemporaries. Dixon was distressed by the open conflict of religion a n d poetry, b u t respected the decision taken by Hopkins. W h a t Bridges thought we do not know, but he h a d no sympathy 162

The Poetry and Prose of Painting for the religious life of his friend, even a definite antipathy. One wonders on what the friendship subsisted, so little were Hopkins's profoundest feelings appreciated by Bridges. But friendship is perhaps never solidly grounded on intellectual interests ; Hopkins had known Bridges for ten years before he discovered (and then from a review !) that his friend wrote poetry. We can assume, therefore, that the attraction was instinctive, even physical. How otherwise could Hopkins have tolerated the conceit, the pedantry, the complete lack of perception that was the return for all his frankness, humility and grace ? Bridges has cautiously destroyed his side of the correspondence, but that very caution is significant. A man has not such a care for his reputation but from what we call a good conceit of himself, which is a fault even Hopkins charged him with.

34.

The Poetry and Prose of Painting

SOME of the difficulties experienced in the appreciation of the visual arts, especially the art of painting, arise from an unnecessary simplification in our habits of thought about the subject. We think of certain tools and materials, of brushes and canvas and oil-paint, and we expect that the art produced by these tools and materials should be, in spite of all its variety, one art ; if we admit distinctions and species, they are due to variations in the tools and materials —the substitution of tempera or water-colour for oil-paint, of paper for canvas, and so on. But there is really no more reason why the art produced by brushes and paint and canvas should be one art than there is reason why the art produced by pen and ink and words should be one art. Any adequate literary criticism has long since realized that the distinction between poetry and prose is an absolute one—that though the same material, words, is used, the 163

A Coat of Many Colours use m a d e of the words, a n d the psychology of the user, differs totally in each activity. These interdepartmental analogies are very doubtful modes of criticism, as Lessing long ago showed. T h e whole field of criticism is obscured by a free a n d inexact borrowing of terminology by the critics of one art from the critics of another, a n d mental poverty is the only excuse. As a rule critics should not write about the colour of music, the r h y t h m of painting, the cadence of poetry, a n d so on. I a m sure I have sinned with the rest, but my transgressions have always been followed by repentance. O n the present occasion I sin deliberately, hoping that the end will justify the means. Finally we m a y be faced with the necessity of inventing a new terminology, a n d then our p a t h will once more be narrow but straight. A distinction has often been m a d e between the magical a n d the scientific use of words. W e m a y put the same distinction in a way more useful for my present purposes by saying that prose is an art which aspires to exact a n d economic statement, poetry the charged a n d electric use of words for emotional effect. If we wish to convey the objective nature of things, our best m e d i u m is prose, because then the words transmit their meaning and nothing b u t their meaning ; they do not d r a w attention to themselves. But if we wish to convey, not the objective n a t u r e of things, but the subjective associations which words have in our minds, then we use words which are full of indefinite subtleties of meaning a n d secondary aspects ; a n d such words are always poetic, though they m a y not be in verse. Verse is a more concentrated a n d ordered a r r a n g e m e n t of such words, a n d we m a y even be tempted to use such words for their own sake, that is to say, quite independently of their logical meaning, because they have a n inexplicable or magic effect which we cannot explain, but which is justified because it gives pleasure. 164

The Poetry and Prose of Painting In the same way the artist may take up his brushes and paint with one of two quite distinct intentions. He may desire to reproduce on his canvas an exact picture of the objective world, such as he conceives it to be given to him by the mechanism of his sight. That has been the crude intention of many artists, even since the invention of a rival means in photography. But the camera, of course, is limited ; it cannot render colour with any exactitude, and even its reactions to light and perspective are not quite those of the human eye. And there is still scope for the prose painter in the selection of his material, the arrangement of his objects, the invention of themes, and in the creation of what is literally a personal point of view. A good deal of post-Renaissance painting is prose painting of this kind, and whilst it may be as drab and Dickensian as Frith's " Derby Day ", it can also be as exquisite and Paterian as a still-life by Chardin or Manet. Alternatively, the painter may start with quite a different intention. He will leave to others the exact record of the dimensions and actuality of objects in space, their particular colouring and lighting. He is more interested in using his colours for their own sake, and for the sake of the moods they can evoke in association with the things he depicts. Whilst, therefore, taking his theme from the actual world, he will so use that theme, vary it and even distort it, that the final picture he is left with may be of no use as a record or reproduction of the world, but will have its own inherent values of colour, and of colour formally organised. Indeed, the painter, like the poet, may become so interested in the materials of his craft that he may begin to use them independently of all reproductive intention, just for the sake of the enchantment they convey as objects of pure sensation. This is the stage to which modern painting has advanced, and its advance has, of course, been made concurrently with analogous advances in the other arts. But in general 165

A Coat of Many Colours it is not a case of one art influencing another ; it is the h u m a n sensibility itself that grows more inventive, more courageous, more complicated a n d refined. T h e analogy between certain kinds of painting a n d poetry could be pushed into m u c h greater detail. J u s t as poetry is subdivided into various species, such as the epic, the lyric, the ode, the sonnet, d r a m a t i c a n d narrative poetry, so poetic painting could be similarly subdivided. T h e analogies would not now be exact, b u t w h o can d o u b t t h a t Poussin, for example, expresses himself in the ode, Delacroix in the epic, Giorgione in the lyrical ballad, Boucher in the simple lyric, Cézanne in the sonnet. But the essential distinction is the broad one between painting with a prose intention, a n d painting with a poetic intention. Both methods of painting are legitimate, b u t our criticism will continue to be confused unless we bear this distinction in mind, a n d apply standards of value appropriate to each kind.

35. Doctor Faustus I AM afraid I cannot lay claim to any expert knowledge of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, but only to an exceptional love of it. This dates from the time I was a student at a provincial university, where a m o n g the books p r e scribed for the course I was taking was this play of M a r lowe's. U p till then Marlowe h a d been merely a n a m e to m e — I h a d probably read a few quotations in histories a n d anthologies, but I h a d never read a whole play, m u c h less the whole of his works. All w h o have been students in those " red-brick " institutions of learning know well the cruel rack of the curriculum. T o get through it all within the year, time h a d to be rationed as severely as later we learned to ration our butter a n d our sugar. T h e prescribed 166

Doctor Faustus books h a d to be kept to, a n d a week or two was all the student could afford for a n y particular author. I will not discuss the merits of this system, b u t I must confess t h a t I ignored it. Incidentally, I also failed in my examination, a n d if I h a d to fix the blame for my failure on any particular person, it would be on K i t Marlowe. Not marching in the fields of Thrasimen, W h e r e Mars did m a t e the warlike Carthagens ; N o r sporting in the dalliance of love, I n courts of kings, where state is over-turn'd ; Nor in the p o m p of p r o u d audacious deeds, Intends our Muse to v a u n t his heavenly verse : — t o this day I cannot read these opening lines of Doctor Faustus without reviving the vivid emotions with which I read t h e m thirty years ago. Marlowe is the poet of youth. T h e r e is something in his eager enquiring spirit, something in the h a r m o n y a n d magic of his words, something which I would call his sense of glory, which goes straight to our hearts as we stand on the threshold of life. It is more t h a n the mere romance of his themes, more t h a n the general fervour a n d colour of the English Renaissance. Spenser could give us these, Shakespeare himself. But Marlowe could give the thirsty m i n d of a youth something m o r e — something which even Shakespeare could not give. I n the course of this note I w a n t to try a n d discover w h a t t h a t unique quality is in Marlowe. But first let me observe that it is not a quality which has been discovered in h i m by our particular age ; it is an eternal quality, a n d was never better described than by his contemporary Michael Drayton, in those lines which I hope are not too well-known to quote : N e a t Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, H a d in him those brave translunary things T h a t the first poets h a d : his raptures were All air a n d fire, which m a d e his verses clear : For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. 167

A Goat of Many Colours " N e a t Marlowe " — t h e epithet is appropriate to his verse, but not to his life, which was untidy, obscure, a n d tragically short. T h i r t y years ago, when I was a student, we knew very little of this life. W e knew that he h a d been born at C a n t e r b u r y in the same year as Shakespeare, 1564, a n d that his father was a shoemaker. W e knew that from the King's School in Canterbury he proceeded to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, taking his B.A. degree in 1584 a n d his M.A. three or four years later. W e knew t h a t his first play, Tamburlaine the Great, h a d been produced in 1587, a n d that six years later the dramatist h a d been stabbed to death in a tavern brawl in Deptford. W e also knew that when he died he was u n d e r suspicion of heresy or atheism, a n d that his case was about to be investigated by the Privy Council. T h e rest was largely a field for ingenious speculation. But the very obscurity a n d teasing mystery of Marlowe's life was to inspire some very persistent investigators, a n d as a result our knowledge of the poet's life has, during the past twenty years or so, been enormously increased. The Death of Christopher Marlowe, published in 1925, is Dr. Leslie Hotson's account of the remarkable discoveries he m a d e in the Record Office a n d elsewhere, a n d is only one of several exciting pieces of detection we owe to this literary sleuthhound. Luckily for all students of Marlowe, the results of all these discoveries have now been finally gathered together in the standard biography of the poet by Professor Boas. T h e most surprising discovery m a d e by these scholars is that some time between taking his B.A. degree in 1583-4 a n d proceeding to his M.A. degree in 1587, M a r l o w e was engaged by the Privy Council on w h a t we should now call secret service. For this service he h a d been " defamed by those that are ignorant in t h ' affaires he went about " , a n d as a result the University authorities m a d e some 168

Doctor Faustus difficulties about allowing him to take his M.A. degree. Whereupon the Privy Council intervened, certified that Marlowe had been employed in matters touching the benefit of his country, and that in all his actions he had behaved himself orderly and discreetly. Marlowe was then given his degree, under a " grace " dated 31 March, 1587. That was the end of his academic studies, for he abandoned the clerical career for which his scholarship was provided, proceeded to London, and by the 10 November in this same year had not only written but had produced on the stage the two parts of Tamburlaine the Great. H e was still only twenty-three years old. T w o years later Marlowe was arrested and put into Newgate Prison for being involved in an affray in the course of which he had attacked a certain William Bradley. Marlowe had eventually desisted from the fight, whereupon a certain Thomas Watson intervened, and setting about Bradley with sword and dagger, chased him into a ditch and killed him. Marlowe was bound over, as we say, and eventually discharged, having spent only a fortnight in prison. The Thomas Watson with whom he was associated in this affray was a fellow poet, dramatist and translator, but we know nothing more about his relations with Marlowe. Four years pass, during which Marlowe writes The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, Edward II, and Doctor Faustus. We are not without news of Marlowe's activities during these years, but we must pass over them to deal with the tragic events of 1593. In May of that year the Privy Council directed a body of commissioners appointed by the Lord Mayor to arrest and examine any persons suspected of lately setting up " divers lewd and mutinous libells " within the city of London, to search their chambers for writings or papers, and, in default of confession, to " p u t them to the torture in Bridewell ". One of the first people to be arrested by this Elizabethan gestapo was the dramatist, 169

A Goat of Many Colours T h o m a s K y d . U n d e r torture K y d asserted that an atheistical tract discovered a m o n g his papers belonged to Marlowe, a n d on being persuaded to amplify his statement, m a d e a general accusation against Marlowe, w h o m he described as " one so irreligious . . . intemperate a n d of a cruel heart " . I shall deal with this charge of atheism presently, but first let us follow the events to their fateful close. O n 18 M a y the Privy Council issued a w a r r a n t for Marlowe's arrest. T h e plague was raging in London a n d the theatres were closed. Marlowe was staying with his friend T h o m a s Walsingham at Scadbury in K e n t , a n d there, after reporting to the Privy Council, he was for some reason allowed to stay ; he was b o u n d over, b u t not apprehended. W e can only assume that Walsingham, w h o was a brother of the late Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, h a d sufficient influence to protect his friend. A n d it is possible that the Privy Council were so m u c h indebted to their secret agent, Christopher Marlowe, that they wished to deal with him leniently. T e n days later, on the 30 M a y , 1593, M a r l o w e repaired to a tavern at Deptford Strand in the company of three other m e n — R o b e r t Poley, Nicholas Skeres a n d I n g r a m Frizer. T h e r e Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by I n g r a m Frizer. According to the account accepted by the j u r y at the inquest which followed, a quarrel h a d arisen after supper about the p a y m e n t of the reckoning. M a r l o w e was lying on a bed, a n d Frizer was sitting between Poley a n d Skeres at a table nearby, his back towards Marlowe. Marlowe drew Frizer's dagger, which he was wearing at his back, a n d gave him two wounds in his head, two inches long a n d a quarter deep. Frizer, pinned between Skcres a n d Poley, struggled to get back his dagger a n d in selfdefence dealt Marlowe a blow above the right eye from which h e immediately died. All kinds of inconsistencies—logical, strategical a n d 170

Doctor Faustus anatomical—have been discovered in the evidence accepted by the coroner's j u r y , a n d some critics have gone so far as to suggest t h a t it was a frame-up, a n d that M a r l o w e was really the victim of a political m u r d e r . W e know t h a t Poley was a government agent, a n d a double-crosser w h o h a d spent a year or two as a prisoner in the Tower of L o n d o n . T h e r e is evidence t h a t Skeres, too, was a spy, a n d Frizer was also a shady character. But then, so was M a r l o w e . I n addition to the charges of manslaughter, atheism a n d blasphemy, there are contemporary accusations of h o m o sexuality a n d false coinage. I n all this we must discount the jealousy of rivals a n d the fanaticism of public informers. But by n o conceivable process of exculpation can we convert our poet into a n angel. T h e best we can say of h i m is t h a t like so m a n y Elizabethans, he anticipated the Nietzschean philosophy a n d " lived dangerously " . H e died ingloriously. T o speak of Marlowe having a philosophy is no metaphor. H e not only lived dangerously, b u t also thought dangerously. Beneath the phrases in which he was currently accused of atheism, we detect the searchings of a restless intellect, a n d on this aspect of Marlowe's life we now have far m o r e information t h a n was available to a student thirty years ago. H e r e let me mention one more book : it is The School of Night—a study in the literary relationships of Sir Walter Ralegh, by M . C. Bradbrook. 1 I t is a short book b u t it is a brilliant one, a n d I know of nothing which so well conveys the intellectual atmosphere of Marlowe's time. " T h e School of Night " , so called by Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost, which play is largely a skit on the subject, is the n a m e given to a group of intellectuals of w h o m Sir W a l t e r R a l e g h was the acknowledged leader, a n d Marlowe a n d C h a p m a n the chief members known to fame. T h e r e were other members, a n d one of them, T h o m a s Harriot, a 1 Cambridge University Press, 1936. 171

A Coat of Many Colours m a t h e m a t i c i a n a n d " master of all true a n d essential knowledge " as C h a p m a n called him, was probably the animator of the whole group. Unfortunately no work of Harriot's survives to throw light on his philosophical views, a n d we shall look in vain for any consistent doctrine common to all the members of the group. T h e common charge against t h e m was " atheism " , b u t that was a label of no more significance t h a n " bolshevism " in our own days. Indeed, a comparison with our own situation will perhaps bring us nearer to an understanding of Marlowe's attitude than any direct approach. To-day, for example, we get a little nearer the reality if we talk about " marxism " rather than " bolshevism " . W e can then relate our views to a definite philosophy. I n the same way, we shall get nearer to the Elizabethan reality if for " atheism " we substitute " machiavellism " . As Miss Bradbrook has pointed out, Machiavelli was the fashionable thinker a m o n g Elizabethan intellectuals, just as M a r x has been fashionable a m o n g our own intellectuals. T h e parallel is very close. T h e distance that separated Marlowe a n d his contemporaries from Machiavelli was exactly the same as that which separates M a r x from the poets a n d dramatists of our own time. Both Machiavelli a n d M a r x offer a theory of the state in which is involved a philosophy of life. T h e y appeal, that is to say, to the active as well as to the contemplative side of our natures, a n d that is very important at a time when everything is in a state of flux, a n d young poets feel that their fate is to be m e n of action as well as m e n of imagination. Of Marlowe's obsession with Machiavelli there can be n o doubt. Greene, in his Groats-worth of Wit written in 1592, addressing Marlowe asks : " Is it pestilent Machivilian pollicie that thou hast studied ? " But we need not go outside Marlowe's own works for evidence. Machiavelli himself is introduced as Prologue-speaker in the Jew of 172

Doctor Faustus Malta, and not only the character of Barabas in this play, but also that of the Duke of Guise in The Massacre at Paris, are deliberately conceived as Machiavellian figures, indeed, as reincarnations of the sinister Italian : Albeit the world think Machiavel is dead, Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps ; And, now the Guise is dead, is come from France, T o view this land, and frolic with his friends. T o some perhaps my name is odious ; But such as love me, guard me from their tongues, And let them know that I am Machiavel, And weigh not men, and therefore not men's words. Admir'd I am of those that hate me most : Though some speak openly against my books, Yet will they read me, and thereby attain T o Peter's chair ; and when they cast me off, Are poison'd by my climbing followers. I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance . . . It would be possible to write at much greater length on the Machiavellian element in Marlowe's work, but I must pass on to other aspects, merely observing that, however much our dramatist may pretend to ridicule or refute the Machiavellian doctrine, he betrays at every step a fascination which does not fall far short of full sympathy. The other aspect of the School of Night which concerns Marlowe is represented by Harriot, the intimate friend of Ralegh. H e is famous as a mathematician, but he was much more than that. H e was a very considerable astronomer, and a tireless experimenter in all the physical sciences. H e accompanied Ralegh to Virginia in 1585 and stayed a year there, publishing on his return a scientific survey of the natural resources of the newly discovered country. What Harriot represented, in short, was the scientific attitude of mind, typified by Galileo, which was prepared to question all things, including the dogmas of 173

A Coat of Many Colours organized Christianity. The School of Night was the English embodiment of this Renaissance spirit of enquiry, a n d it might seem to us nowadays that the things they questioned were not really fundamental. T h e y questioned the historicity of the Book of Genesis ; they suggested natural explanations of miracles, a n d in a n extreme case, such as Marlowe's, they might have questioned the divinity of Christ. But that was more t h a n sufficient to have themselves b r a n d e d as blasphemers, heretics a n d atheists ; a n d we should remember that such charges were mortally dangerous, a n d that people were still b u r n t at the stake for professing unorthodox views. I n 1589, the year in which Marlowe wrote the Jew of Malta, Francis K e t t , who h a d been a tutor of the same college at Cambridge, was b u r n t at Norwich on a charge of heresy. This should make us realize that Marlowe was not playing with abstractions, that he was not the equivalent of a parlour-communist of our days ; if he was playing with anything it was with death. A n d so we come to The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, to give it its full title, Marlowe's last play, probably written, as Dr. Boas has shown, within the twelve months preceding the poet's death. T h e theme which Marlowe chose with such sure instinct was to be given its final form a n d consistency two centuries later by Goethe, b u t Marlowe deserves the credit, which Goethe himself was willing to give to him, of having first seen the significance of the t h e m e — t h e significance which was to m a k e it the great typical m y t h of the m o d e r n age. T h e original source of the m y t h is a G e r m a n prose narrative published at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1587. T h e r e is a little d o u b t a b o u t the exact d a t e of the first edition of the English translation which Marlowe used, b u t the latest research points to M a y , 1592, a n d unless we presume that Marlowe h a d access to the manuscript of the translation, 174

Doctor Faustus or could read G e r m a n , this gives us the earliest date for the writing of the play. T h e first performance of which we have a record took place on 30 September, 1594, sixteen months after Marlowe's death. W h a t is there in the story of Dr. Faustus which first m a d e an appeal to Marlowe, a n d then to countless audiences all over Europe, until Goethe took u p the theme a n d deepened it a n d developed it into its final shape ? Marlowe tells us in the Prologue, spoken by a Chorus. H e describes how Faustus went to the University of Wittenberg a n d there profited so m u c h by his studies in divinity T h a t shortly he was grac'd with Doctor's n a m e , Excelling all, a n d sweetly can dispute I n t h ' heavenly matters of theology ; Till swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did m o u n t above his reach, And, melting, heavens conspir'd his over-throw ; For, falling to a devilish exercise, A n d glutted now with learning's golden gifts, H e surfeits u p o n cursed necromancy ; Nothing so sweet as magic is to him, Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss . . . It is the peculiar problem of the Renaissance intellectual. H e h a d discovered a new freedom, the freedom of his mind. H e h a d rejected the authority of the C h u r c h a n d was ready to explore the whole universe with his new instrument, the telescope : O , w h a t a world of profit a n d delight, Of power, of honour, a n d omnipotence, Is promised to the studious artizan ! All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at m y c o m m a n d : emperors a n d kings Are but obey'd in their several provinces, But his dominion that exceeds in this, Stretcheth as far as doth the m i n d of m a n . . . But with this new-found freedom comes a new feeling of isolation a n d doubt, a n d it is this sense of insecurity, 175

A Coat of Many Colours represented by Mephistophiles, which drives Faustus to his doom. W h e n the devils gather to watch the last fateful scene, Mephistophiles observes of his victim : Fond worldling, now his heart-blood dries with grief, His conscience kills it a n d his labouring brain Begets a world of idle fantasies, T o over-reach the Devil ; but all in vain, His store of pleasures must be sauc'd with pain. Faustus dies in the agony of his self-sufficiency, a n d out of that agony, at the last utter gasp, comes the cry : " I ' l l b u r n m y books ! " But it is too late ; " the serpent t h a t tempted Eve m a y be saved, b u t not Faustus " ; a n d it only remains for the chorus to declaim their lovely epitaph : C u t is the b r a n c h that might have grown full straight, A n d b u r n e d is Apollo's laurel-bough, T h a t sometimes grew within this learned m a n . T h e significance of this tragedy is almost inexhaustible, but I would like to emphasize only two further aspects, one personal to Marlowe, one still valid for us. As for the personal aspect, I only w a n t to repeat that this conflict between " sweet divinity " a n d " cunning " , to use the terms most used in the play, was Marlowe's own conflict— the dilemma which afflicted all the intellectuals of that time. It is this actuality which caused M a r l o w e to write the play with such feeling a n d poetic power. But Marlowe's problem is still our problem. W e have not yet discovered how to use our new-found freedom, a n d Faust is still our representative myth. Afraid of his freedom, m o d e r n m a n has fallen back again a n d again on some form of authoritarianism—on Lutherism, Calvinism, Puritanism, Marxism, Fascism. Is it impossible for m a n to realize his destiny, to master his environment, to get rid of his feeling of isolation a n d insecurity ? T o these questions those who still retain faith in m a n k i n d have a positive answer, but I need not insist on it here. I only 176

Doctor Faustus want to point out that this play by an Elizabethan poet written 350 years ago is not so remote as at first sight it might seem. Swinburne summed up the significance of Marlowe, in words which, exalted as they are, I do not find exaggerative : The place and value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets [wrote Swinburne] it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to overestimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for the good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work ; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare.

36. Toulouse-Lautrec DESPITE his affectation for English things—English animals and English sports, English drinks and English music-hall actresses—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has never been a popular artist in this country. During his lifetime an exhibition of his works was held in London, and he came over expecting appreciation in a country for which he himself had so much sympathy ; but he found only a complete lack of understanding, complete boredom, and intolerant policemen. He was quite cured of his anglomania. Actually, even to-day, Toulouse-Lautrec is a type of artist we find most difficult to admire, and though his 177

A Coat of Many Colours paintings have been seen in L o n d o n m o r e frequently of late, we have not yet done justice to a n artist w h o is surely as great as some of his contemporaries we have accepted a n d h o n o u r e d — M o n e t a n d G a u g u i n , for example—and who has been one of the most powerful influences in the development of modern painting. H e was Picasso's first master, a n d even Rouault's. T h e English attitude to Lautrec is doubtless determined by the subject-matter of his paintings. I t would be confirmed by the details of his life were they known, b u t the extent of most people's knowledge is probably, a n d as it happens, rightly, suggested b y the paintings. H e painted w h a t he experienced. H e n r i de Toulouse-Lautrec belonged to a n ancient aristocratic family, " comtes d e Toulouse-Lautrec, vicomtes d'Albi, seigneurs d e SaintGermier et de Monfa " . During the Middle Ages they dominated the whole Midi, a n d their power was such that they could defy the Pope a n d defend their subjects, the famous Albigeois heretics, against his edicts. T h e y prolonged their feudal habits well into the nineteenth century. T h e painter's father was a n extraordinary eccentric w h o preferred to live naked in a tent in the grounds of his castle. H e fed almost exclusively on trufiles cooked in milk. By night he shot rats with a pistol ; he h a d his p a p e r read to him by a servant, who also h a d to taste all food a n d wine before his master took it. At the same time, this amiable savage was, w h e n it suited him, a perfect gentleman who frequented the Jockey C l u b a n d the highest ranks of Parisian society. It is related of h i m t h a t once, for a bet of two h u n d r e d louis, he took a flying leap on horseback over a passing cab. W h e n a boy H e n r i broke both his legs, a n d in spite of every kind of remedy, the legs ceased to grow. But the u p p e r p a r t of his body developed normally—his head a n d shoulders were even excessively large ; with the result that he h a d not even 178

Toulouse-Lautrec the miniature proportions of a dwarf. He was grotesque. Yvette Guilbert's description of him is horribly vivid : A dark, huge head, with a very ruddy complexion, a black beard, a greasy, oily skin, a nose big enough for two faces, and a mouth—a mouth that cut across his face from cheek to cheek, like a great open wound. Flat, thick, flabby, purple lips surrounded this dreadful and obscene chasm. I was aghast, until I looked into Lautrec's eyes. How beautiful they were, how large, how wide, rich in colour, astonishingly brilliant and luminous. It is important to realize the nature of his deformity because it explains the kind of life he led ; and the kind of life he led explains the kind of pictures he painted. He did not become bitter and waspish like Pope ; he accepted his fate with a certain zest ; it might even be said that he exploited his misfortune. An incident related by Yvette Guilbert is revealing : " O n e day, as I was looking over some of the drawings he had made of me, I became annoyed because he had distorted me to such an extent and said : * Really, you are the genius of deformity.' In a voice as sharp-edged as a knife he answered : * But— naturally ! ' " This suggests that he used his art to get his own back, as we say—to point out that the distance between the normal and the abnormal was not so great as the world complacently supposed. Whatever the psychological effect of his deformity, it is certain that it determined the course of his practical life. It is doubtful whether he would have become a painter at all if he had been strong and active ; and if he had been a painter with a normal body he would certainly have painted different subjects. For it was his deformity, which deprived him of normal relationships with women, that drove him to the underworld of Paris. Once there, he adopted it as his world, the peculiar theme of his art. The brothels he had visited casually he presently began to live in, so that he 179

A Coat of Many Colours might study the inmates with realistic detachment. Besides the brothels there were the cabarets, the cafés, the theatre and the circus j the singers, the dancers, the actors and actresses—these are his exclusive material. He never painted landscapes and could not understand why anyone did. It is true that he painted some remarkable portraits, but these were generally of his friends, for the ordinary patron would not have tolerated his realism. And almost by chance he became a pioneer in one department of commercial art—the poster. Pictorial posters did exist before his time, but the coloured poster as we know it to-day was practically invented by Jules Chéret, an immediate predecessor of Lautrec's, and it was Lautrec who, profiting by Chéret's experiments in colour reproduction, first madr the poster an individual work of art. Lautrec's talent was modest. He contributed little or nothing to the formal or technical development of modern painting. He seems to have recognized the genius of Van Gogh, and he was a fanatical worshipper of Degas. But he was contemptuous of Impressionists like Monet, and blind to the significance of Cézanne. The importance of his art derives mainly from its subject-matter, and this subjectmatter from his life of dissipation. If he had been a better man he would almost certainly have been a less interesting painter. There have been, of course, painters who used the same subject-matter with a sentimental or a pornographic intention. Lautrec is redeemed by his realism ; and his realism as we have seen, was probably a result of his deformity. Prostitutes, comédiennes, clowns ; cafés, bars, theatres, race-courses—there is plenty of scope for realism here, but is it the whole of reality ? To be fair to ToulouseLautrec, we must remember his portraits, which are an important part of his work. But he himself once said : " Je ne fais pas de portraits. Je peins mes amis les chiens, 180

Toulouse-Lautrec et mes amis les hommes "—which is as much as to say that he did not distinguish between his portraits and the rest of his work. He painted what he saw around him, and that was, for the greater part of his life, the Paris of Montparnasse. Naturally, it must be admitted that Montparnasse is not what we mean by reality. But it is not the scope or extent of an artist's vision that matters, but its intensity. The world Toulouse-Lautrec saw he saw without passion, without distortion, simply and sympathetically. It was not he that was cynical, but his world. Somewhere in the unedifying sequence a light breaks out, as of truth or compassion, and lifts the art out of its dreary background. And as one of his friends, Tristan Bernard, said of him : " Lautrec only seems supernatural because he was natural in the extreme." To be natural in the extreme is the definition of genius : it is to possess that quality of vision or sensibility which only a few men in any generation possess, and who thereby enable other men to look on the world with new eyes. It is instructive to compare him with Baudelaire, who was near to him in spirit. Baudelaire was perhaps not so spontaneously creative as Lautrec : he was much more reflective and therefore much more critical in his reactions. But the art of both men has the same basis in sensuality, and the same power which comes from accepting one's obsession without fear. The difference between them, due to Baudelaire's reflective nature, lies in their moral attitude. Baudelaire was not exactly a moralist, but neither was he, like Lautrec, a remorseless realist. Remorse is always the residue of moralism. Moralism is native to most men (the categorical imperative, the inner check—we have many names for its hidden power) and when it is absent, in a tyrant or an artist, we are apt to regard the exception as a monster. I am not prepared to argue the case for the tyrant (we now 181

A Coat of Many Colours call him dictator) because I a m not prepared to admit that moralism should be excluded from public life. But I a m sure t h a t it has nothing to d o with art, a n d t h a t most of our mistakes in the appreciation of a r t — o u r so-called English lack of taste—is d u e to nothing so m u c h as this age-long confusion. Painters like Lautrec, poets like Baudelaire, confront in this country not a temporary prejudice, b u t a formidable tradition.

37.

Wordsworth's Remorse

I N 1816 Shelley published a sonnet to Wordsworth. Its mixture of admiration a n d regret expresses a n attitude towards that great poet which I still find reasonable : Poet of N a t u r e , thou hast wept to know T h a t things depart which never m a y return : Childhood a n d youth, friendship a n d love's first glow, H a v e fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to m o u r n . These common woes I feel. O n e loss is mine Which thou too feeFst, yet I alone deplore. T h o u wert as a lone star, whose light did shine O n some frail bark in winter's midnight roar : T h o u hast like to a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind a n d battling multitude : I n honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth a n d liberty,— Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, T h u s having been, that thou shouldst cease to be. Shelley was then twenty-four ; Wordsworth forty-six. T h e older poet h a d lived through the great days of the French Revolution, a n d h a d h a d some direct contact with the Revolutionary leaders. By the time Shelley h a d become mentally a w a r e of the issues involved, the Revolution was over a n d reaction h a d set in. I t is possible to argue that Shelley at this time was an enthusiastic young m a n w h o would, like Wordsworth, become sober in his 182

Wordsworth's Remorse middle age. But six years later, w h e n Shelley died, there was no sign of the process ; a n d the a r g u m e n t is superficial because it avoids the philosophical issues which are involved. T h e r e were m a n y contemporaries of Wordsworth—Hazlitt a n d Leigh H u n t , for example—who did not change their attitude towards the principles which inspired the French Revolution. W h a t , then, in Wordsworth's particular case, was the cause of his reaction ? It is a pertinent question because, with this change of political attitude went a change in poetic quality, a n d a change for the worse. T h a t is a dogmatic statement, but I d o not think it would be challenged by any of Wordsworth's admirers. I personally take the view that these two processes of change were connected in Wordsworth's development, a n d elsewhere I have given m y a r g u m e n t full scope. 1 It cannot be argued that the growth of discretion, or of rational j u d g e m e n t , has necessarily an adverse effect on poetic inspiration—there are m a n y examples to the contrary. But was the change, in Wordsworth's case, in any real sense logical or intellectual ? Did it not rather arise from deep psychological wounds which he suffered in circumstances only indirectly connected with the political events which were m a d e the excuse for reaction ? I believe it did. W e must remember that when Wordsworth decided that all he h a d written before 1797-8 should be deemed juvenilia, he was drawing a line at a point within which m a n y poets have produced their best work. I n that year he was already twenty-eight, a n age which embraces the whole of Keats's work, a n d most of Shelley's. Moreover, before reaching that age he h a d undergone all the vital experiences which were to mould his character a n d determine the course of his life. H e h a d b u r n e d with revolutionary zeal ; he h a d gone to France to participate in the 1 Wordsworth. London (Gape), 1930 183

A Coat of Many Colours great events which were stirring his imagination ; he h a d fallen passionately in love a n d become the father of an illegitimate child ; a n d then, still within this period, he h a d lost his revolutionary zeal, retreating first to Godwinian rationalism a n d then to his own philosophy of natural piety ; a n d in the process he h a d renounced his first love, a n d m a d e of this passionate experience a guilty secret unrevealed to all b u t a few of his most intimate friends for the rest of his long life. I t is one of the strangest transformations in that age of romantic personalities, a n d the extent to which his poetry can be—or as some would have it, should be—interpreted in the light of this experience remains one of the most interesting problems in the history of literature. T h e extreme theory which I p u t forward some years ago seeks to hinge the whole process on w h a t must have been the intensest event—Wordsworth's passion for Annette. T h e intellectual changes in Wordsworth's mind are regarded as a secondary consequence of the emotional changes, a n d as largely determined by them. T h e fundamental process is physical or emotional ; the rest is a superstructure of rationalization or sublimation. This theory has not found m u c h favour with academic critics, least of all with devoted Wordsworthians like Professor de Sélincourt. But I a m bound to say that I find nothing but confirmation of it in the definitive edition of Wordsworth's works which Professor de Sélincourt was editing so scrupulously a n d so objectively u p to the time of his death. T h a t confirmation is to be found, not only in passages a n d poems which the later Wordsworth suppressed, a n d which are now for the first time published, b u t in a general reconsideration of the significance of the work done by Wordsworth between his return from France at the end of 1792 a n d his mystical rebirth in 1797-8. H e r e there is not space to give all the necessary supporting quotations, but the long poem 184

Wordsworth's Remorse Guilt and Sorrow, the strange tragedy The Borderers, and several of the shorter poems included among the Juvenilia and published for the first time in the definitive edition, are bathed in a morbid atmosphere of guilt and remorse, intense with a feeling which no merely political disillusionment could justify or explain. The following lines from an early version of Guilt and Sorrow, probably written in the summer of 1793, provided the keynote : Unhappy Man ! thy sole delightful hour Flies fast ; it is thy miserable dower Only to taste of joy that thou mayst pine A loss, which rolling suns shall ne'er restore. From that feeling of inevitable loss he passes to regret for his hasty passion, then to feelings of guilt and remorse, then to attempts at rationalistic justification, and finally to more moral and more sublime feelings of renunciation, resignation and repair. If this process were not clear enough in the text of the poems, it is revealed with complete directness and a power of self-analysis of the highest order in a prefatory essay which Wordsworth wrote for The Borderers. This manuscript, which was only recently discovered, was published by Professor de Sélincourt in a volume of miscellaneous essays six years ago, but did not then receive the attention it deserved. Now that it is included in the canon of Wordsworth's works, it should be studied for what it really is ; a key to the very complex transformation which Wordsworth's mind underwent in these formative years. The general moral, says Wordsworth, is " t o show the dangerous use which may be made of reason when a man has committed a great crime " ; but it must be stressed that the final effect of this document, and of the poems we have been considering, is not to involve Wordsworth in a charge of hypocrisy or equivocation. We may regret that he deceived the world and we may believe that 185

G

A Coat oí Many Colours this deceit h a d a blighting effect on his subsequent develop ment ; but we know that at least he was uncommonly honest with himself, a n d that his m i n d was of a depth a n d subtlety rarely exceeded a m o n g m e n of genius. W h a t is this mental activity we call remorse ? T h e word comes from the Latin verb meaning to bite, a n d its literal sense is shown by the medieval English mystic who wrote the Agenbite of Inwit—the repeated gnawing of the conscience. I t arises from the consciousness of some wrong done in the past, perhaps concealed, certainly never expiated. It is a terrible scourge, a n d the p a r t it has played in the psychology of great writers has always been disastrous. T h e r e are m a n y lives from which this truth could be illustrated—Tolstoy's is one, b u t none is so clear as Wordsworth's. 1 Wordsworth became so obsessed by this feeling that m u c h of his earlier work, as I have already indicated, deals directly with themes of remorse, as though he were trying to get rid of the burden by objectifying it in a work of art. I n a cancelled scene from The Borderers, one of the characters cries : . . . ah, teach m e first, If not to bring back all I've loved, at least T o rescue my poor thoughts, which now a n d ever Bleed helplessly on Memory's piercing thorn. I n the Preface which he wrote to this play, b u t which h e did not publish (it appeared for the first time in the first volume of Professor de Sélincourt's edition of Wordsworth's Works), he makes a very acute analysis of his own case : 1 " Remorse is not among the eternal verities. The Greeks were right to dethrone her. Her action is too capricious, as though the Erinyes selected for punishment only certain men and certain sins. And of all means to regeneration Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissue with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil."—E. M. Forster : Howards End (1910), p. 316. 186

Wordsworth's Remorse Let us suppose [he says] a young man of great intellectual powers yet without any solid principles of genuine benevolence. His master passions are pride and the love of distinction. He has deeply imbibed a spirit of enterprise in a tumultuous age. He goes into the world and is betrayed into a great crime.—That influence on which all his happiness is built immediately deserts him. His talents are robbed of their weight, his exertions are unavailing, and he quits the world in disgust, with strong misanthropic feelings. In such a case, said Wordsworth, there would be a tendency for the remorseful mind to seek relief from two sources, action and meditation. If he follows the line of action, he will attempt to build up his own power and to give vent to his frustrated feelings in aggressive violence. " Power is much more easily manifested in destroying than in creating." But if—and here Wordsworth is contemplating his own case—he follows the line of meditation, then he will indulge in what it is fashionable nowadays to call " rationalization "—that is to say, in Wordsworth's words, " having indulged a habit, dangerous in a man who has fallen, of dallying with moral calculations, he becomes an empiric, and a daring and unfeeling empiric. He disguises from himself his own malignity by assuming the character of a speculator in morals, and one who has the hardihood to realize his speculation." The main object of Wordsworth's play was to show " the dangerous use which may be made of reason when a man has committed a great crime." It is one of the characteristics of remorse that it acts like a slow drug. It calls into existence an antidote to the pain which accompanies it, and when the pain disappears, and the original crime is forgotten, or contemplated with equanimity, it is because the drug has completed its anaesthetic work. Anaesthetic is the right word—it is the feelings that are killed. But the feelings have a unity ; 187

A Coat of Many Colours they can only be dulled by working upon the whole mind or sensibility. T h e mind that feels remorse is the same mind that feels the beauties of n a t u r e or of h u m a n affections. T h e shell of insensibility which it cultivates is over-all : the victim cannot consciously preserve a sensitive area for the benefit of his poetry, or for any other purpose. It is for this reason that great artists often seem to despise or evade the code of conventional morality. Shelley is a case in point. His desertion of H a r r i e t Westbrook, his first wife, was a crime against the conventional code of morality as serious as Wordsworth's, a n d it h a d far more tragic consequences. But Shelley was not a victim of remorse. I n a famous retort to Southey, w h o h a d charged him with immorality, he said : You select a single passage out of a life otherwise not only spotless, but spent in a n impassioned pursuit of virtue, which looks like a blot, merely because I regulated m y domestic arrangements without deferring to the notions of the vulgar, although I might have done so quite as conveniently h a d I descended to their base thoughts—this you call guilt. . . . I a m innocent of ill, either done or intended ; the consequences you allude to flowed in no respect from m e . . . . T h e r e are other statements in his letters to the same effect. T h e y do not prove that Shelley h a d a callous heart : there is, in any case, other evidence in overwhelming quantity which shows how sensitive a n d affectionate he was. T h e y prove, if anything, Shelley's possession of a moral courage of exceptional strength. T h e r e are weak people who have n o moral code a n d there are timid people who conform to a conventional moral code ; there are also a few people strong enough to formulate their ov/n moral code, a n d Shelley was one of these. But to return to Wordsworth. If we relate his poetic production to the psychological development suggested by the theory I have advanced, we shall find that it divides 188

Wordsworth's Remorse into four very distinct periods. There is first of all the Juvenilia, the poems like An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches which were written before his decisive experiences in France. Then come the poems of Remorse, which I have already mentioned and which fill the next five years. Then in 1797 begins his intimate collaboration with Coleridge. This is the supreme phase of his creative activity, and it lasted about ten years. From about 1800 he composed, not merely with difficulty, but as his sister Dorothy relates in her Journals, with a real sense of pain and physical exhaustion. H e was fighting against frustration and inhibition. Remorse was completing its deadly work. H e was to live for another fifty years, his powers at first swiftly, and then slowly but completely giving out. The dying embers emit an occasional spark, but nothing that in any degree adds to the total impression of his genius. It may be asked at this point why, if remorse was the active agent of Wordsworth's decline, his greatest period comes, not immediately as a consequence of his decisive experiences, but only some five years later ; and why the deadening effects of remorse did not begin to develop until some ten years later. The answer would have to take into account certain rhythms of psychological development (intermittences of the heart, as Marcel Proust called them) of which Wordsworth himself was well aware, and indeed made the basis of his famous theory of poetic composition. We might say, briefly, that from the age of twenty-two to twenty-seven Wordsworth was too near to the events, too inwardly agitated, to compose great poetry ; that between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-two, when he wrote his greatest poetry, he was recollecting his emotions in a state of relative tranquillity, under the immediate personal influence of his sister Dorothy and of Coleridge ; and that up to the date of his marriage to Mary Hutchinson, which 189

A Coat of Many Colours took place in October, 1802, he had not taken the irrevocable step of finally deserting his French mistress and their child. By then the phase of contending motives was over : the heart was passive and remorse could henceforth do its deadly work without the mitigation of hope or irresolution.

38. Realism and Superrealism T H E S E two extremes of art do not exhaust all the possible forms of plastic expression. There is classical art, for example, which is idealistic ; there is naturalistic art and academic art ; impressionist art and abstract art. There are all these types of art, and it is possible to find good art and bad art among them all. Nevertheless, I think the distinction between realism and superrealism represents something fundamental. All art is a kind of language— a language of form and colour, instead of words and sentences. To that extent all art is subjective : it expresses what a particular individual—the painter or sculptor—feels and thinks about a particular subject. But there is a broad distinction between feeling and thinking about an object which we are actually observing with our senses, and feeling and thinking about a subject which only exists in our minds. And that is the fundamental distinction between these two types of art. One type begins with what is immediate and actual in the world—a flower, an animal or a human being ; the other type begins with what is conjured up or imagined in the mind—the image, the phantom, or the dream. During the nineteenth century—at any rate in this country—there grew up a curious prejudice in favour of a naïve form of realistic art. It was an art, or rather a technique, which we call naturalistic, and we may describe any prejudice in its favour as curious because if you examine the history of art from the earliest times, you will find 190

Realism and Superrealism that this kind of art is extremely rare. It is only at long intervals, and usually in somewhat luxurious and decadent periods, that artists have tried to give in their paintings and sculpture an exact representation of what the eye sees. Now that we have photography—even coloured photography—there is no longer the excuse of recording the appearances of things which was one of the functions of the artist in the past. But in the past that function was always considered a minor one, and the most exact artists, like the Dutch painters of flower-pieces, have never been great artists. Great artists have always had what we rightly regard as a higher aim. They have always desired, not merely to make a record, but to express an idea, even a point of view or judgement, and to do this with the proper materials of their art. Thus the great masters of European art—Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco—such artists do not give you exact pictures of the natural world—they create a world of their own which is an imaginary world, bearing little or no relation to the appearance of nature. Modern art is essentially an insistence on that freedom of artistic creation. In that sense it is merely a return to well-established traditions. That is all very well, it might be said, but there are limits. Liberty is not licence : the old masters, however free in their compositions, did at any rate base their art on realistic elements. However imaginative their scenes and subjects, a man is always recognizably a man, a tree a tree and so on. In your modern pictures we never know whether we are looking at a man or a tree. . . . The truth is that art has no limits. Art is anything that can be imagined, and expressed. But living as we do in particular circumstances and with particular desires and experiences, the art of our time is not so indeterminate. It is something determined by our social and economic 191

A Coat of Many Colours conditions, and by the ideas and habits we inherit from the past. Those conditions are continually changing. Just as our social and economic conditions change, so do our habits and ideas. We change our houses and our clothes, our food and our morals. We change our art. But just as there are people who cling on to old fashions in houses and clothes, food and customs, so there are people who want to retain old fashions in painting and sculpture. And if we belong to a younger generation we say of such people that they are old-fashioned or prejudiced. I would like to suggest that the prevalent misunderstanding of modern art is due, not so much to a lack of sensibility, not even to blank ignorance of the aims of the modern artist, but simply to this sort of prejudice. We go about with a certain preconception of what art ought to be like ; it is a narrow conception derived from our environment, from the education we have had, and from the economic limitations imposed on our mode of life. I do not say this in any kind of snobbish spirit. Indeed, the most limited people may be those who have enjoyed all the privileges of wealth and rank—who are, so to speak, heirs to a particular tradition. They inherit their culture along with the rest of their heirlooms, and it is they who most strenuously resist change and dispossession. Surely these people, who inherit their culture and preserve it unchanged, are not the true traditionalists. Tradition is not a heritage ; it is rather an active principle, a principle we apply to solve particular problems ; and since the problems change with every age, so must the solutions. From this point of view, modern art is not fundamentally revolutionary or subversive. It only seems to be revolutionary because it insists on developing the central tradition of art. And it is not only in art that the return to tradition, or the maintenance of a tradition, takes 192

Realism and Superrealism on the o u t w a r d appearances of a revolution ; we might find plenty of examples in the history of religion a n d science. T h a t phrase I have used, " the return to tradition " , indicates another danger. T h e r e are m a n y people w h o revolt against the conventions they have inherited. T h e y dislike the houses they have been brought u p in, the pictures a n d furniture of their parents, a n d that general air of established righteousness which one generation tries to p u t across its successor. T h e r e are various ways of escape for the younger generation : they can become nihilists— people w h o d o not believe in anything in particular, whose only desire is to uproot a n d destroy ; or they can build anew. But more likely they will just look round for something they like better. N o t acting on any principle of creation or destruction, they will accumulate a new set of possessions from the things of the past. T h e y m a y even adopt a particular period, like T u d o r or Georgian ; or they make merely a miscellaneous collection of bric-a-brac from all periods—and by bric-a-brac I do not m e a n only furniture, prints a n d china, b u t also ideas a n d attitudes, even a religion. For there are people who choose their mental furniture in the same way that they choose their household furniture. Such people are a p t to consider themselves broadminded, but actually their attitude is a product, not of reason, b u t of timidity. It is a " safety first " policy in matters of taste a n d criticism. It is characteristic of phases of civilization that have lost their belief in any central doctrine or universal faith, particularly of periods w h e n this intellectual scepticism is combined with social irresponsibility, when art, along with other worldly goods, becomes a symbol of wealth a n d power. Such people, for w h o m we have the n a m e dilettanti, possess neither the courage nor the convictions which would enable them to discover a n d support those works of art which are being 193

A Coat of Many Colours produced by their contemporaries. Apart from the fact that such works could not be treated as gilt-edged securities, they would demand an individual exercise of perception. The only real taste is a contemporary taste. I do not say that a real taste will confine itself to contemporary works of art—it will in a certain sense be timeless. I have said that one kind of artist turns away from the outer world of perceptions to the inner world of imagination and dream. That is obvious if we look at the art of any great period. But if we examine the imaginative creations of great painters like Giorgione or Rembrandt or El Greco, we observe that though they may transcend reality to the point of mystery, they do nevertheless preserve a certain rationality. Their themes may be " far fetched ", their ideas poetic and even strange, but they use recognizable conventions to express their themes or ideas. That is to say, they use forms and compositions which are part of the intellectual equipment of an educated man of the time. If they want to express the spiritual or poetic world, there is a whole stock-in-trade of gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs, legends and myths ready made. But the kind of imaginative art which we call superrealist, has very little in common with such pictorial charades. It has no readymade stock-in-trade. It has no tradition and no rules. There are precedents for it, but these are mostly found in the art of people who have no rational culture, and who do not judge things by intellectual standards—so-called savage peoples. This fact suggests one possible explanation of superrealism—that since our age is one of increasing savagery, it is only natural that our artists should revert to a savage type of art. But that is not quite the line of my argument. I would rather say that there is a savage in every human being, and always has been ; and that our savage instincts find their sublimation in art. But that too is not an altogether satisfactory argument—it suggests 194

Realism and Superrealism that art is a sort of medicine to make us mentally healthy. That may be one of its functions, but art is something more and something greater. It is the exploration of the heights and depths of the human mind. Just as the physical world is explored by the scientist whose discoveries are then recorded in the laws of nature, so the psychical world is explored by the poet and the painter, and their discoveries are recorded in works of art. This psychical world, this world of our dreams and desires, is just as important, just as much a part of reality, as the world of matter and energy. And in order to make his discoveries in this psychical universe, the artist must conduct experiments. The poems and pictures he offers to us are not to be regarded as complete in themselves ; they are facts won from the unknown—records of experiences which throw some light on the greatest of all mysteries, the human mind. Therefore accept the fragments of that great mystery in the spirit in which they are offered—humbly, tolerantly, without prejudice. They have something to say to you if only you will look at them with innocent eyes. Picasso is inviting you to a carnival where Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbine hide their tragedy under gay geometric costumes ; Miró entices you into a playground where the sun is shedding globules of pure colour ; Max Ernst leads you into a nocturnal forest bright with lynx-eyes and the phosphorescent gleam of moths' wings ; Paul Nash takes you on to the open downs and reanimates the standing stones in the Druids' Shrine . . . these painters restore to art the magic and the wonder which it had lost in that dreary waste of commerce, cash-values and common sense which is our immediate fate and shameful past.

195

A Coat of Many Colours 39. A Further Note on Superrealism I N the Introduction to his Short Survey of Surrealism David Gascoyne warns us that his treatment of the subject " should not be taken to imply that surrealism is anything but a ' latent state of mind, a h u m a n attitude in the widest sense of the word h u m a n \ Surrealism is not a style, it is not a school of literature or painting, it is not a system of aesthetics.' ' O n e might venture, perhaps, to call it a philosophy of life ; it is certainly a Weltanschauung. " I say that there exists a lyrical element that conditions for one p a r t the psychological a n d moral structure of h u m a n society, that has conditioned it for all time a n d that will continue to condition it. This lyrical element is u p to this day, even though in spite of them, the fact a n d the sole fact of specialists." Such is Breton's declaration, a n d the lyrical element he refers to is, of course, the unconscious element which so far has only been treated seriously a n d systematically by the psychoanalysts. It has always been recognized (at least, by all but the most doctrinaire a n d academic of critics) that the creative or inventive force in art comes from some obscure d e p t h in the personality, a n d the more perceptive poets like Goethe a n d Blake have even suggested that this source is in some way related to the instinctive or sexual faculties, a n d that it has some connection with our d r e a m life. W h a t has been thus a vague intuition on the p a r t of a few isolated individuals, the superrealists would make a systematic basis for artistic experiment. J u s t as the old naturalistic school of painting (or of poetry) was based on the careful observation of natural facts, so the new school is based on the careful observation of facts equally " natural " but hitherto neglected—the facts below the surface of normal perception, the facts presented in dream, hypnosis a n d clairvoyance. 196

A Further Note on Superrealism As defined in the first manifesto of the Surréalistes (1924) superrealism is " pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral pre-occupations." It is not merely that superrealism wishes to introduce an element of the dream world into art ; it definitely and defiantly proclaims the superiority of this dream-world ; its images and processes alone are a clue to the true nature of reality and a guide to " the solution of the principal problems of life ". It follows that superrealism must be dissociated from all those forms of art which under the guise of fantasy or imagination are merely attempts to avoid reality, to take refuge in an illusion. " The most vital feature of surrealism ", says Mr. Gascoyne, " is its exclusive interest in that point at which literature and art give place to real life, that point at which the imagination seeks to express itself in a more concrete form than words or plastic images." For that reason superrealism must be more than a literary or artistic movement ; it must aim at nothing less than a transformation of life itself. Breton ended an address to a Congress of Writers with these words : " * Transformer le monde J a dit Marx ; í changer la vie,9 a dit Rimbaud ; ce$ deux mots d'ordre pour nous n'en font qu'un" Let me try in a sentence or two to define my own attitude to this general philosophy of art. The time is past when anyone can seriously dispute the relevance of the facts revealed by psychoanalysts ; what we might call the unconscious basis of all forms of art is now an established truth. I believe that the greatest power of art, especially the greatest power of the greatest art—poetry—is derived from the automatic workings of the poet's mind, and that the poet's essential faculties (his sensibility to language and his agility in metaphor-making) are only operative when 197

A Coat of Many Colours the rational faculties are suspended and expression becomes instinctive (intuitive or unconscious). Whatever poetry I myself have written was experienced in that way. I doubt if any values which are specifically poetic or lyrical are ever of any other origin. I am not sure, however, that one can poeticize the whole of life. Whatever value we ascribe to " progress " (and admittedly that value may be questioned) has been achieved by an increasing development of consciousness or objectivity—in other words, of reason and all those " controls " which are opposed to psychic automatism. In that development new types of art have arisen which owe little or nothing to the unconscious mind—which are in effect rational arts depending more and more on the intellect alone, or at least the intellect combined with a purely sensational and hedonistic awareness. These are the so-called classical types of art, though not everything in a classical age necessarily conforms to the type. It is possible to argue (as the superrealist does) that all such art is false art, dead from its conception. I do not see, however, why both types of art should not be valid. I do not see why both types should not be practised by one and the same artist, though I believe that in general the plastic arts will tend towards rationality and the poetic arts towards superreality ; I have no faith in the architecture of the postman Cheval, one of the more mythical figures in the surréaliste movement. Prose, at any rate, and especially in the hands of Monsieur Breton, remains a supremely rational art. A philosophy of life that sets out to transform life inevitably involves a revolutionary aim in the political sphere. The surréalistes are revolutionaries, opposed to all the bourgeois ideals of capitalist culture. Ideally they should be communists—they accept the doctrine of dialectical materialism—but they experience some difficulty 198

George Saintsbuiy in practice. They resent the implication that art should be polemical. " L'imagination artistique doit rester libre. Elle est tenue quitte par définition de toute fidélité aux circonstances, très spécialement aux circonstances grisantes de l'histoire. L'œuvre d'art, sous peine de cesser d'être elle-même, doit demeurée déliée de toute espèce de but pratique." That is merely the most relevant of their objections to the communist régime in Russia ; they criticize it also on purely political grounds—for its departure from its early idealism, its fraternization with capitalist governments, its gradual admission of and even encouragement of bourgeois morals. In all this the Surréalistes show courage and consistency, and far from being " played out ", remain the only consciously critical intellectuals within the revolutionary movement.

40.

George Saintsbury

1 HERE can scarcely be a critic or student of literature to-day, in this country or in America, who has not benefited liberally from such books as the History of Criticism, the History of English Prosody and the History of English Prose Rhythm. But these works are not in any real sense criticism ; nominally they are historical, and even as history they should be further qualified as surveys rather than as investigations. The latter type of history implies a very limited field, and very deep burrowing ; Saintsbury skimmed over the surface of received facts, marshalled them and ordered them, in some sense masticated them for less voracious readers. His books will probably be used as manuals by several generations of undergraduates ; for official education such as it is, they are perfect instruments. They guide the student down tidy paths, they cram his unwilling maw with the fruit of knowledge, they lead him 199

A Goat of Many Colours inevitably into the wilderness of satiety. T h e y communicate a sense of the author's enormous gusto. If gusto were a virtue in a critic (instead of being, on the whole, a disadvantage : it usually implies a lack of discrimination), Saintsbury's numerous prefaces a n d essays would be good criticism. T h e r e is no d o u b t that Saintsbury enjoyed the books he wrote about, a n d enjoyed writing about them. But enjoyment is only of value to the critic if he can be sure that he has good grounds for enjoyment, if his enjoyment invariably leads him to the best ; if, in short, enjoyment is related to a hierarchy of values which can be defined. I n writing of Pater, Saintsbury comes very Yiear to expressing his own ideal : T h e more your interests are, the better ; the higher, the nobler, the purer the subjects of t h e m are, of course, the better ; but the m a i n thing is to get themselves intensified, purified, ennobled ; to clear the m i n d in regard to t h e m of convention a n d of cant ; to clear it of confusion a n d commonplace, to make the flame " gem-like " , the essence quintessential, the gold free from alloy. This reads a little like the psychopathic p a n a c e a of a few years ago : " every day a n d in every way I get better a n d better " : it is a bombinahs in vacuo, a fussy ball of intensity bouncing off into vacancy, no one knows where or whence, nor cares. I n a very interesting memoir of Saintsbury written by Professor Blyth Webster, one or two personal characteristics of Saintsbury's are mentioned which offer some clue to his deficiencies as a critic. H e is coupled with his friend Creighton, a n d we are told : I n m u n d a n e matters their turn of mind was a p t to be sceptical. It was free from trace of bigotry, distrusted generalizations a n d specifics, did not divide parties or persons into black or white, a n d felt the irony of things. E a c h h a d the historic a n d comparative sense, a n d would not dogmatize in mere terms of the present. Not 200

George Saintsbury unacquainted with the higher criticism in their fields of study, they were unimpressed with its methods and results ; and, indifferent to metaphysical and psychological subtlety, they were chargeable with cleaving to the outer husk of fact. And of Saintsbury alone : " If he does not keep altogether out of controversy, he engages in no logomachies ; he declines to define, and will not prescribe nor condemn." These observations are offered in praise of Saintsbury, and his biographer is at least complacent when he says that " it was later a principle of his, ' most sincere and most strong ', and his practice, not to criticize living authors ". Actually this attitude, common in academic circles, reveals a certain fear of life, a certain treatment of literature as a refuge from life, which is actually the explanation of Saintsbury's limitations. He was, in fact, a typical exponent of the Victorian evasiveness. There is one characteristic common to all the authors he preferred and recommended—they are all men without general ideas. He instinctively avoided those writers who probe deeply into the problems of human life. That his attitude may have sprung from a conviction that those problems are beyond the capacities of the individual, and are best left to the authority of institutions, is true enough ; but that does not exempt him from the charge of timidity. Critics like Dryden and Coleridge before him, and like Mr. Eliot in our own time, have held a similar conviction. But holding that conviction, they have not been afraid—have, indeed, regarded it as an essential duty—to relate their criticism to their beliefs. One has only to compare, for example, S a l i s bury's essay on Pater with Eliot's essay on Pater and Arnold to see the difference between the literary gossip of a refugee from life and the criticism of a man for whom literature is an integral part of life, dealing with problems which cannot with any good conscience be 201

A Goat of Many Colours isolated from life. Perhaps in this particular case it is too much to expect Saintsbury to criticize Pater on the same grounds as Eliot ; for at bottom Saintsbury's and Pater's attitude is the same attitude—the divorce of literature and art from everything that makes it significant. There is, of course, a sense in which literature does and must preserve its independence ; the poet's first concern is the technical quality of his verse, and a poet who subordinates this concern to questions of religion, morality or ideology of any kind is thereby the less a poet. T h e " values " which a poet imports into his work are his fatality ; they are inevitable but accidental to his sensibility. They cannot be forced or cultivated in any way. It is precisely the function of criticism to be aware of the imponderable and the unpredictable in a poet's work ; and to have sufficient grasp of general values to find a place in their hierarchy for the object of his criticism. Logomachies and definitions, generalizations and specifics—these are ugly words for necessary activities, and in rejecting them Saintsbury was avoiding the essential function of the critic.

41. MAX

Max Liebermann

LIEBERMANN was

one

of the

g r a n d old

men

of

European art. Born only eight years after Cézanne, seven years after Monet, and ten years before Seurat, he was, when he died at the age of eighty-seven, still painting pictures in a vigorous impressionist style. Post-impressionism and its aftermath had left him undisturbed ; he was an authentic survivor from the epoch of Manet and Degas, and as such he deserved our respect, and a fair measure of admiration. In his own country he has earned the highest honours : in 1920 he received the order " Pour le Mérite " —the highest of all German decorations ; in 1924 he became 202

Max Liebermann President of the Academy ; in 1927 the freedom of the City of Berlin was conferred on him ; in 1928 he was appointed Chancellor of " Pour le Mérite ". In 1933 he renounced all his honours. For this painter, the most honoured of all contemporary German painters, a painter essentially German in his outlook, had the misfortune to be born a Jew. He began his career in 1866 as a pupil of Karl Steffeck, a popular painter of horses, and then came under the influence of Munkacsy, a genre painter who had a great vogue in the nineteenth century (" The Last Hour of the Condemned", etc.). In 1873 Liebermann went to Paris, and during his five years there became acquainted not only with the work of the Barbizon school, but also with Courbet and Millet. But the strongest influence on him at this time was not French, but Dutch. He visited Holland from Paris, and from then onwards returned to it year after year. There he found an art very much to his liking—the intimate realistic art of painters like Josef Israels and Antonis Mauve. After a few years in Munich, a place he did not find very sympathetic, Liebermann went to Berlin, where he established himself in 1884 and where he remained for the rest of his life. Here he could not escape that eupeptic Prussian, Adolf Menzel. Menzel's work has to be seen to be believed. He had the infinitecapacity-for-taking-pains theory of genius (" Genie ist Fleiss ") and for the best part of the nineteenth century (he lived to be ninety) he took pains to portray all the formless energy, the tasteless life, and the topicality of that monstrous age. He had the capacity for the task ; he was the professional painter in excelsis. He infected Liebermann with his worldliness, his lustiness, his technical virtuosity. Liebermann never descended to such detail as Menzel, and though Menzel could be impressionistic, he was never an Impressionist in the historical sense of the word. But that is a label we can fairly apply to Liebermann. 203

A Coat of Many Colours As compared with a French Impressionist like Degas (his nearest parallel in France) Liebermann seems very heavyh a n d e d a n d insensitive. His " Polo Players " , for example, should be compared with one of Degas's racecourse pictures. L i e b e r m a n n perhaps renders energy a n d action more directly ; Degas's canvases are comparatively static. But in every other quality, in ingenuity of composition, in atmosphere, above all in colouring, the French painter is infinitely more subtle a n d successful. Liebermann's landscapes owe more to M a n e t . T h o u g h one does not think of M a n e t as one of the great colourists, he has at least his liveliness. Liebermann would seem to be completely devoid of this sensibility. His paintings are not positively disharmonious ; they are just dull. H e did, in the course of his development, greatly lighten their tone, but only to expose more a n d more his essential reliance on line. Liebermann was too old a n d too generally respected to surfer the fate of nearly all Jewish artists in G e r m a n y . But in view of the Nazi theory of racial qualities in art, and of the detrimental effect of Jewish elements in a national culture, it is worth while to consider w h a t characteristics in Liebermann's art might be d u e to his Jewish origin. I confess I find none at all. T h e Jewish genius is not naturally expressed in the plastic arts ; there is no H e b r e w architecture or painting or sculpture to correspond to H e b r e w literature. Nevertheless, in the case of one or two m o d e r n artists ( M a r c Chagall, for example) one might isolate a certain quality which is Jewish—a certain rhetoric, a certain psychological fantasy. But these qualities are not present in Liebermann. " T h e more naturalistic a painter is, the more imaginative he must be ; for the imagination of a painter is shown not in the representation of ideas but in the representation of reality." That is a saying of Liebermann's, a n d it certainly expresses a sentiment inconsistent with the general character of German 204

Max Liebermann art, in which there has always been a mystical, transcendental tendency. But the contrary tendency expressed by Liebermann is not typically Jewish ; it is merely antitranscendental, anti-romantic. It exactly describes the art of such un-Jewish artists as Constable a n d Cézanne. I have often been upbraided for my habit of rash generalization. I prefer to generalize, because it seems to m e to be the only vital kind of mental activity, even when it is wide of the mark. But here is a case where generalization does not seem to me to be possible. Perhaps at certain stages in its development a people expresses its national or racial characteristics in its art ; b u t that is not true for the whole of history, a n d particularly u n t r u e of the m o d e r n period, since the Renaissance. Again a n d again we have seen movements in art arise which, in virtue of a certain universality in their basic assumptions, sweep across boundaries and racial divisions, a n d unite m e n in the commonalty of an idea. Such movements are not national, a n d yet they are not anti-national ; they are supernational, a n d those forces which oppose them are the forces of philistinism—of intellectual mediocrity a n d cultural reaction.

42. Art and Ethics 1 H E ethical aspect of art was one of the preoccupations of nineteenth-century writers, a n d from Ruskin to Tolstoy they all m a d e a desperate effort to give a r t a n ethical foundation. But, however variously they expressed themselves, they h a d only one notion of how this could be done. Art itself must be ethical—that is to say, the artist must have a n ethical conception of life a n d must give clear expression to it in his works. " It is necessary that h e should stand on the level of the highest life-conception of his t i m e , " said Tolstoy ; a n d Ruskin was even more 205

A Coat of Many Colours explicit. But art remained obstinately non-ethical ; indeed, these doctrines only succeeded in provoking a reaction among artists, and art has never been so deliberately devoid of a message as during these last fifty years. At the same time, and in the true sense of the word, we can also assert that art has never been so effectively ethical. Never has art roused such intense feelings, of protest or of partisanship ; even in this indifferent country of ours works of art have been reviled and defaced by indignant zealots ; while farther afield the smoke still rises from holocausts of condemned pictures and books. T o a great extent, indeed, the artist now occupies the place of the persecuted saint of another day. The explanation of this paradox is simple ; for art actually becomes more ethical the purer it becomes. Ultimately art is concerned with one value and one value only : truth. But truth is an ethical value—perhaps the supreme ethical value. Modern art is unpopular because it has pursued this value to the exclusion of all sentiment and compromise. In painting, for example, it has discarded the shadow for the substance, the appearance for the form ; in poetry it has rejected artifice and convention in favour of the rhythms of human speech ; in fiction it has laid bare the psychological motives which determine our actions ; and generally art has discovered that the imagination is an instrument of revelation, not an agent of obscuration. In modern art the public discovers an unfamiliar world ; and many people draw back, frightened or resentful. But the new images, the new vision, cannot be dismissed ; they are so much more vivid than the old ways of seeing and hearing ; they are so much more real. So gradually the public accepts them ; it recognizes them as a necessary revelation. Art has thus achieved its ethical object, which is to persuade us to accept a true vision of the world. 206

Art and Ethics So long as the public and the artist moved within the conventions of a generally accepted moral code, art was like a game of chess. Each element had a definite function, and the art was in the skill with which the accepted rules were applied. Art then encouraged qualities like ingenuity, memory, and style. Even so, artists were always the people who broke the rules ; who invented new pieces, new moves, new games. Artists cannot escape the accusation of being disturbers of the peace, outragers of morality, and generally advocan diabolL But the wellbeing of society demands some such ferment. Stability, which we foolishly yearn for, is but another name for stagnation ; and stagnation is death. The ideal condition of society is the same as the ideal condition of any living body—a state of dynamic tension. The yearning for safety and stability must be balanced by impulses towards adventure and variety. Only in that way can society be stirred into the vibrations and emanations of organic growth. Plato, as is too often and too complacently recalled, banished the poet from his Republic. But that Republic was a deceptive model of perfection. It might be realized by some dictator, but it could only function as a machine functions—mechanically. And machines function mechanically only because they are made of dead inorganic materials. If you want to express the difference between an organic progressive society and a static totalitarian regime, you can do so in one word : this word art. Only on condition that the artist is allowed to function freely can society embody those ideals of liberty and intellectual development which to most of us seem the only worthy sanctions of life.

207

A Coat of Many Colours 43.

The later Teats

1 HERE is no d o u b t that Yeats was influenced, a n d influenced for the good, by the technique of some of his juniors, notably by Ezra Pound. T h e change can best be examined in a n early p o e m which Yeats actually rewrote in his later m a n n e r . " T h e Sorrow of Love " was originally published in 1893 ; as late as the 1912 edition of the Poems a n d perhaps later, it read as follows : The The And Had

quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves, full round moon a n d the star-laden sky, the loud song of the ever-singing leaves, hid away earth's old a n d weary cry.

And And And And

then you came with you came all the trouble all the trouble

And The And Are

with those red mournful lips, the whole of the world's tears of her labouring ships, of her myriad years.

now the sparrows warring in the eaves, curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky, the loud chaunting of the unquiet leaves, shaken with earth's old a n d weary cry.

I n the 1933 edition of the Collected Poems this poem has been rewritten a n d reads as follows : The The And Had

brawling of a sparrow in the eaves brilliant moon a n d all the milky sky, all that famous h a r m o n y of leaves, blotted out man's image a n d his cry.

A girl arose that h a d red mournful lips A n d seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus a n d the labouring ships A n d p r o u d as Priam murdered with his peers ; 208

The Later Yeats Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry. The change, it will be seen, is very drastic, but is it altogether a change for the good ? It is, let us observe, in the first place, a change of diction and not of structure ; and that is true of all the changes that occurred in Yeats's verse. " All the revisions I have made," Yeats once said to me, " have been in the direction of making my poems less poetic." His aim, therefore, has been very much the same as Wordsworth's—to get rid of " the inane and gaudy phraseology " of an outworn poetic tradition. The suggestion I wish to put forward is that diction and structure are so closely related in the generation of a poem, that you cannot fundamentally change the one without changing the other. But before elaborating that suggestion, let us look at the actual changes which Yeats made in the poem quoted. Line i.—" Brawling " is substituted for " quarrel ". In itself I do not think the word is any improvement, but the change is necessitated by a change in line 2 ; " quarrel " would not go well with " brilliant ", whereas " brawling " provides a good alliterative and assonantal match. " Sparrows " becomes singular—a gain in precision. Line 2.—" full round " was perhaps felt to be a commonplace epithet, but is " brilliant " any better ? It is rather vaguer. But this change is perhaps in its turn dictated by the change from " star-laden " to " milky ". " Starladen " is a very early-yeatsian, Celtic twilight epithet of just the kind the poet presumably wanted to get rid of; and since a brilliant moon will cancel out the stars, " milky " becomes a more expressive (incidentally a metaphorical) epithet. Line 3.—" ever-singing " was probably felt to be a 209

A Coat of Many Colours cliché, and " loud " is not very exact for the sound of leaves. But " famous harmony " seems to me to be a vaguer and weaker substitute ; it is a dead phrase, without any inherent poetic tone. In fact, it is prose. Line 4.—A completely new image is substituted. "Earth's old and weary cry " was probably felt to be a false and indefinite metaphor. " Blotted " is a gain in sound value, and links alliteratively with " brawling " and " brilliant " ; it has an onomatopoeic value, and provides a much-needed acceleration of the rhythm. Line 5.—A definite image of " a girl " is substituted for the vague " you " ; " arose " gives alliteration with " red ". Line 6.—" the whole of the world's tears " was perhaps felt to be rather a ridiculous image ; the new image is more precise, but still difficult to visualize. Lines 7 and 8.—A completely new image is substituted. The repetition of " And all the trouble of her " was probably felt to be banal, and " myriad years " to be a cliché. The introduction of well-known classical allusions is a gain in precision and in the emotional surplus attaching to legendary names. Line g —The refrain motive of the sparrows in the eaves is dropped—it is a romantic device, and two such devices in one quatrain were felt to be a little too much. The introduction of a time element, " on the instant ", adds dramatic force to the poem. " Clamorous " is a good sonorous word, if a little too emphatic for the noise made by a single sparrow ; but it provides alliteration with " climbing ", " lamentation ", " leaves ", " could ", " compose " and " cry ". Line 10.—The fresh and effective " curd-pale " had to be dropped, since the moon had become brilliant in the first verse ; for the same reason the white stars had to be excluded. " Climbing ", though it sounds well enough, is rather commonplace, and " empty " is banal. 210

The Later Yeats Line n.—" Loud " must be dropped to agree with the first verse ; " chaunting " is an artificial metaphor. The new line has a forceful alliterative movement. But I doubt if a " modern " poet would use a word like " lamentation " in connection with " leaves " ; it is almost a cliché.

Line 12.—The changes are largely dictated by the new form of line 4, and by the desire for alliteration. But " compose " involves a process difficult to visualize, and the line as a whole does not bring the poem to such a definite and inevitable conclusion as in the first version. These are analytical notes, and perhaps on a reckoning the plus and minus of it all cancels out. It is necessary, in the end, to compare the synthetic feeling of the two versions, and here one can only state a personal reaction. My own is definitely in favour of the earlier version. In spite of the romantic diction against which Yeats rightly reacted, I feel that it produces a unity of effect which, romantic as it is, is superior in force to the more definite, more classical diction of the later version. For the truth is, that the poem in essence and inception is ineradicably romantic, and had better retain its romantic diction and imagery. As it is, the new version has a patchy effect. The old suit may have been shabby, but it was of a good cut and an even tone ; the patches of new classical cloth are too obvious and too disjointed. This image, with a litde stretching, will serve for my objection to Yeats's later verse (but naturally it is only an objection on the highest plane of technical criticism—the kind of criticism that poets exchange between themselves, and which is not meant for laymen). Though he makes his poems out of the latest suitings, all of good classical (or, which comes to the same thing) modernist cloth, the cut is still romantic. 211

A Coat of Many Colours I dreamed as in my bed I lay, All night's fathomless wisdom come, T h a t I h a d shorn my locks away A n d laid them on Love's lettered t o m b : But something bore t h e m out of sight I n a great tumult of the air, A n d after nailed upon the night Berenice's burning hair. T h e gesture here, in spite of its precision, is still romantic ; and such poems stand out, luxuriant in the p r u n e d o r c h a r d of the later verse. T h e pruning has produced a larger fruit, a clearer thought ; but the effect is rather bleak, the prose of scientific culture rather than the poetry of natural growth. A complete change of spirit requires a change of form ; of structure as well as of diction. A n d though one or two poems, such as " Byzantium " , seem to promise the necessary development, Yeats remained to the end faithful to the spirit of another age.

44. Socialist Realism I F we are socialists, there are two possible attitudes to a d o p t towards Marxist critics like R a d e k a n d Bukharin : we can excuse them on the grounds that their particular theories, though bearing little relation to the realities of art, are justified by the immediate political necessities— on the grounds, that is to say, that in the bitterest hour of the struggle the artist no less t h a n the worker must be conscripted in the socialist army. But that would be a temporizing argument, for actually both R a d e k a n d Bukharin addressed themselves, not to opportunist arguments oí this kind, b u t to general principles. W e are entitled to ask, then, how far their theories correspond, not only with the general principles of art, but with the general principles of socialism—more particularly, the general principles of 212

Socialist Realism Marxist socialism. And we can identify these two sets of principles, for if the Marxist dialectic is correct, it must naturally include within its scope the phenomena of art no less than all the other phenomena of human society. In the end we shall find that neither Marx nor Engels ever committed themselves to such statements as that " realism means making a selection of phenomena from the point of view of what is essential "—that is to say, from the point of view of socialism. Instead we find Engels, for example, writing that " the more the (political) opinions of a writer remain hidden, the better for the work of art ". Realism, he goes on to say, illustrating his point with the case of Balzac, " may crop out even in spite of the author's opinions ". He admits that many of the world's greatest writers—iEschylus and Aristophanes, Dante and Cervantes, not to mention more recent names like Tolstoy, have produced tendentious works. " But I think (he says) that tendency should arise out of the situation and action, without being specially emphasized, and that an author is not obliged to give the reader a ready-made historical future solution of the social conflicts he depicts." In his literary judgements, Marx himself was exempt from every kind of political or social prejudice. His favourite authors were Shakespeare and Walter Scott. " He considered ^Eschylus and Shakespeare (writes his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue) as the two greatest dramatic geniuses of all time. He had devoted to Shakespeare, for whom he had a limitless admiration, profound study. . . . All the Marx family practised a sort of cult for the great English dramatist ; his three daughters knew him by heart." Marx was a great reader of novels. He liked above all those of the eighteenth century, and especially Fielding's Tom Jones. The modern authors who tempted him most were Paul de Kock, Charles Lever, Alexandre Dumas and Walter Scott. 21/?

A Goat of Many Colours H e considered Old Mortality . . . a masterly work. H e liked amusing stories and tales of adventure. His favourite novelists were Cervantes and Balzac. . . . H e had such an admiration for Balzac that he proposed to write a critical work of La Comédie humaine when he had finished his economic work. For Balzac, who far from selecting phenomena from the point of view of guiding principles, carefully ignored his guiding principles, which were those of monarchism, Catholicism and reaction. Remember that Marx's first literary works were poetic, and that all his life he gave free rein to his magnificent imagination. Only the scientist who had this poetic strain in him could conceive a work of the vast scope and comprehensive unity of Das KapitaL Is it likely, then, that such a genius would so misconceive art as to limit it to any particular theory of realism, or even to realism as such. Let us avoid a superstitious reverence for every theory that bears the stamp " made in Russia ". Russian critics have no monopoly of Marxism. In our own country there are better Marxist critics than Radek and Bukharin. Ralph Fox is one example. His posthumous essay on The Novel and the People is so wise and sensible, so understanding and so fully conscious of the realities of art no less than of socialism, that we cannot too much regret his brave death on the Spanish front. I find very little to criticize in the views he puts forward in his book. He realizes that " the one concern of the novelist is, or should be, this question of the individual will in its conflict with other wills on the battleground of life "—nothing more, nothing less. Marxism, he says, does not deny the individual. " I t does not see only masses in the grip of inexorable economic forces. . . . Marxism places man in the centre of its philosophy, for while it claims that materia 1 forces may change man, 214

Socialist Realism it declares most emphatically that it is man who changes the material forces and that in the course of so doing he changes himself." It is in this sense that Shakespeare's characters are so ideal, presenting man as being at one and the same time a type and an individual, a representative of the mass and a single personality. Ralph Fox even went so far as to say—and those who know Marxist criticism will realize how rare an admission it is—that " i t is completely foreign to the spirit of Marxism to neglect the formal side of art. To Marx form and content were inextricably connected, inter-related by the dialectic of life, and for the novelist of socialist realism formal questions are of first importance." My only criticism of Ralph Fox is directed towards his use of this word " realism ". He says very finely that the revolutionary task of literature to-day is to restore its great tradition, to break the bonds of subjectivism and narrow specialization, to bring the creative writer face to face with his only important task, that of winning the knowledge of truth, of reality. Art is one of the means by which man grapples with and assimilates reality. That is finely and truly expressed, but what I would like to ask is whether the only means of grappling with reality is the literary method known as realism ? That, to me, does not necessarily follow. We have two terms, often contrasted, realism and romanticism. We also have the term naturalism and we have something which we call eclecticism. Most of the literature and painting which goes under the name of realism is actually naturalism, and most of the literature and painting known as socialist realism is actually socialist naturalism. In the same way much that is rejected as romanticism—Chateaubriand, for example, or even Scott —is eclecticism : an arbitrary selection of bright and exotic odds and ends on the basis of the individual writer's 215

A Coat of Many Colours idiosyncrasies. Naturalism is accepting the external world in its totality ; eclecticism is accepting nothing but w h a t pleases the fancy. Both are false attitudes—both are attitudes without a guiding principle. As for true realism a n d true romanticism—what is the difference. Was Shakespeare a realist or a romantic ? Was Cervantes or Balzac a realist or a romantic ? T h e question, directed to geniuses of this scope, is senseless. T h e greatest art includes both realism a n d romanticism, both the senses a n d the imagination. T h e greatest art is precisely this : a dialectical process which reconciles the contradictions derived from our senses on the one h a n d a n d our imagination on the other. R a l p h Fox quoted Keats in his book : Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, grey legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations a n d destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, A n d deify me, as if some blithe wine O r bright elixir peerless I h a d drunk, A n d so become immortal. But that is not a description of a socialist-realist. It is a description of the great humanist artist—of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Balzac, Keats himself—who in his a r t surveys all a n d transcends all. I will now discuss the point of view of another English Marxist—Alick West. I n a book called Crisis and Criticism, he attacked the positions taken u p by T . S. Eliot, I. A. Richards a n d myself. Since I agree in the m a i n with his criticisms of Eliot a n d Richards, who are neither of them socialists, I a m all the more anxious to remove the differences which exist between M r . West a n d myself, for we are both socialists. M r . West's main charge against me leads us directly to the heart of the problem. H e says, quite truly, that I d o 216

Socialist Realism not relate literature to the tensions of the movement o* society, but to tensions within the writer as an isolated unit ; and he then goes on to assert that " the exaltation, direct or indirect, of personality, in isolation from society, means at least an unconscious attachment to capitalist society, within which alone such a conception of personality is possible ". I do not follow the logic of this last assertion, for it was quite possible to isolate and exalt the personality in the age of Montaigne and Shakespeare, and would be in, say, an anarchist community of the future. But actually, of course, I have never for a moment assumed this isolation of the personality. I have seen the individual as in dialectical opposition to society, but that is a very different matter. I have relied, as Mr. West is only too ready to point out, on Freud's interpretation of the personality ; but surely the whole object of psychoanalysis is to show how the personality is formed by reaction to its social environment. Admittedly it does not conceive that environment in exclusively economic terms, but who does but the most purblind and mistaken of Marxian disciples. Environment is not only a matter of money, food and work, but equally of flesh and blood, of emotional and personal relationships. The artist and poet, no less than the normal man, is determined by these same factors, and the only sense in which the artist is isolated is the sense in which we are all isolated by our individual peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. But the artist is the man who can put a price on his peculiarities ; which, extending the sense of the artist to cover all degrees of skill, is true of us all, even under a communist régime. In a book which was published some time before Mr. West's I made it clear that I did not regard the artist as merely an individualist in conflict with society. Admittedly the mental personality of the artist may be determined by a failure in social adaptation. But his whole effort, I then said, is directed towards a reconciliation with 217

H

A Goat of Many Colours society, and what he offers to society is not so much a bagful of his own tricks, his idiosyncrasies, but rather some knowledge of the secrets to which he has had access, the secrets of the self which are buried in every man alike, but which only the sensibility of the artist can reveal to us in all their actuality. This " s e l f * is not the personal possession we imagine it to be ; it is largely made up of elements from the unconscious, and the more we learn about the unconscious, the more collective it appears to be. In this sense Marx and Freud work to the same end, the one showing the collective basis of our social and political ideals, the other the collective basis of our personal habits and thoughts. Mr. West as good as admits this. H e admits that my doctrine of personality, based on Freud, is a wider reality than individuality in the old sense, both because of its more direct contact with the unconscious and its power of losing the sense of " I " through identification with other people. But there is a snag in it somewhere. If my doctrine of the free personality—it is not my doctrine so much as it is Keats's—if this doctrine of " negative capability ", as Keats called it, is good in so far as it rids the individuality of the poet of the repressive habits which are easily recognizable in the form of capitalist morality, capitalist snobbery, capitalist philosophy and so on, it might be equally good to excuse the poet from an excessive devotion to the dogmas of communism. If, as I maintain in general, the poet and the artist is a creature of intuitions and sympathies and by his very nature shrinks from definiteness and doctrinaire attitudes, then he is exempt from marxist no less than from bourgeois disciplines. As I have said on another occasion : Pledged to the shifting process of reality, he cannot subscribe to the static provisions of a policy. H e has two principal duties : to mirror the world as it is and 218

Socialist Realism to imagine the world as it might be. In Shelley's sense he is a legislator, but the House of Poets is even more incapacitated than the House of Peers. Disfranchised by his lack of residence in any fixed constituency, wandering faithlessly in the no-man's-land of his imagination, the poet cannot, without renouncing his essential function, come to rest in the bleak conventicles of a political party. It is not his pride that keeps him outside ; it is really his humility, his devotion to the complex wholeness of humanity. It is in this sense that Homer and iEschylus, Shakespeare and Balzac were poets. The poet must reflect the trend of socialism, says Radek ; he must focus attention on the struggle of the proletariat, says Bukharin ; Marxism must be the writer's way of perceiving and knowing the real world, says Ralph Fox ; criticism must value literature in relation to the social movement, says Alick West. Do any of those statements fit Homer and iEschylus, Shakespeare and Balzac ? Can any of these great poets in any degree be said to have reflected a social or political doctrine ? Not one—and least of all Balzac. If Balzac had followed the advice of our pseudo-Marxist critics, he would have made his works subservient to his political theories, which were the reactionary theories of monarchism and Catholicism. But Balzac was too great an artist to commit any such mistake. He knew that humanity was a complex whole, and that it was his duty to reflect that wholeness and that complexity without bias of any kind, least of all the bias of his own intellectual concepts. Balzac the novelist was greater than Balzac the politician ; and instinctively he knew it. And so did Marx, who never in any of his writings suggests any other point of view. The basis of the poet's activity is sympathy—an intuitive understanding of and projection of himself into the object of his contemplation. Intellectual attitudes, moral prejudice, political judgements—all alike destroy the operation 219

A Goat of Many Colours of these universal sympathetic faculties. I believe no statement I have ever made has done me more harm than a note I added to one of my poems—The End of War : " I t is not my business as a poet to condemn war. . . . Judgement may follow, but should never precede or become embroiled with the act of poetry." In spite of the anger it has aroused, I still stick to that statement. No one can hate war more strongly than I do, and my hatred of war springs from the experience of it. And on other occasions, which were not poetic, I have expressed that hatred in no uncertain terms. But further : no one could be more convinced of the vileness of capitalism nor be more expectant of the blessings of socialism than I am ; on the plane of economic fact and political strife I yield to no man in my devotion to that cause. But in that strife nothing will blind me to the universal aspects of poetry and humanity. I know that when socialism is established among all nations, poetry will still be the poetry of Homer and Shakespeare : the inspired expression of one man's sympathy for his fellow men. I am prepared to make one further admission. Mr. West has perceived—and actually I have never made any disguise of the fact—that my ultimate attitudes in poetry and criticism are based on an absolute for which I have only the warrant of individual intuition. For that reason he accuses me of " latent religious thinking ". But for me there is a considerable difference between the recognition of " absolutes " in philosophy and what is generally meant by " religious thinking ". Religious thinking always involves an act of faith—a belief in supernatural revelation. That kind of belief I do not profess. I am essentially a materialist. But as a materialist I find myself involved with certain intangible and imponderable elements which we call emotion and instinct, and to those elements I, as a materialist, must give due attention. I cannot construct 220

Socialist Realism a credible world without making provision for their active play and satisfaction. In the end I find that emotion and instinct must be reconciled with their dialectical opposites, reason and understanding, and that the achievement of such a reconciliation takes the form of an intuition of absolute values. I am not mystical about these absolute values : I submit them to the pragmatic and empirical tests to which I submit all hypotheses and beliefs. They are only absolute in so far as they are consonant with the world of facts, but our knowledge of this world is very limited, and we are therefore thrown back on our intuitions. But I go further than admitting the presence of such metaphysical elements in my own way of thinking. I ask all those who are socialists to examine the foundations of their own political attitude. I ask them to examine the foundations of Marxism itself. What throughout his cruel and laborious life gave Marx the hope and energy to persist in his great task ? Was he moved by a cold scientific logic, a remote and disinterested rationalism ? We know that such a supposition is absurd. Marx, like every great socialist, was moved by a deep emotional sympathy for the working classes and by a deep anger and indignation at their unjust lot. Their unjust lot—what can our use of that phrase mean but that Marx too had this sense of justice, this intuition of an absolute. Let us but ask what we mean by the word "justice ". It is not something we can measure by an economic scale ; it is not even egalitarianism. It is a sense of values, of human values, and our only clue to those values is our intuition of an absolute and metaphysical quality—justice. And finally all our other knowledge and judgement is referred back to such absolutes —absolutes of truth and beauty no less than of justice. It is on these absolutes that our final vision of a classless society must rest, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. 221

A Coat of Many Colours 45.

The Significance of William James

I T is possible that the name of William James has become a little remote between the Wars, so that it is surprising to be reminded that his Pragmatism was first published as recently as 1907, and that he did not die until 1910. William James was born into the dim and distant world of New England transcendentalism, but his best work belongs to the first decade of this century. And if his name tends to be forgotten, it is perhaps for the best of reasons—for what he himself would have regarded as the best of possible reasons—namely, that his philosophy has become a part of life, an active and progressive force in the politics and culture of our time. In an interview which he gave to the Press in 1926 Mussolini named James, along with Nietzsche and Sorel, as his philosophical masters. " The pragmatism of William James ", he said, " was of great use to me in my political career. James taught me that an action should be judged rather by its results than by its doctrinary basis. I learnt of James that faith in action, that ardent will to live and fight, to which fascism owes a great part of its success." Improbable as this may seem, it has a basis in historical facts. Among the many friends and correspondents James had in all parts of the world we find Giovanni Papini, who, as early as 1906, had become the exponent and apostle of pragmatism in Italy, and among the contributors to Papini's review Leonardo we find Benito Mussolini. As it developed fascism certainly relied more on Sorel and Pareto than on William James, and it is possible that whatever Mussolini derived from pragmatism was based on a complete misunderstanding of its meaning ; for, as Bergson once pointed out, pragmatism is one of the most subtle doctrines ever known to philosophy. It is even 222

The Significance of William James possible that Lenin's very emphatic rejection of pragmatism was based on a similar misunderstanding, for in some of its essential features pragmatism has affinities with Marxism. Pragmatism consists of two main principles, and the perversions of it generally emphasize one to the neglect of the other. The first, to adopt Professor Perry's very clear summary, is the pragmatic method, and " proposes to interpret concepts in terms of their consequences for experience or practice " *—which is very near to Marx's thesis that a belief is proved to be true or false if it works in practice. The second principle of pragmatism is a theory of truth. Truth is an attribute of ideas rather than of reality, and attaches to ideas in proportion as these prove useful for the purpose for which they were invoked. Or, to quote James's own words : The truth of a thing or idea is its meaning, or its destiny, that which grows out of it. This would be a doctrine reversing the opinion of the empiricists that the meaning of an idea is that which it has grown from. . . . Unless we find a way of conciliating the notions of truth and change, we must admit that there is no truth anywhere. But the conciliation is made by everyone who reads history and admits that an earlier set of ideas . . . were in the line of development of the ideas in the light of which we now reject them. . . . In so far as they induced these they were true ; just as these will induce others and themselves be shelved. Their truth lay in their function of continuing thought in a certain direction. In short, James's disposition was all the time to regard truth as prospective rather than retrospective. As Bergson was later to emphasize, the origin and inspiration of pragmatism is to be found in the notion of a reality in which man participates, and participates above all by means of his intuitive faculties. It was perhaps this reliance on intuition, 1 Ralph Barton Perry : The Thought and Character of William James. 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, n.d. [1935]).

223

A Coat of Many Colours backed as it was by the scientific equipment of a man who had written the Principles of Psychology, which more than anything else scandalized his academic colleagues, and which now makes the marxists so suspicious of his philosophy. For once you admit evidence of that kind, you have to take seriously, as James did, the evidence of mystics and even of madmen. James was temperamentally too curious, too vital, to be satisfied with logical or abstract categories. He was, above all, an anti-intellectualist. He claimed, with good reason, that he had destroyed the basis of rationalism and reduced philosophy to a dependency on —even to an identity with—psychology. It is precisely this tendency which, at the present stage of cultural development, makes him of such interest outside academic circles. All his life James lived and worked in such circles, but he scoffed at them, often in no uncertain terms. " I am û-logical, if not illogical," he wrote to one of his correspondents, " and glad to be so when I find Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known. Ass ! " He persisted in addressing himself to the general public, and his books are, as a result, more readable than almost any philosophy ever written, and models of simple expository style. " Active tension " was his ideal and uncertainty, unpredictability, extemporized adaptation, risk, change, anarchy, unpretentiousness, naturalness, the qualities which, according to Professor Perry, he found most palatable. In a word, he was a romantic, and my own interest in his philosophy, for example, is due to the fact that I find in it a premonition of our present romantic revival and a justification of what might be called the poetic attitude. James himself was not a poet, but his temperament might be described by the much-abused word " artistic " (his brother Henry obviously found him too bohemian for his taste). His 224

The Significance of William James interest in abnormal states of mind, hallucination, etc., has, with pragmatic justice, developed into the theories which justify the modern movement in art and literature. All neat schematisms with permanent and absolute distinctions, classifications with absolute pretensions, systems with pigeon-holes, etc., have this character (of artificiality). All "classic", clean, cut and dried, " noble ", fixed, " eternal ", Weltanschauungen seem to me to violate the character with which life concretely comes and the expression which it bears of being, or at least of involving, a muddle and a struggle, with an " ever not quite " to all our formulas, and novelty and possibility for ever leaking in. James has perhaps been unduly overshadowed by Bergson, but he remains, at least for the Anglo-Saxon world whose deep-seated empirical and practical sense of reality he so completely embodies, the typical transition figure of our epoch. He represents the dethroning of absolutism and idealism as well as the decay of scientific dogmatism ; he belongs, as an initiating force, to the movement which has produced relativity in science, the analytical method in psychology, the empirical study of religion, and, finally, superrealism in art. It is a movement which has its dangers and even its disasters—and everything leads us to suppose that James would have regarded fascism as one of the disasters ; but essential to this movement is the doctrine of heroism. " The great use of a life ", he once said, " is to spend it for something that outlasts it." We lack a better faith.

46.

The Poet and the Film

EVERY work of art is a product of the creative imagination, and to be worthy of the name of art, the film, too, must be a product of the creative imagination. 225

A Coat of Many Colours Before such a sentence can mean much, however, we must define that vague phrase, " the creative imagination ". I do not particularly like to use the word " creative " in this connection. It imputes to the artist a god-like rôle and that is bad for his conceit. There is nothing new under the sun, and all the greatest artist can do is to discover new arrangements of existing elements. That is not really to be creative : it is re-creative, amusing, illuminative, instructive, affecting. But my excuse for using the word " creative " in conjunction with " imagination " is to imply something more than a merely mental activity. Not merely imagination, but imagination embodied. Imagination finding its objective equivalents in sight and sound and touch. Imagination translated into sensible shapes, tones and textures. But imagination itself is a vague word. What do we mean by i t ? T h e meaning of imagination has been discussed for well over two thousand years. It is discussed very acutely by Aristotle, and from Aristotle the discussion passes to the great tradition of mediaeval scholasticism ; and from that tradition it passed into the school of romantic criticism, notably, in this country, to Coleridge ; and we are still discussing the meaning of imagination. Meanwhile, in the seventeenth century a school of philosophy arose, led by Descartes, which denied the existence of imagination, or regarded it as so inferior to reason that it could and should be ignored. That school of philosophy held the field between the decline of scholasticism and the rise of romanticism, and the period of its predominance is sometimes called the Age of Reason or Enlightenment : it is an age of derivative styles in art. Imagination, we may conclude, is essential to art, though it may be opposed to reason. A rational work of art—that sounds like a contradiction in terms and I think is a contradiction in terms : it is a contradiction 226

The Poet and the Film involved in the aims and methods of many modern film producers. The centuries-long discussion of imagination to which I have referred succeeded in making a distinction between ingsnium and fantasia : between fancy and imagination. This distinction was hot always kept clear, because with that depressing desire to reduce all things to a unity which distinguishes philosophers, there has always been a tendency to reduce ingenium and fantasia to one faculty and call it the imagination. It has necessarily been a vain ambition, for actually two very distinct processes are involved. Ingenium may be defined as the capacity to perceive or discover similitudes between otherwise disparate objects. We say that a person is as cool as a cucumber, by which we mean that we perceive this common element of coolness in two such disparate objects as such a person and a cucumber. Or describing the action of a man who is holding stocks in a rising market, we say that he is freezing on to a good thing, as water freezes to cold metal. These are elementary examples of simile and metaphor, but the whole art of poetry originates in such an activity. When the choice of terms in such comparisons is arbitrary (as it is in the case of the cucumber, because other things are cool besides the cucumber) then the activity might be called fancy or fantasy, and it is what Coleridge called a mode of memory emancipated from the order of space and time ; it is an activity of the will involving choice—a choice of objective and definite things which can be brought into some illuminating association. But ingenium, fancy, wit or whatever we are to call it, does not exhaust the activities of the mind engaged in literary creation. There is another process which begins with a state of emotional tension and to this nucleus of feeling attracts the objects or events which objectify or express the feeling. Such objects or events are no longer 227

A Goat of Many Colours arbitrary, b u t exact a n d necessary. Everything, as it were, must conform to the colour a n d force of the original emotion. T h e power of imagination, to quote Coleridge again, reveals itself in a balance a n d reconciliation of " a more t h a n usual state of emotion with more t h a n usual order ; j u d g m e n t ever awake and% steady self-possession combined with enthusiasm a n d feeling profound a n d vehement " . T h e film produces its effect by projected images. T h e s e images, projected on the screen, are associated immediately with the images stored in the memory of the spectator, and from that association or collocation of images flow t h e emotions of surprise, delight, pleasure, pride or sorrow, which we experience in the picture house. F r o m this dependence on the visual image, there has arisen the notion that the film can only succeed as an a r t by avoiding all abstractions, by confining itself rigorously to the concrete image. Salvador Dali, who has written the scenario for an ultra-modern film called Babaouo, writes in the following strain : Contrary to the usual opinion, the cinema is infinitely poorer a n d more limited for the expression of real processes of thought than is literature, painting, sculpture or architecture. About the only form below it is music, whose spiritual value, as everyone knows, is almost nil. T h e cinema is linked fundamentally, by its very n a t u r e , to the sensorial, vulgar a n d anecdotic surface of p h e n o mena, to abstraction, to rhythmical impressions, in a word, to harmony. A n d h a r m o n y , the sublime p r o d u c t of abstraction, is by definition at the other extreme to the concrete, a n d consequently, to poetry. T h e rapid a n d continuous succession of images on the screen . . . hinders all attempts to achieve the concrete a n d annuls more often t h a n not (thanks to t h e element memory) its intentional, affective, lyrical quality. T h e mechanism of memory, u p o n which these images act in a m a n n e r exceptionally direct, tends even in itself to the disorganization of the concrete, towards idealization. 228

The Poet and the Film In waking life, the latent purpose and the fury of the concrete nearly always become submerged in forgetfulness, but they rise to the surface again in dreams. The poetry of the film demands more than any other kind of poetry a complete dream metamorphosis in concrete irrationality before it can attain a real degree of lyricism. And on the basis of that idea we have in France the surréaliste film—a film that is completely irrational in its content, a film that can only be compared with the dream, even with the nightmare, and which gains all its force and vividness by possessing the same characteristics as the dream. The foremost film of this kind is Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poete—A Poet's Blood—with music by Georges Auric. It is a vital experiment in film construction and it is the work of a poet—not of a camera-man, a kinist, a filmist or whatever you want to call the creator of a film, but of a man who is first and foremost and all the time a poet. This kind of film fits exactly, I think, our definition of fancy—a mode of memory emancipated from space and time. Its appeal depends on its concreteness, its irrationality, its strange dream-like fertility of images. Admittedly, it is an extreme—just as lyric poetry is an extreme of expression. It rejects the logical : it seeks the lyrical appeal, the direct sensation of the concrete. The only commercial films which a superrealist like Dali can accept are apparently those of the Marx Brothers. But the elements which dominate a film like Cocteau's or Animal Crackers are elements present in most good films : the sudden projection of a concrete image to represent an abstract idea. The projection of two images to suggest a similitude : in Turksib the swirl of water followed by the flickering revolutions of cotton bobbins—a swift concrete effort to convey complex ideas of underlying processes of dynamic cause and effect. The danger which threatens this 229

A Coat of Many Colours kind of film is the cliché : the repetition of the same image in film after film—how often have we seen a close-up of corn waving against the sky, to suggest the peace of nature, of the wheels a n d piston of a locomotive to suggest travel, speed or power a n d so on. But that fault is due to a lack of the faculties which are so conspicuously absent from the film in general, the faculties which must come into the film to m a k e it the great a r t which the potentialities of its technique suggest it m a y some day become—that is to say, the poetic faculty itself. T o the absence of t h a t faculty in the process of film production is d u e not only the poverty of film fantasy, but the almost total absence of the film of imagination. T h e film of imagination—the film as a work of art ranking with great d r a m a , great literature, a n d great painting—will not come until the poet enters the studio. I know w h a t is immediately advanced against that idea— the necessity of working in the strict terms of a new m e d i u m , exploiting a new technique : the camera is the film artist's muse : down with the literary film a n d so on. About such a point of view I have only two things to say :—firstly, that in every art there is a good deal of cant spoken a b o u t technique. Most techniques can be learnt in a few days, a t the most in a year or two. But no a m o u n t of technical efficiency will create a work of art in any m e d i u m if the creative or imaginative genius is lacking. Naturally the technique must appeal to the sensibility of the poet : he must love his m e d i u m a n d work in it with enthusiasm : but the vision necessary to create not merely the means, but the e n d — t h a t is a gift of providence a n d we call that gift poetic genius. Secondly, those people w h o deny t h a t there can be a n y connection between the scenario a n d literature seem to m e to have a wrong conception, not so m u c h of the film as of literature. Literature they seem to regard as something 230

The Poet and the Film polite and academic, in other words, as something godforsaken and superannuated, compounded of correct grammar and high-sounding Ciceronian phrases. Such a conception reveals the feebleness of their sensibility. If I were asked to give the most distinctive quality of good writing, I should express it in this one word : VISUAL. Reduce the art of writing to its fundamentals and you come to this single aim : to convey images by means of words. But to convey images. To make the mind see. To project on to that inner screen of the brain a moving picture of objects and events, events and objects moving towards a balance and reconciliation of a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order. That is a definition of good literature—of the achievement of every good poet —from Homer and Shakespeare to James Joyce or Henry Miller. It is also a definition of the ideal film.

47.

The Message of Ruskin

T H E R E is a well-established type of writer to whom we give the name " essayist "—in England it includes Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, and the essay as a literary form, though it is free and adaptable, is fairly clearly defined. But I would hesitate to call Ruskin an essayist. An essayist is generally something of a dilettante—a man who may, indeed, be inspired, but who is always rather short of breath. That description does not fit Ruskin's fire and fury—the sustained flight of his rhetoric and imagination. Ruskin reminds us rather of one of the prophets of the Old Testament, of an Indian seer or a Chinese sage, or of one of the great English preachers, Jeremy Taylor, or Richard Hooker : he himself preferred the title of Teacher. But nevertheless Ruskin was a creative writer in the same sense as Shakespeare or Milton 231

A Goat of Many Colours or Wordsworth or any other master of English literature. His creative use of language is sufficient proof of that—in my opinion there is no English writer who has written such magnificent prose. But that is not all—Ruskin would not rank as one of the major figures in our literature if he was merely the author of a number of purple passages. Ruskin is great for what he writes no less than for how he writes. The conclusion we must come to, I would like to suggest, is that with Ruskin, as to some extent also with his contemporary Carlyle, criticism is for the first time raised to the rank of an independent art. Naturally there were critics before this time—Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge—but with them criticism was either ancillary to their creative work (as it were, a clearing of the ground), or it was a very prosaic and logical activity in no way comparable to the imaginative art of the poet or the dramatist. It was the distinction of Ruskin in England, as of the very comparable figure of Nietzsche in Germany, to raise criticism to the creative level. Now, one might speculate at some length on this new development in literature, for it is undoubtedly a phenomenon which has its explanation in the peculiar character of modern civilization. That civilization, we might say, has reached a point of spiritual disintegration at which the poet can no longer confidently create—no longer build on foundations which he feels are secure. So he becomes prophet : he becomes preacher. It has been the fashion to call such writers as Ruskin and Nietzsche " frustrated poets ". But who, of their time or since their time, has not been in some sense frustrated ? Tennyson and Arnold, Browning and Hardy—the work of all these poets is in some measure disturbed and distorted by the prevailing uneasiness of the age. One of the best, and certainly one of the best-known of Ruskin's books, Sesame and Lilies, is essentially an analysis 232

The Message of Ruskin of this problem—the problem of the relation of art to the prevailing ethos, or spiritual atmosphere. Sesame and Lilies was originally delivered as lectures in the year 1864, and when published in book form the following year became Ruskin's first popular success. It has been said that this success was due to the supposed suitability of the book as a prize for young ladies leaving school, and it does indeed contain some very good advice for such young ladies. But we do not need to look beyond the book's inherent eloquence and general aptness for an explanation. A particularly big nail was protruding into the public conscience, and Ruskin hit it squarely and forcibly on the head. He had seen coming into vogue what he called a mass of realistic, or materialistic, literature and art, founded mainly on the theory of nobody's having any will, or needing any master : much of it extremely clever, irresistibly amusing, and enticingly pathetic : but which is nevertheless the mere whirr and dust-cloud of a dissolutely reforming and vulgarly manufacturing age. Against this tendency Ruskin was passionately anxious to affirm that " there is such a thing as essential good, and essential evil, in books, in art, and in character " ; and that " this essential goodness and badness are independent of epochs, fashions, opinions and revolutions ". Ruskin also stated that his book " was written while his energies were still unbroken and his temper unfettered " : and that together with Unto this Last it contained the chief truths he had endeavoured through all his past life to display. Unto this Last is concerned chiefly with his economic doctrines, and we may therefore regard Sesame and Lilies as his aesthetic testament, the essence of his teaching on art. Perhaps because he had already written so much on the plastic arts—so much, let me interject, that is still worth reading—perhaps for this reason Ruskin concentrates in this book on the art of writing. He begins by asking why 233

A Goat of Many Colours a book is written and published, and arrives at the conclusion that it is not with a view of mere communication, but of permanence. The author desires, not merely to multiply his voice, or convey it, but to perpetuate it. The author [says Ruskin] has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet said it : so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may : clearly, at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him :—this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down for ever : engrave it on rock, if he could ; saying, " This is the best of me ; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another : my life was as the vapour, and is not : but this I saw and knew : this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory." That is his " writing " : it is, in his small way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a " Book ". This interpretation of a man's book as his personal scripture, his small and perhaps insignificant but nevertheless inspired Bible, is entirely characteristic of Ruskin. It explains why he then goes on to insist on the importance of words. " I tell you earnestly and authoritatively, (I know I am right in this,) you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable—nay, letter by letter ", and he suggests that it is no mere accident that the study of books is called literature, and a man versed in literature a man of letters rather than a man of books, or of words. All he says of the study of words, the love of words, the hierarchy of words, is excellent, but now I have only the desire to repeat his warning against the false use of words, because it is so appropriate for the circumstances of our own time. 234

The Message of Ruskin There are masked words droning and skulking about us in Europe just now [he writes], there are masked words abroad which nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this or that, or the other, of things dear to them : for such words wear chamad eon cloaks—" ground-lion " cloaks, of the colour of the ground of any man's fancy : on that ground they lie and wait, and rend him with a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words : they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas : whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of for him : the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him—you cannot get at him but by its ministry. I can only, in this short essay, emphasize a few of the more significant truths which are packed into this little book. I must pass over the acute analysis of a passage from Milton's Lycidas—it is one of the high points of English literary criticism : I must pass over his beautiful defence of the indecisiveness of the great poets—the fact that the most they can do is " to mix the music with our thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly doubts ". But I must insist on Ruskin's defence of what he calls passion or sensation, for it is the key to his whole philosophy of art, and of life. It is essentially the same doctrine as that expressed by Keats in a famous letter which must have been familiar to Ruskin. In Ruskin's words : " The ennobling difference between one man and another,—between one animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another. . . . We are only human in so far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion to our passion." The truth of this statement is perhaps best seen by expressing it negatively, which Ruskin proceeds to do. The absence of sensation is simply vulgarity. 235

A Goat of Many Colours Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind : but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar : they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy—of quick understanding,—of all that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called the " tact " or " touch-faculty ", of body and soul : that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures ; fineness and fullness of sensation, beyond reason :—the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true :—it is the God-given passion of humanity which alon® can recognize what God has made good. Ruskin adds to this fiery declaration of faith the corollary that true passion is disciplined and tested passion, but it is precisely this control of passion or sensation which is the proper function of art, making it so relevant to the fundamental needs of life. I do not want to disguise the fact that Ruskin was first and foremost a moralist, and that he tended to make statements subordinating art and everything else to ethics. H e is never tired of telling us that no great art was ever created by a bad man, and if we have a conventional view of badness or immorality, such statements may seem obviously untrue. But Ruskin's idea of good and evil was not conventional : it was intimately linked up with this doctrine of sensation. T h e goodness of a man is a question of his sensibility ; it is the goodness of his heart, not of his brain. When Ruskin defines the qualities of a great man, as he does in the case of Sir Walter Scott, these qualities—humility, absence of affectation, ease of expression, simplicity of vision—these are all sensitive qualities, even nervous qualities. They have 236

Etruscan Art nothing to do with codes of morality or systems of dogma. " Mighty of heart, mighty of mind—magnanimous—to be this, is indeed to be great in life, to * advance in life ',—in life itself—not in the trappings of it. . . . He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace."

48. Etruscan Art ETRUSCAN art, like early Hellenic art, early Gothic art, negro art and primitive art generally, is one of those phases of art which have soared in public estimation during the last twenty or thirty years. This revolution in opinion has been the work of painters, poets and critics rather than of professional archaeologists and classicists. There are still scholars for whom Etruscan sculpture is " inglorious ", " vulgar ", " superficial ", " brutalized "—expressions of contempt whose very strength betrays an irrational prejudice. That prejudice is in favour of naturalism, of Hellenic realism, of Hellenic idealism, but whatever its nature it is very general and has led, not only to an extraordinary and unscientific distortion of the history of art, but also to a complete inability to understand (and even to translate) those classical theories of art, such as Plato's, which were free from this prejudice. But that is another story. D. H. Lawrence called Etruscan art the supreme art of all times and all nations. The statement is no doubt considered as a wilful exaggeration by all those scholars and critics who value a reputation for objectivity, but I think it needs very little amendment to be acceptable. Etruscan art undoubtedly belongs to the most supreme type of art of all times and nations. Like Oriental art and Gothic art, it is what is perhaps best described as a trans237

A Coat of Many Colours cendental art. This is admittedly a dangerous term, with all kinds of theological and philosophical implications ; but its simple meaning is that ideas exist which are superior to, and not deduced from, ordinary human experience or ascertainable fact ; and a transcendental art is an art which attempts to express such ideas rather than to imitate natural appearances. It is not implied that there is a complete division between idea and fact ; indeed, there is an intimate relationship, and nature itself is the imitation or representation of an Idea. Art and nature are therefore analogous : they are both representations of ideas, and we can best learn how to represent an idea by observing the operations of nature. " Art is the imitation of Nature in her manner of operation ", is the way St. Thomas Aquinas describes it ; and it is implied that art is not the imitation of nature in her manner of appearance. Once this important distinction is grasped, we have the key to the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational art, between realistic and transcendental art, between Roman and Etruscan art. It will be seen that it is more than a difference in degree ; it is a fundamental difference in kind, and once it is realized in all its implications I do not think anyone can fail to recognize that it is a difference in value. One can, of course, deny all spiritual values, and reduce man to a clever animal. It is conceivable that a clever monkey might reproduce the appearance of a natural object in paint or clay. But a clever monkey would never be able to express an idea for which there is no natural or inevitable prototype. W e have very little direct knowledge of the Etruscans. W e do not know for certain where they came from, or with what races they mixed ; we cannot interpret their inscriptions, and their literature, like their wooden architecture, has almost totally disappeared. But we know from the remnants of their art which we do still possess that they 238

Walter de la Mare were a race of almost terrifying vitality—what is more terrifying in European art than the Chimaera from Arezzo in the Museum at Florence ? We also recognize in this same art the presence of supernatural or superreal qualities which express a mystical rather than a rationalistic attitude towards life. These qualities, strong and unequivocal in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., gradually weaken and disappear as the race loses its social and economic cohesion and integrity—they merge into the cosmopolitan idealism of the Graeco-Roman world. Into that melting-pot, and its modern equivalents, most of the integrity and clarity of human art has disappeared.

49.

Walter de la Mare

W A L T E R DE LA MARE survives from a pre-war world— his most famous and most characteristic volumes were published in 1912 {The Listeners) and 1913 {Peacock Pie). Who else has survived from this period : from the generation that was formed in the 'nineties or earlier, and came to maturity before 1914? Abercrombie and Binyon do not seem to me to enter into the question ; Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke were in some sense formed by the war—their best poetry is of the war epoch ; Yeats survives as a reconstituted post-war poet. The early Yeats might yield some fruitful comparisons ; the author of A Child's Garden of Verses some immaterial ones : but for the true measure of our poet we must go back to one who is at first sight and superficially so different—to Thomas Hardy. De la Mare, like Hardy, belongs to and is the greatest living representative of that specifically English tradition, which is neither Celtic nor Symbolist, but something as autochthonous as the fools and fairies of Shakespeare. But already, perhaps, a distinction can be made—one 239

A Coat of Many Colours which brings De la Mare more into line with Shakespeare than with Hardy. Hardy, like Yeats—like so many of the best modern poets—is a regionalist : his work springs from a specific soil. But I defy anyone to deduce from De la Mare's poetry that he was born in Kent and spent his youth in London. His world is quite literally a dream world : it has no local habitation. I cannot see that this is necessarily a failing : I am all in favour, politically speaking, of devolution, regionalism and the parish-pump, but I think that it is highly civilized to think, and write, universally. For this does not necessarily imply a lack of that most essential poetic quality, precision. De la Mare has more precision, both of image and expression, than Yeats : in this respect, if in no other, he is the peer of Hardy. Technically speaking, indeed, he has delicacies and nuances beyond the reach of Hardy's crisp but coarse homespun. Hardy never wrote anything so magical as the " Epitaph " (" Here lies a most beautiful lady . . .") nor was he capable of the authentic ballad thrill which we get in The Listeners. Both poets indulge in archaicisms which are odd and ungracious to the modern ear—oh's and lo's, unnecessary inversions and, worst of all, the word italicized for an emphasis the rhythm should have conveyed : syntax is often outraged for the sake of a rhyme. Both poets have preserved too many trivia ; they make most effect in selected volumes, though more than one selection is possible—indeed, both poets seem to invite us to make our own selection. For a generation so selfconsciously technical as the one between the wars these have been portentously exaggerated flaws. They don't seem to matter so much now : the patina of time has crept over them, leaving the form homogeneous. The comparison with Hardy will reveal a difference of more serious significance. Both poets are what we call 240

Walter de la Mare objective : they keep their eyes on the object. Both poets are apt to moralize—Hardy habitually. But how differently ! The poems are often so parallel in theme and composition that the experiment of confronting them becomes " exact "—and exacting. Let us take the concluding verse of Hardy 's " Darkling Thrush " : So little cause for carollings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. In De la Mare's poem, " The Riddlers ", a blackbird asks the nightingale why, when all other birds are at rest, he delights " to make music for sorrow's sake ", and after giving the nightingale's reply, the poet muses thus : Thus, then, these two small birds, perched there, Breathed a strange riddle both did share Yet neither could expound. And we—who sing but as we can, In the small knowledge of a man— Have we an answer found ? Nay, some are happy whose delight Is hid even in themselves from sight ; And some win peace who spend The skill of words to sweeten despair Of finding consolation where Life has but one dark end ; Who, in rapt solitude, tell o'er A tale as lovely as forelore, Into the midnight air. There is in both poems the same depreciation of human knowledge as against animal faith : but whereas in De la Mare we have merely the statement of a paradox (consolation in despair), in Hardy we have a suggestion oftrans241

A Goat of Many Colours cendentalism, a distinctly metaphysical concept of H o p e emerging from the bleak wintry landscape a n d thejin-de-siècle pessimism (the p o e m was written in December, 1900). T o those who think of D e la M a r e as a poet of childhood a n d fairyland, of ghosts a n d goblins, this m a y seem to be pressing an unfair point ; b u t actually the a m o u n t of would-be philosophical a n d meditative verse in the Collected Poems is considerable 1 it is summarized in a long concluding p o e m entitled " Dreams ", whose concluding stanzas give the substance of this insubstantial system of thought : Starven with cares, like tares in wheat, Wildered with knowledge, chilled with doubt, T h e timeless self in vain must beat Against its walls to hasten out Whither the living waters fount ; And—evil a n d good n o m o r e at strife— Seek love beneath the tree of life. W h e n then in memory I look back T o childhood's visioned hours I see W h a t now m y anxious soul doth lack Is energy in peace to be At one with nature's mystery : A n d Conscience less m y mind indicts For idle days t h a n dreamless nights. T h e visionary innocence of childhood a n d the timeless reality of dreams—these are the two values which M r . De la M a r e has affirmed, not only in his poems, b u t in his more polemical prose works. T h e y are the values affirmed by an earlier English poet—William Blake ; b u t D e la M a r e is curiously unlike Blake, simply because he is not in any strict sense a mystic. For the poet nearest in spirit as in form we must go farther back—to the seventeenth century a n d to R o b e r t Herrick, a poet we often quote b u t d o not sufficiently consider. W i t h some allowance for period changes, the furniture of these two minds is almost identical. 242

Walter de la Mare Now it happens that Herrick has left us, in a short poem in his Hespérides, a precise inventory of his subjects : I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers : Of April, May, of June, and Jw/y-flowers I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes, Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes. I write of Youth, of Love, and have Acesse By these, to sing of cleanly Wantonnesse ; I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece, Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Ambergreece. I sing of Times trans-shifting ; and I write How Roses first came Red, and Lillies White. I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing The Court of Mab, and of the Faerie-King. I write of Hell ; I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. Walter De la Mare could not write a similar catalogue of his own themes without repeating all but two of these items. The omissions would be significant. There is no wantonness in De la Mare's poetry, cleanly or otherwise : his work is almost completely devoid of eroticism. Even when he treats an erotic theme at second hand, as in his poems on Imogen and Ophelia, the heart is sterilized, the image cold and glassy. The other missing theme is the last named by Herrick. There is a Hell in De la Mare's poetry, if only the hell of lost innocence, of ruined minds and haunted places : that sense of terror-in-beauty so well expressed in " The Children of Stare ". But though the poet can write of " the awful breath of God ", he has been too infected with Hardy's pessimism to sing of Heaven, and to hope to have it after all. In a poem on Thomas, Hardy he writes : " O Master ", I cried in my heart, " lorn thy tidings, grievous thy song ; Yet thine, too, this solacing music, as we earthfolk stumble along." 243

A Coat of Many Colours Earthfolk, without any expectation of heaven—in expressing this state of unbelief De la Mare has been true to the mental climate of his own age. That age, we can claim without self-pity (especially on the threshold of another age) is not one in which poets have found much spiritual sustenance : and if they have been called upon to supply that spirituality, it has not always been to the benefit of their poetry—Hardy is a sufficient illustration of that fact. Oliver Elton once wrote of Herrick : " A stormy age is incomplete without at least one artist who sits by himself and cares only for his craft." It is a thought which in our time we may reserve for Walter de la Mare.

50. Jean Hélion I T is generally assumed that Cubism is dead ; and if by Cubism we mean that phase of modern painting which aimed at resolving the apparent surfaces of objects into a formal system of planes and angles, that is no doubt true. Art can never survive if it is limited to a formula : it must consistently develop and its continuity is, at least by analogy, organic. But Cubism did not end in a formula : it grew into the wider movement of non-representational art which includes Cubism but which has become something profounder, something more fundamentally revolutionary. Cubism was a beginning and not an end—a revelation of unsuspected potentialities in an age of decadence and disintegration. In the later stages of that development Jean Hélion has played a significant part. He is still a young painter, but from the beginning of his career his work has shown an intellectual coherence which makes him already seem one

244

Jean Hélion of the most mature leaders of the modern movement in the direct line of descent from Cézanne, Seurat, Gris and Léger. His particular preoccupation has been to carry Cubism from the static condition which was the inevitable result of its analytical approach to nature, forward to a dynamic condition, which condition still retains the essential features of the discoveries made by Picasso, Kandinsky, Gris and Léger. Whilst retaining, that is to say, the intellectual clarity of abstract design, Hélion wishes to make that design once more an affair of movement, a dramatic action within a three-dimensional world. To do this he has increased the complexity of his compositions, controlling more and more individual forms and specific colours within a unity of design, but never losing the clarity due to an intellectual control of that design. The increase of individual forms has implied, pari passu, an increase in the organization of colour harmony ; hard scientific research into the possibilities of colour ; realization of these researches in the potentialities of composition. Complexity is gained, but without any clogging of the vision. For the forms, once realized in relation to the colours and the pitch of the colours, must then move» They move, as colours, by the balance and ordered recession of their pitch : blue sinking, red rising, yellow spreading (process of halation) ; subtleties of shift and emphasis beyond verbal description. With these elements, mass can be made to move, as it moves in baroque architecture. As baroque is to classical architecture (dynamic to static), so is Hélion to the classical cubism of Juan Gris. It is significant that Hélion is fascinated, among painters of the past, by Poussin. Where will this development lead to ? (We must ask such a question because Hélion is a painter in transition— 245

A Goat of Many Colours his solution not found, his style not established.) Hélion himself does not know, but he is not afraid of the future—he would, in fact, welcome a way back to social integration, to a functional art of some kind. But such a development will never come about by a concession on the painter's p a r t ; it can only come through the inherent development of his strictly aesthetic ideals. It is for society to catch u p with the artist—not vice versa. A n d such has always been the rule. T h e great artists of the past never p u t a brake on their development so that " the people " could catch u p . Art is conditioned by the highest intellectual understanding of a period ; or is inferior a n d decadent. Even when art was most socialized a n d " integrated " , the actual business of patronage was still in the hands of a n exclusive clique of connoisseurs—the higher ranks of the priesthood in t h e Middle Ages, for example. T h e people accepted the art that was imposed on t h e m ; we have absolutely no evidence that they understood it or appreciated it—especially no evidence that they appreciated it for the aesthetic values which constitute its title to be called art. Art is socially functional, but it has always functioned through the intellectual élite of a n y period. A n y other view would compel us to reverse our values, a n d to exalt peasant art above the art of the élite. Admittedly the élite themselves are a function of the sociological process of history. A n d admittedly the proletariat of to-day is the élite of to-morrow. These general reflections are not remote from the a r t of Hélion, for we, the critics a n d apologists of the modern movement, are increasingly impelled to justify the social relevance of such art. Society to-day is disunited ; there is no accepted mythology on which the artist can rely for a m e d i u m of communication. T h e élite, in this decaying stage of capitalism, feels insecure, is without intellectual confidence, a n d therefore aimlessly dilettante. W e live, it is only too obvious, in a n age of transition. 246

Jean Hélion What can the artist do in such an age—an age of transition which is going to outlast his own lifetime ? If he refuses to be a mere time-server, he can only withdraw upon himself, creating his own world, his own public—a happy few who will appreciate the aesthetic values which he embodies in his abstractions and fantasies. That dilemma, for an artist like Hélion, is inevitable. In the present spiritual and economic condition of Europe, there should be no question of the choice to be made. The values of this age, in so far as they are social values, are not spiritual values. They are values of wealth, comfort, amusement, excitement, sexual stimulation, and what might be generically called dope—modes of escape from the horror of a materialistic world. There are no other values which can in any sense of the words be called both social and spiritual. There is no spiritual integrity in our life, and no artist of any worth will put his skill and sensibility at the service of any less worthy cause. An artist will serve either the light within him, or the light of humanity embodied in a superhuman conception of reality. But there is no superhuman conception of reality which is valid in the modern world, and therefore an artist like Hélion must remain true to the only reality of which he has knowledge—the subjective reality of his own vision. With this vision he interprets the world and his art remains relatively limited and individual. But so long as the artist is honest, his vision will have more than a personal value. For we all, in our baffled way, are compelled to construct a personal vision, but few of us can find a mode of realizing our intimations in an objective fashion. We rely, therefore, on those rare individuals whose sensibility is geared to materials—to colours, metals, stones, sounds and words— and who can by virtue of that faculty convert their visions into works of art : objects in which we may see the form, if not the substance, of reality. 247

A Coat of Many Colours 51.

Kierkegaard

KIERKEGAARD, like Marx, is a product by reaction of Hegel. Hegel had at least this virtue : he left behind him a progeny, not of slavish disciples, but of active intelligences, and among these Kierkegaard and Marx represent the widest possible extremes of thought. For whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instrument inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action. T o what extent either Kierkegaard or Marx rightly interpreted Hegel is only an academic question ; but for the extremist—and every philosopher or lover of the truth is an extremist—they represent the only possible alternatives to-day. The significance of Marx is evident enough, and becomes more evident with the progress of economic affairs ; the significance of Kiekegaard is recognized abroad, by Protestant theologians like Barth, and, at first sight more surprisingly, by Catholic theologians. His chief advocate and best translator in Germany, Theodor Haecker, is a Catholic ; and most of the people in this country who take any serious interest in him are Catholics. But Kierkegaard himself was never a Catholic ; he was a son of Lutheran parents and intended for the Lutheran ministry, but he spent his intense life, not in hovering between one sect and another, but in a vain struggle to reconcile himself to Christianity itself. It is because in this struggle he revealed the inner meaning and consequences of the Christian faith more clearly and more acutely than any mystic since Pascal that he exercises 248

Kierkegaard such an attraction for Christians to-day. It is open to them, of course, to say that Kierkegaard was never vouchsafed the final grace which would have perfected his faith ; but the fact remains that only a very few mystics like Meister Eckhart and Pascal have written so illuminatingly on the Christian Mysteries. It would be a mistake, however, to give the impression that Kierkegaard is only concerned with Christianity ; his range is much wider. He was, in fact, an individual in conflict with all the tendencies—philosophical, political and cultural—of his time. He refused, that is to say, to keep his religion in a separate compartment of his mind, but the more he realized the implications of that religion, the more he found it impossible to reconcile himself with the tendencies of his time—which are still the tendencies of our time. He was, in short, the complete personalist, in the sense in which Berdyaev to-day uses the term. Truth, he would say, is in the person believing and not in the proposition believed. This principle of the subjectivity of truth he carried into every sphere of knowledge—into ethics and aesthetics, for example. It is in the latter sphere that I personally find him so illuminating, his doctrine of Innerlichkeit being of the essence of any real understanding of poetic creation. I have called Kierkegaard a mystic, but that is one of the points in dispute. In so far as the word implies a being of a rare and superior kind, Kierkegaard would have rejected it. But there is no doubt that some of his experiences, as recorded in his Journals and other writings, imply a direct or " inspired " relationship with God which we should normally describe as mystical. But Kierkegaard was also a dialectician, trained in the logic of Hegel ; with the result that he is in no sense naïve or simple. He is, indeed, one of the subtlest thinkers that ever lived, and though many of his readers go to him for a confirmation 249

1

A Goat of Many Colours or elaboration of their Christian faith, he is quite capable of attracting others by the quality rather than the content of his thought. Kierkegaard was the son of a well-to-do Danish merchant, and during his life was never under the necessity of earning a living. His father was excessively severe and gloomy, a fanatic labouring under a sense of guilt and remorse. Kierkegaard many times deplores his early upbringing, and utters warnings which still have their force—for example : If the child is not allowed, as he should be, to play innocently with holy things, if his existence is sternly forced into the decisive Christian concepts, such a child will have to suffer much. Such an upbringing will either, by inhibiting immediacy, result in despondency and anguished dread, or else incite the lusts of pleasure and the anguish of lust in a measure which even paganism did not know. This describes Kierkegaard's own case. His first reaction was towards the lusts of pleasure, but then, after one of the mystical experiences referred to, he returned to a condition of dread and anguish, out of which he slowly built up his spiritual faith. He elaborated his famous dilemma, his " either—or "—either the aesthetic life or the ethical. H e came to the conclusion that the aesthetic life— " living in the moment ", as he called it—always entailed despair. He insisted that the choice is not to be avoided— that if we do not make it, as an act of freedom, the choice will be made for us, by obscure movements in our unconscious or impersonal self. O n the inevitability of that dilemma the whole of Kierkegaard's philosophy depends. Personally I do not believe that the choice is free. In Kierkegaard's own case it was so obviously conditioned by the circumstances of his childhood, by his physical disease and his depressive melancholia. His philosophy, beautiful in its intricacy and depth, sensitive to all the poetic and 250

Kierkegaard tragic aspects of life, is but a sublimation of this inherent suffering. But Kierkegaard was driven too far by his masochism. The story of his treatment of Regina Olsen— the young girl to whom he made love and to whom he became engaged, only to break off the engagement from " ethical " scruples—merely reveals to what fantastic heights (admittedly heights) the aberrations of the human spirit can reach. That in the end they lead to " the religious absolute " can scarcely justify the wanton sacrifice of another person's feelings. Kierkegaard's own comment (one of many Î) was : " Either you throw yourself into wild diversions or religiousness absolute, of a different sort from that of the parsons." The qualification is significant. Kierkegaard's intense subjectivity, the very sincerity of his religious experiences, led him in the end into a bitter conflict with the organized Church. He had escaped one dilemma only to discover another : either Christ or the Church. Kierkegaard is a new world of thought, a rare mental atmosphere in which we live dangerously, as many people have already discovered at the cost of their complacency. No book of his illustrates this truth better than Stages on Life's Way, a " passion narrative " in the form of a long diary which is an intimate relation, stage by stage, of Kierkegaard's own love story. This diary is preceded by " In Vino Veritas ", an account of a banquet in the manner of Plato's Symposium and not unworthy of comparison with that supreme masterpiece : and by " Various Observations about Marriage ", a document in which a certain Judge Williams answers the objections which had been voiced at the Banquet. The Banquet is in effect a plea for keeping the sexual relationship on a superficial or sensuous level : woman is represented as the most seductive power in heaven and on earth, but man must not be caught by the bait. " The highest thing a woman can do for a man is to come 251

A Goat of Many Colours within his range of vision at the right instant—but that, after all, she cannot do, it is the kindness of fate—but then comes the greatest thing she can do for a man, and that is, to be unfaithful to him, the sooner the better." That is to say, from this point of view it is only in a negative relationship that woman makes a man idealistically productive. Judge Williams presents a very different point of view : his " Observations " constitute, indeed, the most beautiful and profound defence of conjugal felicity ever written—and as Coventry Patmore once pointed out, this theme is of all great themes the most difficult and the most neglected. Marriage is the confirmation of love by resolution, rather, its transformation. " Love's gait is light as the feet which dance upon the meadow, but resolution holds the tired one till the dance begins again." It is only against this profound appreciation of the " validity " of marriage that we can measure the tragic significance of Kierkegaard's own renunciation. For just as the ethical stage represented by the Judge is far beyond the erotic stage represented by the speakers at the Banquet, so beyond the ethical stage is the religious, towards which Kierkegaard was driven by a kind of demoniacal fury. He was fond of comparing himself with Periander, of whom it was said that he talked like a wise man and acted like a maniac. But it is perhaps more to the point to compare him with Abelard, whose " case " fascinated him, but about whom he never ventured to write at length. Kierkegaard was an Abelard—that is to say, a man dedicated to God—who resisted the temptation of his Héloïse. The accident that he was not a priest only made it more difficult to justify his action in breaking off his engagement, especially as his Regina was a comparatively simple girl without that sense of religious immediacy which alone would explain such inhuman conduct. There can be no doubt of the reality of Kierkegaard's love for Regina—the " Diary " is the revelation 252

Kierkegaard of a tortured and divided mind, and in the subtlety of its introspection and analysis it reminds us of Proust. Granted the book is too long and too boring, written with that dialectical prolixity for which Hegel must be held responsible : nevertheless, it is of absorbing interest, not only for its diagnosis of the sexual relationship—its main theme—but also for its abundant asides, for the observations on nature and metaphysics, on poetry and music, on human suffering and human joy, which are to be found on almost every page. To begin reading Kierkegaard is to embark on a long journey, a journey which will be difficult and dangerous, but with such a reward at the end that all the incidental pain will be immediately forgotten. The Unscientific Postscript is but one more voluminous commentary on the main theme of all Kierkegaard's work, the dilemma which he represented by the phrase " eitheror " : either aesthetic immediacy, which includes not only the eudaemonistic search for pleasure, but also despair (the " sickness unto death ") and religious or metaphysical self-explanation ; or the ethical along with the religion oi immanence and immediacy and (as its culmination) Christianity apprehended as a paradox. In the Postscrip Kierkegaard is chiefly concerned to define the nature of the religious alternative : to make it clear to his readers that it is not a choice between the aesthetic life and any sort of religion, but between true religion and every other possible alternative. And true religion is distinguished by its immediacy, without which it cannot live. Immediacy is opposed to reflection : it is direct apprehension, either by the senses or by intuition, and it is the only means by which we can apprehend " being ". " Subjectivity is the truth ", and it is upon this basis that Christianity must be interpreted and believed. The Unscientific Postscript is an obscure and ungainly book, yet it has had an incalculable influence upon the develop253

A Coat of Many Colours ment of modern theology, and a so-called " existential philosophy " in Germany is largely based on it. When the late Professor Geismar of Copenhagen first read it, his mental excitement was so great that his physician had to forbid him reading anything of Kierkegaard's for a year. Dr. Lowrie, in his Introduction to the English edition, claims that no great work on philosophy or theology, if we except the Dialogues of Plato, has been written with so much wit, with so much art. The wit we must grant : the art we must question, and Kierkegaard himself seems to have disclaimed it. The subjective thinker, he says, has a style of his own ; it is existential, which seems to mean that it has no form. " The subjective thinker does not have the poetic leisure to create in the medium of the imagination, nor does he have time for aesthetically disinterested elaboration." This is rather like making a virtue out of necessity, but it does state a fact which the reader must be prepared for : the nature and form of Kierkegaard's thought and style are not comparable to ordinary scientific exposition or aesthetic creation. You read Kierkegaard as you would swim with a tide : you immerse yourself totally in what is the most extraordinary flood of subjectivity ever poured from a philosophical mind. Kierkegaard began his Journals in 1834, when he was twenty-one. Though nothing is truer than his statement that " everyone is essentially what they are to be when they are ten years old ", it is nevertheless surprising to find with what sureness he has already discovered himself, decided on the nature of his personality and the course of his destiny. What is truth, he asks, but to live for an idea ? In order to lead a complete human life " and not merely one of the understanding " he sees the necessity of basing the development of his thought upon " something which grows together with the deepest roots of my life, through which I am, so to speak, grafted upon the divine ". 254

Kierkegaard It is with joy, and,inwardly strengthened, that I contemplate those great men who have thus found the precious stone, for the sake of which they sell all, even their lives, whether I see them intervene forcefully in life, and without faltering go forward on the path marked out for them, or discover them remote from the highway, absorbed in themselves and in working for their noble aim. And I look with reverence even upon the errors which lie so near by. It is this divine side of man, his inward action which means everything, not a mass of information ; for that will certainly follow and then all that knowledge will not be a chance assemblage, or a succession of details, without system and without a focusing point. I too have certainly looked for such a centre. It is only by realizing that Kierkegaard had set out with this determination to find a centre, to know himself before anything else, and thus to see his way through life, that we can understand the two decisive moments in his career— his refusal of marriage and his break with the official Church. As soon as he had become engaged to Regina Olsen, Kierkegaard realized that he had made a mistake. He thought of many ways out of his predicament, even suicide, but finally decided on self-abasement. He behaved as if he were " subtle, false and treacherous " with the object of killing her love for him. His action caused anger, resentment, bewilderment, and was never properly understood until the publication of his Journals ; but even with the help of his confession, it needs a certain effort of sympathy and perhaps a spiritual affinity to appreciate his motives. " It was a time of terrible suffering : to have to be so cruel and at the same time to love as I did. She fought like a tigress. If I had not believed that God had lodged a veto she would have been victorious." God had lodged a veto—such love of God as Kierkegaard had conceived could not co-exist with the love of a human being. It compelled him to an asceticism as rigorous as that of the 255

A Coat of Many Colours saints ; and indeed, from this moment Kierkegaard's life was in every sense that of a saint. He is perhaps the most real saint of modern times. This same intensity and integrity of spiritual experience inevitably brought him into conflict with the organized Church, or Christendom. His attack only became open and embittered towards the end of his life, and there is some truth in the suggestion that it had its origins as a psychological release from parental repression—from the oppressive fanaticism of a father overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. But the criticism of Christianity runs throughout the Journals, and is not confined to the Church ; we find him, for example, as early as 1835, contrasting the luxuriance of the Christian imagination when it deals with eternal suffering and torment with its poverty when it deals with the happiness of the chosen and the faithful. The Protestant Church of his own country receives the most frequent and the most fatal blows ; but Catholicism is not spared. At the same time, Kierkegaard's arguments can have little appeal to the sceptic or agnostic. Kierkegaard's " true inwardness " is a passion that pierces through all collective forms of religion to " the contemplation of God face to face ". It would be a mistake to give the impression, however, that the Journals are exclusively concerned with Kierkegaard's religious development. Kierkegaard was essentially a poet—a child of the Romantic Movement— and he analyses every aspect of life with profundity, with irony and often with lyrical feeling. His Journals have been compared with the Confessions of St. Augustine, the Pensées of Pascal and the Apologia of Newman ; they have something of the quality of all these great books, and still something more—something nearer to Nietzsche than to anything these other names convey, though Pascal is very near. But of the three spheres into which Kierkegaard divided 256

Kierkegaard existence—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—it is only Nietzsche who rivals him in his understanding of the significance of the aesthetic. In his study of this Danish philosopher, Theodor Haecker emphasizes the fact that Kierkegaard's work is so complex that it is possible for three classes of reader to occupy themselves with it independently of each other : the theologian, the philosopher and the critic. It is possible, however, that Kierkegaard himself would not have approved of such a separation. His criticism of Hegel is fundamental, but nothing in Hegel seemed to him so misleading as that evolutionary or historical distinction between the aesthetic, the religious and the rational faculties. For Kierkegaard the whole man included all three faculties in their full force, and the very object of philosophy was to reconcile them, to unite them in one synthesis. Kierkegaard's work is perhaps best regarded as a protest against the cul-de-sac of objective knowledge. Professor Swenson, to whom we owe a translation of the Philosophical Fragments, says : In his case the entire energy of a great genius of reflection was expended upon the clarification of the realm of the subjective, which is the realm of spirit. There exists at present a school of thinkers whose fundamental principle it is to make a sharp cleavage between what they call " logical " and " emotive " significance, denying to the latter all verifiability, and hence all real truth or error. . . . The Kierkegaardian literature is not so much an argument against this view, which erects into a philosophical principle the vulgar prejudice which identifies the emotional with the structureless and the arbitrary, as it is a demonstration of its falsity through the actual production of a reflectively critical system of evaluations. The dialectics of subjectivity might do as a phrase to describe Kierkegaard's philosophy, but always on the understanding that with such a philosophy he was necessarily, as Haecker brings out so clearly, a realist and not 257

A Coat of Many Colours an idealist. He made a break with European philosophy because he wished to go " from the person over the things to the person, and not from the things over the person to the things ". It was his reflection on the being and essence of the person that brought him to that demonstration of the existence of God with which the Fragments are concerned. It is not possible to explain shortly the particular evidence or experience which Kierkegaard called the Moment or the Absolute Paradox, nor the dialectical method which forced on him the recognition and acceptance of God. It is sufficient to note that Christians of widely different views are united in their praise of the beauty and acceptability of this demonstration. Kierkegaard, more deeply than any other modern philosopher, had pierced to the heart of the Christian mystery. But then ? If we are to accept Kierkegaard's own last works as his final message, it involved an utter condemnation of organized Christianity. " Officialdom is incommensurable with Christianity "—that was his final message, and it is only possible to pretend otherwise by assuming that Kierkegaard's last works represent an almost pathological decline in his powers. Professor Haecker, who is a Catholic, makes that assumption ; Professor Swenson, who might be a Unitarian from the way he quotes Emerson, vigorously protests against it. But Kierkegaard remains, profound, enigmatic, endlessly significant. He himself wrote his own epitaph : " T h e cause he served was Christianity, and his life was from childhood wonderfully adapted to this end. He succeeded in realizing the reflective task of translating Christianity whole and entire into terms of reflection. The purity of his heart was to have had but a single aim."

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Indian Art 52. Indian Art A R T is a language, and though we may at first need the symbols of our written language to initiate us into its secrets, essentially it is a language with its own symbols, and it cannot be properly understood unless we learn to read these symbols directly, with our eyes. No one who has studied medieval Christian imagery is likely to underestimate its complexity or its spiritual significance. But Indian art involves us in a world of thought which is at once more subtle and more consistent. The general student of art may quail a little at the first impact of something so vast and so strange. He has absorbed the art of the Far East, but that had a superficial charm which could be assimilated even if its deeper significance was ignored. But the art of India admits no such compromise. It is firmly based in life—in a very sensuous fullness of life ; but it transcends life. It is never, in our sense of the word, merely naturalistic. The curve of a dancer's body, however appealing in its naturalness and sensual grace, proves to be a pre-ordained posture, of spiritual significance. The art we call humanistic, restricted to the expression of individualistic feelings and concepts, must seem almost meaningless to the Indian artist. For him, what is human is fragmentary, and the perceptions of our senses only touch the surface of reality. Those senses, and all they can express in plastic form and bodily movement, are but the instruments by means of which we can piece together our fragmentary perceptions and so construct a picture of that fuller reality which underlies them. But the greatness and the uniqueness of Indian art lies precisely in the fact that, however purposive and transcendental it may become, it still strives to retain its aesthetic virtue, which is sensuous and personal. The 259

A Coat of Many Colours symbol is everywhere, exuberant and sometimes exasperating, but never intellectual and dead. When art becomes consciously symbolical, as it did in Christian art, and in Indian art, it begins to decay. The trouble about the intelligence is that it is " overweening " ; it considers itself self-sufficient, and assumes that its own instruments of reasoning are effective in communication. But in fact they are not so effective as the instruments of sensation. It is all very well to dismiss sensation as " an animal property " and to exalt knowledge as " distinctly human ", and therefore to conclude that art, " a s a department of the ' higher things of life ', must have much more to do with knowledge than with feeling ". 1 But man is also an animal, and " the higher things of life " have not suddenly intruded into the process of evolution, but have come as a progressive refinement of sensation and feeling. And these faculties still remain the test of reality, in art as in human relations. To accept the view that the purpose of art is " primarily to communicate a gnosis " is to acquiesce in a petrification of life—the supersession of human relations by abstract doctrines. It may be arguable whether human relations need such a stiffening, but there is no doubt that art dies if confined to intellectual purposes. The purpose of art is to communicate, we agree, but not primarily to communicate a gnosis, or any other conceptual entity. The purpose of art is to communicate . . . let us leave it at that. The art is in the power to communicate, and this power depends without any doubt on the vitality of the senses which are used by the artist in the process of giving form to anything—be it a religious symbol or a chair to sit on, a poem or an aeroplane. 1 These expressions come from an essay by Dr. Ananda Coomarasvvamy : " Why Exhibit Works of Art ?

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Architect's Place in a Modern Society 53.

The Architect's Place in a Modern Society

T H E architect has always had a specific place and purpose in society—he has always been the person who has tried to bring order into the otherwise unco-ordinated building activities of the human race. What I think we have to ask to-day is whether the particular circumstances of our period have imposed a special duty on the architect. Behind us is more than a century of architectural chaos. It is partly a chaos that just happened—the débris of the industrial revolution. But it is also to a great extent a chaos made by architects—made by architects without any creative instinct who in their impotency could only turn to the past and imitate any style that pleased their momentary fancy. The past is not to be despised, and a great new style has sometimes been formed by an intelligent study and adaptation of a former tradition. But that was only possible so long as the needs of society remained more or less constant. The fifteenth century A.D. could imitate the fifth century B.C. because the intervening two thousand years had not changed the economic basis of society in any fundamental sense. Men were still living in small cities and dependent on handicraft. But the inventions of the last two centuries have completely changed the mode of human existence. About the only feature that has survived is the family, and round this unit the architect can still build a house that need not fundamentally differ from the house of a Greek family, provided that house is in a small town or the country. But everything else has changed. Power and transport have revolutionized industry ; new and more efficient materials have been invented, and new methods of building free the architect from old restrictions. The architect of to-day is therefore 261

A Goat of Many Colours faced with a totally new problem. H e has new materials a n d new power, a n d with these he has to create a new style, not merely as an aesthetic fancy, b u t as a practical necessity. I do not, of course, imply that the aesthetic element is unnecessary, or can be postponed. O n the contrary, a style is not a style until it has its beauty. But the beauty is born of the necessity ; it is not an arbitrary choice ; it is rather the exact solution of a problem. W h e n the problem is solved, then the architect m a y begin to express his free-will or his personality. A work of art, like an individual, is a variation of a natural order : it is never a creation in the void. T h e architect's place a n d purpose in m o d e r n society is nothing less t h a n the discovery of fundamental laws u p o n which a later generation can safely base its diversions.

54. D. H. Lawrence A LITERARY career whose productive period lies between the years 1912 a n d 1930 belongs to a clearly defined generation—specifically known as " the w a r generation " . T h o u g h , as m a n y of his letters show, Lawrence felt the w a r far more acutely t h a n most of the people who actually took p a r t in it, he yet remained curiously unlike those who h a d fought—unlike Wilfred O w e n , for example, a n d unlike his " Arabian " namesake. For the m a i n effect of w a r was to drive the poet to silence, or to a dry laconic utterance. Whereas " volubility " would not be too strong a word to describe Lawrence's flow of expression—a button-holing, nagging prolixity of style which is his most serious fault. So m u c h admitted, we can praise Lawrence with a better conscience. For now we can see that of all his generation Lawrence h a d the greatest genius a n d the most prophetic knowledge. I believe that because of these 262

D. H. Lawrence qualities he has had the greatest influence on the younger generation—an influence which by now has passed far beyond the intellectual circles of London, Cambridge and Oxford and is actually a ferment within the national consciousness, and beyond these shores, in America, France and Germany. Though Lawrence was not the kind of man who is aware either of his masters or his disciples, we can interpret him as the poet-philosopher of a movement which includes, as intellectual counterparts, William James, Bergson and Freud. It is essentially a movement of liberation—liberation from dogma, from static conceptions of life, from unwholesome repressions of instinct. On its positive side, it is not a doctrine which Lawrence preached with any particular regard for consistency or completeness. Perhaps he should not have preached a doctrine at all, for what it all amounts to, in his case, is magnificent self-justification : the self-justification of a poet who knows that poetry is only possible under certain conditions, conditions of the personality and of society, conditions which the whole course of modern civilization has tended to deny. " The imagination ", Lawrence once wrote, " is that form of complete consciousness in which predominates the intuitive awareness of forms, images, the physical awareness." He was generalizing from his own experience ; rightly generalizing, in my opinion. But it was his poetic experience, and the whole question is how, and in what degree, we can pass from poetic experience to what we may call a philosophy of life. " Whatever makes life vivid and delightful is the heavenly bread. And the earthly bread must come as a by-product of the heavenly bread. The vast mass will never understand this. Yet it is the essential truth of Christianity, and of life itself. The few will understand, let them take the responsibility.'' The few who understand are the poets. They alone have the physical 263

A Coat of Many Colours awareness, the tenderness of nerve, the discriminating sensibility. Lawrence had this awareness, in every fibre, and that is the secret of his greatness. But it is the greatness of a poet, and the poet only states ; the rest is deduction, philosophizing, a clouding of the pure vision. Not that the awareness is confined to objective things ; it is equally an awareness of subjective feelings, atmospheres. Nothing is more startling than the dead accuracy of Lawrence's awareness of what was going to happen in Germany, in Europe, years after his death. One aspect of Lawrence tends to be forgotten : the technique of his poetry, which is integral with its quality. In the preface to an American edition of New Poems (1920) he wrote : " One realm we have never conquered : the pure present. One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us : the instant. T h e most superb mystery we have hardly recognized : the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue : free verse." Lawrence wrote much else, in that essay and elsewhere, in defence of free verse. It is inseparable, not only from his attitude to art, but inseparable from his whole philosophy. There seems now to be a tendency to return to deliberation, attitudinizing, the whole bagful of metrical monkey-tricks. Those who partake in this reaction should realize that they have separated themselves entirely from what is essential in Lawrence.

55. Modern Chinese Painting A TRADITION may be good or bad and is not to be valued merely for its age ; but a tradition that has survived the vicissitudes of thirteen centuries is likely to possess some principle of vitality unknown to the short-term policies of 264

Modern Chinese Painting European art. No one is likely to claim that the contemporary school in China can produce paintings to compare with the great masterpieces of the T'ang and Sung epochs ; but contemporary painters like Liu Hai-su and Wang Chi-Chih are literally born to the manner, and without any conscious affectation or sophistication (such as would distinguish a modern English painter who painted in the manner of Giotto) paint freshly and vividly in a tradition whose canons were fixed long before Giotto's time. That tradition is partly technical, partly philosophical. But the philosophical aspect is the primary one, the technical one being fixed because it is best adapted to express the philosophical aim. Of the historical development of Chinese painting it is perhaps sufficient to say that in spite of the great division in Chinese thought between Confucianism and Taoism, Chinese painting was able to maintain its unity. This was due to a certain measure of pantheism common to both philosophies, but more particularly to the early recognition that what mattered in art was not the philosophy so much as the individual interpretation of it. Chinese art is uncompromisingly personal, individualist ; and its great tradition, and the secret of its long survival, is due to this fact. The traditions that die are the impersonal abstractions that have no roots in the self, and in the eternal need of the self to be objectified. Chinese painting is a technique for self-expression ; by keeping to this standard of self-expression, it bases itself on the eternal verities of the human mind and sensibility, which through all the stress of religions and philosophies, remain in direct communication with the physical phenomena of the world. But to the Chinese those phenomena are not disconnected and discordant events ; they are part of a universal harmony ; and the peculiarity of the artist, distinguishing him from other men, is due to his perception of that 265

A Coat of Many Colours universal harmony. observed :

A

modern

Chinese

scholar

has

Without distinction of schools, Chinese painting is concerned with that rhythmic harmony without which life would not be life. It is with this in view that Hsieh H o (second half of the fifth century, A.D.) in his " Six Component Parts of Painting " names Chi yung, Shen tung (literally the combination " rhythmic harmonylife's motion ") the primary condition to be observed. Chinese critics, in spite of differences of opinion and divisions into schools, unite in the belief that the painter must before all else concern himself with this combination of rhythmic harmony and vitality. There is the implication that the painter, in order to express this quality of universal harmony, must in himself acquire a special state of grace, a nobility of spirit or depth of feeling. But one of the great artists of the Ming epoch, Tung Ch'i-ch'ang, said with perhaps obvious truth that no one was likely to gain such a state of grace, even if he read ten thousand books and ranged over ten thousand leagues ; the artist is born, not made. This sense of the harmony of the universe, which is the special possession of the artist, is best expressed, according to Chinese aesthetics, with the most limited means. The Chinese artist does not ask for a variety of colours and textures ; he is content with ink, one colour, in all its infinite tones, and a brush, that most sensitive instrument for registering the sensibility of the individual touch. With that same instrument the Chinese have for centuries written their complicated characters, and to handle a brush is for them as natural as writing with a pen is with us. Chinese painting is literally an extension of their handwriting ; written characters are an integral part of the composition. T o the Chinese connoisseur, there is no division between the " written " and the " painted " parts of a picture ; all are equally an expression of the painter ; 266

Modern Chinese Painting and the painter is a sensitive recorder of the rhythmic harmony of the universe. It follows that the subject of a Chinese painting is of little importance ; it is merely a point of departure, like a key in music ; and one looks in a Chinese painting for qualities analogous to those in music—varieties of stroke and touch correspond to beauty of tone and phrasing. But though the subject is relatively important, Chinese painters have inevitably tended to be above all landscape painters, or painters of natural objects like flowers and trees. For in such objects the rhythm and harmony of life is most freely embodied, is most accessible. In things made by human hand, in the habits and habiliments of men, there is an arbitrary quality, determined by function and intellect, overriding the universal rhythm and harmony. Art must be as free as Nature herself. For these reasons we should approach Chinese art with great humility, recognizing that it is something less trivial than most of our Western preoccupations. It is true that Western art in its great moments is at once transcendental and monumental ; and Chinese art is never monumental. But the monumental tends to be immovable and finally oppressive, and one of the secrets of Chinese art is that in spite of its universality it is always miniature ; a key to the illimitable but never a Colossus.

56.

Walter Bagehot

W A L T E R BAGEHOT is an eminent Victorian whose works, though they belong to a class which seldom survives its own age, show an obstinate vitality. This is partly due to his style, which has none of the deadly pompousness which afflicted so many of his contemporaries ; and partly to his matter, which has retained an interest for a variety of 267

A Coat of Many Colours intelligent readers. Bagehot was such a clear and precise writer that there is no occasion for exegesis. When it is necessary to draw the threads together and state " the ultimate logic and meaning of Bagehot's literary theory ", it seems at first sight to be something rather thin and unexciting : In surveying as a whole Bagehot's theoretical ideas on literature and criticism, one is struck with their coherence. One is surprised that what are for the most part disjointed and occasional remarks, dropped in the course of a criticism, should, at least in broad outline, hang so well together. The basis of this consistency, as of all other consistency in Bagehot, lies ultimately in the concept of the moderate and many-sided man. . . . The best literature should be broad in its contact with life, moral and serious in its thought and tone, noble and restrained in its style, because the moderate and many-sided man, as a reader and critic, prefers such literature, and because, as an author he produces it. 1 This is an American critic's just summary of Bagehot's point of view in literary criticism, but it is just precisely because it recognizes that this concept of the moderate and many-sided man lies at the centre of all Bagehot's thought, that it represents a philosophy which Bagehot applied consistently to all aspects of life. The present circumstances may be regarded as a sufficient excuse for turning to these wider aspects of Bagehot's philosophy, for they have an application to the problems of international politics. As a young man of twenty-six, Bagehot had visited Paris immediately after the coup d'état of 1851, and he wrote for the Inquirer a series of letters which immediately established his literary reputation. These letters, though not entirely consistent, were in effect a defence of the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon and an attack on democracy. But Bagehot, who was always to 1 Walter Bagehot, by William Irvine. !939268

London (Longmans),

Walter Bagehot maintain that politics is a piece of business for which no universal laws were possible, was ready to admit that the fault lay, not with democracy as such, but with its application to a particular people, the French. If you have to deal with a mobile, a clever, a versatile, an intellectual, a dogmatic nation, inevitably, and by necessary consequence, you will have conflicting systems, every man speaking his own words, and always giving his own suffrage to what seems good in his own eyes— many holding to-day what they will regret to-morrow— a crowd of crotchetty theories and a heavy percentage of philosophical nonsense—a great opportunity for subtle stratagem and intriguing selfishness—a miserable division among the friends of tranquillity, and a great power thrown into the hands of those who, though often with the very best intentions, are practically, and in matter of fact, opposed to society and civilization. This is already sufficiently like the criticisms brought against democracy by apologists of the totalitarian state, but Bagehot goes on in almost their very words : And, moreover, besides minor inconveniences and lesser hardships, you will indisputably have periodically— say three or four times in fifty years—a great crisis ; the public mind much excited, the people in the streets swaying to and fro with the breath of every breeze, the discontented ouvriers meeting in a hundred knots, discussing their real sufferings and their imagined grievances, with lean features and angry gesticulations ; the Parliament, all the while in permanence, very ably and eloquently expounding the whole subject, one man proposing this scheme, and another that ; the opposition expecting to oust the Ministers and ride in on the popular commotion ; the Ministers fearing to take the odium of severe or adequate repressive measures, lest they should lose their salary, their places and their majority ; finally, a great crash, a disgusted people, overwhelmed by revolutionary violence, or seeking a precarious, a pernicious, but after all a precious protection from the bayonets of military despotism. 269

A Goat of Many Colours Such a sentence is a very compendious summary of the vices inherent in democratic government ; and many people since Bagehot's day have thought as he did, that a personal dictatorship, however unscrupulous, is much to be preferred. H e was not even then unaware of the disadvantages of dictatorship, and by 1865, in an essay of " Caesarism as it now exists ", he had become sharply critical. H e had seen that the enforced calm of a despotism is opportunist—that it makes no provision for the future, and that by stifling discussion it inhibits progress. Worse still, it involves the corruption of the present. It imposes a greater burden on human nature than human nature will bear ; an Empire, in such circumstances, becomes merely an efficient immorality. Turning to his own country, Bagehot saw that democracy did not entail the same disadvantages as in France, and in seeking for the reason he hit upon a paradox which he was to play with all his life. " I fear you will laugh ", he writes in the third Letter, " when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale ; it is much stupidity." H e then defines this quality : What we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is Nature's favourite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion. It enforces concentration ; people who learn slowly, learn only what they must. The best security for people's doing their duty is, that they should not know anything else to do ; the best security for fixedness of opinion is, that people should be incapable of comprehending what is to be said on the other side. But it must not be supposed that this quality was desirable in the people only ; Bagehot would not have cleverness in 270

Walter Bagehot politics at any level. His ideal statesman was Sir Robert Peel. These youthful notions of Bagehot's are still present in his maturest political writings, notably in Physics and Politics, which he began to write in 1867. This is one of the pioneer works on a subject we now call sociology, and is described in the sub-title as " Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of * Natural Selection ' and ' Inheritance ' to Political Society ". Though it is largely based on the ideas of Darwin and Sir Henry Maine, this book develops several of Bagehot's original ideas, and is still worth reading, especially at the present moment. He no longer uses the paradoxical term " stupidity ", but that first brilliant observation is still latent in his mind. He notes, for example, that " long ages of dreary monotony are the first facts in the history of human communities, but those ages were not lost to mankind, for it was then that was formed the comparatively gentle and guidable thing which we now call human nature ". But the corresponding political virtue is now called " animated moderation ", a certain combination of energy of mind and balance of mind. It is a quality in which the English excel all other nations, and which has enabled them to make a success of democratic government. But to understand the significance of this quality in politics, we must refer very briefly to Bagehot's general theory of social evolution. He distinguishes a preliminary age of isolation, a period of confusion and disorder, during which, in ways which are much clearer to us now than they were to Bagehot, groups and communities came into existence. Within these communities self-protective devices are gradually developed, " the cake of custom ", social discipline and a system of religious sanctions. Natural selection operates through conflict. Civilization begins, because civilization is a military advantage. Law, morality, religion, the arts 271

A Coat of Many Colours and sciences tend to develop because they make for a better war machine. In due course a nation is formed, and then conservatism becomes the aim and principle of its existence. The youthful Bagehot had concluded that despotism was the only safeguard of a mature society, but he now sees that " it tends to keep men in the customary stage of civilization ; its very fitness for that age unfits it for the next. It prevents men from passing into the first age of progress ". A new principle is needed—the principle of variability. If any further progress is to be possible, the intelligence which has hitherto been directed to war must be employed in discussion. The beginning of civilization is marked by an intense legality ; that legality is the very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together ; but that legality—that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke upon all men and all actions—if it goes on, kills out the variability implanted by nature, and makes different men and different ages fac-similes of other men and other ages, as we see them so often. Progress is only possible in those happy cases where the force of legality has gone far enough to bind the nation together, but not far enough to kill out all varieties and destroy nature's perpetual tendency to change. The application of these ideas to the present situation in Europe is obvious enough. T h e one problem which w e could wish Bagehot had discussed is not only our own particular problem, but also one which recurs throughout the history of the world—the co-existence of civilizations at different stages of social development. It is unfortunately not true that the most highly developed society is also the one most skilled in warfare ; at least, it is difficult to carry on an age of discussion in one corner of the world whilst an age of conflict is threatening you from another corner. But Bagehot's final conclusion is heartening : Liberty is the strengthening and developing power— 272

The Triumph of Picasso the light and heat of political nature ; and when some " Caesarism " exhibits as it sometimes will an originality of mind, it is only because it has managed to make its own the products of past free times or neighbouring free countries ; and even that originality is only brief and frail, and after a little while, when tested by a generation or two, in time of need it falls away. In another place in this same book, Physics and Politics, Bagehot has been discussing the military advantage of moral virtue (Carlyle's God-fearing armies) and uses a phrase which describes the mood in which free men will always oppose Caesarism in any shape or form. " That high concentration of steady feeling ", he says, " makes men dare everything and do anything."

57.

The Triumph of Picasso

W E can imagine an actual triumph : the streets adorned with garlands, everyone in carnival dress, shouts of Io triumphe ! At the head of the procession, instead of a senate, we might place the dealers—Messieurs Vollard and Kahnweiler, the brothers Rosenberg, Pierre Colle and Pierre Loeb, Mr. Zwemmer and Mr. Mayor. Instead of the trumpeters would come the critics, led by Monsieur Zervos, the authors of the twenty books on Picasso, the writers of the hundred essays on Picasso. For trophies there would be paintings, statues and models by the thousands of imitators of Picasso. Prominent among the victims destined for sacrifice would be a living representation of Venus, and the prisoners would, of course, include all the members of the Royal Academy and the Académie Française. Picasso's chariot might still be drawn by the traditional four bulls ; laurels would sit well on his head, but instead of a sceptre he would hold a brush in his hand, and his palette would be held by a moneylender to remind 273

A Coat of Many Colours him in the midst of his glory that he was a mortal man. He would be followed by an international army of admirers, and after the feast there would be a bull-fight for Picasso to paint. Picasso is triumphant and prolific. Not content with painting and all the graphic means of expressing himself he turned a few years ago to sculpture ; and more surprisingly, he has ventured into literary expression with a series of poems in Spanish and French. It is not the kind of poetry to be insulted with a few irreverently casual remarks ; I am willing, with André Breton, to believe that it has the same kind of significance as Picasso's painting, presenting, in lyrical images, that same synthesis of the real and the unreal, of the fabulous and the true. Here it is merely to be mentioned as one more manifestation of a genius too violent to be constrained within the categories of one art. Picasso has passed beyond the extremes of any previously-known romanticism ; more and more he has tended to fuse, not only all the elements of plastic expression, but everything material and immaterial—spirit and matter, myth and science, the dream and the reality. After exploiting abstract art, the pure tectonics of form and colour, he moved to the opposite pole and created surrealisjne, a form of art that denies " art ", that seeks only the naked heart, the unknown, the uncreated, the dreaded Minotaur in the dark labyrinth of the unconscious mind. In the whole career of an artist like Picasso there is an avoidance of any fixity of aim, of any rigid adherence to laws and precepts determined by the conscience or the intellect. " Pour mon malheur et pour ma joie peut-être, je place les choses selon mes amours ", he has declared. In other words, he works emotionally, instinctively, and not in accordance with a rational programme. His faith is, that what he creates out of love, and with passion, will be found beautiful—or if that is a tarnished word, acceptable. It is 274

The Triumph of Picasso a dangerous creed, opening the realm of art to all kinds of charlatans, who can claim that their confusion is inspiration, their chaos a unity worthy of our consideration. But I do not know whether more charlatans can shelter under such a doctrine than gather under the classical porticos of academic competence. Mediocrity is no more tolerable for being tidy. In 1936 some of Picasso's sayings were recorded by Christian Zervos in Cahiers d9Art, and one of these reveals, not only the cause of his quarrel with abstract art, but also the clue to the unfailing vitality of all his paintings, even those which seem most abstract : There is no abstract art. We must always begin with something. Afterwards we can remove all appearance of reality ; there is no danger because the idea of the object has left its indelible imprint. It was the object which provoked the artist, excited his ideas, stirred his emotions. Ideals and emotions will be securely imprisoned in his work ; whatever they do, they can't escape from the picture ; they form an integral part of it, even when their presence is no longer discernible. Whether he likes it or not, man is an instrument of nature ; she imposes her character and appearance on him. . . . We cannot contradict nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. It pays us to be on good terms with her. We can allow ourselves some liberties, but only in the details. Perhaps there are some terms in such a statement against which we might enter a logical or philosophical protest— though we must remember that it is only reported conversation that we are considering, not a clause in a manifesto. I always suspect any appeal to " nature "—that Mother, red in tooth and claw, who is invoked to justify most of the crimes of humanity. But Picasso's general meaning is clear. He wishes to warn us against the sterilizing influence of the intellect, which in its search for an ideal perfection sacrifices everything to precision and exactitude and 275

A Coat of Many Colours finds itself left with a static corpse instead of a living organism. The intellectuals might well reply that the perfection they seek is of an absolute and universal nature, and what is absolute and universal may have sacrificed the pulsing actuality of organic life, but only in exchange for a life more beautiful and more enduring. These two ideals would seem to be irreconcilable, and certainly, if we are to compare the latest works of Picasso with the work of an abstract artist like Mondrian, it would seem that modern art has now split into two independent streams and that each will follow its own course henceforth. But actually history does not allow such independence for long ; sooner or later the social and economic conditions within whose framework art, like any other human activity, takes its shape, will bring art into unison. It is possible that the will to abstraction will find an outlet in some less obvious and less doctrinaire way—in architecture, for example. It is possible, too, that Picasso's latest development is prophetic, and that poetry will prove to be the most appropriate medium for the expression of a superrealistic vision. The only alternative is that some synthesis should be found which will reconcile intellectual idealism and emotional superrealism. Picasso himself rarely dispenses with every formal or intellectual element in his pictures ; nor, for that matter, does a superrealist sculptor like Henry Moore ; their most powerful creations are perhaps just those in which the extremes meet in some kind of tension or equilibrium. It is probably too difficult a position for any artist to maintain consistently ; but in art, if we ask for impossible perfection, we are likely to get an Alberti instead of a Leonardo, a Ben Jonson instead of a Shakespeare, an Alma-Tadema instead of a Cézanne— or, more likely still, complete sterility.

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International Situation in Fiction 58.

The International Situation in American Fiction

r ROM the beginning there has been what is vulgarly known as a snag. We speak of " American " literature ; this note deals with the " American " novel. But in what sense American ? In almost every other case,1 when we speak of the literature of a country, we identify that country and its language ; so profound is this sense of identity, that the only stable foundation for political boundaries is based on the linguistic test. But the language of American literature is English, and the question follows ; to what extent can American literature be distinguished from English literature ? Or, to put the question in a more acute form, to what extent can the American writer create an American tradition ? Every great American writer has been conscious of this problem, to a degree not often realized by the English reader. Perhaps, as a general rule, the American is more conscious of his difference. The average Englishman to-day hardly makes any distinction between any of the English-speaking peoples ; they come from vast countries over the seas, they speak his language with an accent which is different, in kind but not in degree, from the accent of a Yorkshireman or a Scotsman, but they are definitely " one of us " as opposed to the Frenchman or the German. No doubt the Englishman makes a serious mistake, but I am sure that this is the general attitude of those who have never been to the United States or any of the Dominions. The American, on the other hand, is very conscious of all manner of differences—differences due to the variety of 1 A parallel situation may be said to exist for Austrian, or Czechoslovakian literature, in so far as it makes use of the German language.

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A Goat of Many Colours climate and custom, to a greater infusion of continental blood, and to the memory, perpetuated in literature and school-books, of bitter political quarrels in the past. As time passes, the first two differences are consolidated ; the third is happily disappearing. But to a representative American novelist of the last century such as Hawthorne, the sense of difference was primarily political. It appears most strongly in his Journals, and in that fascinating but neglected book of his, Our Old Home (first published in 1863). Here is a typical passage from the latter source : An American is not very apt to love the English people, as a whole, on whatever length of acquaintance. I fancy that they would value our regard, and even reciprocate it in their ungracious way, if we could give it to them in spite of all rebuffs ; but they are beset by a curious and inevitable felicity, which compels them, as it were, to keep up what they seem to consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling between themselves and all other nationalities, especially that of America. They will never confess it ; nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to them as their bitter ale. Throughout the records of his English stay, as Henry James noted in his biography of Hawthorne, there appears this constant mistrust and suspicion of the society that surrounded him—" his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness ". Henry James regarded this as the weak side of Hawthorne's character (and showed no trace of the feeling himself) ; but it is important to realize that the first great American novelist wrote with this deliberate national assertiveness. But with what result ? Our Old Home itself, the perfection of an English prose style, is one answer. The style of any of Hawthorne's books is an adequate answer, for that style is always English, the purest English, with the literary traditions of centuries to explain its transplanted bloom. Divorce Hawthorne from his style, and though he 278

International Situation in Fiction still remains a considerable novelist—a creator of character and a describer of scenes on the level, shall we say, of Charlotte Brontë—yet the result, as no dispassionate critic of Hawthorne could fail to admit, is a certain thinness, " subtle and slender and unpretending ", as James put it with his usual felicity. And the moral, added James, " is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion ". It is only fair to add that thirty-five years later, in his Notes of a Son and Brother, James pointed rather a different moral. He had been discussing The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's Roman novel, defending it against the contempt of another American cosmopolitan, suggesting that it was all charged with a tone, a full and rare tone of prose. And the tone had been, in its beauty—for me at least— ever so appreciably American ; which proved to what a use American matter could be put by an American hand : a consummation involving, it appeared, the happiest moral. For the moral was that an American could be an artist, one of the finest, without " going outside " about it, as I liked to say ; quite in fact as if Hawthorne had become one just by being American enough, by the felicity of how the artist in him missed nothing, suspected nothing, that the ambient air didn't affect him as containing. Perhaps the thirty-five years that had elapsed explain the discrepancy in these two " morals " ; the American scene had become denser, richer ; and Henry James, in his long and acute observation of his countrymen and their " situations ", had seen so many more facets, plumbed so many more depths, than in his youth had seemed possible. And meanwhile he himself had become the greatest illustration of our problem. In jumping from Hawthorne to James, I do not think we 279

A Goat of Many Colours unduly simplify the problem we are discussing. Their cases are complex enough to include every shade of the American novelist's dilemma. It is true that there is the case of the complete expatriate of whom H. B. Brewster is a good example (he was the author of that considerable work, The Prison) ; and altogether the American seems to be peculiarly susceptible to cosmopolitanism—there are American " colonies " in scores of European cities. But does this aspect of the question denote anything more profound than the romantic view of life to be found in every country ? A certain type of romantic American inevitably turns his eyes towards Europe, and if he can afford to indulge his romanticism, he will come to Europe, and finally settle there. But this is a very minor question ; it has no bearing on the major question, which transcends romanticism. And the answer to this major question, the solution of our problem, transcends the false ideology of nationalism. It should already be obvious that the problem is really two problems, which have very little to do with each other. The first we might call cultural, the second linguistic. In the first place, the novelist's art, in all its temporal elements, in all that is not a question of form or style, depends strictly on his reaction to the society about him (differing in this respect from the romance, the work of fantasy) ; and the older, the richer, the denser that society is, the more subjects and situations it will offer for treatment. In this respect the relation of the American novelist to Europe only differs in degree from the relation of the provincial novelist in England to the culture of the metropolis. Provincial society has its own values, and American society has its own values, and great works of art can be the product of such values. But there will always be a centrality, an overtone, a tradition, towards which the fully conscious artist will aspire. In this sense (think of the case of 280

International Situation in Fiction Turgenev) the problem is not an American one ; it is human. The linguistic problem is even more definitely determined. Style is a function of language. The artist in language, whether in prose or poetry, is an individual possessing an exceptional sensitiveness to the sound and significance of words ; he cannot create his style in relation to any other quality. Style has nothing to do with climate or condition, it is not the product of environment nor of economic forces. It is a central stream to which many writers contribute their personal idiosyncrasies (which nevertheless usually float like sticks and straws on the surface), but which no single writer deflects. The course of the stream is gradually modified by usage, and at some distant date it is possible that American usage may diverge so far from English usage as to produce a division in the stream ; but that I doubt, for now English adapts itself to American idiom as quickly as American adapts itself to English idiom. I see no possibility of a distinct American style. Sometimes a writer claims a distinct American style —Bret Harte, O. Henry and their contemporary equivalents—but then it is usually a bad style. The style of the best American writers differs in no essential from the style of the best English writers. There is a letter which Henry James wrote^to his brother William in 1888 which gives a final expression to this truth ; it has often been quoted, but I must give it once more : For myself, at any rate, I am deadly weary of the whole " international " state of mind—so that I ache, at times, with fatigue at the way it is constantly forced upon me as a sort of virtue or obligation. I can't look at the English-American world, or feel about them, any more, save as a big Anglo-Saxon total, destined to such an amount of melting together that an insistence on their differences becomes more and more idle and pedantic ; 281

K

A Goat of Many Colours a n d that melting together will come the faster the more one takes it for granted a n d treats the life of the two countries as continuous or more or less convertible, or at any rate as simply different chapters of the same general subject. Literature, fiction in particular, affords a magnificent a r m for such taking for granted, a n d one m a y so d o an excellent work with it. I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I a m at a given m o m e n t a n American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries), a n d so far from being ashamed of such a n ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it would be highly civilized. T h a t , it seems to me, must be the attitude of every mind not given to ignoble prejudices a n d narrow views. W e English-speaking peoples cannot alienate our common culture ; against its long historic continuity, the political differences of a century or two sink into insignificance. Precisely in the degree of their greatness our poets a n d novelists are at work preserving that continuity, binding together more firmly than ever the " big Anglo-Saxon total " .

59. Roger Fry I HE set or coterie to which Roger Fry belonged was popularly supposed to have a local habitation in Bloomsbury, b u t it was nourished if not born at C a m b r i d g e a n d in reality it h a d an altogether wider ambience : it was (and is) a fairly common attitude to life. It was (the past tense is now inevitable) a cultured attitude ; b u t its exponents would probably prefer the word " civilized " . It was an élite—of birth no less t h a n of education ; its leading members were the sons a n d daughters of eminent Victorians, a n d they had passed through one or other of 282

Roger Fry our public schools. Cambridge gave them a scientific and inquiring temper. Historians, economists and philosophers belonged to this élite no less than writers and painters, and for that reason it could never be loosely identified with Bohemianism. But no less certainly it could never be identified with a true sense of reality. It turned with a shudder from the threatening advance of the proletarian " herd ". Though it despised the moral pretensions and social prestige of the parent generation and hated the prevalent commercialism, it did not attempt to reconcile its own traditions of good taste and refinement with the necessary economic foundations of a new order of society. This was very obvious in Roger Fry's case : faced with the machine, mass-production and universal education, he could only retreat into the private world of his own sensibility. H e did, more and more as time went on, attempt to find a universal philosophical justification for this private world, and he had at his command an ingenious mind and a patient experience of his subject. But all this effort did not bring him into any very vital or sympathetic relationship to his own age. This came out very clearly in his only public venture— the Omega Workshops. This experiment was very nearly a success—a success, that is to say, with the small and snobbish public which can afford to buy individualistic art in a machine age. That it could not be more than this was evident in its early days to four of the most original artists whose services Fry had enlisted ; they revolted with perhaps unnecessary violence, but one passage in their manifesto expressed a truth which is still not obvious to anyone within the charmed circle : The Idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck, and its skin of " greenery-yallery ", despite the Post-What-Not fashionableness of its draperies. This family party of strayed and dissenting .¿Esthetes, 283

A Coat of Many Colours however, were compelled to call in as m u c h m o d e r n talent as they could find, to d o the rough a n d masculine work without which they knew their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party, or c o m m a n d more attention. This brings us to the real problem of Roger Fry's life—a certain ambiguity which was d u e to his championship of Post-Impressionism. His sincerity has more t h a n once been questioned, b u t usually by forthright reactionaries like Dr. MacColl, who could not understand why a m a n w h o knew so m u c h about art could support such a n a b r u p t break with tradition. Fry was quite capable of looking after himself in that quarter, but he was h u r t a n d bewildered when the young m e n w h o m he h a d patronized turned against him. It would be absurd to suggest that Fry did n j t really appreciate artists like Cézanne, Matisse a n d Picasso ; he h a d a n inborn aesthetic sensibility which could not play h i m false. But he h a d been converted rather late in life—he was over forty when he first began to appreciate the significance of C é z a n n e — a n d favourably as his m i n d might react to the art of Matisse a n d Picasso, h e was never able to follow them in his own painting. H e might try to penetrate the secret of Cézanne, not only by analysing him as he did in his book on the painter, b u t also by trying to repeat the old wizard's performance on canvas ; b u t it would never have occurred to h i m to j u m p forward, in front, not only of Cézanne, but even of Matisse a n d Picasso. Painters with m u c h less talent have ventured more : but Fry's deepest instinct was not adventurous—his point of view being that " art as created by the artist is in violent revolt against the instinctive life, since it is a n expression of the reflective a n d fully conscious life " , a point of view which is the antithesis of that expressed by Matisse a n d Picasso a n d the artists w h o have come after them. T h e explanation of this ambiguity probably lies in the 284

Roger Fry traditions against which Roger Fry vainly revolted. The " snailhorn sensibility " which manifested itself while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge was something that could not be denied : it made him give up a scientific career ; it made him disappoint his eminent Quaker parents ; it landed him in all sorts of financial and social difficulties ; it gave him immense joy and stimulated him to endless intellectual research ; but it could not prevail against the Inheritance—against the prettiness and the protectiveness of the Ivory Tower, against the benevolence of the Liberal outlook, against the intellect's pretensions to the final word. Roger Fry described himself as an artist, and most of all he would have liked to be remembered as a painter. But already during his lifetime the public, which often exercises a tyrannic control over an individual's development, decided otherwise ; for one person who knew Fry as a painter there were probably hundreds who knew him as a critic. Nevertheless, most of his life was devoted to the canvas. He was nearly forty when his first books appeared—his monograph on Giovanni Bellini and his edition of Reynolds's Discourses—and after that there was a gap of fifteen years before Vision and Design was published in 1920. But that book and its successor Transformations (1926), were actually the products of an intensive journalistic activity which began as far back as 1903 with the foundation of the Burlington Magazine, which periodical he nursed into success and remained its animating spirit until the day of his death. With the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1911, he entered upon a more polemical phase, and his defence of the new school whose work he had introduced into England brought him into contact with a wider public. Doubtless because he had been trained as a scientist, there was a novel scientific approach in his art criticism—something drastically different from the vague emotional appreciation which had served the pur285

A Coat of Many Colours pose for a century or more. Fry was the first critic in this country to use the method of formal analysis—at least, the first to make it a popular method of exposition, for Bernhard Berenson h a d long been practising his " constructive art criticism " for the benefit of a more exclusive circle. But Berenson remained in the region of scholarship, whilst Fry brought scholarship into the contemporary arena. T h e r e was nothing amateurish or egregious about his defence of the Post-Impressionists in general a n d of Cézanne in particular. T h e startled academicians h a d to reckon with a n opponent w h o could beat t h e m on their own ground ; who h a d far more knowledge a n d real understanding of ancient art t h a n they had, a n d w h o could reinforce his advocacy of modern art with impeccable analogies from the past. W h e n they were compelled further to recognize his intimate acquaintance with the technique of painting, there was little they could do b u t impotently fume against him. H e , on his p a r t , took the lead calmly a n d modestly, a n d only regretted that these journalistic d e m a n d s encroached so m u c h on his painting. As a painter he sadly recognized that he h a d been d a m n e d by faint praise, a n d he took positive joy in a n occasional article which roughly abused him. T h e value of his painting is difficult to estimate ; he never departed from the p a t h m a r k e d out by his master Cézanne, a n d Cézanne, in t h a t particular p a t h , was not to be excelled. His patient exploration of formal values a n d colour harmonies gave the public an impression of relentless dullness, a n d in the mass his pictures were monotonous. But often, isolated in a private house, one comes across a canvas that asserts itself b y its sureness a n d coherence, a n d then one discovers it is one of his paintings. " O f course," one says, " he is such a good p a i n t e r . " But that opinion is always privately expressed ; it never gets published. His book on Cézanne is certainly the masterpiece of his 286

Roger Fry criticism. It traces the stylistic evolution of the master's art with a closeness of attention and an analytical brilliance that has rarely been equalled. His essay on Matisse is not so searching, perhaps because there was not the same degree of personal sympathy ; but like the shorter essays, collected in Vision and Design and Transformations, it is at once subtle and persuasive. Fry was tireless in his search for an aesthetic basis for his criticism, and did not hesitate to throw over a pet theory if he found a better one. He was, as most critics of his generation, an " aesthete ", not looking far beyond the self-consistent unity of the work of art itself, always sticking to his sensibility as the only reliable guide. He was enormously interested in the psychology of art, but hated anything in the nature of psychological art. For this reason he had great difficulty in appreciating German art of any period, and he simply loathed the more recent developments of Expressionism. Even the Latin equivalents—the art of Picasso and Braque, for example—he found difficult to accept, though he admitted that the French always had good manners of some sort. He was " amused " by the imagery of Dali, but the Surréalistes as a whole bored him. It is monstrous that a man of his intelligence and perception should never have occupied an official post of distinction. His own university did him tardy justice by electing him to the Slade Professorship when he was already sixty-seven. But alas, it was too late for his influence to have much effect. When he died suddenly in 1934, his course of lectures was uncompleted. He had undertaken to give a complete survey of the history of art, and this had compelled him, not only to complete his knowledge of epochs which he had hitherto neglected, but also to try and bring his judgement of various kinds of art into some degree of unity or consistency. Actually he did not live to complete his survey ; he dealt with Egyptian, Meso287

A Coat of Many Colours potamian, iEgean, Negro, American, Chinese, Indian and Greek art, but a tragic accident robbed us of the rest. Roger Fry was essentially an impressionistic critic—he relied, that is to say, on his immediate sensations in the presence of a work of art rather than on any preconceived ideas about the purpose of art. Nevertheless, after an inaugural lecture on " Art-History as an Academic Study ", he gave two lectures on theoretical aspects of art which are in effect an attempt to justify the impressionist attitude. In his augural lecture he had suggested that in the criticism of art " we must abandon all hope of making aesthetic judgements of universal validity "—a conclusion only too effectively illustrated by the history and present state of art criticism. But to make this admission does not mean that we must simply give up all attempts to introduce order into this untidy department of human thought ; we might at least define the terms we use. This is what Fry did, to a limited extent, in these two lectures. He knew that in the course of his survey he was going to rely almost exclusively on two qualities, sensibility and vitality, and he wanted at the outset to make it clear to his audience exactly what he meant by these terms. It was typical of Fry that he should have used, and given distinct definitions to, notions so closely related as sensibility and vitality. A more logical mind would have sought to isolate the common element in the two phenomena, or to have related them to a superior unity. It would, moreover, have related them to other elements which the work of art possesses, and thus have arrived at a systematic exposition of all the elements included in the work of art—in other words, a system of aesthetics. But Roger Fry would have shuddered at the very thought. For all his scientific method, he was really on the side of those who protest that though they don't know much about art, they know what they like when they see it. His 288

Roger Fry criticism of art is nothing but an extensive rationalization and justification of this unscientific attitude. Even these two quasi-scientific terms which he did admit, turn out, on examination, to be of an extreme psychological naivety. Though he devotes a whole lecture to vitality, he confesses that he knows very little about this quality. " It seems to me very mysterious, and I find it very difficult to allege any explanations of why it occurs when it does, by what exact processes the artist gives the illusion ; and yet further, I do not know quite what value we ought to attach to the quality, or what its relations are to other aesthetic qualities.'* In effect, it is something in the work of art which we detect by virtue of the other quality, sensibility, which he had defined in his previous lecture. If we then turn to his definition of this quality, we are again thrown back on something very obscure. It is a quality which the artist possesses and impresses on his work of art, and which can be communicated from the work of art to a suitably sensitive spectator. To illustrate what he means by the term, Fry compares a straight line drawn by a ruler with a straight line drawn by hand. The ruled line is completely mechanical and as we say insensitive. Any line drawn by hand must exhibit some characteristics peculiar to the nervous mechanism which executed it. It is the graph of a gesture carried out by a human hand and directed by a brain, and this graph might theoretically reveal to us first, something about the artist's nervous control, and secondly, something of his habitual nervous condition, and finally, something about his state of mind at the moment the gesture was made. Now though Fry gives several more elaborate illustrations of what he means, this simple one suffices to show the limitations of this standard of judgement. What Roger Fry called " sensibility " should more exactly be called " sensitivity ". If we use the wider 289

A Goat of Many Colours term sensibility, which would, as Fry later assumes, include sensibility towards the abstract relations of planes, masses a n d intervals, then we must claim that a ruled straight line m a y possess just as m u c h sensibility of one kind as a line d r a w n by h a n d possesses of another kind. It is sensibility of the first kind which is exploited in so-called abstract a r t — a kind of art to which Fry, incidentally, was insensible. W h a t Fry m e a n t by sensibility was something m u c h more limited. It was the idiosyncrasy which is evident in every personal gesture of an individual, a n d which is recorded exactly in such activities as writing with a pen or painting with a brush. It is that peculiarity of line or texture— generally an irregularity or nervousness—which is expressive of the nervous energy a n d indeed whole mentality of a n individual h u m a n being. If we think of our relations with other h u m a n beings, we must a d m i t that they are rarely based on rational or even moral grounds. W e m a y cultivate people we d o not particularly like because they are or m a y be useful to us ; a n d we have to p u t u p with others because we are tied to t h e m by business or marriage. But the people we genuinely like we like instinctively a n d irrationally ; a n d if we analyse such relationships we find that they are based on subtle psychological accords a n d sympathies which are the peculiar possession of each individual. I n h u m a n relationships everything is relative ; in Roger Fry's aesthetics everything is relative. H e liked or disliked works of art instinctively, a n d his great quality, the quality which m a d e h i m a n inspiring teacher a n d a fascinating companion, was his immense gusto. T h o u g h he was always willing if not eager to discuss theories, in his presence one willingly abrogated theory for the sake of enjoyment. His real art was the art of communicating sensuous pleasure. T h e very absence in h i m of a strong logical faculty left h i m free of those intellectual prejudices which interfere with the 290

Roger Fry aesthetic reactions of most people. He had his blind spots, which were not so much blind spots as black-outs. One was German art in general, and Durer in particular ; another was Turner. Of the former prejudice there is an interesting example in one of his last lectures. Having recognized vitality as one of the essential qualities in a work of art, he was faced with the inescapable fact that German art, from the Gothic period down to the modern Expressionist movement, had possessed this quality in abundance. But Fry saw a way out of the dilemma ; they possessed it, he would say, not in abundance but in excess. But when it came to illustrating this point he was not very convincing. He contrasts, to the disadvantage of the German works, the Bamberg St. Elizabeth with Donatello's " Lo Zuccone ", Grunewald's " Crucifixion " with Castagno's ; but all his special pleading cannot alter what, for another critic, are the inescapable facts : that we are in the presence of four great works of art whose qualities should be reconcilable in any comprehensive theory of art.

60. Raphael 1 HE average man, asked to name a great painter, will automatically answer " Raphael ". Bernhard Beienson, the famous critic of Italian art, once said that it would take not one but ten thousand M. Tissots to win the populace away from the spell of Raphael. But Mr. Berenson was still living in the nineteenth century when he made that statement, and since then a considerable shift in public taste has taken place. The chromo of the Sistine " Madonna ", which then looked down so calmly and incongruously from the dining-room wall, has long since been relegated to the spare bedroom, or even to the attic. In normal times, some of the greatest of Raphael's 291

A Coat of Many Colours works, the so-called " Parthenon Sculptures of modern art ", the Raphael Cartoons, are splendidly displayed in a special gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum : in spite of its easy accessibility, it is the most solitary spot in London, the solitude only occasionally disturbed by an industrious German traveller, Baedeker in hand, or more rarely by a party of noisy and unwilling schoolchildren. It is too simple to explain this as but another example of our national indifference to art. It is true that the same gallery, if transferred to Berlin or Florence, would have more visitors, but only because the tourist traffic in these places is better organized. The real truth of the matter is that the average man of to-day is bored by Raphael—and not only by Raphael, but equally by Michelangelo, Titian and the whole of the classical tradition in art. So much the worse for modern man, no doubt. But it is again too simple to ascribe this boredom or indifference to a decline in taste. T h e modern attitude is not a merely negative attitude. It is the expression of a positive preference for other types of art, and though a change of taste may still be a decline of taste, the superiority of the earlier standard must not be taken for granted. What ten thousand Tissots would not be able to achieve may nevertheless have been accomplished by but one Renoir or V a n Gogh. Even though, by some absolute standard, we recognize the supreme nature of Raphael's genius, must we at the same time condemn as spurious the sensibility which prefers, in the place of honour formerly occupied by the Sistine " Madonna ", V a n Gogh's " Sunflowers " ? Even those who are most conscious of Raphael's sublimity are ready to admit the unfortunate nature of his influence on the development of painting : not merely are his immediate followers—Giulio Romano, Pierino del Vaga, Giovan Franceschi Penni, and the rest—dreary and banal 292

Raphael beyond endurance, but from the school of Raphael there descends directly that academicism in art education which has for three centuries been a blight on all creative activity, and which still survives in such " charnel-houses ", as Berenson called them, as the École des Beaux Arts at Paris, not to mention similar institutions nearer home. Why sublimity should have such a shabby progeny is one of the mysteries of life—for sublime poets and prophets share the same fate as sublime painters. It is popularly supposed that Eastern craftsmen, in order to avoid any presumption to the perfection which belongs properly only to the divine, deliberately introduce a fault into their work : it is more likely that they are aware of the aesthetic value of an occasional discord. Would we now like Raphael's art rather more than we do if it had been less perfect, more " mannered " ? There are elements in some of his late paintings—in the " Visitation " in the Prado at Madrid, for example—which suggest this possibility : a new colourism, as Professor Suida describes it, " which leaves far behind the rational naturalism of the fifteenth century and opens the path along which El Greco, Baroccio, and many other painters will wander ". But at this point we must remember that Raphael died young : had he lived as long as Titian, for example, it is possible that what we have been taught to regard as the achieved classicism of his maturity would have the appearance of merely one phase in the restless progress of an experimental genius. There is, however, one other justification for what I have described as a change of taste. Raphael was essentially a decorative artist. " Raphael's best doing ", wrote Ruskin, " is merely the wall-colouring of a suite of apartments in the Vatican, and his cartoons were made for tapestries." Ruskin did not say this in any derogatory spirit—rather " there is no existing highest-order art but is decorative " : 293

A Goat of Many Colours a n d the derogatory use of the word is merely a contemporary prejudice. But w h a t the public—particularly the public which can only afford to buy reproductions—has become obscurely aware of during the past fifty years is a sense of decorative appropriateness. T h e y realize that a painting whose sublimity fits it for its place in a church or a palace is distinctly out of place in a s u b u r b a n drawingroom. T h e y m a y even feel that, pickled a n d insulated in the artificial atmosphere of a m o d e r n museum, it loses m u c h of its original significance. I n such a n atmosphere, R a p h a e l ' s m a d o n n a s survive, not in virtue of their divinity, but of their very tender a n d sensuous h u m a n i t y . O n c e that fact is admitted, it is but honest to a d m i t that we prefer the more direct or unequivocal representation of these same qualities in a Renoir or Degas. But taste is the last stronghold of dissimulation, a n d we shall doubtless continue to pay tribute to virtues we d o not desire to possess a n d to ideals we can never emulate.

61.

T. E. Hulme

o EVERAL poets a n d philosophers of promise lost their lives in the last war, b u t it is doubtful if any one of them would have m a d e so m u c h difference to the intellectual life of his country as H u l m e , w h o was killed at the age of thirty-four in 1917. I use the vague phrase " i n t e l l e c t u a l l i f e " because I do not suggest that H u l m e , w h o was a philosopher, would have created a new philosophical system. T h o u g h he was a brilliant thinker, he was not particularly original. H e h a d a n extraordinary sense for w h a t was significant in other people's ideas, a n d though he was guided by one or two general principles, these were relatively simple a n d decidedly reactionary. It was H u l m e ' s function to be a n animator of thought a n d feeling—one of 294

T. E. Hulme those raiding corsairs of the intelligence who respect no boundaries and observe no rules. H e has been compared to Pascal, and though at first sight that may seem too bold, it is Pascal's name which most frequently crops up in any discussion of Hulme. He was not only the same type of thinker ; there is also a considerable similarity in their thought. Hulme himself declared in one place that his notes were to be regarded as prolegomena to the reading of Pascal. One of my first tasks after the last war was to edit Hulme's essays and philosophical fragments and these were published under the title Speculations in 1924. The book made slow progress at first, but a new edition was called for in 1936, and has had a steady accession of readers. But the influence of a book of this sort is not to be judged by its sales ; either directly or indirectly Hulme has affected the outlook of a generation. Hulme recognized two orders of reality, the one divine, a hierarchy of absolute ethical values represented by religion ; the other human, the world of our physical existence, inevitably limited, imperfect, and only saved from brutishness by some perception of the nature of the divine order. Hulme, like many philosophers before him, naturally drew the conclusion that if humanity is to enjoy any degree of civilization, it must be disciplined by an order or tradition established in accordance with the absolute ethical values. H e was never, however, very precise as to the way in which this was to be done. H e combined a belief in absolute values with a nominalism which would normally lead a philosopher to deny their existence. That is to say, though he might admit the existence of the values, he was equally convinced that it was impossible to define them, or rather, that any attempts to define them would necessarily be only " amplifications of man's appetites ". There is an abyss between the human and divine, and we 295

A Coat of Many Colours can only bridge it with approximations—that is to say, with the intuitions of the poet and the mystic. If we look at Hulme's dilemma a little closer, we find that one of its terms is equivocal. There can be no question about the first proposition—that man is inherently limited, a mixture of good and evil impulses, incapable of progress unless controlled. That proposition must either be accepted or rejected—it cannot be qualified. Hulme accepted it and based on it his destructive attacks on humanism. The second proposition, that man, on account of his inherent weakness, must submit to the authority of a religious tradition, he held with the same conviction but with less consistency. Tradition in art, the subject in which Hulme was chiefly interested, meant classicism. Hulme hastened to adopt classical art. Without putting too much strain on his natural preferences, he could exalt fancy at the expense of imagination, and a German art historian, Wilhelm Worringer, provided him with a distinction between geometric and organic form which enabled him to divide contemporary painting and sculpture along similar lines. War was declared against romanticism, and by defining romanticism as spilt religion and confusing it with sentimentality, he was able to manoeuvre all his enemies into the same false position. But when he came to review his own forces he found not only Horace, Racine and the English Augustans on his side, but also Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Nietzsche provided him with a phrase—dynamic classicism—to hide the discrepancy, but it was a palpable begging of the question. Actually, when he is discussing this weary question of romanticism and classicism, Hulme is apt to forget his fundamental distinction, which is philosophical, and lose himself among the secondary characteristics of aesthetic expression. That is to say, having decided on philosophical grounds that Horace, Racine and Shakespeare are accept296

T. E. Hulme able poets, he proceeds to lump their very diverse literary qualities together as classicism ; and having decided on the same grounds that Lamartine, Hugo and Swinburne are bad poets, he proceeds to call their qualities romantic. But it is doubtful if stylistic criteria have much to do with the question. The underlying distinction, which is never so consciously philosophical as Hulme would have it, is between two social attitudes—between those poets on the one hand who wish to devote their artistic talents to the conservation of exisiting social values, and those on the other hand who wish to devote them to the disruption of these values and to the establishment of new ones. A revolutionary poet will often introduce a revolutionary technique, but not necessarily so. The youthful and revolutionary Wordsworth revolted against an artificial poetic diction, but the equally youthful and revolutionary Swinburne restored it. From the point of view of art, there is not something which we can call tradition : there are two traditions, the romantic tradition and the classical tradition, and the prevalence or urgency of one or the other at any particular time will depend on the distribution of social forces. The only conditions which would ensure a stable form of art, that is to say, a disappearance of the conflict between classical and romantic tendencies, would be a state embodying the principles of absolute justice. But to suppose that such a state can ever exist is to accept that very doctrine of human perfectibility against which Hulme brings his most destructive arguments. This contradiction is inherent in every form of the traditionalist doctrine—even the religious. Unless a religion is based on mystical revelation, on an irrational authoritarianism which can in no sense be called " an act of the intellect ", the traditional dogmas of that religion can only be established and elaborated and sustained by 297

A Coat of Many Colours fallible h u m a n agents ; a n d that this h u m a n fallibility extends to such doctrinaire products of the m i n d is evident enough from the whole course of history. T h e choice, therefore, is not between h u m a n i s m a n d a n absolute ethical order free from h u m a n taint ; it is between a h u m a n i s m that strives after a rational interpretation of the universe a n d a h u m a n ism that accepts a n irrational dogma. A n d an irrational dogma can only survive as a tradition by virtue of a n external authority. T h e life of reason, which also has every right to be called a tradition, is a life of change, of growth a n d decay ; b u t the stabilization of a h u m a n interpretation of ethical values, which is the only m e a n i n g we can give to a religious tradition of a rational kind, is a n arbitrary act of the h u m a n will. Even if we believe with K a n t that a moral sense is implicit in the n a t u r e of reason, we are still b o u n d to the limitations of a h u m a n faculty. Michael Roberts, in his study of H u l m e , 1 says finely t h a t reason is not complete unless it includes humility, a n d t h a t humility involves a recognition of tradition a n d authority. But reason also includes doubt—humility involves d o u b t ; a n d finally we m a y accept all Hulme's criticisms of h u m a n ism, romanticism a n d liberalism a n d still be no nearer the shelter of a C h u r c h . Between the feebleness of m a n k i n d a n d the perfection of the divine H u l m e saw nothing b u t a tragic discord—a discord to be resolved by the fallible processes of h u m a n reason, or to be affirmed by a n act of intuition—by the highest of all h u m a n modes of expression, the art of tragedy. H u l m e ' s p r e d o m i n a n t interest, as I have already said, was aesthetic. His work on Epstein, in which Epstein was a point of departure rather t h a n a n end, perished with him. T h e most detailed a n d coherent plan found a m o n g his notes was for a book on the theory of art. T h e r e is 1

T. E. Hulme, by Michael Roberts. London (Faber & Faber), I938298

T. E. Hulme little doubt that in the course of his development Hulme would have encountered Kierkegaard, and would have had to deal with that philosopher's contention that the aesthetic attitude can only lead to despair. If he had accepted that conclusion, the real problem would then have been to reconcile the aesthetic with the ethical attitude. Kierkegaard believed that they could only be reconciled in religion, but he could not reconcile his conception of religion with the tradition of the Established Church. If we would secure the free assent of men we must appeal to them by myth rather than by precept—by art rather than by dogma. Perfect things teach hope, said Nietzsche. In the perfection of tragedy we transcend our fate. This realization of the tragic significance of life is the prerequisite of any measure of human greatness, but it is not specifically religious. Or if it is, the religion is in the ritual, in the drama, in the creation of the poet. T o interchange tragedy and religion is to confuse what is perhaps the greatest of all issues. Between tragedy and religion the burden shifts. Redemption, which is inseparable from religion as understood in the Western world, introduces the idea of divine pity. Tragedy is not so humane ; its catharsis is a healing process, but the most that it promises is serenity.

62. Seurafs " La Baignade "x E V E R Y work of art contains two groups of elements. Let us call them the universal and the incidental. In the universal group are all those elements of form, colour, material, and their interrelations, which appeal directly to the senses, or sensibility. It is because the sensibility of man may be regarded as constant in its range 1

Contributed to a series entitled " What I like in Art ". 299

A Coat of Many Colours (though not in its operation) that these elements can be called universal. The universal is the permanent, and for our present purpose we may regard the universal elements in art as simply those which persist. Some of them, such as colour, are very superficial in their appeal ; others are very profound, such as the formal configuration of planes and masses in sculpture and architecture. In the incidental group are all those elements which appeal to the emotions and intellect—all those elements associated with words, symbols and ideas. We should include under this head the primitive magical significance of a savage mask, the higher religious significance of a Greek temple or a Byzantine church, or a painting by Giotto or Fra Angélico, and the intellectual significance of a painting by Leonardo or Poussin, the decorative significance of Tura or Braque— everything imported into a work of art by the use or purpose for which it is designed. I begin by making this general distinction, because I believe that an awareness of its existence in any particular work of art is necessary for clarity of appreciation. W e should ask oursleves what is the asthetic value of the reasons we advance for our preference of any particular work of art. It is possible to say that only the universal elements are properly to be regarded as aesthetic ; this is the theory of pure art, or art for art's sake. From this point of view, the religious content of a painting by Giotto, or the ideological content of any picture whatsoever, is of no significance. But that is not the point of view generally adopted by critics of art, nor is it my own point of view. I regard the ideological content (granted that this may be very abstract and intellectual, as well as religious or sentimental) as a normal ingredient in works of art. It is not the subject of Frith's " Derby Day " that disturbs m e — it is its utter crudity as a composition in colour. I do not, however, always feel competent to appreciate the ideological 300

Seurat's " La Baignade " content of a work of art. I do not feel sure that I can put myself at the mental and emotional point of view of a Giotto or a Piero or a Michelangelo. That point of view, in the case of any artist, is a very complex construction, depending on a vast array of factors which I can only dimly reconstruct. I may get somewhere near to an appreciation of the religious conceptions of a Giotto—somewhere near ; perhaps a little nearer than to those of a fifth-century Greek or an African negro. But even assuming that I do so much, there are still numberless factors which I have not accounted for. There is the particular social atmosphere prevailing in Giotto's time ; and not only in his time, but in his country and town, his particular economic status and the general economic structure of the society of which he was a unit. There are simpler questions of climate and mode of life. There are very important details such as Giotto's relations to his predecessors and his followers ; the painter's professional status and the professional practices which he adopted ; even more technical questions such as the range and quality of materials available to him, the prevalent method of painting, the chemistry of the colours he used, the mode of lighting ; workshop organization, and in particular the importance attached during his lifetime to the painter's own handiwork—in other words, the part played by apprentices and assistants. There is the still more difficult question of arriving at some conception of what the picture looked like when Giotto had finished painting it. Very few old paintings have survived without repainting, and in every case their original colours are faded and their original surfaces decayed. I may study these questions for many years and become a specialist on a particular period ; even then I should feel the presence of a veil of uncertainty and incomplete knowledge between myself and the painter. I am not and cannot be in possession of all the factors necessary for the full 301

A Goat of Many Colours appreciation of an " old master ", or of any work of art distantly removed from me in time. Only in works of art contemporary with my experience of life do I feel fully aware of all their potentialities. Therefore I enjoy modern art above the art of all other periods. It may be said that a 50 per cent, enjoyment of a work of art from one of the great periods is worth more than a 100 per cent, enjoyment of a contemporary work of art. That is a possible point of view, but I believe it depends on a deliberate suppression of real aesthetic enjoyment. Most connoisseurs, as they are rightly called, enjoy their art with deliberation and memory rather than with their immediate senses. They have been taught what to admire and know what they are expected to admire ; they rarely make their own aesthetic discoveries ; their intellectual caution breeds a sensual impotence. For these reasons I have chosen a modern work to represent " what I like in art ". In comparison with others who have contributed to this series, I am at a disadvantage, because the condition that the particular work of art chosen should be in a public gallery or well known from reproductions excludes nearly all my real preferences. It is true that a few contemporary paintings and pieces of sculpture have drifted into the Tate Gallery by accident rather than by design ; but I do not find there a representative example of the best work of Picasso, Juan Gris, Léger, Miró, Kokoschka, Klee, or any of the modern artists whose work I particularly admire. It is a standing reproach to this country that it does nothing, or next to nothing, for contemporary art. It is true that there is a Chantrey Bequest which is supposed to be devoted to the purchase of modern works of art, but it is administered by officials completely out of touch with the modern spirit ; there is also the Contemporary Art Society, which occasionally buys a work contemporary in spirit as well as in name, but its 302

Seurat's " La Baignade " general policy is timid and academic. New York, on the other hand, has now two public galleries entirely devoted to contemporary art—the Museum of Modern Art, and the Gallery of Living Art (the latter attached to the University). The work of art which nevertheless I have chosen is a classic of the modern movement—" La Baignade ", by Georges Seurat, which hangs in the Tate Gallery. Seurat, who was born in 1859, died at the early age of thirty-two in 1891 ; if he had lived I believe he might have been incomparably the greatest of modern painters—greater even than Cézanne. As it is, his work seems to gain in significance year by year ; and the best elements in the painting of to-day are more nearly related to Seurat than to Cézanne. This picture, which is of considerable size (144J inches by 71J inches), is entirely typical of his work. We must first note its almost regular geometrical organization. It is divided horizontally by an emphatically linear skyline, placed at exactly one-third of the depth of the canvas ; a diagonal crosses from the top left corner and meets the bottom of the frame one-tenth of the way along ; an exactly corresponding diagonal crosses from right to left through the shoulder of the largest bather and at rightangles to the axis of the body of the man in the bowler hat, emerging through the near paw of the dog and meeting the frame again at exactly one-tenth of the w a y along. A great number of other geometrical correspondences exist ; one suspects them in the dimensions and intervals of the factory chimneys on the skyline ; in the distances separating the various heads ; in the triangles formed by lines joining these heads, above all in the perspective recession of the various figures and groups. Corresponding motives are the curves of the backs of several figures, the curves of the sails, the curves of hat-brims. T h e composition is further knit together by various lateral motives, such as the shadows on the grass, the weeds in the river, and the distant punt. 303

A Coat of Many Colours The colour scheme is correspondingly deliberate. In each compartment made by the diagonals, an equation is set up, which holds good for both sets of compartments. T h e dominant colours are blue and yellow, with red as a constant multiple. The paint is applied in small touches of pure colour, the method known as pointillism, but this method was an affectation of the period to which I do not attach particular importance. What is important in the picture is the fact that everything is meant, everything is mathematical. I do not imply that it is devoid of individuality, or of emotion ; it is as personal, as unique, as the artist's handwriting. But there is no slopping-over of irrelevant emotion. The temporal elements are conscious and intellectual, and not, as is more usual, magical or sentimental ; and that is my own personal preference in the plastic arts. I fully recognize the right of the artist to be emotive and expressionist, and have on other occasions explained such types of art to the best of my ability. But for the moment I am writing of my personal prejudices, and they are represented, as near as they can be in a work of art available to the public, by this painting of Seurat's. I find the same qualities in Juan Gris, in Fernand Léger, and in certain phases of Picasso's art. It will be seen that a painting like this of Seurat's unites all those factors, both universal and incidental, that exist in a work of art ; moreover, all these factors are completely available to an open and unprejudiced sensibility. Above all, I would insist on the incidental elements. " One must look at nature with the eyes of the mind and not merely with the eyes of the body, like beings without reason. . . . Reason is one of the most beautiful faculties of the human mind, and he who does not passionately seek to extend his knowledge by that fact alone renounces his greatest privilege." Seurat had pondered these words of a con304

Stendhal 1

temporary scientist, and found that they expressed his own ideal. It may be that a time will come when such an intellectual ideal in art will not be appreciated ; there are special reasons why intellectual values appeal to our generation. impalpable spirit of the They are part of our Ze^ie^—tnat times which is created by the air we breathe, the manner of our lives, our habits and adventures, our work and pleasure, our hopes and fears—all the spiritual and material factors of our mode of being. In "La Baignade " this spirit has been felt by the keen sensibility of a great artist and objectified in the colour and form of a great work of art.

63. Stendhal READING for pleasure and reading for profit is a distinction which most people, presumably, can maintain all their lives, and if it is lost it is because reading becomes wholly a spare-time occupation. But the professional man of letters finds himself in a more pitiful condition ; all he reads must be grist to his mill and it is rarely that he can afford himself the time to read for no purpose at all beyond immediate enjoyment. That is not to say that he does not enjoy what he reads, but the virtue is in the necessity. Sometimes, however, time and circumstances leave him stranded. He picks up what is at hand, and reads idly, innocently, incontinently. In such a mood I recently found myself indulging—I was conscious of the moral aspect—in a recently published novel. There is no point in divulging its name, but it was a clever novel, by one of the most promising of our younger writers. I was absorbed, and finished the book before the long summer's day was 1 The scientist in question was a certain David Sutter. For the evidence see Georges Seurat, by John Rewald. New York (Wittenborn), 1943.

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A Coat of Many Colours over. I was very pleased, and promised myself to read more modern fiction. The experience had been vivid, and for the moment the characters in the book haunted me with their glittering presences. For the moment ! For the day being a long one, I turned in the evening to another book, a book I had read years ago and which I had often intended to re-read—Stendhal's Journal, which he called Vie de Henri Brulard. I had not read many of its not very exciting pages before I realized that the experience was totally different in kind from the experience of the earlier part of the day ; and that before the reality of this experience, the art of the novelist had collapsed like a pack of slippery cards. Now Stendhal himself was a novelist, one of the greatest, and the difference between his Journal and any of his novels is not considerable ; his novels, that is to say, are largely transcriptions of his own experience, and his heroes are but various portraits of the artist as a young man. T h e modern novel I had read had been, on the other hand, what we would call objective ; the portrait of a cad with whom the author would in no sense wish to be identified. I then put the following questions to myself : (i) Does the attempt to be objective in fiction inevitably involve the author in shallow creations—in twodimensional painting which lacks the subjective depth of truth ? (2) Is there a fundamental conflict between creation and observation ; between the imaginative and the scientific faculties ? That is to say, is self-observation the only creative kind of observation ? (3) Is there an order of fiction emancipated from observation and the naturalism it always implies ? Questions which I did not answer to my own satisfaction, but questions which imply a profound discontent with the present standards of fiction. 306

Stendhal I noted as I read Brulard that it was exactly a h u n d r e d years since it was written. T h e r e are few centenaries better worth keeping—and to keep the centenary of a book it is only necessary to re-read it. I n this j o u r n a l Stendhal tried to give a completely honest portrait of himself. Admittedly a difficult thing to do, but often, it will be said, achieved by other writers. But never, I would retort, in quite the same way. Never with quite the same absence of distortion. T h e difficulty, when you look in a mirror, is not to adopt an attitude, an artificial alertness. T h e fault with those great self-confessors, Montaigne a n d Rousseau, is w h a t Stendhal called " l'emphase " ; the self is emphasized, accented, placed in a limelight which is not p a r t of its natural outfit. T h e same fault is to be found in various modern confessions —in A n d r é Gide's, for example. Gide is aware of these subtleties of pose—aware, too, of his Stendhal ; but it is always the photogenic face—the face of the m a n photographing himself. Even if the effect is that of a snapshot, we feel t h a t the camera was first fixed in position, a n d that the author himself surreptitiously pulled the string. T h e alternative, as Stendhal feared, is superficially dull. But personally I find myself fascinated by every detail of Stendhal's life of a m a n supremely intelligent, supremely h u m a n , a n d supremely honest in his writing. It is a unique combination. I n one of those model obituaries of himself which Stendhal thoughtfully provided for posterity, he sums u p his taste in these words : " I l aima Cimarosa, Shakespeare, Mozart, le Corrège." T h a t was written in 1821, a n d is a fair test of Stendhal's artistic discrimination. O u r discrimination is no more absolute in 1935 t h a n his was in 1821, but in at least two cases, Shakespeare a n d Mozart, time has marvellously confirmed his choice-^a choice by no means inevitable a h u n d r e d years ago. As for Cimarosa, present musical fashions keep us in profound ignorance of his 307

A Coat of Many Colours work ; but the fact that Stendhal ranked his music with Mozart's is enough to make me suspect that our neglect is unjustified. But Correggio ? Correggio is by no means unappreciated to-day—not long ago he was one of the minor sensations of the Italian Exhibition in Paris ; and I dare prophesy that before another century has elapsed, this choice of Stendhal's will seem less eccentric. I mean, that not knowing El Greco, Correggio was almost the only choice possible for Stendhal. " L'emphase ", the quality Stendhal disliked so much in literature, has one meaning in the original Greek, another in French, and still another in English. Stendhal meant what perhaps we should now call affectation. But taking the word in its normal English sense, as a stress placed on a word to make its particular significance evident, it might still be used as a test of style. Emphasis makes for good journalism and for bad literature. In good writing individual words need no particular emphasis : they convey their full force by their perfect syntax, by their place in the sentence and in the architecture of the paragraph. A writer with an emphatic style is just as objectionable as a man with a loud voice.

64. Georges Rouault 1 HE first thing that strikes us on entering a room in which Rouault's paintings are hung is that we are no longer in a private world. It is no more private than a medieval cathedral—to the decorative art of which it has direct resemblances. It may be that the derivation is too direct, and that Rouault has adopted the language of the Middle Ages because he could not find one of our own age. But the lesson nevertheless is there to learn. This is a public style, announcing important truths in unmistakeable terms. 308

Georges Rouault Subtleties, intimate relationships, are subordinated to simplicity and economy and strength. The scale is infinite. Almost any one of these subjects could be enlarged to the size of a poster, a mural, a stained-glass window, and only gain by the process. I would like to see a Rouault exhibition brought into the midst, not of experienced amateurs, but of unsophisticated workmen and peasants. I know it is possible that the world does not contain a corner free from the slime of sentimentality, for where there has been no art people have accepted for generations the cheap substitutes poured out by the press and more recently by the cinema and the radio. If the unsophisticated man is a myth, then our civilization is already doomed. But if he does exist, and can form a nucleus from which a new world can grow, then he will demand from the artist, not a private world, but a public style. I am not suggesting that a public style is necessarily a medieval style, or that Rouault is an artist who should be universally imitated. There are two styles of art which, though they also have been too sophisticated and private in the between-war years, do hold the possibility of a public style—I mean constructivism and surréalisme. Constructivism has evolved in architecture what we have already been in the habit of calling an international idiom, and an international idiom is only a sophisticated way of saying a public style. As for surréalisme, when it has finally accomplished its destructive work (and the war has almost done that for it) and begins to concentrate on the problems which have been raised in art by the discovery of the unconscious, then it may evolve something in the nature of a collective idiom. In The Integration of the Personality Jung has suggested that the modern world is suffering from the consequences of iconoclasm, from the lack of any archetypal symbols to act as safety-valves for the suppressed forces of what he calls the collective unconscious. The 309

A Goat of Many Colours artist, from prehistoric times down to the Middle Ages, was the agent who created these symbols for society, a n d he has now to recover that public function.

65. A Community of Individuals 1 HE structure of E u r o p e a n society is breaking d o w n before our eyes. A p a r t from the conservative policy of trying to shore it u p , there exist various drastic schemes for rebuilding it on a securer basis. These various schemes as evolved by representative politicians can all be reduced to three types : (1) the totalitarian state ; (2) the social democratic state ; a n d (3) a Christian society—which might conceivably be identical with (2) but not with (1). So m u c h has been written against the idea of a totalitarian state by social democrats a n d Christians that I do not feel it is necessary for me to repeat any of the arguments now. T h e subordination of the individual to a n abstraction like the state is so openly contradictory to any belief in the dignity a n d freedom of the individual t h a t it cannot for a m o m e n t be tolerated by someone w h o begins with a profession of individualism. I would, however, like to take this opportunity to point out a certain danger which m o d e r n events have shown to be inherent in purely speculative philosophy. T h e philosophy of Hegel, to which we can trace the ideology which has inspired m o d e r n totalitarian doctrines of the state, was first of all p u t forw a r d as a justification of the autonomy of the spirit, of the faculty of thought. Hegel's conception of t h e state, a n d of the individual's relation to the state, was a n abstract conception, justified by reason a n d logic, a n d even by aesthetic sensibility. Like Plato's republic, it is a pretty thing to think about. It is in its practical consequences that it is so appalling, a n d if Hegel h a d h a d the imagination 310

A Community of Individuals to foresee these consequences he would never have prop o u n d e d the idea with such energy a n d insistence. For after all, Hegel himself did believe in freedom. It was, for him, rather a fundamental belief, as the following quotation shows : If we say that the consciousness of freedom is connected with the appearance of Philosophy, this principle must be a fundamental one with those with w h o m Philosophy begins ; a people having this consciousness of freedom founds its existence on that principle seeing that the laws a n d the whole circumstances of the people are based only on the notion that M i n d forms of itself, a n d in the categories which it has. Connected with this on the practical side, is the fact that actual freedom develops political freedom, a n d this only begins where the individual knows himself as a n independent individual to be universal a n d real, where his significance is infinite, or where the subject has attained the consciousness of personality a n d thus desires to be esteemed for himself alone. Free, philosophic thought has this direct connection with practical freedom, that as the former supplies thought about the absolute, universal a n d real object, the latter, because it thinks itself, gives itself the character of universality. . . . O n account of this general connection between political freedom a n d the freedom of thought, Philosophy only appears in History where a n d in as far as free institutions are formed. 1 I a m not sure that I can understand or accept the reasoning by which Hegel arrives at his comparatively simple conclusion, but that conclusion is a historical fact. I t is a fact which has been demonstrated negatively in Hegel's country in our own time. I t is all the more ironical, therefore, to observe in this same History of Philosophy t h a t Hegel assigns the whole future of philosophy, a n d indeed all future progress in h u m a n thought, to the Teutonic world. Every thinking m a n must know in his heart, even if he 1 History of Philosophy, Introduction, B, 3, a. Haldane. London (Kegan Paul), 1892.

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A Coat of Many Colours does not find it expedient to confess it, that to bring into being a totalitarian conception of society is an act of despair. The whole of what we mean by civilization or culture has been built up by a dialectical process, a process which implies the free exchange and discussion of discoveries and ideas. The only alternative form of society which might seem to question such freedom of discussion is the Christian conception. How deeply opposed the Christian doctrine is to the totalitarian conception of the state has been clearly revealed in recent pronouncements from the Vatican, particularly in the Encyclical Quadragésimo Anno (1931). The Pope's drastic condemnation of the idea that the state is " something ultimate, to which everything else should be subordinated ", is probably supported by Christians of every denomination. It is only when we come to the positive ideas about society which Christians put forward as an alternative to present conditions that we are likely to encounter disagreement both inside and outside the Christian community. The Christian conception of society, considered apart from its doctrinal implications, has much to attract the individualist. The Christian is, or should be, a peaceful and just citizen, and the monastic communities which he has from time to time established outside the framework of society have often been a last refuge for the finer values of civilization. The idea of a Christian society, as advocated by an apologist like Mr. Eliot in his recent book of that title, is one which has no obvious disadvantages for the individual, for it respects his personality and will even tolerate his neutrality. And as for the social ethics of Christianity—love your neighbour as yourself, do unto others as you yourself would be done by, render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, etc.—they are perfectly consonant with the kind of society which I desire. 312

A Community of Individuals But the idea of a Christian society has been tried before in the history of the world, and from my point of view it was not a great success. It suffered from two defects which are still inseparable from the idea : an organized Church and a supernatural sanction. An organized Church implies an all-powerful institution and a hierarchy of officials, and even supposing that the institution as it exists now could be purged and reformed to give the idea of a Christian society a fair trial under modern conditions, I see no reason to suppose that it would not quickly succumb to the vices inherent in institutionalism (not merely Erastianism, but also simony, worldliness, tyranny and bureaucratic despotism). Power corrupts the natural goodness even of Christians. Or in the words of Kierkegaard who had deeply considered this problem as a Christian : The clergy are royal officials, and officialdom is incommensurable with Christianity. . . . You see, God is sovereign, but then we also have all these human beings who want to live at ease in comfort, and so they give them all Christianity, and thus support a thousand clergymen ; nobody in the country can die happy without belonging to this vested interest ; the consequence is that they become sovereign, and it is all over with God's sovereignty ; but H e must be obeyed throughout. 1 T h e second feature of such a society is perhaps not so much an inherent defect as an anachronism. Those Christians who sincerely advocate a form of society which will not merely be based on a Christian ethic, but in which a Christian Church will be an established, pre-empted and active unit, seem to me to ignore a positive development which has taken place in the last hundred years. By various agencies—universal education, cheap books and newspapers, the technique of vulgarization—the ever-increasing 1 Quoted by David F. Swenson in his Introduction to his translation of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments (Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), p. xxix.

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A Coat of Many Colours fund of scientific knowledge about the universe a n d the process of its historical evolution has become so diffused t h a t the state of doubt, which formerly afflicted a minority of intellectual heretics, is now universal. I would also suggest that the actual character of this knowledge has become m u c h more positive a n d inclusive, leaving very little to be ascribed to the agency of a supernatural power. As a result, the minority (as it actually is) of believers, in advanced civilizations, now consists of the very ignorant a n d the very clever. A p a r t from the unquestioning belief of those few classes still untouched by the diffusion of knowledge, belief in a supernatural order requires a high degree of intellectual effort—which m a y explain the emphasis which apologists like M . Maritain, M r . Eliot and Father D'Arcy nowadays place on the intellectual element in faith. I a m not suggesting that the state of our scientific knowledge is final or absolute—it obviously rests on all kinds of unverifiable hypotheses. But it presents to the lay m i n d a front of such credibility a n d logicality that in comparison any irrational explanation of the universe simply stands no chance of general acceptance. Admittedly our knowledge is not sufficient to answer the eternal questions : T o w h a t purpose were we born ? W h a t is the end of M a n ? But it can at least persuade us that such questions are unanswerable. For these reasons I come to the conclusion that whatever m a y from a philosophical point of view be desirable, w h a t M r . Eliot calls a Neutral Society is inevitable. Such a society might very possibly a d o p t in a large measure the ethics of Christianity, which have proved on the whole so suitable to our philosophical as well as our practical needs. I t might even become a w a r e of t h e necessity of a more strict observance of moral laws—indeed, it is a significant fact that the loss of belief in supernatural sanctions has not entailed any diminution in the general observance of 314

A Community of Individuals Christian morality. Private morals have tended to improve in line with the general improvement in social conditions. There is absolutely no correlation nowadays between " good " people and " religious " people ; nor, for that matter, between nations which are predominantly Christian and nations which show some respect for public morality. It is the predominantly Christian countries which are most deeply committed to the amorality of power politics. Morality, in fact, has become dissociated from religion, and there is no evidence to show that it need ever again be dependent on it. It is difficult to believe that without violence to our intellectual understanding of the world we can ever again transform ourselves into what Christians mean by a Christian Society. At the same time it is equally inconceivable that we should accept any form of society based on an alternative irrational creed. The paganism which is sometimes imposed on the naked materialism of the German system is open to the same objections as Christianism : it cannot for long contend against the scepticism of the educated majority. This is the dilemma which faces everyone who hopes to save our present civilization by a return to religious sanctions. Whilst insisting that this dilemma is inescapable, no one who has given the least thought to the morphology of societies will be disposed to deny that they always depend for their cohesion and survival upon some unifying idea, which unifying idea has generally been of a mystical or religious kind. Only the most inveterate rationalist would be hardy enough to believe that a society might exist on a purely rational basis. I do not say that the idea of a rational society is impossible : a country like Sweden is even near to the realization of such an idea. But for my own part I do not estimate the survival value of such a society very highly—it would probably die of a kind of communal accidie, 315

A Goat of Many Colours As for the " mystique " of nationalism, which is probably the most vital cohesive force to-day in a country like France, a n d which sometimes seems to be the only a d e q u a t e substitute for religion, it tends to create conditions which foster the aggressive impulses of m a n k i n d a n d which lead to the progressive exhaustion of our civilization by war. I have not yet mentioned the second of the three schemes for a new society which I mentioned at the beginning of this article : democratic socialism. Democracy has been so m u c h reviled of late t h a t a singular fact should be stated simply : democracy has never yet been tried. Democracy is not consistent with the financial oligarchism which has prevailed in Europe a n d America ever since the decay of the landed aristocracy. Nothing corresponding to a d e m o cracy is possible unless a freely elected government controls the production a n d distribution of the economic wealth of a country a n d establishes a virtual egalitarianism. Nothing near to that condition of affairs exists anywhere in the world, not even in Russia where for a year or two it seemed possible. W h e n it does exist—that is to say, when we have a classless society exploiting the resources of the earth for the general benefit of the community of individuals—then the ethical conceptions of that society will change so radically that nothing we can imagine now is likely to meet its needs—though one might suggest that the Christian ethic presupposes m a n y of the general features of such a society. M y own objection to such a society is that, as generally envisaged by socialists, it involves t h a t very institutionalism which I have already found fatal to the acceptance of the idea of a Christian society. T h e tragic fate of the Russian democracy is there to w a r n us. T h a t democracy was m a i m e d in the very process of being born, a n d a few sadistic obstetricians have kept their grip on the weakling ever since. I t is not likely t h a t a true democracy will ever 316

A Community of Individuals come into being so violently. If anywhere, it will probably emerge first in the British Commonwealth : we have evolved slowly towards the potentialities and we probably have a psychological predisposition for its requisite ideals—if only in such vulgar notions as fair play, team spirit, etc. But we shall have to anticipate the dangers inherent in a centralized bureaucracy, and our whole future will depend on our ability to avoid them. I believe that they can be avoided by making the ultimate ideal anarchism, and by determining every step in the transition towards and beyond democratic socialism by this ideal. In short, anarchism is the " mystique " which I propose for a democratic society. I do not pretend that anarchism is an idea of society which can be realized as immediately as democratic socialism. I believe that the only idea of a society which is capable of guaranteeing the integrity of the person is the negation of the idea of society. Every advance towards community must be countered by an affirmation of individual freedom. Every law must allow for its violation. The greatest power must be vested in the humblest men. Every act of government must involve a limit of service and an impermanency of office. The continuity of life should be as invisible as the prevailing wind. No drums to bang, no flags to wave ; no salutes or genuflections, no armies marching or choirs singing ; but only the still small voice and the orient wheat.

66.

Picasso's

cc

Guernica "

A R T long ago ceased to be monumental. To be monumental, as the art of Michelangelo or Rubens was monumental, the age must have a sense of glory. The artist must have some faith in his fellow men, and some confidence in the civilization to which he belongs. Such an attitude 317

A Goat of Many Colours is not possible in the modern world—at least, not in our Western European world. We have lived through the greatest war in history, but we find it celebrated in thousands of mean, false and essentially unheroic monuments. Ten million men killed, but no breath of inspiration from their dead bodies. Just a scramble for contracts and fees, and an unconcealed desire to make the most utilitarian use of the fruits of heroism. Monumental art is inspired by creative actions. It may be that sometimes the artist is deceived, but he shares his illusion with his age. He lives in a state of faith, of creative and optimistic faith. But in our age even an illusion is not tenable. When it is given out that a great Christian hero is leading a new crusade for the faith, even his followers are not deceived. A Christian crusade is not fought with the aid of infidel Moors, nor with fascist bombs and tanks. And when a Republic announces that it is fighting to defend liberty and equality, we are compelled to doubt whether these values will survive the autocratic methods adopted to establish them. . The artist, at the lowest level of prestige and authority he has ever reached in the history of civilization, is compelled to doubt those who despise him. The only logical monument would be some sort of negative monument. A monument to disillusion, to despair, to destruction. It was inevitable that the greatest artist of our time should be driven to this conclusion. Frustrated in his creative affirmations, limited in scope and scale by the timidities and customs of the age, he can at best make a monument to the vast forces of evil which seek to control our lives : a monument of protestation. When those forces invade his native land, and destroy with calculated brutality a shrine peculiarly invested with the sense of glory, then the impulse to protest takes on a monumental grandeur. Picasso's great fresco is a monument to destruc318

Picasso's " Guernica " tion, a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius. It has been said that this painting is obscure—that it cannot appeal to the soldier of the republic, to the man in the street, to the communist in his cell ; but actually its elements are clear and openly symbolical. The light of day and night reveals a scene of horror and destruction ; the eviscerated horse, the writhing bodies of men and women, betray the passage of the infuriated bull, who turns triumphantly in the background, tense with lust and stupid power ; whilst from a window Truth, whose features are the tragic mask in all its classical purity, extends her lamp over the carnage. The great canvas is flooded with pity and terror, but over it all is imposed that nameless grace which arises from their cathartic equilibrium. Not only Guernica, but Spain ; not only Spain, but Europe, are symbolized in this allegory. It is the modern Calvary, the agony in the bomb-shattered ruins of human tenderness and faith. It is a religious picture, painted, not with the same kind, but with the same degree of fervour that inspired Grünewald and the Master of the Avignon Pietà, Van Eyck and Bellini. It is not sufficient to compare the Picasso of this painting with the Goya of the " Désastres ". Goya, too, was a great artist, and a great humanist ; but his reactions were individualistic—his instruments irony, satire, ridicule. Picasso is more universal ; his symbols are banal, like the symbols of Homer, Dante, Cervantes. For it is only when the widest commonplace is infused with the intensest passion that a great work of art, transcending all schools and categories, is born ; and being born, lives immortally.

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A Coat of Many Colours 67.

Machine ¿Esthetic

F O R the average Englishman, American industry means Ford cars and skyscrapers, and there has not been much disposition on his part to treat these phenomena philosophically, to find a new canon of beauty in them. Indeed, the Englishman prefers to confine his philosophy to the cloistered precincts of the universities (where, incidentally, the existence of a philosophy of art is not recognized) and he does not even indulge in those genial moralizations which, I believe, characterize the American business man in his leisure moments. The growth of any consciousness of the need for a new aesthetic has been very slow in our country ; what uneasiness there has been during the last hundred years has always avoided the issue, turning away from the problems presented by the machine and yearning for the return of an idealized guild system of handworkers. This tendency, which was rarely, if ever, the practical policy of industrialists themselves, was nevertheless taken seriously in some quarters ; a movement was created, if only by poets, which forced the aesthetic problem of industrial production into some sort of international prominence. What in England remained the practice of a few cranks became, on the Continent, a movement affecting industry as a whole. It is perhaps too early to claim that in its developed form this industrial aesthetic has hit England fair and square ; but in many obscure and indirect ways the practical ideals which were represented on the Continent by the Bauhaus have penetrated into this country. At least, it would be fair to say that in architecture and the related industrial arts (furniture, lighting equipment, domestic utensils, etc.) we have learned more from Germany, Scandinavia, and France than from America. This is not to claim that we have learned much ; we have so 320

Machine ^Esthetic much more to unlearn than most countries. Nor does it exclude the possibility that in what we have absorbed from the Continent there is already an element which the Continent took from America. I am not much given to defending the so-called common sense of my countrymen ; it is but a polite name for a widespread inability to perform any mental operation involving intellectual abstraction. I need not point out the advantages of this attitude in the field of politics. " Trust in God, but keep your powder dry " is our national motto, and it implies that combination of blind faith and practical cunning which has made the British Empire what it is. It is true that we may on occasions change our faith, but not as a result of intellectual suasion ; we change our faith, like our clothes, because we have grown out of them, and they begin to pinch. A change of heart is not impossible, but a change of head would be regarded as a sign of weakness. " Ours not to reason why ", to mention another national motto. The application of these generalizations to our present subject is obvious. It means that the presentation of a logical aesthetic for modern architecture and industrial art in England is quite useless. England will never proceed on a priori lines ; she will take it or leave it, it in this case being any form of dogmatic aesthetic law. The only laws that are recognized are practical laws—for the most part laws defending the rights of property owners. Even those laws which to a casual observer might seem to have an aesthetic motive—townplanning regulations, preservation of rural amenities, etc. —are always given a pragmatic or utilitarian sanction ; it is not for us a question of beauty, but of health. And naturally, we do not consciously identify health and beauty, in the manner of Hitler. 1 1 Cf. his speech at the Reichsparteitag, Nuremburg, 1936 : " Das Gebot unserer Schõnheit soil immer heissen : Gesundheit."

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A Coat of Many Colours Confronted with the beauty of New York, the Englishm a n will instinctively begin to explain it away. H e will point out t h a t the skyscraper is an adventitious product— the inevitable product of fantastic land values on a confined space. H e finds peculiar satisfaction in demonstrating that every progressive step in the development of the skyscraper can be explained on similar materialistic lines. If this attitude was d u e to a tender philosophical regard for the absolute n a t u r e of beauty, it would be admirably idealistic. But the actual motive is just the contrary ; the wish to deny the existence of any aesthetic quality in such a product of the machine age. W h a t Lewis Mumford has defined as the prerequisite of any further development of aesthetic capacity in the h u m a n race—the assimilation of the m a c h i n e — t h a t is the step which so far the Englishman has refused to take. H e sees a complete distinction between the vital a n d organic elements of his inherited concept of beauty a n d the purely mechanistic elements of machine production ; a n d not being by nature a dialectician, he does not believe in the synthetic resolution of such contradictions. Since I d o not know America at first h a n d , I cannot assume t h a t it already offers us t h e completed synthesis. I only know it is impossible that there should exist in America the formidable obstacles which face the English architect a n d designer whichever way he turns—the obstacle of subsidized academic prejudice, a n d the still greater obstacle of prevailing traditionalism a n d conservatism. I t is the presence of these obstacles which has determined our tactics. H e r e the struggle is primarily a n ideological one. W e have to break down one concept of beauty a n d establish a new one. If in support of our theories we appeal to the evidence of the facts, the facts on which we rely are everywhere dominated by the residues of ancient civilizations. Conceive, if you can, t h e j p r o b 322

Machine -¿Esthetic ability of an architect being allowed to build a vitally modern building within the sacred precincts of Oxford or Cambridge ! But that is precisely the kind of difficulty which faces the industrial artist in England whichever way he turns. It may be that a not inconsiderable snobbery operates against the modern artist and architect in America, but snobbery can always be ridiculed and shaken ; in the Old World we need the faith to move, if not mountains, at least monuments. The new aesthetic must be based on the fundamentally new factor in modern civilization—large-scale machine production. That method of production involves certain characteristics which contradict the accepted notion of beauty—they are generally indicated by the word standardization. In itself, standardization is not an aesthetic question. If a thing is beautiful, you do not diminish that beauty by reproducing it. You may complain that the reproduction is not exact, but again that has nothing to do with the question. Standardized machine products are exact replicas of one another, and if one is beautiful, the rest are beautiful. What the critics of machine art object to when they talk about standardization is not the fact of standardization, but rather its failure to reproduce certain qualities which they regard as essential to art. Art, they would say, inevitably involves a unique personal element, an arbitrary and accidental quality peculiar to the moment of creation ; and this element or quality, they assume, is not capable of being mechanically reproduced. There are two possible answers to this objection. We may admit that certain forms of personal expression are not suitable for mechanical reproduction as standardized objects, but we claim that the creative will of the artist can and should be adapted to the new conditions. We draw attention to a certain type of modern art (abstract, non-representational or constructivist art) which, while still 323

A Coat of Many Colours remaining a very personal expression of the individual artists who produce it, is nevertheless the prototype of machine art. Such works of art could be reproduced without losing any of their aesthetic qualities ; a n d utilitarian objects which express similar aesthetic qualities are actually reproduced in the standard products of modern industry. T h e other answer is more drastic. I t challenges the values inherent in the personal or individualistic criterion of beauty. T h e modern car, which incorporates the refined sensibility of a succession of designers, is a collective work of art of far greater value t h a n the painting or statue which is the expression of the mood or thought of an individual. Even the past might be appealed to in support of this contention, a n d great impersonal works of art like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Gothic cathedrals are quoted as examples of collective works of art. T h e a r g u m e n t is perhaps a little specious, but it m a y surely be admitted that the tremulous idiosyncrasies which m a n y critics regard as the final quality in art can be sacrificed if in their stead we can place qualities of precision a n d exactitude which have an equal claim on the aesthetic sensibility. Perhaps the only mistake we can make is to attempt to drive art into a single track. T h e mystery, the magic, the imponderable a n d incommensurable majesty of the Sphinx exists side by side with the geometrical exactitude, the mathematical precision of the Pyramids.

68. André Gide O E N I U S is sometimes difficult to transplant, a n d a m o n g modern instances there is none so striking as Gide's. I n France his influence pervades every section of intellectual life. La Nouvelle Revue Française, which he founded, has been the organ of all that is vital in contemporary French 324

André Gide literature, and the only school of thought that stands apart —the Catholics under Claudel and Massis—has to a large extent been goaded into action by Gide's success. The only comparable figure in this country is Bernard Shaw, but a comparison of the two would only serve to show how superficial and naïve a moralist must be to succeed with us. It is true that Shaw has, even ostensibly, dealt with " unpleasant " themes, but they are of the kind that require social remedies ; they do not involve moral dilemmas. And yet there is something so essentially Protestant in Gide, and his problems are so much the problems of the redeemed puritan, that obviously his work should provoke great interest in a community where this type is the rule rather than the exception. Perhaps the explanation lies in fortuitous facts ; six of Gide's most important books appeared in English translations between the years 1928 and 1930, and then that particular publisher went out of business. But I do not remember the books making any stir at the time, and no doubt we must look for a more convincing explanation of Gide's lack of appeal to English readers. " Gide's work as a whole may be regarded as a prolonged debate on the subject of morality." * Gide himself would admit as much, and seek the explanation in his origins and early upbringing. His father was a professor of jurisprudence from the Cevennes ; his mother a rich heiress from Normandy. They were devout Protestants, and Gide was brought up in an atmosphere of sheltered bourgeois respectability. His father died when he was eleven, and his mother acquired a very complete dominance over his affections. Already in his boyhood he betrayed neurotic symptoms ; on account of his precocious sexual instincts, he was expelled from his first school. In Si le Grain ne meurt, his early development is related with com1 Léon Pierre-Quint : André Gide. London (Cape), 1934. 325

A Goat of Many Colours plete frankness ; but there is a passage in that book where, seeking to explain his personality in terms of heredity, Gide unconsciously betrays his limitations as a psychologist. He has been speaking of the extraordinary difference between the two families from which he sprang, and between the provinces to which they belonged—contradictory influences joined in him. Often I feel that I was forced to create a work of art because only in that way could I harmonize those elements which otherwise would have continued to war within me—or at least to debate. There is no doubt that the only people who are capable of positive achievements are those who can prolong the line of their heredity in a single direction. O n the other hand, I believe that eccentrics and artists are recruited from among the offspring of cross-breeding, in whom contradictory forces coexist, and multiply and neutralize each other. For proof Gide appeals to history, but complains that his dictionaries and biographies never tell us about the maternal origin of great men. If they had, it might have been necessary to amend his generalization, for it is not borne out by the facts, so far as we know them. The facts, for example, classified by Havelock Ellis in his Study of British Genius, show that out of 1030 persons included in the inquiry, only 133 were of mixed British, or mixed British and foreign origin. But the point I wish to make is that the very reason given by Gide as the probable explanation of his development as an artist is really the explanation of why he is such an imperfect artist. I believe it could be shown that the artist is never a moralist, that there is an incompatibility between the " judging " attitude and the " creative " attitude, for the latter is always sympathetic. But it is perhaps sufficient to point out that in none of Gide's books, with the possible exception of Le Retour de VEnfant Prodigue, has the author betrayed that sense of form which is essential to the work of art. We should note 326

André Gide with suspicion how often his books take the form of a journal —that most inartistic mode of literary expression. Gide's works, in fact, are one long Agenbite of Inwit, the selfexamination of a conscience-stricken moralist. Gide's importance, that is to say, is primarily ethical and sociological ; he is a writer of excellent prose, and on that account is to be acknowledged as a skilled craftsman. Even when we calmly consider his work from this point of view, we have to admit that he has been preceded by a greater figure, whose achievement overshadows Gide's, and of whom Gide is but a humble follower—I mean Nietzsche. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are Gide's masters, his work a dilution and extension of theirs (just as Shaw's work is a clever exegesis of Butler, Ibsen and Marx). In a sense, however, it is misleading to trail these names across Gide's track, because Gide has neither aimed at the consistency of a philosophy nor at the creation of an epic. His work is personal, and the best part of it is introspective. Above all, it is the problem of personal sincerity that has exercised Gide's mind, for he has seen clearly enough that the problem of sincerity is the key to aesthetic as well as moral values. This irritating problem [he once wrote] is everything to me. To know whether I feel what I believe myself to be feeling ; whether I am my single self or double, or triple, or nothing ; whether I flow from my consciousness or am coincident therewith ; if beneath the continuous deterioration of body and soul, anything of me remains constant. Absolute sincerity, Gide concludes, is only possible in the act of creation ; that is to say, when the reason retires and " truth speaks for itself and prevails by virtue of its immediacy ". It will be obvious how directly such a theory leads to individualism in ethics. What is more difficult to see is how it leads to communism in politics. 327

A Goat of Many Colours T h e somewhat sinister quality in Gide's reputation is due to his attitude towards homosexuality ; he is the first modern writer of any status who has openly condoned inversion ; he has done more, for in Corydon he has idealized it. T o what extent his attitude can be justified on scientific and historical grounds is perhaps a moot point ; Mr. Montgomery Belgion, who discussed the question at some length in the study of Gide included in his book, Our Present Philosophy of Life, came to the conclusion that in our present state of knowledge no scientific basis for Gide's attitude was possible. There is no doubt, however, that Gide was justified in lifting the taboo which had hitherto suppressed any sane discussion of the subject. But the furore he thus raised subsided before the greater scandal of his acceptance and subsequent rejection of communism. H e first accepted communism as the expression of his passion for freedom and justice : he went to Russia and discovered that the social reality had little correspondence to the political ideal. O n his return he proved himself faithful, not to a creed, nor to a promise, but to the evidence of his own senses. It was an act of integrity worthy of his admired Montaigne, if not precisely with Montaigne's motive. Somewhere in his Journal Gide says that no one could persuade him to believe in God because it would make life more agreeable. H e feels that his strength comes from the disdain of comfort, and for that reason he would reject " le mol et doux oreiller de Montaigne ". It is perhaps for that reason, he adds, that he is attracted to communism—just as, for the same reason, others fear it. But in the end he would admit that such stoic aids to virtue are not to be purchased at the cost of personal integrity. The subtlety and variety of Gide's intelligence are not covered by this brief note. I think it will be found, when the perspective is clear enough, that he has been the most representative spirit of his tormented age—representative 328

The Duality of Leonardo in his profundity, but also in some quality which I can only call a profound insincerity. " Les extrêmes me touchent " is his adopted motto : it is the motto of a divided mind.

69.

The Duality of Leonardo

1 HE name of Leonardo da Vinci inspires something like universal awe : with a certain type of intellectual he is almost the object of a cult. No other man, it would seem, has ever had such a diverse intelligence, or been so supreme at once in art and in science. Goethe perhaps comes nearest, but by comparison Goethe is imperfect and fallible ; and Goethe himself would not have ventured the comparison. And though there are Goethe Societies up and down the world, they do not practise a cult. For the basis of a cult is a mystery, and from the first Leonardo was a mysterious figure. He was even in danger of being regarded as a necromancer and heretic ; his experiments had to be conducted in secret and his observations confined to cryptic notebooks. But the real basis of the fascination he has exercised is what Pater described as the tendency of his genius " to lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery ". The mystery, that is to say, is not so much in the circumstances of Leonardo's life and activity, as in the products of his genius. During the whole period of the formation of the Leonardo legend, from his death in 1519 to, say, the date of Pater's famous essay (1869), those products were largely his works of art—that is to say, paintings like the " Mona Lisa ", the " Last Supper ", and the " Virgin of the Rocks ". The existence of his manuscripts was, of course, well known, but they were generally regarded as ghiribizzh idle scribblings ; only the Trattato delta Pittura, or Treatise on Painting, a compilation which was probably made shortly after Leonardo's death by one of his pupils, 329

A Goat of Many Colours had been published before 1883, which is the date of J. P. Richter's pioneer edition of the complete manuscripts. The extent of these manuscripts is more than five thousand pages, of all shapes and sizes, and they cover a wide variety of subject. The standard English translation, by Edward MacCurdy, 1 very conveniently sorts Leonardo's notes according to their subject-matter. There are forty sections, ranging from Anatomy, Natural History and Optics to Warfare, Art and Personalia. The range is, indeed, encyclopaedic, for there is no department of human knowledge into which Leonardo did not pry with a curious and penetrating mind. It is necessary to emphasize the word " knowledge " because there is one kind of mental activity in which Leonardo did not indulge—that which we call metaphysics. It is true that Mr. MacCurdy has a section which is headed Philosophy ; but it consists for the most part of moral precepts, such as " Wine is good, but water is preferable at table ", or " One ought not to desire the impossible ". The question which we must now ask is : What effect does all this comparatively new material have upon the legend ? The legend was built up on the evidence of a dozen pictures and the usual gossip ; here are 1,200 printed pages which reveal the mind of Leonardo in the precise terms of his logical mode of expression. The mind of Leonardo is no longer a mystery : it is as exactly delineated as any psychological type ever will be^ It cannot be pretended that the type is universal ; we have only to contrast it with minds like Plato's and Shakespeare's to see that there are whole worlds which Leonardo does not touch. If for a moment we put aside Leonardo's artistic activity, and concentrate only on his restless research into natural phenomena, we shall have no difficulty in 1 The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, translated and edited by Edward MacCurdy, 2 vols. London (Jonathan Cape), 1938.

330

The Duality of Leonardo admitting that Leonardo is to be regarded as a great scientist and inventor, a genius who anticipated many of the discoveries of subsequent centuries, not only in natural science, but also in practical mechanics—even modern inventions like the aeroplane and tank. H e was something like a combination of Darwin and Edison, though it is doubtful whether he had the particular kind of synthetic imagination which results in an hypothesis like the Origin of Species. His method was purely empirical, a process of observation and analysis of the nature of what exists, and of trial and error in the creation of what had not hitherto existed. Of such a character have been all the world's great natural philosophers, and it is to be observed of them that, however much they add to our understanding of the world, they have not altered the quality of our existence. As a result of their inventions, men may be physically happier, but they are not spiritually more content. If we now turn to Leonardo's remarks on art, particularly the art of painting which he held to be superior to all other arts, we shall find that he carries into this domain the same scientific method and ideals which he applied to the natural world. It soon becomes apparent that he regards art too as a means to the understanding of " the infinite works of nature ", and painting as superior to the other arts precisely because it is the most exact means of recording those works, the sole imitator of all the visible works of man— a subtle invention which with philosophical and ingenious speculation takes as its theme all the various kinds of forms, airs and scenes, plants, animals, grasses and flowers, which are surrounded by light and shade . . . The mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing thai it reflects, and which is filled by as many images as there are placed before it. This is, of course, the naturalistic theory of painting in all its purity, and all Leonardo's precepts on light, shading, 331

A Goat of Many Colours perspective, etc., have one object—to make the picture a n exact image of the natural object. H e seriously recommends the painter to take a flat mirror a n d set it so that it reflects the object represented in the picture, a n d then to compare the reflection with the painting. His observations of light a n d shade anticipate a n d indeed are far more subtle t h a n those of the Impressionists, though he would never have followed the Impressionists in their attempt to render the transient aspects of nature. All this, of course, is merely emphasizing the fact that Leonardo was in this respect but the foremost a n d most logical representative of a whole tradition. But it would be mere idolatry to suppose that because Leonardo was the possessor of such a great intellect, his theory of art was necessarily the right one. It is, at any rate, possible to p u t forward a theory which directly contradicts it, a n d which is just as fully warranted by the history of art. T h e two possible activities which we m a y thus set in opposition are : (i) to observe a n d record, a n d (2) to feel a n d express. Leonardo might have objected that we cannot feel without first observing, a n d that to feel strongly we must observe accurately. But a p a r t from the probability that feeling is a general a n d diffused response of the whole organism to its environment (suggested, for example, by the fact that children born blind have images which they can express in plastic form), it is fundamental to the n a t u r e of art that feeling is intensified in the degree that art is selective. T h e strongest feelings are aroused by the simplest means, a n d the art of poetry, which Leonardo despised, has far more power to move m e n to laughter a n d tears t h a n any form of pictorial representation. Leonardo's own paintings go far to contradict his theories. Neither the " M o n a Lisa " nor the " Virgin of the Rocks " could be found in a mirror's reflection ; a n d the " Last Supper " is a schematic projection of the scene 332

The Duality of Leonardo rather than an actual representation of it : there is far more actuality in Rubens' version of the subject, more still in Tintoretto's. In other words, in his highest moments Leonardo himself departs from nature to create a supernatural poetry. Of that poetic imagination there is little trace in the 1,200 pages of these notebooks ; but once or twice even his pen betrays him, as when he writes : " I f liberty is dear to you, may you never discover that my face is love's prison "—a sentence that might describe, but not explain, the mysterious suggestiveness of the " Mona Lisa ". Unfortunately for the history of painting, the majority of Leonardo's successors were not to be so much inspired by the spirit of his paintings as indoctrinated with his precepts. If Leonardo's paintings have come to express some of the most transcendental feelings of mankind, his Treatise on Painting, on the other hand, has been used as a justification for all that is most academic and stultifying in the teaching of art.

70.

The

cc

Areopagitica "

T H E speech which Milton addressed to the Parliament of England in 1644 " for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing " was provoked by the particular circumstances of the time. Those circumstances had their pattern in the past, most notably in the Spanish Inquisition : but Milton could not have foreseen that they would recur in the future, and that three hundred years after the appearance of his pamphlet, his words would be as apt as if they had come hot from the press. The Areopagitica is Milton's greatest prose work, and this rank is given to it on account of its inherent qualities of fervour and style : but it is great also because of its wisdom, its logic and the universal application of its argument. Every newly established tyranny brings its 333

A Goat of Many Colours pages to life again : there is no encroachment on " the liberty to know, to utter a n d to argue freely " which it does not anticipate, a n d oppose with unanswerable reason. T h e public measures a n d commercial practices which to-day threaten the liberty of printing will not be far to seek, b u t before I review t h e m I would like to d r a w attention to some features of the situation which provoked Milton's speech that find their counterpart in our own situation. It is sometimes assumed t h a t the questions which agitated our country in the seventeenth century, a n d particularly those which broke over Milton's head, were so theological or doctrinal in their n a t u r e t h a t they n o longer concern us. Milton is one of the chief protagonists of the Reformation in E n g l a n d : the Reformation is past a n d d o n e with, a n d the dust has settled on ten thousand tracts. If we exempt one or two of t h e m from oblivion, it is for qualities of style which we m a n a g e to enjoy while remaining indifferent to the underlying argument. T h a t this is a mistaken a n d superficial attitude is m a d e very clear in the present instance. W e now realize, more clearly t h a n ever Milton could have done, that revolutions have their evolution : they are caused by an irreconcilable conflict of wills, b u t from the victory of the revolutionary p a r t y there emerges, not unity, b u t a reflection of the old conflict. It seems easier for men to unite to destroy t h a n it is for t h e m to unite to construct. J u s t as the French Revolution gave birth to the violent struggle of Girondins a n d Jacobins, Dantonists a n d Robespierrists, a n d just as in our time in Russia we have seen revolution succeeded by the fratricidal strife of Menshevik a n d Bolshevik, Stalinists a n d Trotskyites, so after the Reformation in E n g l a n d there was a bitter dispute between Presbyterians a n d Independents. W h a t was the precise doctrinal difference between these reforming sects we need not stop to enquire : but the Presbyterians were for the establish334

The " Areopagitica " ment of a new orthodoxy, and were the immediate object of that most bitter taunt of Milton's, that " new presbyter is but old priest writ large ". In the exercise of the liberty to argue freely " according to conscience ", Milton had not hesitated to argue freely where his own conscience pricked him most keenly—that is to say, on the subject of divorce. The Order of Parliament requiring all publications to be licensed for press by an official censor, and to be registered in the books of the Stationers' Company, had already been in force for two months when Milton issued his pamphlet on The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, uncensored and unregistered. The printing might have been in train before the Order was promulgated, but to make quite clear that his defiance was deliberate, Milton issued a second and enlarged edition in February, 1644, and addressed it openly to Parliament and the Assembly of Divines. We must remember that England was in a state of civil war. Milton belonged to the ascendant parliamentary party, and enjoyed the patronage and protection of its leader, Cromwell. The outraged Presbyterians could not hope to succeed in a personal indictment. They therefore tried to catch Milton in the net of the law, and for this purpose entered into alliance with the Stationers' Company. In August, 1644, t n e Company was induced to petition the House of Commons to take action against all writers who were showing contempt of the printing ordinance. It was then that Milton roused himself to a defence of unlicensed printing, addressing his remonstrance direct to Parliament. The Order of Parliament of 14 June, 1643, is drafted for a far-reaching effect. The Preamble recounts that " many false . . . scandalous, seditious, and libellous " works have lately been published " to the great defamation of Religion and government ", and complains that many private printing335

A Goat of Many Colours presses have been set up, thus infringing the monopoly rights of the Stationers' Company. It then orders, among its several provisions, that no Book, etc., " shall from henceforth be printed or put to sale, unless the same be first approved of and licensed by such person or persons as both or either of the said Houses shall appoint for the licensing of the same ". In plain words, every manuscript must be submitted to officiai censorship, and licensed, before it can be printed. But even then the copyright— that is, the right to copy the manuscript in printed type— is vested in the Stationers' Company ; that is to say, it is their monopoly, an interest vested in them " for their relief and the maintenance of their poor ", and the Order of Parliament gives them full power to enforce this right, and calls upon all "Justices of the Peace, Captains, Constables and other officers " to assist in the search for unlicensed presses, and to break them up ; to search for unlicensed books and to confiscate them ; and to " apprehend all authors, printers and others " concerned in publishing unlicensed books and to bring them before the Houses of Parliament or " the Committee of Examination " for " further punishments ". It was against this totalitarian edict that Milton hurled his scorn and eloquence, his learning and his logic. Again he defied the regulations and issued his pamphlet unlicensed and unregistered. H e took Parliament by storm, and though its deliberations on the subject are not recorded, he won the day. H e was never prosecuted, and the Order of Parliament became a dead letter. It is true that it was not the end of the attempt to impose a censorship on printed books. That attempt is made whenever a sufficient excuse is discovered in war or revolution : we have seen it made in our own time. If our vigilance continues armed with invincible weapons, it is mainly because Milton forged them in his Areopagitica. His arguments are 336

The " Areopagitica " immortal, but it is the duty of every age to review them, to burnish them till they shine in a new light, and sharpen them for a present use. There are four principal arguments in Milton's speech. All I intend to do is to restate them in our current phraseology, and give them application to our current affairs. There is first what we should now call the pragmatic argument. Milton's way of expressing it is simple, and we perhaps only add complications of no value if we convert his words into our modern jargon. " Assuredly ", says Milton, " we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather : that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary." Trial by what is contrary suggests the dialectical theory of the progressive development of thought which Hegel introduced into modern philosophy, and which has played such a part in the social philosophy of Marx and his followers. But I do not think Milton can be claimed for dialectical materialism. Truth might not be wholly revealed to human nature, but he did believe in its absolute nature or existence. He did not suppose that it was something which was being discovered by a continuous process of trial and error : he would have said, rather, that we have an intuitive knowledge of truth which must nevertheless be continually proved by the process of trial and error. The doctrine of free will, so foreign to dialectical materialism, is involved : " what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forebeare without the knowledge of evill ? " It is a philosophical distinction and may therefore seem of little importance to some people : but it might nevertheless explain why the practical exponents of dialectical materialism have shown such a readiness in our time to suppress what they consider false or evil : why they have become reincarnations of those " glutton Friers " and dour Presbyters against whom Milton directed his arguments. 337

A Coat of Many Colours Milton was above all a H u m a n i s t — t h e greatest representative in England of that movement which had a b a n d o n e d the dogmatism of the Middle Ages a n d was seeking for a natural or empirical basis for its beliefs. T h a t is why I have called his first a r g u m e n t for the liberty of the press pragmatic. H e would have subscribed to William James's definition : " T r u e ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, a n d verify. False ideas are those that we c a n n o t . " But how can this process of assimilation, corroboration a n d verification go on unless there is the freest circulation of the relevant facts. A n d facts are facts independently of our discrimination of t h e m : we cannot wish them away, or legislate them into oblivion. T h e y are the dust a n d heat, through which the race for the immortal garland is to be run. And if your aim is a philosophical one, the relevant facts are in controversy, and in our days controversy is in books. Since therefore [concludes Milton] the knowledge a n d survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of h u m a n vertue, a n d the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, a n d with less danger scout into the regions of sin a n d falsity then by reading all m a n n e r of tractats, a n d hearing all m a n n e r of reason ? And this is the benefit which m a y be h a d of books promiscuously read. T h e r e are plenty of people to-day ready to give their assent to this first argument of Milton's who yet boggle at some specific application of it to present circumstances. T h e y say that Milton was generalizing from theological or philosophical premisses, a n d that he did not have in mind, for example, questions of public morals or provisions for public safety. Milton, however, m a d e no exceptions. H e did not exempt books from the normal incidence of the law ; he admitted that their authors should be punished if convicted of libel, scandal or blasphemy. But the punish338

The " Areopagitica " ment is always ex postf acto> and there is no prohibition of the means available to the delinquent. Indeed, Milton discusses at some length those scurrilous writers of antiquity, and is clearly of the opinion that there never was a case for suppressing any of them, not even " that Petronius whom Nero calPd his Arbiter " nor " that notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded and yet dear to the Italian Courtiers ". Milton's tolerance of the printing even of obscenities follows more logically, perhaps, from his second and third arguments, to which I now pass. These two arguments are connected : one points to the extreme difficulty of knowing where to draw the line between what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil ; and the other points to the impossibility of finding individuals competent to draw such a line, supposing it to exist. Generally, on the first of these scores, Milton argues that the kind of control contemplated in the Order of Parliament is impossible of application : " this order of licencing conduces nothing to the end for which it was framed.'' If your end is the restriction of heresy, why stop at books ? " I f we think to régulât Printing, thereby to rectifie manners, we must régulât all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightfull to man. . . There must be licencing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest . . . " We could extend the list to-day, for though we have an illogical censorship of the theatre, and a farcical censorship of the cinema, the means of propagating heresy, corruption and all other mental errors through the press and broadcasting are limitless. But the complexity of the task of censorship does not deter our legislators, and in many parts of the world Milton's arguments are needed, not so much for the liberty of unlicensed printing, as for the liberty of any kind of expression. Perhaps it would be more realistic to say that the truth of this particular argument of Milton's has 339

A Goat of Many Colours been recognized, but in countries where liberty is an inconvenience to a tyrannous government, no limit is set to the scope of censorship. Milton thought he was asking a rhetorical question when he said : " And who shall silence all the airs and madrigalls, that whisper softness in chambers ? " ; but we have lived to see these, and other fancies he thought absurd, come to pass throughout most of Europe. Not knowing where to draw the line, our modern tyrants have made it all-inclusive : it is the totalitarian logic. Totalitarian government has an equally effective answer to Milton's third argument. In his innocence of our modern efficiency, Milton imagined that though licensing were imposed, writing would still continue, and that men would freely submit their manuscripts to the official censors. H e therefore found it difficult to imagine a body of men with either the patience or the competence to carry out such an enormous task. His description of such a judge will strike a modern publisher's reader as painfully apt : If he be of such worth as behoovs him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing Journey-work, a greater losse of time levied upon his head, then to be made the perpetuall reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, oftimes huge volumes. There is no book that is acceptable unlesse at certain seasons ; but to be enjoyn'd the reading of that at all times, and in a hand scars legible, whereof three pages would not down at any time in the fairest Print, is an imposition which I cannot beleeve how he that values time, and his own studies, or is but of a sensible nostrill should be able to endure. But this, of course, is not what happens in modern censorship. There is, no doubt, a thin trickle of unsolicited matter which must be read by some poor drudge. But the modern method is to print only what is initiated by the State, and entrusted to reliable servants to execute. The 340

The " Areopagitica " totalitarian censorship operates on the mind of the public, not on the manuscripts of its writers. But all this makes Milton's final argument all the more relevant to our present circumstances. " I lastly proceed ", says Milton, " from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt it causes, in being first the greatest discouragement and affront, that can be offered to learning and to learned men." This is partly a psychological argument. A man does not become learned without acquiring a certain sense of dignity or self-respect. If the State infringes this delicate structure of confidence and freedom, the intellect itself suffers—recoils and atrophies. In his travels Milton had found and visited " the famous#Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought ", and that sight and its significance had been deeply impressed on his youthful mind. In other countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes [he had] sat among their lerned men . . . and bin counted happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic freedom, as they suppos'd England was, while themselvs did nothing but bemoan the servil condition into which leming amongst them was brought ; that this was it which had dampt the glory of Italian wits ; that nothing had bin there writt'n now these many years but flattery and fustian ". In his first argument Milton has said that truth must be tested against error : what he is now saying is that truth nevertheless can never be stabilized or defined. It is in a continuous state of emergence, the issue of ceaseless mental strife. " Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz'd and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the Land, to mark and licence it like our broad cloth, and our wooll packs." Or, as we might say to-day, truth cannot be rationed, or 341

A Goat of Many Colours standardized, or cut to a p a t t e r n of utility. T r u t h cannot be controlled in any way : it is the unpredictable outcome of the exercise of free will, a h a r m o n y of colours which are discordant as they lie juxtaposed on the canvas, but mingle a n d cohere in the vision. Milton himself uses a vivid architectural m e t a p h o r : when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can b u t be contiguous in this world ; neither can every peece of the building be of one form ; nay rather the perfection consists in this, t h a t out of m a n y modérât varieties a n d brotherly dissimilitudes t h a t are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly a n d the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile a n d structure. . . . T h e r e must be m a n y schisms a n d m a n y dissections m a d e in the q u a r r y a n d in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. Milton welcomes the free circulation of schisms a n d heresies. Let every m a n , he says, be his own prophet. If the root be strong, w h a t matter how we branch out ? H e then indulges in that greatest m e t a p h o r with which his tract is adorned : his picture of the City " besieg'd a n d blockt about, her navigable river infested, inrodes a n d incursions round, defiance a n d battell oft r u m o r ' d to be m a r c h i n g u p ev'n to her walls, a n d suburb trenches " a n d the people within this city " wholly tak'n u p with the study of highest a n d most important matters to be reform'd . . . disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, ev'n to a rarity, a n d admiration, things not before discourst or writt'n of". A n d this, he continues, far from being a sign of weakness in that city or nation, " argues first a singular good will, contentedness a n d confidence in your p r u d e n t foresight, a n d safe government, Lords a n d Commons " . It is a sign of organic health. For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits p u r e a n d vigorous, not only to vital, but to rationall faculties, a n d those in the acutest, a n d the pertest 342

The " Areopagitica " operations of wit and suttlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the cherfulnesse of the people is so sprighty up, as that it has, not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversie, and new invention, it betok'ns us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off the old and wrincl'd skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entring the glorious waies of Truth and prosperous vertue destin'd to become great and honourable in these latter ages. Then follows that supremely beautiful passage envisaging " a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.'* Such are Milton's arguments for the liberty of unlicensed printing. Not one of them is without its aptness to-day, and though in our state of siege we have not wholly abrogated this liberty above all liberties, there is a dull acquiescence in the many restrictions that have been imposed, and a tolerance of their abuse. We have not come through this time of trial without some cause for doubting whether England is still a place of philosophic freedom. Refugees from foreign tyranny have been imprisoned on suspicion of their opinions, and not on any proven transgressions of law. Englishmen who have too openly expressed their sympathy with the false and illiberal philosophy of our enemies have been arrested and detained without open trial. A specious sophistry has been used to arrest and imprison men whose moral objections to war were as strong and as sincerely held as any which could be brought under a religious rubric. But these are blatant and occasional infringements of our liberties which will, I hope, disappear with the state of war which has given them their only sanction. What I feel more concerned about are certain tendencies which prolong their dark shadows into the time of peace and reconstruction. I refer 343

A Coat of Many Colours to the growing power of trade associations, a n d to the proposal, freely canvassed, that such associations should be entrusted with w h a t is called a planning or rationalization of their particular trade. For the printing a n d publishing of books is a trade, a n d there have not been lacking voices to call for its regimentation. I n Milton's time, as we have seen, the task of censorship was to be entrusted to the contemporary trade association, the Stationers' C o m p a n y . Since Milton's time those corrupted remnants of the free guilds, which tried their best for m a n y years to restrict trade a n d to immobilize labour, came u n d e r the control of Parliament a n d for the most p a r t only continued to exist as picturesque survivals of a past economy. But within recent years—and largely as a counterpart to the organized associations of workmen— these bodies have been revived, though generally u n d e r new names a n d with new functions. T h a t they are a necessary feature of the totalitarian state is not to be denied : a centralized economy must have institutions through which it can transmit its rigid control of the lives a n d actions of its citizens. This is not the occasion to discuss the economic aspects of the question : there is undoubtedly m u c h to be said for the planned production a n d distribution of the material necessities of life. But the control of material is a p t to give the controllers consequential powers whose abuse cannot be prevented. T h e materials of publishing are not to be treated as ordinary merchandise ; for the control of these materials cannot be easily distinguished from the control of the words a n d thoughts they disseminate. This wider threat has no sanction in w a r : it is a proposal for peace. O u r publishing trade must, it is said, be planned, a n d if publishers cannot p u t their own house in order, the state must intervene. Liberty, we are told by one of our leading publishers, is a barren intellectual concept. " Books a n d authors, the literary art a n d science of a great nation, 344

The " Areopagitica " are too important to be left to the unrestricted scope of private enterprise." Publishers as a corporate body " should find a way of discouraging the minority from actions dangerous to publishers as a whole " ^ These may look well as the pious sentiments of a tidy mind : but the field of truth, as Milton describes it, is not tidy : it is a battlefield. We may deplore the waste of paper and labour on tracts that are pernicious, on books and periodicals that cater for the lowest levels of taste. But prohibition is no cure for the evil. The prettiest of flowers are a culture from the wilderness of weeds, and a garden in which only red roses are allowed to bloom is not only monotonous : it is a cemetery in which all adventure lies buried. I am not recommending that we should let things be— that we should stand aside in idle indifference. But it is public taste and public sensibility which should be improved, by education, by example, by the abundance of beauty and the free intercourse of creative spirits. These manifestations come spontaneously from the groundwork of a free community, and because they are spontaneous, they seek and find many and diverse channels of expression. For this reason I would not strive to prevent the establishment of a state publishing house, or a guild of publishers, or a guild of authors publishing their own works : I would add to private enterprise any institutions of co-operation and mutual aid which promised diversity and ease of communication. It is the character of restrictions that they breed and multiply, until, as Milton so vividly says, we " fall again into a grosse conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay and stubble forc't and frozen together ". But Liberty is absolute : it suffers no limitation to its range, no definition of its measures. It is a reflection of the confident belief that when the dust of 1 Mr. F. J. Warburg in an address to the Publishers' Advertising Circle, 24 September, 1942. 345

M

A Goat of Many Colours controversy has settled, a n d m a n y subtle engines lie broken in the ditches, the divine image of truth shall stand, simple, radiant, a n d benign.

71.

Envoy

E V E R Y W H E R E , in that ominous summer of 1939, we found deserted hotels, silent b u t not unfriendly people, good roads but poor food. W h e n we reached the Italian Lakes we h a d been travelling strenuously for a week or more, a n d decided to rest for two or three days at a spot I h a d m a r k e d for such a purpose some years before—the H e r m i t a g e at San Vigilio. It stands on the eastern shore of Lake G a r d a , overlooking a miniature harbour. T h e c h a r m of the place comes not only from its situation, but also from a stage-like antiquity—it is opposite the peninsula of Sermione, Catullus's retreat, a n d everything h a d been done, back in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, to enhance its classical associations. White statues gleam between d a r k cypresses, a n d here a n d there, cut into the garden walls a n d half hidden by the hanging weeds, is an elegant Latin inscription. T h e h a r b o u r is not m u c h bigger t h a n a pond, but it is perfect, with its " sea-front " a n d landing-stage. It shelters perhaps half a dozen fishing boats, which set out with their russet sails at sunset—the fishing is a night industry, a n d this makes the place all the sleepier during the day. T h e fishers emerge about midday a n d take a prolonged siesta sitting against the whitewashed walls of their cottages, which in their turn lean sleepily against the cliffs. F r o m the balcony of the hotel, where we h a d all our meals, we looked down on this peaceful scene. Normally a lake-steamer calls twice a day, b u t the service h a d been 346

Envoy suspended—there were not enough tourists. Occasionally a rowing-boat would drift slowly round the headland to the north of the harbour. Then one day, the third of our stay, the peace was suddenly broken. We had finished lunch and were sipping our coffee on the balcony when some echoing hoots warned us of the approach of a steamer. Actually there were two of them, and as they came round the headland we saw that they were crowded with tourists. They approached slowly and came to anchor outside the harbour. At first we viewed them with mild curiosity, but as they came within range of all our senses, this curiosity turned to apprehension, and slowly to mystified horror. A holiday excursion is not a welcome sight to anyone enjoying peace and solitude. We might have fled indoors at once, but were held by the odd behaviour of this crowd. They shouted, some of them, but not in any sort of unison. They waved their handkerchiefs or hats, but in aimless jerks. Their sweaty faces seemed to be lifted towards us, and for a time we thought their shouts might be intended for us, but they never waited for an answer. The majority were fat, the men bald, with open shirts and thick pink necks ; their knees showing between dirty leather shorts and white stockings. The women wore blouses and skirts of cheap printed cotton. The shouts and snatches of talk that reached us were in German. Some of the passengers were scrambling into boats, and I began to fear an invasion of our privacy. They landed, these few, but there was little for them to see— no shops, no bar, no café—nothing but a steep path up the lake side, some fishing boats, and some fishermen who sat stolidly under their walls, not moving, not speaking. The shouting and gesticulating continued ; the bunched groups on the steamers were eating oranges, throwing the rind into the harbour, along with screwed-up tissue papers, 347

A Goat of Many Colours cigar butts, all the characteristic droppings of Mass-man. And all the time grimacing a n d uttering their strange disconnected cries. It h a d soon become a p p a r e n t that it was one of the " Kraft durch Freude " tours organized by the Nazis, a n d though in reality the crowd's appearance was not very different from a bank-holiday excursion in England, I was ready to find a racial or a political excuse for my disdain. So, for that matter, was the Italian waitress who h a d come out to watch from the same balcony, a n d stood near us. She brought some news which immediately m a d e the odd behaviour of the crowd more understandable—it was a party consisting entirely of the deaf or the d u m b . But only Germans, I thought, perhaps only Nazis, would think of herding together a lot of similarly afflicted people a n d sending them off to a foreign country to enjoy themselves. T h e hooters h a d sounded a n d the Brueghel figures were scrambling aboard again. Soon they were gone, trailing their discordant cries a n d the sentimental wail of an accordion—played by the deaf, perhaps, for the benefit of the d u m b . T h e silence was deeper t h a n ever. T h e sun h a d disappeared behind the distant mountains. T h e lovely twilight settled mistily over the surface of the lake. T h e n from the group under the houses a fisherman got u p a n d crossed below us. H e was carrying a long-handled shovel a n d m a d e his way to the outer wall of the little harbour, where it joined the rocks a n d pebbly beach. H e began to shovel u p some pebbles, throwing t h e m into the water in a heap. Perhaps a dozen shovelfuls, a n d then he went back. W e were completely puzzled by this action, a n d asked the waitress for an explanation. It was as simple as it was astounding. H e was creating a current which would slowly coil round the harbour, carrying with it all the débris which the trippers h a d left floating on its surface.

348

Envoy Presumably the pebbles still retained the heat of the midday sun, and when dropped into the water, caused it to expand in this particular spot and with this particular effect. It was a small incident, but even then, before the storm had broken over Europe, it already seemed like a fragment of ancient wisdom, confronting with its dignity and simplicity the deaf and dumb emissaries of a civilization that had nothing but horror to bring into the world.

349

Notes 'lhe essays published in this volume are selected from the various products of my critical activity during the past twenty years. None of them has been previously published in book form, though here and there a paragraph which has escaped my memory may have been incorporated in one of my books. In the main these are occasional essays—a volume of more formal essays was published seven years ago (Collected Essays in Literary Criticism, Faber & Faber, 1938)—and I have deliberately refrained from giving them any classification : they have no particular design on the reader ; I wish them to be read for their variety. I have been so often accused of inconsistency that I must expect a renewal of the charge now that I have tied so many faggots into a convenient bundle : but against a single-minded fanaticism I can only protest with Burke (whom I am inconsistent enough to admire) that my opinions come " from one who wishes to preserve consistency ; but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end ; and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise ". In the notes which follow I have endeavoured to record those periodicals in which the essays first appeared, and would like to take this opportunity of proffering any acknowledgements which may be due to their editors. H. R. 1.

Not previously published. The translation of the passage from Rilke's " Letters to a Young Poet " is by Dr. K. W. Maurer. 2. Composite : partly from an unpublished lecture, partly from an article and review contributed to the Listener. 3. Introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of Klee's work at the Leicester Galleries, February, 1941. * 4. From the Listener, 1938. 5. From the Bibliophile's Almanac, 1928. Lawrence discusses this article in his Letters, ed. David Garnett, London (Heinemann), 1938, pp. 547-51. 6. From the Comrade, 1943. 7. From the Times Literary Supplement. I have published a more general study of James in Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (London, Faber & Faber, 1938), pp. 354-66. 8. Introduction to an exhibition. 350

Notes 9. From a review. 10. Composite, chiefly from the Listener, 1939. 11. A broadcast. Compare my Wordsworth (London, Jonathan Cape, 1930). 12. From the Listener. 13. From Now. 14. From the Listener. 15. From News Letter. 16. From the Observer, on the occasion of the centenary of Morris's birth, 1934. 17. From the Listener. 18. From the Times Literary Supplement, 1926. 19. From Now. 20. From Circle (Faber & Faber, 1937). 21. From the New English Weekly. 22. From the Listener. 23. From the Spectator. 24. From the Listener. 25. A broadcast, with additional material from a review. Cf. In Defence of Shelley. (London, Heinemann, 1936). 26. From the Listener. 27. From the Observer. 28. From the Listener and the Spectator. 29. From Cinema Quarterly. 30. From the Listener, 1930. 31. Introduction to an exhibition of paintings (Dublin, 1943). 32. A broadcast. A further essay on Hawthorne appears in Collected Essays in Literary Criticism, pp. 265-79. 33. From the Listener. A further essay on Hopkins appears in Collected Essays in Literary Criticism, pp. 331-53. 34. From the Listener. 35. A broadcast. 36. From the Listener. 37. Broadcast (1944), with passages from a review. 38. From a lecture. Cf. Surrealism (London, Faber & Faber, 1936), for a larger treatment of the same subject. 39. From the New English Weekly. 40. From the Spectator. 41. From the Listener. 42. A foreword to Ethics in Modern Art, by Marjorie Bowen (Conway Memorial Lecture, 1939). 43. From the Criterion. 44. From a lecture. Cf. Art and Society (London, Faber & Faber, 1946), Chapter V. 45. From the Spectator. 46. From Cinema Quarterly. 47. Broadcast. 48. From the Listener. 351

A Goat of Many Colours 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

From Poetry (London). From Axis. Composite : partly from reviews in the Spectator and the Listener. The quotations are from the various volumes of Kierkegaard's works published by the Oxford University Press. From the Listener. No record of previous publication. From the Listener. From the Listener. From the Times Literary Supplement. Cf. Collected Essays in Literary Criticism, pp. 299-314. From the Listener. From the Listener. Composite : partly from the Spectator and the Listener. From the Listener. From the Times Literary Supplement. From the Listener. From the Mew English Weekly. From the Listener. From Purpose. From the London Bulletin. No record of previous publication. The subject is treated at greater length in Art and Industry (Faber & Faber, 2nd éd., 1944). From the Spectator, with additions. From the Listener. Speech at the Areopagitica Tercentenary Conference, 25 August, 1944. From Tribune.

The frontispiece is reproduced from a photograph by Brogi, Florence

352

Routledge Revivals

The English Vision

This anthology, first published in 1939, aimed to present the English ideal in its various aspects as expressed by representative Englishmen. This book will be of interest to students of literature and to the general reader.

The English Vision An Anthology

Edited by Herbert Read

First published in 1939 by George Routledge & Sons This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1939 Benedict Read All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 40030245 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

13: 13: 13: 13:

978-1-138-91423-0 (hbk) 978-1-315-69082-7 (ebk) 978-1-138-91407-0 (Set) 978-1-315-69097-1 (Set) (ebk)

THE

ENGLISH VISION AN ANTHOLOGY

EDITED BY

HERBERT

READ

LONDON

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD. BROADWAY HOUSE : 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.C.4.

«939

PrintedinCreat Britainby Butler &Tanner Ltd., Frome andLondon

GE NE RA L

CONTENTS PAGI

I n tr o d u c tio n

V XV

A ckn ow ledgm en ts T able

of

C ontents

L andscape

.

.

.

.

.

U pb r in g in g .

.

.

.

C h a r a c te r is tic s

xvii 21

.

.

65

.

81

H is t o r ic a l I deals N a t io n a l T

10 7

em per

N a t iv e G enius— L it e r a t u r e

•

177

.

241

N a t iv e G enius — D ram a

287

N a t iv e G enius— P ain tin g N a t iv e G enius — T

he

Music

U ltim a te I d e a l

.

III

•

•

325

•

•

•

339

.

.

•

351

INTRODUCTION his anthology was made in the early months of 1933, when the ideals which it is designed to express were first seriously threatened by the forces which we are now compelled to challenge with arms. In declaring war the King and his Ministers repeated those words—liberty, justice, toleration—which have so often appeared as symbols of our national faith. But symbols, though they may have a self-evident meaning for those who habitually use them, stand in need of definition to the world at large. Such a definition is, I would claim, given in this book. My aim has been to present the English ideal in its various aspects as expressed by representative Englishmen, and, moreover, by Englishmen who were perfectly conscious of what they were doing and saying. This anthology is not a mere gathering of things typically English: such grow on every bush, and are too various to have much significance. But in every age we have had poets, statesmen and writers who have in rare moments felt that what they were doing or what they were propounding had about it something intimately linked with their blood and with the soil to which they belonged, and this unique quality they have v

T

VI

INTRODUCTION

attempted to define. It is to such representative spirits that I have gone, with the hope that from the aggregation of their sentiments would emerge something clear and unequivocal, an expression of the national ideal which would be valuable, not only as a guide to all Englishmen, but even as an example for the world at large. It is surely desirable that during the catastrophic times in which we live, Englishmen should have by them a compendious book which will remind them of those traditions of liberty, justice and toleration which have always guided our destinies and in whose defence we are now fighting the last fateful battle. These qualities are not, of course, the peculiar possession of the English people, but, as more than one writer in this anthology reminds us, they have found a firmer embodiment in our customs and institutions than anywhere else, and to them we owe the stability of our national life and the comparative calm of our historical evolution. I make haste to add that I attempt to define this ideal in no spirit of conservatism or reaction. It is precisely because the underlying spirit of the English ideal is active and dynamic that it has endured so long, and proved so capable of adaptation to the growing complexity of our civilisation. Liberty was always a fine word to make a fury about, but only in England do we pursue the idea in calmness of mind. All the various aspects of our ideal will, I hope, emerge clearly in the pages that follow. What I wish to emphasise now is the universal validity of

INTRODUCTION

Vll

this our vision. Alone of national ideals, the English ideal transcends nationality. A writer so unexpected as the late D. H. Lawrence (nevertheless a typical Englishman) wrote at a time when he had little patience with the material conditions of our present social order: “I really think that the most living clue of life is in us Englishmen in England, and the great mistake we make is in not uniting together in the strength of this real living clue—religious in the most vital sense—uniting together in England and so carrying the vital spark through.” 1 That is my own profound belief, and this book has no other intention but to give that real living clue, and so offer to the distracted world one ideal which is above the intolerant extremes which now tyrannise over millions of unhappy people. I cannot hope to have succeeded in such a task, which would be worthy of the effort of a lifetime if events would wait on it; but I have done the best I could in the time at my disposal, the time being dictated by my own sense of the urgency of the task. Having declared so high a purpose, I must hasten to apologise for the apparent irrelevance of some of my material. The book proceeds on a genetic plan. That is to say, I begin with the soil, the physical climate and the actual landscape; then to the race, its upbringing, its reaction to material considerations, the resultant character of the people; then to the historical behaviour of such 1 Letter to Robert Pratt Barlow, 30 March, 1922.

viii

INTRODUCTION

a people, to the evolution of their ideals, and so to a formulation of these ideals in institutions, in religion, art and literature; the various aspects of native genius; and so finally to the projection of an ultimate ideal, transcending this one nationality, embracing the community of Europe and of all men. Naturally, all these extracts do not show the same degree of aptness or of eloquence, and some fall short of their function. More witnesses might have vouched for the peculiarities of our educa­ tional system, but I was not confident enough of its unfailing virtue. Something, too, of our rural genius escapes—something not reached in the ex­ tracts from Ruskin, Fuller, Hazlitt or Bagehot— something which is perhaps only fully expressed in ballad and folk-song, and in that subtly English music which died before its commentators were born. An apology is due for the excessive length of some of my extracts—the Congreve and the Dryden, for example; but I claim that the length of these extracts is duly proportioned to their importance, and that when Dryden is carefully disentangling the essentially English qualities of our drama, he is giving us an analysis significant far beyond its immediate object. I am also sensible of the objection that might be raised against the excessive nationalism of some of the extracts; and though all the time I have been conscious of the distinction between a narrow nationalism and a noble patriotism, some of the exemplars of our

INTRODUCTION

IX

virtues, and Milton is a prime instance, have so mingled nobility and excessive zeal, that the one cannot be presented without the blot of the other. I have endeavoured to avoid the quaint, but a certain quaintness in the English character cannot be wholly excluded. I have chosen little poetry, but that is not because I have not sought it; we have not been very vocal on this score, for the very good reason that when it comes to the expression of discursive ideas, our poetic good sense tells us that prose is the better medium. For this reason even the lyrical expression of nationality in Shakespeare is better presented within the frame of Coleridge’s and Swinburne’s more conscious criticism. The extracts on our language might at first seem dis­ proportionate, but it should be realised that no faculty in nationhood is so vital as language; with­ out a consciousness of a national language there can be no consciousness of a nation, and no national poetry. In a very real sense, a nation is the creation of its language. One further criticism I must anticipate: I have not looked into the pedigree of my authors, and some of them, like Burke and Carlyle, are not in the least English in the strict sense of the term. But England within the meaning of this book is not a tract of land bounded by the Marches in the West and the Cheviots in the North: it is an ideal, a dynamic vision with which many Irishmen, Welshmen and Scotsmen have identified themselves. The fact that

X

INTRODUCTION

Burke and Carlyle came to London and helped to form the destinies of England, of that Greater England which includes the whole Empire, is sufficient warrant for my annexation of their names. It will be said that it is a one-sided picture that I present, for that is my deliberate aim; by con­ centrating on our good qualities, we may learn to moderate our bad ones—among which, perhaps as a result of personal prejudice, I include English sport and English morals. If it is said that these are inseparable from our virtues, I flatly deny it. We must learn to distinguish between the customs of a class and the characteristics of a nation, between conventions of a negative force and positive activi­ ties. Cricket and fox-hunting have no longer any deep national significance, any more than bearbaiting or cock-fighting; and never had. The differences between a crowd at an English football final and a crowd at a Spanish bull-fight are super­ ficial and local. As for our social morality, which is mainly a creation of the nineteenth century, it has no representative validity in the wide prospect of our history. Whatever is local and circumscribed I have tried to avoid, even an institution so apparently representative as the English Church—“national in its morals and manners, mincing in its scholarship, snobbish in its sympathies, sentimental in its emo­ tions.” 1 If I could have built an English cathedral in my pages, that would have been a different matter, 1 Santayana: Soliloquies in England, p. 86.

INTRODUCTION

xi

for when English cathedrals were built they were expressive of the English vision. They are part of our landscape and were formed with our language, but the spirit that now inhabits them is not essentially English. One has only to ask: is this an ideal we can set before Europe, before the world? to arrive at a test which excludes many aspects of our life and character of which we are unreasonably proud. But what remains is very essential, and essential to the rest of this disaffected world. Once in the history of the world an ideal not unlike ours became actual in a state, in Ancient Greece. England has reminded more than one detached observer of Greece. The philosopher I have already quoted has drawn the comparison. “What I love in Greece and in England is content­ ment in finitude, fair outward ways, manly perfec­ tion and simplicity.” Our Lion strength and forti­ tude, our Lion reason, he observes, is balanced by the Unicorn of imagination and fantasy. Our vitality finds its continual support in both symbols. And that is the vision we offer to Europe. In England our differences are not suppressed; we say that we “sink” them, meaning that we resolve them into some wider conception of conduct and life. In life, as in art, the rule of reason or intellect is finally stultifying, and society becomes “sterile, hopeless, useless, like a dead tree.” Only when reason is stirred by the imagination (which in its turn has its roots in the senses) can we hope for that spirit of

Xll

INTRODUCTION

love and creation upon which, as Lawrence so fully realised, depends the reality of a new and a better epoch of civilisation. “And now the time returns again”—a time of joy and love. The great central voices of our English spirit all echo that confident cry of Blake’s; in this book I have tried to make those voices swell in one' clear chorus.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS thanks are due to the following authors and publishers for permission to print copy­ right extracts: the executors of the late G. K. Chesterton and Messrs. Faber & Faber; Mr. Christopher Dawson and Messrs. Sheed & Ward; the Very Rev. Dean Inge and Messrs. Ernest Benn; Mr. Percy Lubbock and Messrs. Jonathan Cape; the literary executors of the late Henry James and Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson for the extract from the introduction to Rupert Brooke’s Lettersfrom America; the executors of the late D. H. Lawrence and Messrs. Heinemann; the Ruskin Trustees and Messrs. Allen & Unwin, the publishers of the only author­ ised editions of Ruskin’s Works; Messrs. Heine­ mann (for the Swinburne extract); Messrs. Mac­ millan (for the extract from Dean Church’s Spenser) ; Messrs. Constable (for the George Gissing extract); Messrs. Longmans, Green (for the extract from Newman’s On the Scope and Nature of University Education, and Miss Tillyard and the Cambridge University Press for the translation of Milton’s Prolusiones Oratoriae. Acknowledgments are also due to the editors of the texts from which I have taken some of the exxiii

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tracts, but as I have in most cases allowed myself slight liberties with such texts in the direction of the modernisation of the spelling and punctuation, I content myself with a general expression of my obligation to these gentlemen.

TABLE

OF

CONTENTS

LANDSCAPE i. A Gleaming Segment of all England. 2. The Valley of the Avon. 3. An English Hill. 4. This England. 5. Shakespeare’s Scenery. 6. Local Circumstance in “ Lycidas.” 7. Landscape and Genius. 8. A Country House. 9. The Principles of English Gardening. 10. English Comfort.

D. H. Lawrence. William Cobbett. William Wordsworth. D. H. Lawrence. John Ruskin. Thomas Warton. John Ruskin. Sir William Temple. William Wordsworth. George Gissing.

UPBRINGING ii. An English School. 12. Eton and Cambridge.

Leigh Hunt. Percy Lubbock.

CHARACTERISTICS 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

The Good Yeoman. Thomas Fuller. R. W. Church. The English Gentleman. A Definition of a Gentleman. John Henry Newman. A Natural Gentleman. William Hazlitt. The Old English Guise. Anonymous. Walter Bagehot. The Equable Sense. Common Sense. John Ruskin. English Youth. Henry James. English Pride. John Ruskin.

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xvi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

HISTORICAL IDEALS 22. Heralds of Fame. 23. Retrospective Immortality. 24. The Patriot King. 25. Patriotic Reminiscence. 26. National Brotherhood. 27. The Virtues of Insularity. 28. The Two Englands. 29. Just Prejudice. 30. A Republican Firmness. 31. Filial Fears. 32. Civil Liberty. 33. The Institution ofJuries. 34. Liberty and Authority. 35. The Doctrine ofEccentricity. 36. Independence and Liberty.

Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury. John Milton. A. C. Swinburne. S. T. Coleridge. Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury. Henry Thomas Buckle. Christopher Dawson. Edmund Burke. Junius. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Junius. Henry Fielding. Walter Bagehot. John Stuart Mill. WilliamWordsworth.

NATIONAL TEMPER 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

The Racial Blend. Our Earthly Instinct. Grown Children. The English Renascence. The Spirit of the Reforma­ tion. A Christian People. The English Revolution. The Epic ofJohn Bull. English Religion and Philo­ sophy.

Matthew Arnold. John Ruskin. WilliamHazlitt. John Richard Green. John Milton. John Milton. Lord Macaulay. Thomas Carlyle. William Ralph Inge, C.V.O., D.D.

NATIVE GENIUS—LITERATURE 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

We too serve Phoebus. These Islands my World. Good English Words. The Vulgar Tongue. The English Language (1). » » » (2).

William Cowper. John Milton. E. K. George Puttenham. Joseph Addison. Richard Chenevix Trench.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 52 - Importations. 53 - English Eloquence. 54 - The Turn for Style. 55 - The First of the English. 56 . Town and Country Poets. 57 - Licensed Fooling. N A T IV E

58 59

John Dryden. Thomas de Quincey. Matthew Arnold. G. K. Chesterton. Walter Bagehot. William Hazlitt.

G E N IU S — D R A M A

. English Humour. - The-English Stage.

William Congreve. John Dryden.

N A T IV E

G E N IU S — P A IN T IN G

60. The English School.

61. Stay at Home.

Sir Joshua Reynolds. George Borrow.

N A T IV E G E N IU S — M U S IC 62. An English Composer. . English Melody.

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TH E

U L T IM A T E

64. Albion’s Land. 65* 66. 67. 68.

Roger North. Leigh Hunt.

The New Age. One Great Federation. England and Europe. The Time Returns.

ID E A L

William Blake. William Blake. Matthew Arnold. D. H. Lawrence. William Blake.

xvii

LANDSCAPE

I. A GLEAMING SEGMENT OF ALL ENGLAND

o vivid a vision everything, so visually poig­ nant, it is like that concentrated moment when a drowning man sees all his past crystallised into one jewel of recollection. The slow, reluctant, pallid morning, unwillingly releasing its tarnished embellishment of gold, far off there, outside, beyond the shafted windows, beyond, over the forgotten unseen country, that lies sunken in gloom below, whilst the dawn slug­ gishly bestirs itself, far off, beyond the windowshafts of stone, dark pillars, like bars, dark and un­ fathomed, set near me, before the reluctance of the far-off dawn. The window-shafts, like pillars, like bars, the shallow Tudor arch looping over between them, looping the darkness in a pure edge, in front of the far-off reluctance of the dawn. Shafted, looped windows between the without and the within, the old house, the perfect old inter­ vention of fitted stone, fitted perfectly about a silent soul, the soul that in drowning under this last wave of time looks out clear through the shafted windows to see the dawn of all dawns taking place, the England of all recollection rousing into being.

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23

24

THE ENGUSH VISION

The wet lawn drizzled with brown, sodden leaves; the feathery heap of the ilex tree; the garden seat all wet and reminiscent. Between the ilex tree and the bare, purplish elms, a gleaming segment of all England, the dark plough-land and wan grass, and the blue, hazy heap of the distance, under the accomplished morning. So the day has taken place, all the visionary business of the day. The young cattle stand in the straw of the stack-yard, the sun gleams on their white fleece, the eyes of Io, and the man with sidewhiskers carries more yellow straw into the com­ pound. The sun comes in all down one side, and above, in the sky, all the gables and grey stone chimney-stacks are floating in pure dreams. There is threshed wheat smouldering in the great bam, the fire of life : and the sound of the threshing machine, running, drumming. The threshing machine, running, drumming, waving its steam in a corner of a great field, the rapid nucleus of darkness beside the yellow ricks : and the rich plough-land comes up, ripples up in endless grape-coloured ripples, like a tide of pro­ créant desire : the machine sighs and drums, wind blows the chaff in little eddies, blows the clothes of the men on the ricks close against their limbs : the men on the stacks in the wind against a bare blue heaven, their limbs blown clean in contour naked shapely animated fragments of earth active in heaven.

LANDSCAPE

25

Coming home, by the purple and crimson hedges, red with berries, up hill over the heavy ground to the stone, old three-pointed house with its raised chimney-stacks, the old manor lifting its fair, pure stone amid trees and foliage, rising from the lawn, we pass the pond where white ducks hastily launch upon the lustrous dark grey waters. So to the steps up the porch, through the door­ way, and into the interior, fragrant with all the memories of old age, and of bygone, remembered lustiness. It is the vision of a drowning man, the vision of all that I am, all I have become, and ceased to be. It is me, generations and generations of me, every complex, gleaming fibre of me, every lucid pang of my coming into being. And oh, my God, I cannot bear it. For it is not this me who am drown­ ing swiftly under this last wave of time, this bursten flood. . . . But in the farmyard up the hill, I remember, there were clusters of turkeys that ruffled them­ selves like flowers suddenly ruffled into blossom, and made strange, unacquainted noises, a foreign tongue, exiles of another life. In Florida they will go in droves in the shadow, like metallic clouds, like flowers with red pistils drooping in the shade, under the quivering, quick, miraculous roof of pine-needles, or drifting between the glowing pine-trunks, metallic birds, or perched at evening like cones on the red-hot pine boughs,

26

THE ENGLISH VISION

or bursting in the morning across open glades of sunshine, like flowers burst and taking wing. There is a morning which dawns like an irides­ cence on the wings o f sleeping darkness, till the darkness bursts and flies off in glory, dripping with the rose of morning. There is the soaring suspense of day, dizzy with sunshine, and night flown away and utterly for­ gotten. There is evening coming to settle amid the redhot bars of the pine-trunks, dark cones, that emit the utter, electric darkness. Another dawn, another day, another night— another heaven and earth— a resurrection. d. h . l a w r e n c e : Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell. i st December, 1915.

2.

THE VALLEY OF THE AVON

off this morning on the Marlborough road about two miles, or three, and then turned off, over the downs, in a north-westerly direc­ tion, in search of the source of the Avon river, which goes down to Salisbury. I had once been at Netheravon, a village in this valley; but I had often heard this valley described as one of the finest pieces of land in all England; I knew that there were about thirty parish churches, standing in a length of about thirty miles, and in an average width of hardly a mile; and I was resolved to see a

I

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LANDSCAPE

27

little into the reasons that could have induced our fathers to build all these churches, especially if, as the Scotch would have us believe, there were but a mere handful of people in England until of late years. . . . In steering across the down, I came to a large farm, which a shepherd told me was Milton Hill Farm. This was upon the high land, and before I came to the edge of this Valley of Avon, which was my land of promise; or at least, of great expecta­ tion; for I could not imagine that thirty churches had been built for nothing by the side of a brook (for it is no more during the greater part of the way) thirty miles long. The shepherd showed me the way towards Milton; and at the end of about a mile, from the top of a very high part of the down, with a steep slope towards the valley, I first saw this Valley of Avon; and a most beautiful sight it was! Villages, hamlets, large farms, towers, steeples, fields, meadows, orchards, and very fine timber trees, scattered all over the valley. The shape of the thing is this: on each side downs, very lofty and steep in some places, and sloping miles back in other places; but each out-side of the valley are downs. From the edge of the downs begin capital arablefields generally of very great dimensions, and, in some places, running a mile or two back into little cross-valleys, formed by hills of downs. After the corn-fields come meadows on each side, down to the brook or river. The farm-houses, mansions, vil­

28

THE ENGLISH VISION

lages, and hamlets are generally situated in that part of the arable land which comes nearest the meadows. Great as my expectations had been, they were more than fulfilled. I delight in this sort of country; and I had frequently seen the vale of the Itchen, that of the Bourn, and also that of the Teste in Hampshire; I had seen the vales amongst the South Downs; but I never before saw anything to please me like this valley of the Avon. I sat upon my horse and looked over Milton and Easton and Pewsey for half an hour, though I had not break­ fasted. The hill was very steep. A road, going slanting down it, was still so steep, and washed so very deep by the rains of ages, that I did not attempt to ride down it, and I did not like to lead my horse, the path was so narrow. So seeing a boy with a drove of pigs going out to the stubbles, I beckoned him to come up to me; and he came and led my horse down for me.. . . Endless is the variety in the shape of the high lands which form this valley. Sometimes the slope is very gentle, and the arable lands go back very far. At others, the downs come out into the valley almost like piers into the sea, being very steep in their sides, as well as their ends towards the valley. They have no slope at their other ends: indeed they have no back ends> but run into the main high land. There is also great variety in the width of the valley; great variety in the width of the meadows; but the land

LANDSCAPE

29

appears all to be of the very best; and it must be so, for the farmers confess it. . . . From the top of the hill I was not a little sur­ prised to see, in every part of the valley that my eye could reach, a due, a large, portion of fields of Swedish turnips, all looking extremely well. I had found the turnips of both sorts by no means bad from Salt Hill to Newbury; but from Newbury through Burghclere, Highclere, Uphusband, and Tangley, I had seen but few. At and about Ludgarshall and Everley I had seen hardly any. But when I came this morning to Milton Hill Farm, I saw a very large field of what appeared to me to be fine Swedish turnips. In the valley, however, I found them much finer, and the fields were very beautiful objects, forming, as their colour did, so great a contrast with that of the fallows and the stubbles, which latter are, this year, singularly clean and bright. Having gotten to the* bottom of the hill, I pro­ ceeded on to the village of Milton. . . . I left Easton away at my right, and I did not go up to Watton Rivers, where the river Avon rises, and which lies just close to the south-west corner of Marlborough Forest, and at about 5 or 6 miles from the town of Marlborough. Lower down the river, as I thought, there lived a friend, who was a great farmer, and whom I intended to call on. It being my way, however, always to begin making inquiries soon enough, I asked the pig-driver where this friend

30

THE ENGLISH VISION

lived; and, to my surprise, I found that he lived in the parish of Milton. After riding up to the church, as being the centre of the village, I went on towards the house of my friend, which lay on my road down the valley. I have many, many times witnessed agreeable surprise; but I do not know that I ever in the whole course of my life saw people so much surprised and pleased as this farmer and his family were at seeing me. People often tell you that they are glad to see you; and in general they speak truth. I take pretty good care not to approach any house, with the smallest appearance of a design to eat or drink in it, unless I be quite sure of a cordial recep­ tion ; but my friend at Fifield (it is in Milton parish) and all his family really seemed to be delighted beyond all expression. When I set out this morning, I intended to go all the way down to the city of Salisbury to-day; but I soon found that to refuse to sleep at Fifield would cost me a great deal more trouble than a day was worth. So that I made my mind up to stay in this farm-house, which has one of the nicest gardens, and it contains some of the finest flowers, that I ever saw, and all is disposed with as much good taste as I have ever witnessed. Here I am, then, just going to bed after having spent as pleasant a day as I ever spent in my life. william cobbett: Rural Rides. 1826.

LANDSCAPE 3*

31

AN ENGLISH HILL

and Ossa flourish side by side, Together in immortal books enrolled: His ancient dower Olympus hath not sold; And that inspiring Hill, which “ did divide Into two ample horns his forehead wide,” Shines with poetic radiance as of old; While not an English Mountain we behold By the celestial Muses glorified. Yet round our sea-girt shore they rise in crowds: What was the great Parnassus* self to Thee, Mount Skiddaw? In his natural sovereignty Our British Hill is nobler far; he shrouds His double front among Atlantic clouds, And pours forth streams more sweet than Castaly. e l io n

P

WILLIAM

WORDSWORTH:

Miscellaneous Sonnets.

1801.

4. THIS ENGLAND

I drive across this country, with autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collaps­ ing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos o f old things passing away and no new things coming: this house— it is England— my God, it breaks my soul— their England, these shafted win-

W

h en

32

THE ENGLISH VISION

dows, the elm-trees, the blue distance—the past, the great past, crumbling down, breaking down, not under the force of the coming birds, but under the weight of many exhausted lovely yellow leaves, that drift over the lawn, and over the pond, like the soldiers, passing away, into winter and the darkness of winter—no, I can’t bear it. For the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out. It has been 2000 years, the spring and summer of our era. What, then, will the winter be? No, I can’t bear it, I can’t let it go. Yet who can stop the autumn from falling to pieces, when November has come in? It is almost better to be dead, than to see this awful process finally strangling us to oblivion, like the leaves off the trees. I want to go to America, to Florida, as soon as I can: as soon as I have enough money to cross with Frieda. My life is ended here. I must go as a seed that falls into new ground. But this, this England, these elm-trees, the grey wind with yellow leaves— it is so awful, the being gone from it altogether, one must be blind henceforth. But better leave a quick of hope in the soul, than all the beauty that fills the eyes. D. h. lawrence: Letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith. November 1915.

LANDSCAPE 5.

33

SHAKESPEARE’S SCENERY

t is interesting,

with respect to this love of stones in the Italian mind, to consider the difference necessitated in the English temper merely by the general domestic use of wood instead of marble. In that old Shakespearian England, men must have rendered a grateful homage to their oak forests, in the sense of all that they owed to their goodly tim­ bers in the wainscot and furniture of the rooms they loved best, when the blue of the frosty midnight was contrasted, in the dark diamonds of the lattice, with the glowing brown of the warm, fire-lighted, crim­ son-tapestried walls. Not less would an Italian look with a grateful regard on the hill summits, to which he owed, in the scorching of his summer noonday, escape into the marble corridor or crypt palpitating only with cold and smooth variegation of the un­ fevered mountain veins. In some sort, as, both in our stubbornness and our comfort, we not unfitly describe ourselves typically as Hearts of Oak, the Italians might in their strange and variegated ming­ ling of passion, like purple colour, with a cruel sternness, like white rock, truly describe themselves as Hearts of Stone. Into this feeling about marble in domestic use, Shakespeare, having seen it even in northern luxury, could partly enter, and marks it in several passages of his Italian plays. But if the reader still doubts his limitation to his own experience in all subjects of imagination, let him consider how the B

I

34

THE ENGLISH VISION

removal from mountain influence in his youth, so necessary for the perfection of his lower human sympathy, prevented him from ever rendering with any force the feelings of the mountain anchorite, or indicating in any of his monks the deep spirit of monasticism. Worldly cardinals or nuncios he can fathom to the uttermost; but where, in all his thoughts, do we find St. Francis, or Abbot Samson? The “Friar” of Shakespeare’s plays is almost the only stage conventionalism which he admitted; generally nothing more than a weak old man, who lives in a cell, and has a rope about his waist. While, finally, in such slight allusions as he makes to mountain scenery itself, it is very curious to ob­ serve the accurate limitation of his sympathies to such things as he had known in his youth; and his entire preference of human interest, and of courtly and kingly dignities, to the nobleness of the hills. This is most marked in Cymbeline, where the term “mountaineer” is, as with Dante, always one of re­ proach, and the noble birth of Arviragus and Guiderius is shown by their holding their mountain cave as A cell of ignorance; travelling abed; A prison for a debtor;

and themselves, educated among hills, as in all things contemptible: We are beastly; subtle as the fox, for prey; Like warlike as the wolf, for what we eat; Our valour is to chase what flies; our cage We make our choir, as doth the prisoned bird.

LANDSCAPE

35

A few phrases occur here and there which might justify the supposition that he had seen high moun­ tains, but never implying awe or admiration. Thus Demetrius: These things seemsmall and indistinguishable, Like far-off mountains, turned into clouds.

“Taurus $now” and the “frosty Caucasus’3 are used merely as types of purity or cold; and though the avalanche is once spoken of as an image of power, it is with instantly following depreciation: Rush on his host, as doth the melted snow Upon the valleys whose low vassal seat The Alps doth spit, and void his rheumupon.

There was only one thing belonging to hills that Shakespeare seemed to feel as noble—the pine tree, and that was because he had seen it in Warwick­ shire, clumps of pine occasionally rising on little sandstone mounds, as at the place of execution of Piers Gaveston, above the lowland woods. He touches on this tree fondly again and again: As rough, Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind, That by his top doth take the mountain pine, And make himstoop to the vale. The strong-based promontory Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up The pine and cedar.

Where note his observance of the peculiar hori­ zontal roots of the pine, spurred as it is by them like

36

THE ENGLISH VISION

the claw of a bird, and partly propped, as the aiguilles by those rock promontories at their bases which I have always called their spurs, this observ­ ance of the pine’s strength and animal-like grasp being the chief reason for his choosing it, above other trees, for Ariel’s prison. Again: You may as well forbid the mountain pines To wag their high tops, and to make no noise When they are frettea with the gusts of heaven.

And yet again: But when, fromunder this terrestrial ball, He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines.

We may judge, by the impression which this single feature of hill scenery seems to have made on Shakespeare’s mind, because he had seen it in his youth, how his whole temper would have been changed if he had lived in a more sublime country, and how essential it was to his power of contem­ plation of mankind that he should be removed from the sterner influences of nature. For the rest, so far as Shakespeare’s work has imperfections of any kind,—the trivialness of many of his adopted plots, for instance, and the comparative rarity with which he admits the ideal of an enthusiastic virtue arising out of principle; virtue being with him. for the most part, founded simply on the affections joined with inherent purity in his women, or on mere manly pride and honour in his men;—in a word, whatever difference, involving inferiority, there exists between

LANDSCAPE

37

him and Dante, in his conceptions of the relation between this world and the next, we may partly trace, as we did the difference between Bacon and Pascal, to the less noble character of the scenes around him in his youth; and admit that, though it was necessary for his special work that he should be put, as it were, on a level with his race, on those plains o f Stratford, we should see in this a proof, instead o f a negation, of the mountain power over human intellect. For breadth and perfectness of condescending sight, the Shakespearian mind stands alone; but in ascending sight it is limited. The breadth o f grasp is innate; the stoop and slightness of it were given by the circumstances of scene: and the difference between those careless masques of heathen gods, or unbelieved, though mightily con­ ceived visions of fairy, witch, or risen spirit, and the earnest faith of Dante’s vision of Paradise, is the true measure of the difference between the willowy banks of Avon, and the purple hills of Amo. John ruskin : Modern Painters. 1856. 6. LOCAL CIRCUMSTANCE IN “ LYCIDAS” octor Johnson observes, that L ycidas is filled with the heathen deities; and a long train of mythological imagery, such as a Col­ lege easily supplies. But it is such also, as even the Court itself could now have easily supplied. The public diversions, and books of all sorts and from all

D

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THE ENGLISH VISION

sorts of writers, more especially compositions in poetry, were at this time overrun with classical pedantries. But what writer, of the same period, has made these obsolete fictions the vehicle of so much fancy and poetical description? How beauti­ fully has he applied this sort of allusion, to the Druidical rocks of Denbighshire, to Mona, and the fabulous banks of Deva! It is objected, that its pas­ toral form is disgusting. But this was the age of pastoral: and yet L ycidas has but little of the bucolic cant, now so fashionable. The Satyrs and Fauns are but just mentioned. If any trite rural topics occur, how are they heightened! Together both, ere the high lawns appear’d Under the evening eye-lias of the mom, We drove afield, and both together heard What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn, Batt’ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night.

Here the day-break is described by the faint appear­ ance of the upland lawns under the first gleams of light: the sun-set by the buzzing of the chaffer: and the night sheds her fresh dews on their flocks. We cannot blame pastoral imagery, and pastoral alle­ gory, which carry with them so much natural paint­ ing. In this piece there is perhaps more poetry than sorrow. But let us read it for its poetry. It is true, that passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough Satyrs with cloven heel. But poetry does this; and in the hands of Milton, does it with a peculiar and irresistible charm. Subordinate poets exercise

LANDSCAPE

39

no invention, when they tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, and must feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping: but Milton dignifies and adorns these common artificial inci­ dents with unexpected touches of picturesque beauty, with the graces of sentiment, and with the novelties of original genius. It is objected ‘‘here is no art, for there is nothing new.” To say nothing that there may be art without novelty, as well as novelty without art, I must reply, that this objection will vanish, if we consider the imagery which Milton has raised from local circumstances. Not to repeat the use he has made of the mountains of Wales, the isle of Man, and the river Dee, near which Lycidas was shipwrecked; let us recollect the introduction of the romantic superstition of St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, which overlooks the Irish seas, the fatal scene of his friend’s disaster. But the poetry is not always unconnected with passion. The poet lavishly describes an ancient sepulchral rite, but it is made preparatory to a stroke of tenderness. He calls for a variety of flowers to decorate his friend’s hearse, supposing that his body was present, and forgetting for a while that it was floating far off in the ocean. If he was drowned, it was some consolation that he was to receive the decencies of burial. This is a pleasing deception: it is natural and pathetic. But the real catastrophe recurs. And this circumstance again opens a new vein of imagination.

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THE ENGLISH VISION

Dr. Johnson censures Milton for his allegorical mode of telling that he and Lycidas studied to­ gether, under the fictitious images of rural employ­ ments, in which, he says, there can be no tender­ ness ; and prefers Cowley’s lamentation of the loss of Harvey, the companion of his labours, and the partner of his discoveries. I know not if, in this similarity of subjects, Cowley has more tenderness; I am sure he has less poetry. I will allow that he has more wit, and more smart similes. The sense of our author’s allegory on this occasion is obvious, and is just as intelligible as if he had used plain terms. It is a fiction, that when Lycidas died, the woods and caves were deserted and overgrown with wild thyme and luxuriant vines, and that all their echoes mourned; and that the green copses no longer waved their joyous leaves to his soft strains: but we cannot here be at a loss for a meaning, a meaning which is as clearly perceived, as it is ele­ gantly represented. This is the sympathy of a true poet. We know that Milton and King were not nursed on the same hill; that they did not feed the same flock, by fountain, shade, or rill; and that rough Satyrs and Fauns with clovenheel never danced to their rural ditties. But who hesitates a moment for the application? Nor are such ideas more untrue, cer­ tainly not less far-fetched and unnatural, than when Cowley says, that he and Harvey studied together every night with such unrcmitted diligence, that the twin stars of Leda, so famed for love, looked down

LANDSCAPE

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upon the twin-students with wonder from above. And where is the tenderness, when he wishes, that, on the melancholy event, the branches of the trees at Cambridge, under which they walked, would combine themselves into a darker umbrage, dark as the grave in which his departed friend was newly laid? Our author has also been censured for mixing re­ ligious disputes with pagan and pastoral ideas. But he had the authority of Mantuan and Spenser, now considered as models in this way of writing. Let me add, that our poetry was not yet purged from its Gothic combinations; nor had legitimate notions of discrimination and propriety so far prevailed, as sufficiently to influence the growing improvements of English composition. These irregularities and in­ congruities must not be tried by modern criticism. thomas warton : Notes Critical and Explanatory to Milton's Poems upon Several Occasions. 1791. 7. LANDSCAPE AND GENIUS E seem to have involved the supposition that mountain influence is either unfavour­ able or inessential to literary power; but for this also the mountain influence is still necessary, only in a subordinate degree. It is true, indeed, that the Avon is no mountain torrent, and that the hills round the vale of Stratford are not sublime; true,

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THE ENGLISH VISION 42 moreover, that the cantons Berne and Uri have never yet, so far as I know, produced a great poet; but neither, on the other hand, has Antwerp or Amster­ dam. And, I believe, the natural scenery which will be found, on the whole, productive of most literary intellect is that mingled of hill and plain, as all avail­ able light is of flame and darkness; the flame being the active element, and the darkness the tempering one. In noting such evidence as bears upon this sub­ ject, the reader must always remember that the mountains are at an unfair disadvantage, in being much out of the way of the masses of men employed in intellectual pursuits. The position of a city is dictated by military necessity or commercial con­ venience: it rises, flourishes, and absorbs into its activity whatever leading intellect is in the sur­ rounding population. The persons who are able and desirous to give their children education naturally resort to it; the best schools, the best society, and the strongest motives assist and excite those born within its walls; and youth after youth rises to dis­ tinction out of its streets, while among the blue mountains, twenty miles away, the goatherds live and die in unregarded loneliness. And yet this is no proof that the mountains have little effect upon the mind, or that the streets have a helpful one. The men who are formed by the schools and polished by the society of the capital, may yet in many ways have their powers shortened by the absence of

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natural scenery; and the mountaineer, neglected, ignorant, and unambitious, may have been taught things by the clouds and streams which he could not have learned in a college, or a coterie. And in reasoning about the effect of mountains we are therefore under a difficulty like that which would occur to us if we had to determine the good or bad effect of light on the human constitution, in some place where all corporal exercise was neces­ sarily in partial darkness, and only idle people lived in the light. The exercise might give an advantage to the occupants of the gloom, but we should neither bejustified in therefore denying the precious­ ness of light in general, nor the necessity to the workers of the few rays they possessed; and thus I suppose the hills around Stratford, and such glimpses as Shakespeare had of sandstone and pines in Warwickshire, or of chalk cliffs in Kent, to have been essential to the development of his genius. This supposition can only be proved false by the rising of a Shakespeare at Rotterdam or Bergen-opZoom, which I think not probable; whereas, on the other hand, it is confirmed by myriads of collateral evidences. The matter could only be testedby plac­ ing for half a century the British universities at Kes­ wick and Beddgelert, and making Grenoble the capital of France; but if, throughout the history of Britain and France, we contrast the general inven­ tion and pathetic power, in ballads or legends, of the inhabitants of the Scottish Border with those

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manifested in Suffolk or Essex; and similarly the inventive power of Normandy, Provence, and the Bearnois with that of Champagne or Picardy, we shall obtain some convincing evidence respecting the operation of hills on the masses of mankind, and be disposed to admit, with less hesitation, that the apparent inconsistencies in the effect of scenery on greater minds proceed in each case from specialties of education, accident, and original temper, which it would be impossible to follow out in detail. Some­ times only, when the original resemblance in char­ acter of intellect is very marked in two individuals, and they are submitted to definitely contrary cir­ cumstances of education, an approximation to evi­ dence may be obtained. Thus Bacon and Pascal appear to be men very similar in their temper and powers of minds. One, born in York House, Strand, of courtly parents, educated in court atmosphere, and replying, almost as soon as he could speak, to the queen asking how old he was—“Two years younger than Your Majesty’s happy reign!”—has the world’s meanness and cunning engrafted into his intellect, and remains smooth, serene, unenthusiastic, and in some degree base, even with all his sincere devotion and universal wisdom; bearing, to the end of life, the likeness of a marble palace in the street of a great city, fairly furnished within, and bright in wall and battlement, yet noisome in places about the foundations. The other, born at Clermont, in Auvergne, under the shadow of the

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Puy de Dome, though taken to Paris at eight years old, retains for ever the impress of his birthplace; pursuing natural philosophy with the same zeal as Bacon, he returns to his own mountains to put him­ self under their tutelage, and by their help first dis­ covers the great relations of the earth and the air: struck at last with mortal disease; gloomy, enthusi­ astic, and superstitious, with a conscience burning like lava, and inflexible like iron, the clouds gather about the majesty of him, fold after fold; and, with his spirit buried in ashes, and rent by earthquake, yet fruitful of true thought and faithful affection, he stands like that mound of desolate scoria that crowns the hill ranges of his native land, with its sable sum­ mit far in heaven, and its foundations green with the ordered garden and the trellised vine. When, however, our inquiry thus branches into the successive analysis of individual characters, it is time for us to leave it; noting only one or two points respecting Shakespeare. He seems to have been sent essentially to take universal and equal grasp of the human nature; and to have been re­ moved, therefore, from all influences which could in the least warp or bias his thoughts. It was neces­ sary that he should lean no way; that he should contemplate, with absolute equality of judgment, the life of the court, cloister, and tavern, and be able to sympathize so completely with all creatures as to deprive himself, together with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as he casts himself

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into their hearts. He must be able to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or Shylock them­ selves feel for or in themselves; otherwise his own conscience and indignation would make him unjust to them; he would turn aside from something, miss some good, or overlook some essential palliation. He must be utterly without anger, utterly without purpose; for if a man has any serious purpose in life, that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to it, will be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him. Shakespeare was forbidden of Heaven to have any plans. To do any good or get any good, in the com­ mon sense of good, was not to be within his per­ mitted range of work. Not, for him, the founding of institutions, the preaching of doctrines, or the re­ pression of abuses. Neither he, nor the sun, did on any morning that they rose together, receive charge from their Maker concerning such things. They were both of them to shine on the evil and good; both to behold unoffendedly all that was upon the earth, to bum unappalled upon the spears of kings, and undisdaining upon the reeds of the river. Therefore, so far as nature ha 1influence over the early training of this man, it was essential to his perfectness that the nature should be quiet. No mountain passions were to be allowed in him. In­ flict upon him but one pang of the monastic con­ science ; cast upon him but one cloud of the moun­ tain gloom; and his serenity had been gone for

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ever—his equity—his infinity. You would have made another Dante of him; and all that he would have ever uttered about poor, soiled, and frail humanity would have been the quarrel between Simon and Adam of Brescia,—speedily retired from, as not worthy a man’s hearing, nay, not to be heard without heavy fault. All your Falstaffs, Slenders, Quicklys, Sir Tobys, Lances, Touchstones, and Quinces, would have been lost in that. Shakespeare could be allowed no mountains; nay, not even any supreme natural beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and clover;—pansies—the passing clouds —the Avon’s flow—and the undulating hills and woods of Warwick; nay, he was not to love even these in any exceeding measure, lest it might make him in the least overrate their power upon the strong, full-fledged minds of men. john ruskin : M odern Painters. 1856.

8. A COUNTRY HOUSE

lies on the side of a hill (upon which the house stands), but not very steep. The length of the house, where the best rooms, and of most use or pleasure are, lies upon the breadth of the garden; the great parlour opens into the middle of a terrace gravel-walk that lies even with it, and which may be, as I remember, about three hundred paces long, and broad in proportion; the border set with stan­ dard laurels, and at large distances, which have the t

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beauty of orange-trees out of flower and fruit: from this walk are three descents by many stone steps, in the middle and at each end, into a very large par­ terre : this is divided into quarters by gravel-walks, and adorned with two fountains and eight statues in the several quarters; at the end of the terrace-walk are two summer-houses, and the sides of the par­ terre are ranged with two large cloisters, open to the garden, upon arches of stone, and ending with two other summer-houses even with the cloisters, which are paved with stone, and designed for walks of shade, there being none other in the whole parterre. Over these two cloisters are two terraces covered with lead, and fenced with balusters; and the pas­ sage into these airy walks is out of the two summer­ houses, at the end of the first terrace-walk. The cloister facing the south is covered with vines, and would have been proper for an orange-house, and the other for myrtles, or other more common greens; and had, I doubt not, been cast for that purpose, if this piece of gardening had then been in as much vogue as it is now. From the middle of this parterre is a descent by many steps flying on each side of a grotto that lies between them (covered with lead, and flat) into the lower garden, which is all fruit-trees, ranged about the several quarters of a wilderness which is very shady; the walks here are all green, the grotto em­ bellished with figures of shell-rock-work, fountains, and water-works. If the hill had not ended with the

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lower garden, and the wall were not bounded by a common way that goes through the park, they might have added a third quarter of all greens; but this want is supplied by a garden on the other side the house, which is all of that sort, very wild, shady, and adorned with rough rock-work and fountains. This was Moor-Park when I was acquainted with it, and the sweetest place, I think, that I have seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad: what it is now, I can give little account, having passed through several hands that have made great changes in gardens as well as house; but the remem­ brance of what it was is too pleasant ever to forget; and therefore I do not believe to have mistaken the figure of it, which may serve for a pattern to the best gardens of our manner, and that are most proper for our country and climate. SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE:. UpOTl

the Gardens of Epicurus. 9.

1685.

THE PRINCIPLES OF ENGLISH GARDENING

was very glad to learn that you had room for me at Coleorton, and far more so, that your health was so much mended. Lady Beaumont’s last letter to my sister has made us wish that you were fairly through your present engagements with workmen and builders, and, as to improvements, had smoothed over the first difficulties, and gotten things into a way of improving themselves. I do not

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suppose that any man ever built a house, without finding in the progress of it obstacles that were un­ foreseen, and something that might have been better planned; things teazing and vexatious when they come, however the mind may have been made up at the outset to a general expectation of the kind. With respect to the grounds, you have there the advantage of being in good hands, namely, those of Nature; and, assuredly, whatever petty crosses from contrariety of opinion or any other cause you may now meet with, these will soon disappear, and leave nothing behind but satisfaction and harmony. Setting out from the distinction made by Coleridge which you mentioned, that your house will belong to the country, and not the country be an appen­ dage to your house, you cannot be wrong. Indeed, in the present state of society, I see nothing interest­ ing either to the imagination or the heart, and, of course, nothing which true taste can approve, in any interference with Nature, grounded upon any other principle. In times when the feudal system was in its vigor, and the personal importance of every chief­ tain might be said to depend entirely upon the ex­ tent of his landed property and rights of seignory; when the king, in the habits of people’s minds, was considered as the primary and true proprietor of the soil, which was granted out by him to different lords, and again by them to their several tenants under them, for thejoint defence of all; there might have been something imposing to the imagination

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in the whole face of a district, testifying, obtrusively even, its dependence upon its chief. Such an image would have been in the spirit of the society, imply­ ing power, grandeur, military state, and security; and, less directly, in the person of the chief, high birth, and knightly education and accomplish­ ments ; in short, the most of what was then deemed interesting or affecting. Yet, with the exception of large parks and forests, nothing of this kind was known at that time, and these were left in their wild state, so that such display of ownership, so far from taking from the beauty of Nature, was itself a chief cause of that beauty being left unspoiled and unimpaired. The improvements, when the place was sufficiently tranquil to admit of any, though absurd and monstrous in themselves, were confined (as our present Laureate has observed, I remember, in one of his essays) to an acre or two about the house in the shape of garden with terraces, &c. So that Nature had greatly the advantage in those days, when what has been called English gardening was unheard of. This is now beginning to be perceived, and we are setting out to travel backwards. Painters and poets have had the credit of being reckoned the fathers of English gardening; they will also have, hereafter, the better praise of being fathers of a better taste. Error is in general nothing more than getting hold of good things, as everything has two handles, by the wrong one. ft was a misconception of the meaning and principles of poets and painters

THE ENGLISH VISION 52 which gave countenance to the modern system of gardening, which is now, I hope, on the decline; in other words, we are submitting to the rule which you at present are guided by, that of having our houses belong to the country, which will of course lead us back to the simplicity of Nature. And leav­ ing your own individual sentiments and present work out of the question, what good can come of any other guide, under any circumstances? We have, indeed, distinctions of rank, hereditary legis­ lators, and large landed proprietors; but from num­ berless causes the state of society is so much altered, that nothing of that lofty or imposing interest, formerly attached to large property in land, can now exist; none of the poetic pride, and pomp, and circumstance; nor anything that can be considered as making amends for violation done to the holiness of Nature. Let us take an extreme case, such as a residence of a Duke of Norfolk, or Northumberland: of course you would expect a mansion, in some de­ gree answerable to their consequence, with all con­ veniences. The names of Howard and Percy will always stand high in the regards of Englishmen; but it is degrading, not only to such families as these, but to every really interesting one, to suppose that their importance will be most felt where most displayed, particularly in the way I am now allud­ ing to. This is contracting a general feeling into a local one. Besides, were it not so, as to what con­ cerns the Past, a man would be sadly astray, who

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should go, for example, to modernize Alnwick and its dependencies, with his head full of the ancient Percies: he would find nothing there which would remind him of them, except by contrast; and of that kind of admonition he would, indeed, have enough. But this by the by, for it is against the principle itself I am contending, and not the mis­ application of it. After what was said above, I may ask, if anything connected with the families of Howard and Percy, and their rank and influence, and thus with the state of government and society, could, in the present age, be deemed a recompence for their thrusting themselves in between us and Nature. Surely it is a substitution of little things for great when we would put a whole country into a nobleman’s livery. I know nothing which to me would be so pleasing or affecting, as to be able to say when I am in the midst of a large estate—This man is not the victim of his condition; he is not the spoiled child of worldly grandeur; the thought of himself does not take the lead in his enjoyments; he is, where he ought to be, lowly-minded, and has human feelings; he has a true relish of simplicity, and therefore stands the best chance of being happy; at least, without it there is no happiness, because there can be no true sense of the bounty and beauty of the creation, or insight into the constitution of the human mind. Let a man of wealth and influence show, by the appearance of the country in his neigh­ bourhood, that he treads in the steps of the good

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sense of the age, and occasionally goes foremost; let him give countenance to improvements in agri­ culture, steering clear of the pedantry of it, and showing that its grossest utilities will connect them­ selves harmoniously with the more intellectual arts, and even thrive the best under such connexion; let him do his utmost to be surrounded with tenants living comfortably, which will bring always with it the best of all graces which a country can have— flourishing fields and happy-looking houses; and, in that part of his estate devoted to park and pleasureground, let him keep himself as much out of sight as possible; let Nature be all in all, taking care that everything done by man shall be in the way of being adopted by her. If people choose that a great man­ sion should be the chief figure in a country, let this kind of keeping prevail through the picture, and true taste will find no fault. I am writing now rather for writing’s sake than anything else, for I have many remembrances beat­ ing about in my head which you would little sus­ pect. I have been thinking of you, and Coleridge, and our Scotch Tour, and Lord Lowther’s grounds, and Heaven knows what. I have had before me the tremendously long ell-wide gravel walks of the Duke of Athol, among the wild glens of Blair, Brunar Water, and Dunkeld, brushed neatly, without a blade of grass or weed upon them, or anything that bore traces of a human footstep; much indeed of human hands, but wear or tear of foot was none.

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Thence I passed to our neighbour, Lord Lowther. You know that his predecessor, greatly, without doubt, to the advantage of the place, left it to take care of itself. The present lord seems disposed to do something, but not much. He has a neighbour, a Quaker, an amiable, inoffensive man,1 and a little of a poet too, who has amused himself, upon his own small estate upon the Emont, in twining pathways along the banks of the river, making little cells and bowers with inscriptions of his own writing, all very pretty as not spreading far. This man is at present Arbiter Elegantiarum, or master of the grounds, at Lowther, and what he has done hitherto is very well, as it is little more than making accessible what could not before be got at. You know something of Lowther. I believe a more delightful spot is not under the sun. Last summer I had a charming walk along the river, for which I was indebted to this man, whose intention is to carry the walk along the river-side till it joins the great road at Lowther Bridge, which you will recollect, just under Broug­ ham, about a mile from Penrith. This to my great sorrow! for the manufactured walk, which was abso­ lutely necessary in many places, will in one place pass through a few hundred yards of forest ground, and will there efface the most beautiful specimen of a forest pathway ever seen by human eyes, and which I have paced many an hour, when I was a youth, with some of those I best love. This path 1 Mr. Thomas Wilkinson. Seepoem, “To his Spade.”

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winds on under the trees with the wantonness of a river or a living creature; and even if I may say so with the subtlety of a spirit, contracting or enlarg­ ing itself, visible or invisible as it likes. There is a continued opening between the trees, a narrow slip of green turf besprinkled with flowers, chiefly daisies, and here it is, if I may use the same kind of language, that this pretty path plays its pranks, wearing away the turf and flowers at its pleasure. When I took the walk I was speaking of, last sum­ mer, it was Sunday. I met several of the people of the country posting to and from church, in different parts; and in a retired spot by the river-side were two musicians (belonging probably to some corps of volunteers) playing upon the hautboy and clarionet. You may guess I was not a little delighted; and as you had been a visitor at Lowther, I could not help wishing you were with me. And now I am brought to the sentiment which occasioned this detail; I may say, brought back to my subject, which is this, —that all just and solid pleasure in natural objects rests upon two pillars, God and Man. Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting; and its object, like that of all the liberal arts, is, or ought to be, to move the affections under the con­ trol of good sense; that is, those of the best and wisest: but, speaking with more precision, it is to assist Nature in moving the affections, and, surely, as I have said, the affections of those who have the

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deepest perception of the beauty of Nature; who have the most valuable feelings, that is, the most permanent, the most independent, the most en­ nobling, connected with Nature and human life. No liberal art aims merely at the gratification of an individual or a class: the painter or poet is degraded in proportion as he does so; the true servants of the Arts pay homage to the human kind as imperson­ ated in unwarped and enlightened'minds. If this be so when we are merely putting together words or colours, how much more ought the feeling to pre­ vail when we are in the midst of the realities of things; of the beauty and harmony, of the joy and happiness of living creatures; of men and children, of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, and trees and flowers; with the changes of night and day, evening and morning, summer and winter; and all their unwearied actions and energies, as benign in the spirit that animates them as they are beautiful and grand in that form and clothing which is given to them for the delight of our senses! But I must stop, for you feel these things as deeply as I do; more deeply, if it were only for this, that you have lived longer. What then shall we say of many great mansions with their unqualified expulsion of huifian creatures from their neighbourhood, happy or not; houses, which do what is fabled of the upas tree, that they breathe out death and desolation! I know you will feel with me here, both as a man and a lover and professor of the arts. I was glad to hear

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from Lady Beaumont that you did not think of re­ moving your village. Of course much here will de­ pend upon circumstances, above all, with what kind of inhabitants, from the nature of the employments in that district, the village is likely to be stocked. But, for my part, strip my fceighbourhood of human beings, and I should think it one of the greatest privations I could undergo. You have all the pov­ erty of solitude, nothing of its elevation. In a word, if I were disposed to write a sermon (and this is something like one) upon the subject of taste in natural beauty, I should take for my text the little pathway in Lowther Woods, and all which I had to say would begin and end in the human heart, as under the direction of the Divine Nature, conferring value on the objects of the senses, and pointing out what is valuable in them. I began this subject with Coleorton in my thoughts, and a confidence, that whatever difficul­ ties or crosses (as of many good things it is not easy to choose the best) you might meet with in the prac­ tical application of your principles of Taste, yet, be­ ing what they are, you will soon be pleased and satisfied. Only (if I may take the freedom to say so) do not give way too much to others: considering what your studies and pursuits have been, your own judgement must be the best: professional men may suggest hints, but I would keep the decisionto myself. william wordsworth : Letter toSir George H. Beaumont. 1805.

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10. ENGLISH COMFORT some stranger from abroad asked me to point out to him the most noteworthy things in Eng­ land, I should first of all consider his intellect. Were he a man of everyday level, I might indicate for his wonder and admiration Greater London, the Black Country, South Lancashire, and other fea­ tures of our civilization which,-despite eager rivalry, still maintain our modem pre-eminence in the crea­ tion of ugliness. If, on the other hand, he seemed a man of brains, it would be my pleasure to take him to one of those old villages, in the midlands or the west, which lie at some distance from a railway station, and in aspect are still untouched by the baser tendencies of the time. Here, I would tell my traveller, he saw something which England alone can show. The simple beauty of the architecture, its perfect adaptation to the natural surroundings, the neatness of everything though without formality, the general cleanness and good repair, the grace of cottage gardens, that tranquillity and security which make a music in the mind of him who gazes—these are what a man must see and feel if he would appre­ ciate the worth and the power of England. The people which has made for itselfsuch homes as these is distinguished, above all things, by its love of order; it has understood, as no other people, the truth that “order is heaven’s first law.” With order it is natural to find stability, and the combination of f

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these qualities, as seen in domestic life, results in that peculiarly English product, our name for which— though but a pale shadow of the thing itself—has been borrowed by other countries: comfort. The Englishman’s need of “comfort” is one of his best characteristics; the possibility that he may change in this respect, and become indifferent to his old ideal of physical and mental ease, is the gravest danger manifest in our day. For “comfort,” mind you, does not concern the body alone; the beauty and orderliness of an Englishman’s home derive their value, nay, their very existence, from the spirit which directs his whole life. Walk from the village to the noble’s mansion. It, too, is perfect of its kind; it has the dignity of age, its walls are beautiful, the gardens, the park about it are such as can be found only in England, lovely beyond compare; and all this represents the same moral characteristics as the English cottage, but with greater activities and re­ sponsibilities. If the noble grow tired of his mansion, and, letting it to some crude owner of millions, go to live in hotels and hired villas; if the cottager sicken of his village roof, and transport himself to the sixth floor of a “block” in Shoreditch; one sees but too well that the one and the other have lost the old English sense of comfort, and, in losing it, have suffered degradation alike as men and as citizens. It is not a question of exchanging one form of com­ fort for another; the instinct which made an Eng­ lishman has in these cases perished. Perhaps it is

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perishing from among us altogether, killed by new social and political conditions; one who looks at villages of the new type, at the working-class quarters of towns, at the rising of “flats’5among the dwellings of the wealthy, has little choice but to think so. There may soon come a day when, though the word “ comfort” continues to be used in many languages, the thing it signifies will be discoverable nowhere at all. If the ingenious foreigner found himself in some village of manufacturing Lancashire, he would be otherwise impressed. Here something of the power of England might be revealed to him, but of Eng­ land’s worth, little enough. Hard ugliness would everywhere assail his eyes; the visages and voices of the people would seem to him thoroughly akin to their surroundings. Scarcely could one find, in any civilized nation, a more notable contrast than that between these two English villages and their in­ habitants. Yet Lancashire is English, and there among the mill chimneys, in the hideous little street, folk are living whose domestic thoughts claim undeniable kindred with those of the villagers of the kinder south. But to understand how “comfort” and the virtues it implies, can exist amid such conditions, one must penetrate to the hearthside; the door must be shut, the curtain drawn; here “home” does not extend beyond the threshold. After all, this grimy row of houses, ugliest that man ever conceived, is

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more representative of England to-day than the lovely village among the trees and meadows. More than a hundred years ago, power passed from the south of England to the north. The vigorous race on the other side of Trent only found its opportunity when the age of machinery began; its civilization, long delayed, differs in obvious respects from that of older England. In Sussex or in Somerset, however dull and clownish the typical inhabitant, he plainly belongs to an ancient order of things, represents an immemorial subordination. The rude man of the north is—by comparison—but just emerged from barbarism, and under any circumstances would show less smooth a front. By great misfortune, he has fallen under the harshest lordship the modem world has known—that of scientific industrialism, and all his vigorous qualities are subdued to a scheme of life based upon the harsh, the ugly, the sordid. His racial heritage, of course, marks him to the eye; even as ploughman or shepherd, he differs notably from him of the same calling in the weald or on the downs. But the frank brutality of the man in all externals has been encouraged, rather than mitigated, by the course his civilization has taken, and hence it is that, unlessone knows himwell enough to respect him, he seems even yet stamped with the half-savagery of his folk as they were a century and a half ago. His fierce shyness, his arrogant self-re­ gard, are notes of a primitive state. Naturally, he never learnt to house himself as did the Southerner,

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for climate, as well is social circumstance, was un­ favourable to all the graces of life. And now one can only watch the encroachment of his rule upon that old, that true England whose strength and virtue were so differently manifested. This fair broad land of the lovely villages signifies little save to the anti­ quary, the poet, the painter. Vainly, indeed, should I show its beauty and its peace to the observant foreigner; he would but smile, and, with a glance at the traction-engine just coming along the road, indicate the direction of his thoughts. george gissing: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 1903.

UPBRINGING

c

II. AN ENGLISH SCHOOL erhaps there is not a foundation in the country so truly English, taking that word to mean what Englishmen wish it to mean—something solid, unpretending, of good character, and free to all. More boys are to be found in it, who issue from a greater variety of ranks, than in any school in the kingdom; and as it is the most various, so it is the largest, of all the free schools. Nobility do not go there, except as boarders. Now and then a boy of a noble family may be met with, and he is reckoned an interloper, and against the charter; but the sons of poor gentry and London citizens abound; and with them an equal share is given to the sons of tradesmen of the very humblest description, not omitting servants. I would not take my oath—but I have a strong recollection, that in my time there were two boys, one of whom went up into the drawing-room to his father, the master of the house; and the other, down into the kitchen to his father, the coachman. One thing, however, I know to be certain, and it is the noblest of all, namely, that the boys themselves (at least it was so in my time) had no sort of feeling of the difference of one another’s ranks out of doors. The cleverest boy was the

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noblest, let his father be who he might. Christ Hospital is a nursery of tradesmen, of merchants, of naval officers, of scholars; it has produced some of the greatest ornaments of their time; and the feeling among the boys themselves is, that it is a medium between the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton and Westminster, and the plebeian sub­ mission of the charity schools. In point of university honours it claims to be equal with the best; and though other schools can show a greater abundance of eminent names, I know not where many will be found who are a greater host in themselves. In the time of Henry the Eighth, Christ Hospital was a monastery of Franciscan friars. Being dis­ solved among the others, Edward the Sixth, moved by a sermon of Bishop Ridley’s, assigned the revenues of it to the maintenance and education of a certain number of poor orphan children, born of citizens of London. I believe there has been no law passed to alter the letter of this intention; which is a pity, since the alteration has taken place. An extension of it was probably very good, and even demanded by circumstances. I have reason, for one, to be grateful for it. But tampering with matters-of-fact among children is dangerous. They soon learn to distinguish between allowed poetical fiction and that which they are told, under severe penalties, never to be guilty of; and this early sample of contradiction between the thing asserted and the obvious fact, can do no good even in an

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establishment so plain-dealing in other respects as Christ Hospital. The place is not only designated as an Orphan-house in its Latin title, but the boys, in the prayers which they repeat every day, implore the pity of heaven upon “us poor orphans.” I re­ member the perplexity this caused me at a very early period. It is true, the word orphan may be used in a sense implying destitution of any sort; but this was not its Christ Hospital intehtion; nor do the younger boys give it the benefit of that scholarly interpretation. There was another thing (now, I believe, done away) which existed in my time, and perplexed me still more. It seemed a glaring in­ stance of the practice likely to result from the other assumption, and made me prepare for a hundred falsehoods and deceptions, which, mixed up with contradiction, as most things in society are, I some­ times did find, and oftener dreaded. I allude to a foolish custom they had in the ward which I first entered, and which was the only one that the com­ pany at the public suppers were in the habit of going into, of hanging up, by the side of each bed, a clean white napkin, which was supposed to be the one used by the occupiers. Now these napkins were only for show, the real towels being of the largest and coarsest kind. If the masters had been asked about them, they would doubtless have told the truth; perhaps the nurses would have done so. But the boys were not aware of this. There they saw these “white lies” hanging before them, a conscious

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imposition; and I well remember how alarmed I used to feel, lest any of the company should direct their inquiries to me. Christ Hospital (for this is its proper name, and not Christ’s Hospital) occupies a considerable por­ tion of ground between Newgate Street, Giltspur Street, St. Bartholomew’s, and Little Britain. There is a quadrangle with cloisters; and the square inside the cloisters is called the Garden, and most likely was the monastery garden. Its only delicious crpp, for many years, has been pavement. Another large area, presenting the Grammar and Navigation Schools, is also misnomered the Ditch; the townditch having formerly run that way. In Newgate Street is seen the Hall, or eating-room, one of the noblest in England, adorned with enormously long paintings by Verrio and others, and with an organ. A portion of the old quadrangle once contained the library of the monks, and was built or repaired by the famous Whittington, whose arms were to be seen outside; but alterations of late years have done it away. In the cloisters a number of persons lie buried, besides the officers of the house. Among them is Isabella, wife of Edward the Second, the “ Shewolf of France.” I was not aware of this circum­ stance then; but many a time, with a recollection of some lines in “Blair’s Grave” upon me, have I run as hard as I could at night-time from my ward to another, in order to borrow the next volume of

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some ghostly romance. In one of the cloisters was an impression resembling a gigantic foot, which was attributed by some to the angry stamping of the ghost of a beadle’s wife! A beadle was a higher sound to us than to most, as it involved ideas of detected apples in churchtime, “skulking” (as it was called) out of bounds, and a power of reporting us to the masters. But fear does not stand upon rank and ceremony. The wards, or sleeping-rooms, are twelve, and contained, in my time, rows of beds on each side, partitioned off, but connected with one another, and each having two boys to sleep in it. Down the middle ran the binns for holding bread and other things, and serving for a table when the meal was not taken in the hall; and over the binns hung a great homely chandelier. To each of these wards a nurse was assigned, who was the widow of some decent liveryman of London, and who had the charge of looking after us at night­ time, seeing to our washing, &c., and carving for us at dinner; all of which gave her a good deal of power, more than her name warranted. The nurses, however, were almost invariably very decent people, and performed their duty; which was not always the case with the young ladies, their daughters. There were five schools; a grammar-school, a mathematical or navigation-school (added by Charles the Second, through the zeal of Mr. Pepys), a writing, a drawing, and a reading school. Those

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who could not read when they came on the founda­ tion, went into the last. There were few in the lastbut-one, and I scarcely know what they did, or for what object. The writing-school was for those who were intended for trade and commerce; the mathe­ matical, for boys who went as midshipmen into the naval and East India service; and the grammarschool for such as were designed for the Church, and to go to the University. The writing-school was by far the largest; and, what is very curious (it has been altered since), all the schools were kept quite distinct; so that a boy might arrive at the age of fifteen in the grammar-school, and not know his multiplication-table; which was the case with my­ self. Nor do I know it to this day! Shades of Horace Walpole, and Lord Lyttelton! come to my assist­ ance, and enable me to bear the confession: but so it is. The fault was not my fault at the time; but I ought to have repaired it when I went out into the world: and great isthe mischiefwhichit has done me. Most of these schools had several masters; besides whom there was a steward, who took care of our subsistence, and who had a general superintendence over all hours and circumstances not connected with teaching. The masters had almost all been in the school, and might expect pensions or livings in their old age. Among those in my time, the mathe­ matical master was Mr. Wales, a man well known for his science who had been round the world with Captain Cook; for which we highly venerated him.

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He was a good man, of plain, simple manners, with a heavy large person and a benign countenance. When he was at Otaheite, the natives played him a trick while bathing, and stole his small-clothes; which we used to think a liberty scarcely credible. The name of the steward, a thin stiff man of invinci­ ble formality of demeanour, admirably fitted to render encroachment impossible, was Hathaway. We of the grammar-school used to call him “the Yeoman,” on account of Shakespeare having married the daughter of a man of that name, designated as “a substantial yeoman.’* Our dress was of the coarsest and quaintest kind, but was respected out of doors, and is so. It con­ sisted of a blue drugget gown, or body, with ample skirts to it; a yellow vest underneath in winter­ time ; small-clothes of Russia duck; worsted yellow stockings; a leathern girdle; and a little black worsted cap, usually carried in the hand. I believe it was the ordinary dress of children in humble life during the reign of the Tudors. We used to flatter ourselves that it was taken from the monks; and there went a monstrous tradition, that at one period it consisted of blue velvet with silver buttons. It was said, also, that during the blissful era of the blue velvet, we had roast mutton for supper; but that the small-clothes not being then in existence, and the mutton suppers too luxurious, the eatables were given up for the ineffables. A malediction, at heart, always followed the C2

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memory of him who had taken upon himself to decide so preposterously. To say the truth, we were not too well fed at that time, either in quantity or quality; and we could not enter with our hungry imaginations into these remote philosophies. Our breakfast was bread and water, for the beer was too bad to drink. The bread consisted of the half of a three-halfpenny loaf, according to the prices then current. This was not much for growing boys, who had had nothing to eat from six or seven o’clock the preceding evening. For dinner we had the same quantity of bread, with meat only every other day, and that consisting of a small slice, such as would be given to an infant three or four years old. Yet even that, with all our hunger, we very often left halfeaten—the meat was so tough. On the other days we had a milk-porridge, ludicrously thin; or ricemilk, which was better. There were no vegetables or puddings. Once a month we had roast beef; and twice a year (I blush to think of the eagerness with which it was looked for!) a dinner of pork. One was roast, and the other boiled; and on the latter occasion we had our only pudding, which was of peas. I blush to remember this, not on account of our poverty, but on account of the sordidness of the custom. There had much better have been none. For supper we had a like piece of bread, with butter or cheese; and then to bed, “with what appetite we might.” Our routine of life was this. We rose to the call of

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a bell, at six in summer, and seven in winter; and after combing ourselves, and washing our hands and faces, went, at the call of another bell, to breakfast. All this took up about an hour. From breakfast we proceeded to school, where we remained till eleven, winter and summer, and then had an hour’s play. Dinner took place at twelve. Afterwards was a little play till one, when we again went to school, and re­ mained till five in summer, and four in winter. At six was the supper. We used to play after it in summer till eight. In winter, we proceeded from supper to bed. On Sundays, the school-time of the other days was occupied in church, both morning and evening; and as the Bible was read to us every day before every meal, and on going to bed, besides prayers and graces, we rivalled the monks in the religious part of our duties.I I am grateful to Christ Hospital for having bred me up in old cloisters, for its making me acquainted with the languages of Homer and Ovid, and for its having secured to me, on the whole, a well-trained and cheerful boyhood. It pressed no superstition upon me. It did not hinder my growing mind from making what excursions it pleased into the wide and healthy regions of general literature. I might buy as much Collins and Gray as I pleased, and get novels to my heart’s content from the circulating libraries. There was nothing prohibited but what would have been prohibited by all good fathers;

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and everything was encouraged which would have been encouraged by the Steeles, and Addisons, and Popes; by the Warburtons, and Atterburys, and Hoadleys. Boyer was a severe, nay, a cruel master; but age and reflection have made me sensible that I ought always to add my testimony to his being a laborious and a conscientious one. When his severity went beyond the mark, I believe he was always sorry for it: sometimes I am sure he was. He once (though the anecdote at first sight may look like a burlesque on the remark) knocked out one of my teeth with the back of a Homer, in a fit of impatience at my stammering. The tooth was a loose one, and I told him as much; but the blood rushed out as I spoke: he turned pale, and, on my proposing to go out and wash the mouth, he said, “ Go, child,” in a tone of voice amounting to the paternal. Now “Go, child,” from Boyer, was worth a dozen tender speeches from any one else; and it was felt that I had got an advantage over him, acknowledged by himself. If I had reaped no other benefit from Christ Hospital, the school would be ever dear to me from the recollection of the friendships I formed in it, and of the first heavenly taste it gave me of that most spiritual of the affections. I use the word “heavenly” advisedly; and I call friendship the most spiritual of the affections, because even one’s kindred, in partaking of our flesh and blood, be­ come, in a manner, mixed up with our entire being.

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Not that I would disparage any other form of affection, worshipping, as I do, all forms of it, love in particular, which, in its highest state, is friendship and something more. But if ever I tasted a dis­ embodied transport on earth, it was in those friend­ ships which I entertained at school, before I dreamt of any maturer feeling. I shall never forget the impression it first made on me. I loved my friend for his gentleness, his candour, his truth, his good repute, his freedom even from my own livelier manner, his calm and reasonable kindness. It was not any particular talent that attracted me to him, or anything striking whatsoever. I should say, in one word, it was his goodness. I doubt whether he ever had a conception of a tithe of the regard and respect I entertained for him; and I smile to think of the perplexity (though he never showed it) which he probably felt sometimes at my enthusiastic expressions; for I thought him a kind of angel. It is no exaggeration to say, that, take away the un­ spiritual part of it—the genius and the knowledge— and there is no height of conceit indulged in by the most romantic character in Shakespeare, which surpassed what I felt towards the merits I ascribed to him, and the delight which I took in his society. With the other boys I played antics, and rioted in fantastic jests; but in his society, or whenever I thought of him, I fell into a kind of Sabbath state of bliss; and I am sure I could have died for him. leigh hunt: Autobiography. 1850.

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12.

ETON AND CAMBRIDGE

sister at Cambridge, the other college of our Founder, has her own right and natural aspirations, and they aren’t of necessity the same as Eton’s. At Cambridge, very properly, study is disinterested: it looks beyond the moment to the vast of truth, to the discovery of the undis­ covered ; and what you may find in those uncharted spaces, the nature and the use of the trophy you bring back, this is of secondary concern to Cam­ bridge—whose first and chief anxiety is that light should be shed where no light was before. Cam­ bridge, therefore, loves to think that a man should throw his mind into his researches without reserve, for their own sake only; and whether their effect upon himself is to civilise and beautify him, or whether they have not this effect but some other, anyhow the man is honoured in the mere fact that the cause of discovery is advanced. That is quite clear. It means that the task of the university—(or rather one side of its task, for of course there are the undergraduates to be beautified, not only the dons to be honoured, and it is a question how the two sides of the task are to be smoothly and practically adjusted; so it may be that at Cambridge the cult of learning has its own embarrassment, and can’t pursue a single end with all that lofty indifference, that disdain of the world that I was wishful to admire)—but at any rate it means, as I was saying,

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•aiat thç task of Eton can never be disinterested ex­ ploration. The blank light of open inquiry won’t be admissible at Eton; for there, whatever happens, the little victims mustn’t be discharged in a ferocious condition. The school exists for no other purpose than to form their ways, and no mind that is bent upon them can be cleared of that reserve. The studies of the young folk must lead them naturally into the world that awaits them, not away from it, whatever happens. Our tearful prayerful Founder, flourishing his sceptre in school-yard, may wonder indeed what has come to the poor scholars and sad priests of his college, what profane ambition has possessed them. If he watches the faces of the children as they assemble for absence, he must shrink in shyness, not to say in horror, before the easy assurance of their looks ; all too clear it is that they aren’t taught to dread the world. Our talk of grateful homage to Henry the gentle and hapless, the star-crossed king, must truly sound ironic ; what has he to say to this bouncing progeny, bom to England in such ampli­ tude of all the good things of the earth, that inun­ dates the retreat which his charity and piety de­ signed for a very different brood? It is written all over our Eton that life is not to be refused, not to be despised when it is ample and honourable. Don’t be deceived, I say again, by the unworldly airs of ancient romance that breathe on us at Eton in the shade of the huge grey chapel. Our virtue, what­

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ever it may be, is neither fugitive nor cloistered; no painful yearning for the unknowable and ineffable torments us here. The good earth is open to -us, good enough for us; and there we are to accept our destiny—why indeed should we quarrel with it? Our masters at Eton won’t help us to quarrel with it, not even the most retiring, the most twilight-loving amongst them. I seem in truth to remember that not many of them in my time had an appearance of loving the twilight; on the whole they were plainly attached to the sun and the holiday afternoon. But even the most enshaded had their view of the great fortunate world, a view in which its palms and prizes weren’t disparaged; or perhaps I should rather call it a view of hopeful and heroic youth— youth that will win the palms of the world and wear them with modesty and grace. Success before men —however lightly you hold it in the void you must desire it for the youthful hero whom it crowns so becomingly; and in one way or another there is honour at Eton for success, no doubt. Percy lubbock : Shades of Eton. 1929.

CHARACTERISTICS

13. THE GOOD YEOMAN

s a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined, and is the wax capable of a gentle im­ pression, when the prince shall stamp it. Wise Solon, who accounted Tellus the Athenian the most happy man for living privately on his own lands,1 would surely have pronounced the English yeo­ manry a fortunate condition, living in the temperate zone, betwixt greatness and want, an estate of people almost peculiar to England. France and Italy are like a die, which hath no points between sink and ace, nobility and peasantry. Their walls, though high, must needs be hollow, wanting filling stones. Indeed Germany hath her boors, like our yeomen, but by a tyrannical appropriation of nobility to some few ancient families, their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher to clarify their bloods. In England, the temple of honour is bolted against none who have passed through the temple of virtue; nor is a capacity to be gentle denied to our yeoman, who thus behaves himself. 1. He wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons, and silver in his pocket. If he chance to appear in clothes above his rank, it is

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1 Herodotus,lib. i,p. 12. 83

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to grace some great man with his service, and then he blusheth at his own bravery. Otherwise he is the surest landmark, whence foreigners may take aim of the ancient English customs; the gentry more floating after foreign fashions. 2. In his house he is bountiful both to strangers and poor people. Some hold when hospitality died in England, she gave her last groan amongst the yeo­ men of Kent. And still at our yeoman’s table you shall have as many joints as dishes; no meat dis­ guised with strange sauces; no straggling joint of a sheep in the midst of a pasture of grass, beset with salads on every side, but solid substantial food; no servitors (more nimble with their hands than the guests with their teeth) take away meat before stomachs are taken away. Here you have that which in itself is good made better by the store of it, and best by the welcome to it. 3. He hath a great stroke in making a knight of the shire. Good reason, for he makes a whole line in the subsidy book, where, whatsoever he is rated, he pays without any regret, not caring how much his purse is let blood, so it be done by the advice of the physicians of the state. 4. He seldomgoesfar abroad, and his credit stretcheth further than his travel. He goes not to London, but se defendendo, to save himself of a fine, being returned of a jury, where, seeing the king once, he prays for him ever afterwards. 5. In his own country he is a main man in juries.

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Where, if the judge please to open his eyes in matter of law, he needs not to be led by the nose in matters of fact. He is very observant of the judge’s item, when it follows the truths imprimis; otherwise, though not mutinous in a jury, he cares not whom he displeaseth, so he pleaseth his own conscience. 6. He improveth his land to a double value, by his good husbandry. Some grounds that wept with water, or frowned with thorns, by draining the one and clearing the other, he makes both to laugh and sing with com. By marl and limestones burnt, he bettereth his ground, and his industry worketh miracles, by turning stones into bread. Conquest and good husbandry both enlarge the king’s dominions: the one by the sword, making the acres more in number; the other by the plough, making the same acres more in value. Solomon saith, The king himself is maintained by husbandry. 7. In time offamine he is the Joseph of the country, and keeps thepoorfromstarving. Then he tameth his stacks of corn, which not his covetousness but providence hath reserved for time of need, and to his poor neighbours abateth somewhat of the high price of the market. The neighbour gentry court him for his acquaintance, which either he modestly waveth, or thankfully accepteth, but no way greedily desireth. He insults not on the ruins of a decayed gentleman, but pities and relieves him; and as he is called Goodman, he desires to answer to the name, and to be so indeed.

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8. In war, though he serveth onfoot, he is ever mounted on a high spirit: as being a slave to none, and a sub­ ject only to his own prince. Innocence and inde­ pendence make a brave spirit: whereas otherwise, one must ask his leave to be valiant on whom he depends. Therefore if a state run up all to noble­ men and gentlemen, so that the husbandmen be only mere labourers or cottagers, which one calls but housed beggars,1 it may have good cavalry, but never good bands of foot; so that their armies will be like those birds called Apodes, without feet, always only flying on their wings of horse. Where­ fore, to make good infantry, it requireth men bred, not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner. Wisely, therefore, did that knowing prince, King Henry the Seventh, provide laws for the increase of his yeomanry, that his king­ dom should not be like to coppice-woods, where the staddles being left too thick, all runs to bushes and briers, and there is little clean underwood. For, enacting that houses used to husbandry should be kept up with a competent proportion of land, he did secretly sow hydras’ teeth, whereupon, according to the poet’s fiction, should rise up armed men for the service of this kingdom. thomas fuller : The Holy State. 1648.

1 Bacon’s Henry

V II,

p. 74.

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14. THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN

n the Faery Qyeen, Spenser has brought out, not the image of the great Gloriana, but in its various aspects, a form of character which was then just coming on the stage of the world, and which has played a great part in it since. As he has told us, he aimed at presenting before us, in the largest sense of the word, the English gentleman. It was as a whole a new character in the world. It had not really existed in the days of feudalism and chivalry, though features of it had appeared, and its descent was traced from those times: but they were too wild and coarse, too turbulent and disorderly, for a character which, however ready for adventure and battle, looked to peace, refinement, order, and law as the true conditions of its perfection. In the days of Elizabeth it was beginning to fill a large place in English life. It was formed amid the increasing cultivation of the nation, the increasing varieties of public service, the awakening responsibilities to duty and calls to self-command. Still making much of the prerogative of noble blood and family honours, it was something independent of nobility and beyond it. A nobleman might have in him the making of a gentleman: but it was the man himself of whom the gentleman was made. Great birth, even great capacity, were not enough; there must be added a new delicacy of conscience, a new appre­ ciation of what is beautiful and worthy of honour,

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a new measure of the strength and nobleness of selfcontrol, of devotion to unselfish interests. This idea of manhood, based not only on force and courage, but on truth, on refinement, on public spirit, on soberness and modesty, on consideration for others, was taking possession of the younger generation of Elizabeth’s middle years. O f course the idea was very imperfectly apprehended, still more imper­ fectly realised. But it was something which on the same scale had not been yet, and which was to be the seed of something greater. It was to grow into those strong, simple, noble characters, pure in aim and devoted to duty, the Falklands, the Hampdens, who amid so much evil form such a remarkable feature in the Civil Wars, both on the Royalist and the Parliamentary sides. It was to grow into that high type of cultivated English nature, in the present and the last century, common both to its monarch­ ical and its democratic embodiments, than which, with all its faults and defects, our western civilisa­ tion has produced few things more admirable. r . w. church : Spenser. 1879. 15. A DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN t is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts paii}. This description is both refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and unembarrassed

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action of those about him; and he concurs with their movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dis­ pelling cold and fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat without them. The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause ajar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;—all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom promi­ nent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort, he has no ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say

THE ENGLISH VISION 90 out. From a long-sighted prudence, he observes the maxim of the ancient sage, that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well em­ ployed to remember injuries, and too indolent to bear malice. He is patient, forbearing, and re­ signed, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain, because it is inevitable, to bereavement, be­ cause it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy of better, though less educated minds; who, like blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on trifles, mis­ conceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust; he is as simple as he is forcible, and as brief as he is decisive. Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration, indulgence; he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits. If he be an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even supports institutions as venerable,

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beautiful, or useful, to which he does not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and he is con­ tented to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them. He is a friend of religious tolera­ tion, and that, not only because his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of feeling, which is the attendant on civilisation. Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of imagination and senti­ ment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the being of God, sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent thoughts, and the startingpoint of so varied and systematic a teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical powers, he is able to see what sentiments are con­ sistent in those who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths which exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions. john henry newman : On the Scope and Nature of University Education. 1852

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16.

A NATURAL GENTLEMAN

shall not trouble myself to inquire whether Fox was a man of strict virtue and principle; or in other words, how far he was one of those who screw themselves up to a certain pitch of ideal per­ fection, who, as it were, set themselves in the stocks of morality, and make mouths at their own situa­ tion. He was not one of that tribe, and shall not be tried by their self-denying ordinances. But he was endowed with one of the most excellent natures that ever fell to the lot of any of God’s creatures. It has been said, that “an honest man’s the noblest work of God.” There is indeed a purity, a rectitude, an integrity of heart, a freedom from every selfish bias, and sinister motive, a manly simplicity and noble disinterestedness of feeling, which is in my opinion to be preferred before every other gift of nature or art. There is a greatness of soul that is superior to all the brilliancy of the understanding. This strength of moral character, which is not only a more valuable but a rarer quality than strength of understanding (as we are oftener led astray by the narrowness of our feelings, than want of knowledge) Fox possessed in the highest degree. He was superior to every kind of jealousy, of suspicion, of male­ volence; to every narrow and sordid motive. He was perfectly above every species of duplicity, of low art and cunning. He judged of everything in the downright sincerity of his nature, without being

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able to impose upon himself by any hollow dis­ guise, or to lend his support to anything unfair or dishonourable. He had an innate love of truth, o f justice, o f probity, of whatever was generous or liberal. Neither his education, nor his connexions, nor his situation in life, nor the low intrigues and virulence o f party, could ever alter the simplicity of his taste, nor the candid openness of his nature. There was an elastic force about his heart, a fresh­ ness o f social feeling, a warm glowing humanity, which remained unimpaired to the last. He was by nature a gentleman. By this I mean that he felt a certain deference and respect for the person of every m an; he had an unaffected frankness and benignity in his behaviour to others, the utmost liberality in judging o f their conduct and motives. A refined humanity constitutes the character of a gentleman. He was the true friend of his country, as far as it is possible for a statesman to be so. But his love of his country did not consist in his hatred of the rest o f mankind. william h azlitt : Winterslow. 1807.

17. THE OLD ENGLISH GUISE was of Stature somewhat Tall, exceeding the meane, with a proportionable bigness to become it, but in no way inclining to Corpu­ lency ; o f an exact Straightnesse of the whole Body, and a perfect Symmetry in every part thereof. He

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was of a Sanguine constitution, which beautified his Face with a pleasant Ruddinesse, but of so Grave and serious an aspect, that it Awed and Discountenanced the smiling Attracts of that com­ plexion. His Head Adorned with a comely LightColoured Haire, which was so, by Nature exactly Curled (an Ornament enough of it self in this Age to Denominate a handsome person, and wherefore all Skill and Art is used) but not suffered to over­ grow to any length unseeming his modesty and Profession. His Gate and Walking was very upright and graceful, becoming his wellshapen Bulke: approach­ ing something near to that we terme Majesticall; but that the Doctor was so well known to be void of any affectation or pride. Nay so Regardlesse was he of himselfe in his Garb and Rayment, in which no doubt his Vanity would have appeared, as well as in his stately pace: that it was with some trouble to himselfe, to be either Neat or Decent; it matter’d not for the outside, while he thought himself never too Curious and Nice in the Dresses of his mind. Very Careless also he was to seeming inurbanity in the modes of Courtship and demeanour, deport­ ing himselfmuch according to the old English Guise, which for its ease and simplicity suited very well with the Doctor, whose time was designed for more Elaborate businesse: and whose motto might have been sincerity. As inobservant he was of persons, unless businesse

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with them, or his concerns pointed them out and adverted him; seeing and discerning were two things: often in several places, hath he met with Gentlemen of his nearest and greatestAcquaintance, at a full rencounter and stop, whom he hath endeav­ oured to passe by, not knowing, that is to say, not minding of them, till rectifyed and recalled by their familiar compellations. This will not (it may be presumed) and justly cannot be imputed unto any indisposednesse and unaptnesse of his Nature, which was so far from Rude and untractable, that it may be confidently averred, he was the most complacent person in the Nation, as his Converse and Writings, with such a freedome of Discourse and quick Jocundity of style, do sufficiently evince. anonymous: The Life of That Reverend Divine, and Learned Historian, Dr. Thomas Fuller. 1661. 18. THE EQUABLE SENSE

the disciples of Carlyle it is considered that having been a Puritan is the next best thing to having been in Germany. But though we cannot sympathise with everything that the expounders of the new theory allege, and though we should not select for praise the exact peculiari­ ties most agreeable to the slightly grim “gospel of earnestness,” we acknowledge the great service which they have rendered to English history. No

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one will now ever overlook, that in the greater, in the original Puritans—in Cromwell, for example— the whole basis of the character was a passionate, deep, rich, religious organisation. This is not Mr. Macaulay’s way. It is not that he is sceptical; far fromit. “Divines ofall persuasions,” he tells us, “are agreed that there is a religion;” and he acquiesces in their teaching. But he has no passionate self-questionings, no indomitable fears, no asking perplexities. He is probably pleased at the exemption. He has praised Lord Bacon for a similar want of interest. “Nor did he ever meddle with those enigmas which have puzzled hundreds of generations, and will puzzle hundreds more. He said nothing about the grounds of moral obliga­ tion, or the freedom of the human will. He had no inclination to employ himself in labours resembling those of the damned in the Grecian Tartarus—to spin for ever on the same wheel round the same pivot. He lived in an age in which disputes on the most subtle points of divinity excited an intense interest throughout Europe; and nowhere more than in England. He was placed in the very thick of the conflict. He was in power at the time of the Synod of Dort, and must for months have been daily deafened with talk about election, reprobation, and final perseverance. Yet we do not remember a line in his works from which it can be inferred that he was either a Calvinist or an Arminian. While the world was resounding with the noise of a disputa-

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tious philosophy and a disputatious theology, the Baconian school, like Alworthy seated between Square andThwackum, preserved a calm neutrality, —half-scornful, half-benevolent,—and, content with adding to the sum of practical good, left the war of words to those who liked it.” This may be the writing of good sense, but it is not the expression of an anxious or passionate religious nature. Such is the explanation of his not prizing so highly as he should prize the essential excellences of the Puritan character. He is defective in the one point in which they were very great; he is eminent in the very point in which they were most defective. A spirit of easy cheerfulness pervades his writings, a pleasant geniality overflows in history: the rigid asceticism, the pain for pain’s sake of the Puritan is altogether alien to him. Retribution he would deny; sin is hardly a part of his creed. His religion is one of thanksgiving. His notion of philosophy— it would be a better notion of his own writing— is illustrans commoda vita. The English Revolution is the very topic for a person of this character. It is eminently an unim­ passioned movement. It requires no appreciation of the Cavalier or of the zealot; no sympathy witli the romance of this world; no inclination to pass beyond, and absorb the mind’s energies in another. It had neither the rough enthusiasm of barbarism nor the delicate grace of high civilisation; the man who conducted it had neither the deep spirit of D

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Cromwell’s Puritans nor the chivalric loyalty of the enjoying English gentleman. They were hardheaded sensible men, who knew that politics were a kind of business, that the essence of business is compromise, of practicality concession. They drove no theory to excess; for they had no theory. Their passions did not hurry them away; for their tem­ perament was still, their reason calculating and calm. Locke is the type of the best character of his era. There is nothing in him which a historian such as we have described could fail to comprehend, or could not sympathise with when he did compre­ hend. He was the very reverse of a Cavalier; he came of a Puritan stock; he retained through life a kind of chilled Puritanism: he had nothing of its excessive, overpowering, interior zeal, but he re­ tained the formal decorum which it had given to the manners, the solid earnestness of its intellect, the heavy respectability of its character. In all the nations across which Puritanism has passed you may notice something of its indifference to this world’s lighter enjoyments; no one of them has been quite able to retain its singular interest in what is beyond the veil of time and sense. The generation to which we owe our revolution was in the first stage of the descent. Locke thought a zea­ lot a dangerous person, and a poet little better than a rascal. It has been said, with perhaps an allusion to Macaulay, that our historians have held that “all the people who lived before 1688 were either

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knaves or fools.” This is, of course, an exaggeration, but those who have considered what sort o f person a historian is likely to be, will not be surprised at his preference for the people of that era. They had the equable sense which he appreciates; they had not the deep animated passions to which his nature is insensible. Walter bagehot : Literary Studies, “ Mr. Macaulay.” 1856.

19. COMMON SENSE have said that had it not been for constant read­ ing of the Bible, I might probably have taken Johnson for my model of English. To a useful extent I have always done so; in these first essays, partly because I could not help it, partly of set, and well set, purpose. On our foreign journeys, it being of course desir­ able to keep the luggage as light as possible, my father had judged that four little volumes ofjohnson — the Idler and the Rambler— did, under names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, contain more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable compass. And accordingly, in spare hours, and on wet days, the turns and returns of reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler fastened themselves in my ears and m ind; nor was it possible for me, till long after­ wards, to quit myself of Johnsonian symmetry and

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balance in sentences intended, either with swords­ man’s or paviour’s blow, to cleave an enemy’s crest, or drive down the oaken pile of a principle. I never for an instant compared Johnson to Scott, Pope, Byron, or any of the really great writers whom I loved. But I at once and for ever recognized in him a man entirely sincere, and infallibly wise in the view and estimate he gave of the common questions, business, and ways of the world. I valued his sen­ tences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they werejust, and clear; it is a method ofjudgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, argu­ ments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms; and are just as ready with their applause for a sentence of Macaulay’s, which may have no more sense in it than a blot pinched between doubled paper, as to reject one of Johnson’s, telling against their own prejudice,—though its symmetry be as of thunder answering from two horizons. I hold it more than happy that, during those continental journeys, in which the vivid excitement of the greater part of the day left me glad to give spare half-hours to the study of a thoughtful book, Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own san­ guine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune; and he secured me, by his adamantine common-

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sense, for ever, from being caught in the cobwebs of German metaphysics, or sloughed in the English drainage of them. I open, at this moment, the larger of the volumes of the Idler to which I owe so much. After turning over a few leaves, I chance on the closing sentence of No. 65, which transcribing, I may show the reader in sum what it taught me,—in words which, writing this account of myself, I conclusively obey. “Of these learned men, let those who aspire to the same praise imitate the diligence, and avoid the scrupulosity. Let it always be remembered that life is short, that knowledge is endless, and that many doubts deserve not to be cleared. Let those whom nature and study have qualified to teach man­ kind, tell us what they have learned while they are yet able to tell it, and trust their reputation only to themselves.” It is impossible for me now to know how far my own honest desire for truth, and compassionate sense of what is instantly helpful to creatures who are every instant perishing, might have brought me, in their own time, to think and judge as Johnson thought and measured,—even had I never learned of him. He at least set me in the straight path from the beginning, and, whatever time I might waste in vain pleasure, or weak effort, he saved me for ever from false thoughts and futile speculations. john ruskin: Praterita. 1885.

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THE ENGLISH VISION 20. ENGLISH YOUTH

it first and foremost really comes to, I think, is the fact that at an hour when the civilised peoples are on exhibition, quite finally and sharply on show, to each other and to the world, as they absolutely never in all their long history have been before, the English tradition (both of amenity and of energy, I naturally mean) should have flowered at once into a specimen so beautifully producible. Thousands of other senti­ ments are of course all the while, in different con­ nections, at hand for us; but it is of the exquisite civility, the social instincts of the race, poetically expressed, that I speak; and it would be hard to cverstate the felicity of his fellow-countryman’s being able just now to say: “Yes, this, with the imperfection of so many of our arrangements, with the persistence of so many of our mistakes, with the waste of so much of our effort and the weight of the many-coloured mantle of time that drags so redun­ dantly about us, this natural accommodation of the English spirit, this frequent extraordinary beauty of the English aspect, this finest saturation of the English intelligence by its most immediate associa­ tions, tasting as they mainly do of the long past, this ideal image of English youth, in a word, at once radiant and reflective, are things that appeal to us as delightfully exhibitional beyond a doubt, yet as drawn, to the last fibre, from the very wealth of our hat

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own conscience and the very force of our own history. We haven’t, for such an instance o f our genius, to reach out to strange places or across other, and otherwise productive, tracts; the exem­ plary instance himself has well-nigh as a matter o f course reached and revelled, for that is exactly our way in proportion as we feel ourselves clear. But the kind o f experience so entailed, of contribution so gathered, is just what we wear easiest when we have been least stinted of it, and what our English use o f makes perhaps our vividest reference to our thick-growing native determinants.” h e n r y j a m e s : Rupert Brooke. 19 16 .

21.

ENGLISH PRIDE

h a v e above noticed the farther and incalculable good it was to me that Acland took me up in my first and foolishest days, and with pretty irony and loving insight,— or, rather, sympathy with what was best, and blindness to what was worst in me,— gave me the good of seeing a noble young English life in its purity, sagacity, honour, reckless daring, and happy piety; its English pride shining prettily through all, like a girl’s in her beauty. It is extremely interesting to me to contrast the English­ man’s silently conscious pride in what he is, with the vexed restlessness and wretchedness o f the Frenchman, on his thirst for “ gloire,” to be gained by agonized effort to become something he is not.

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One day when the Cherwell was running deep over one of its most slippery weirs, question arising between Acland and me whether it were traversable, and I declaring it too positively to be impassable, Acland instantly took off boot and sock, and walked over and back. He ran no risk but of a sound duck­ ing, being, of course, a strong swimmer: and I sup­ pose him wise enough not to have done it had there been real danger. But he would certainly have run the margin fine, and possessed in its quite highest, and in a certain sense, most laughable degree, the constitutional English serenity in danger, which, with the foolish of us, degenerates into delight in it, but with the wise, whether soldier or physician, is the basis of the most fortunate action and swiftest decision of deliberate skill. When, thirty years afterwards, Dr. Acland was wrecked in the steamer Tyne, off the coast of Dorset, the steamer having lain wedged on the rocks all night,—no one knew what rocks,—and the dawn breaking on half a mile of dangerous surf between the ship and shore,— the officers, in anxious debate, the crew, in con­ fusion, the passengers, in hysterics or at prayers, were all astonished, and many scandalized, at the appearance of Dr. Acland from the saloon in punctilious morning dress, with the announcement that “breakfast was ready.” To the impatient clamour of indignation with which his unsym­ pathetic conduct was greeted, he replied by point­ ing out that not a boat could go on shore, far less

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come out from it, in that state of the tide, and that in the meantime, as most of themwere wet, all cold, and at the best must be dragged ashore through the surf, if not swim for their lives in it, they would be extremely prudent to begin the day, as usual, with breakfast. The hysterics ceased, the confusion calmed, what wits anybody had became available to them again, and not a life was ultimately lost. john ruskin: Praterita. 1885.

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HISTORICAL IDEALS

22.

HERALDS OF FAME

"tis scarce a quarter of an age since such a happy balance of power was settled between ^ our prince and people as has firmly secured our hitherto precarious liberties, and removed from us the fear of civil commotions, wars and violence, either on account of religion and worship, the pro­ perty of the subject, or the contending titles of the Crown. But as the greatest advantages of this world are not to be bought at easy prices, we are still at this moment expending both our blood and treasure to secure to ourselves this inestimable purchase of our free government and national constitution. And as happy as we are in this establishment at home, we are still held in a perpetual alarm by the aspect of affairs abroad, and by the terror of that Power which, ere mankind had well recovered the misery of those barbarous ages consequent to the Roman yoke, has again threatened the world with a universal monarchy and a new abyss of ignorance and superstition. The British Muses, in this din of arms, may well lie abject and obscure, especially being as yet in their mere infant state. They have hitherto scarce arrived to anything of shapeliness or person. They

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lisp as in their cradles; and their stammering tongues, which nothing besides their youth and rawness can excuse, have hitherto spoken in wretched pun and quibble. Our dramatic Shakspere, our Fletcher, Jonson, and our epic Milton preserve this style. And even a latter race, scarce free of this infirmity, and aiming at a false sublime, with crowded simile and mixed metaphor (the hobby-horse and rattle of the Muses), entertain our raw fancy and unpractised ear, which has not as yet had leisure to form itself and become truly musical. But those reverend bards, rude as they were, according to their time and age, have provided us, however, with the richest ore. To their eternal honour they have withal been the first of Europeans who, since the Gothic model of poetry, attempted to throw off the horrid discord of jingling rhyme. They have asserted ancient poetic liberty, and have happily broken the ice for those who are to follow them, and who, treading in their footsteps, may at leisure polish our language, lead our ear to finer pleasure, and find out the true rhythmus and harmonious numbers, which alone can satisfy a just judgment and muse-like apprehension. We are now in an age when Liberty is once again in its ascendant. And we are ourselves the happy nation who not only enjoy it at home, but by our greatness and power give life and vigour to it

HISTORICAL IDEALS

III

abroad; and are the head and chief of the European League, founded on this common cause. Nor can it, I presume, be justly feared that we should lose this noble ardour, or faint under the glorious toil, though, like ancient Greece, we should for succeed­ ing ages be contending with a foreign power, and endeavouring to reduce the exorbitancy of a Grand Monarch. 5Tis with us at present as with the Roman people in those early days, when they wanted only repose from arms to apply themselves to the im­ provement of arts and studies. We should in this case need no ambitious monarch to be allured, by hope of fame or secret views of power, to give pen­ sions abroad as well as at home, and purchase flattery from every profession and science. We should find a better fund within ourselves, and might, without such assistance, be able to excel by our own virtue and emulation. Well it would be, indeed, and much to the honour of our nobles and princes, would they freely help in this affair, and by ajudicious application of their bounty facilitate this happy birth, of which I have ventured to speak in a prophetic style. ’Twould be of no small advantage to them during their life, and would, more than all their other labours, procure them an immortal memory. For they must remem­ ber that their fame is in the hands of penmen; and that the greatest actions lose their force and perish in the custody of unable and mean writers. Let a nation remain ever so rude or barbarous,

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it must have its poets, rhapsoders, historiographers, antiquaries of some kind or other, whose business it will be to recount its remarkable transactions, and record the achievements of its civil and military heroes. And though the military kind may happen to be the farthest removed from any acquaintance with Letters or the Muses, they are yet, in reality, the most interested in the cause and party of these remembrances. The greatest share of fame and admiration falls naturally on the armed worthies. The great in council are second in the Muses’ favour. But if worthy poetic geniuses are not found, nor able penmen raised, to rehearse the lives and celebrate the high actions of great men, they must be traduced by such recorders as chance presents. We have few modern heroes who, like Xenophon or Caesar, can write their own Commentaries. And the raw memoir-writings and unformed pieces of modern statesmen, full of their interested and pri­ vate views, will in another age be of little service to support their memory or name, since already the world begins to sicken with the kind. ’Tis the learned, the able and disinterested historian, who takes place at last. And when the signal poet or herald of fame is once heard, the inferior trumpets sink in silence and oblivion. ANTHONY

EARL

OF

SHAFTESBURY I

Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author. 1710.

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23. RETROSPECTIVE IMMORTALITY

a thing it is to grasp the nature of the whole firmament and of its stars, all the movements and changes of the atmos­ phere, whether it strikes terror into ignorant minds by the majestic roll of thunder or by fiery comets, or whether it freezes into snow or hail, or whether again it fails softly and gently in showers or dew; then perfectly to understand the shifting winds and all the exhalations and vapours which earth and sea give forth; next to know the hidden virtues of plants and metals and understand the nature and the feelings, if that may be, of every living creature; next the delicate structure of the human body and the art of keeping it in health; and, to crown all, the divine might and power of the soul, and any knowledge we may have gained concerning thosfe beings which we call spirits and genii and daemons. There is an infinite number of subjects besides these, a great part of which might be learnt in less time than it would take to enumerate them all. So at length, gentlemen, when universal learning has once completed its cycle, the spirit of man, no longer confined within this dark prison-house, will reach out far and wide, till it fills the whole world and the space far beyond with the expansion of its divine greatness. Then at last most of the chances and changes of the world will be so quickly perceived that to him who holds this stronghold of wisdom

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hardly anything can happen in his life which is un­ foreseen or fortuitous. He will indeed seem to be one whose rule and dominion the stars obey, to whose command earth and sea harken, and whom winds and tempests serve; to whom, lastly, Mother Nature herselfhas surrendered, as if indeed some god had abdicated the throne of the world and entrusted its rights, laws, andadministrationtohimasgovernor. Besides this, what delight it affords to the mind to take its flight through the history and geography of every nation and to observe the changes in the conditions of kingdoms, races, cities, and peoples, to the increase of wisdom and righteousness. This, my hearers, is to live in every period of the world’s history, and to be as it were coeval with time itself. And indeed, while we look to the future for the glory of our name, this will be to extend and stretch our lives backward before our birth, and to wrest from grudging Fate a kind of retrospective immor­ tality. I pass over a pleasure with which none can compare—to be the oracle of many nations, to find one’s home regarded as a kind of temple, to be a man whom kings and states invite to come to them, whom men from near and far flock to visit, while to others it is a matter for pride if they have but set eyes on him once. These are the rewards of study, these, are the prizes which learning can and often does bestow upon her votaries in private life. john M ilton : Prolusiones Oratoria. 1632 (trans. Phyllis B. Tillyard).

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24. THE PATRIOT KING

o completer incarnation could be shown us of the militant Englishman—Anglais pur sang; but itisnot only, as somehaveseemedtothink, with the highest, the purest, the noblest quality of English character that hisjust and far-seeing creator has endowed him. The godlike equity of Shake­ speare’s judgment, his implacable and impeccable righteousness of instinct and of insight, was too deeply ingrained in the very core of his genius to be perverted by any provincial or pseudo-patriotic prepossessions; his patriotism was too national to be provincial. Assuredly no poet ever had more than he: not even the king of men and poets who fought at Marathon and sang of Salamis: much less had any or has any one of our own, from Milton on to Campbell and from Campbell even to Tennyson. In the mightiest chorus of King Henry V we hear the pealing ring of the same great English trumpet that was yet to sound over the battle of the Baltic, and again in our later day over a sea-fight of Shake­ speare’s own, more splendid and heart-cheering in its calamity than that other and all others in their triumph; a war-song and a sea-song divine and deep as death or as the sea, making thrice more glorious at once the glorious three names ofEngland, of Grenville, and of Tennyson for ever. From the affectation of cosmopolitan indifference not iEschylus, not Pindar, not Dante’s very self was more alien

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or more free than Shakespeare; but there was nothing of the dry Tyrtaean twang, the dull mechanic resonance as of wooden echoes from a platform, in the great historic chord of his lyre. “He is very English, too English, even/’ says the Master on whom his enemies alone—assuredly not his most loving, most reverent, and most thankful disciples—might possibly and plausibly retort that he was “very French, too French, even” ; but he certainly was not “too English” to see and cleave to the main fact, the radical and central truth, of personal or national character, of typical history or tradition, without seeking to embellish, to degrade, in either or in any way to falsify it. From king to king, from cardinal to cardinal, from the earliest in date of subject to the latest of his histories, we find the same thread running, the same link of honour­ able and righteous judgment, of equitable and care­ ful equanimity, connecting and combining play with play in an unbroken and infrangible chain of evidence to the singleness of the poet’s eye, the identity of the workman’s hand, which could do justice and would do no more than justice, alike to Henry and to Wolsey, to Pandulph and to John. His typical English hero or historic protagonist is a man of their type who founded and built up the empire of England in India; a hero after the future pattern of Hastings and of Clive; not less daringly sagacious and not more delicately scrupulous, not less indomitable or more impeccable than they.

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A type by no means immaculate, a creature not at all too bright and good for English nature’s daily food in times of mercantile or military enterprise; no whit more if no whit less excellent and radiant than reality. Arnica Britannia, sed magis arnica veritas. The master poet of England—all Englishmen may reasonably and honourably be proud of it—has not two weights and two measures for friend and foe. a . c. SWINBURNE: A Study of Shakespeare. 1880. 25.

PATRIOTIC REMINISCENCE

UT this Richard II, O God forbid that however unsuited for the stage yet even there it should fall dead on the hearts ofjacobinized English­ men. Then indeed prateriit gloria mundi. The spirit of patriotic reminiscence is the all-permeating spirit of this drama. It is, perhaps, the most purely historical of Shakespeare’s dramas. There are not in it, as in the others, characters introduced merely for the pur­ pose of giving a greater individuality and realness, as in the comic parts of Henry IV, by presenting, as it were, our very selves. Shakespeare avails him­ self of every opportunity to effect the great object of the historic drama, that, namely, of familiarizing the people to the great names of their country, and thereby of exciting a steady patriotism, a love of just liberty, and a respect for all those fundamental institutions of social life, which bind men together.

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THE ENGLISH VISION I 18 The popularity of Richard II is owing, in a great measure, to the masterly delineation of the principal character; but were there no other ground for admiring it, it would deserve the highest applause, from the fact that it contains the most magnificent, and, at the same time, the truest eulogium of our native country that the English language can boast, or which can be produced from any other tongue, not excepting the proud claims of Greece and Rome. When I feel, that upon the morality of Britain de­ pends the safety of Britain, and that her morality is supported and illustrated by our national feeling, I cannot read these grand lines without joy and triumph. Let it be remembered, that while this country is proudly pre-eminent in morals, her enemy has only maintained his station by superiority in mechanical appliances. Many of those who hear me will, no doubt, anticipate the passage I refer to, and it runs as follows:— “This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise; This fortress, built by nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war; This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Feared by their breed, and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry,

HISTORICAL IDEALS

II9 As is the Sepulchre in stubborn Jewry Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son: This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leas’d out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement, or pelting farm. England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds.” A ct //., Scene 1.

Every motive to patriotism, every cause producing it, is here collected, without one of those cold abstractions so frequently substituted by modern poets. If this passage were recited in a theatre with due energy and understanding, with a proper know­ ledge of the words, and a fit expression of their meaning, every man would retire from it secure in his country’s freedom, if secure in his own constant virtue. s. t . Coleridge : Notes on th$ History Plays of Shakespeare (1818) and Lectures (1811-12).

26. NATIONAL BROTHERHOOD f all human affections, the noblest and most becoming human nature is that of love to one’s country. This, perhaps, will easily be allowed by all men who have really a country, and are of the number of those who may be called a people, as enjoying the happiness of a real constitu­ tion and polity by which they are free and inde-

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pendent. There are few such countrymen or free­ men so degenerate as directly to discountenance or condemn this passion of love to their community and national brotherhood. The indirect manner of opposing this principle is the most usual. We hear it commonly as a complaint, “That there is little of this love extant in the world.” From whence ’tis hastily concluded, “That there is little or nothing of friendly or social affection inherent in our nature or proper to our species.” ’Tis however apparent that there is scarce a creature of human kind who is not possessed at least of some inferior degree or meaner sort of this natural affection to a country. Nescioqua natale solum dulcedine captos Ducit.1

’Tis a wretched aspect of humanity which we figure to ourselves when we would endeavour to resolve the very essence and foundation of this generous passion into a relation to mere clay and dust, exclusively of anything sensible, intelligent, or moral. ’Tis, I must own, on certain relations or respective proportions that all natural affection does in some measure depend. And in this view it cannot, I confess, be denied that we have each of us a certain relation to the mere earth itself, the very mould or surface of that planet in which, with other animals of various sorts, we (poor reptiles!) were also bred and nourished. But had it happened to 1 Ovid, Pont. i. iii. 35. (“Our own country charms and draws us with a certain sweetness.”)

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one of us British men to have been born at sea, could we not therefore properly be called British men? Could we be allowed countrymen of no sort, as having no distinct relation to any certain soil or region? no original neighbourhood but with the watery inhabitants and sea-monsters? Surely, if we were born of lawful parents, lawfully employed, and under the protection of law, wherever they might be then detained, to whate'ver colonies sent, or whithersoever driven by any accident, or in expeditions or adventures in the public service or that of mankind, we should still find we had a home and country ready to lay claim to us. We should be obliged still to consider ourselves as fellow-citizens, and might be allowed to love our country or nation as honestly and heartily as the most inland inhabi­ tant or native of the soil. Our political and social capacity would undoubtedly come in view, and be acknowledged full as natural and essential in our species as the parental and filial kind, which gives rise to what we peculiarly call natural affection. Or supposing that both our birth and parents had been unknown, and that in this respect we were in a manner younger brothers in society to the rest of mankind, yet from our nurture and education we should surely espouse some country or other, and joyfully embracing the protection of a magistracy, should of necessity and by force of nature join our­ selves to the general society of mankind, and those in particular with whom we hau entered into a

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nearer communication of benefits and closer sym­ pathy of affections. It may therefore be esteemed no better than a mean subterfuge of narrow minds to assign this natural passion for society and a country to such a relation as that of a mere fungus or common excrescence to its parent-mould or nursing dunghill. The relation of countryman, if it be allowed any­ thing at all, must imply something moral and social. The notion itself presupposes a naturally civil and political state of mankind, and has reference to that particular part of society to which we owe our chief advantages as men and rational creatures, such as are naturally and necessarily united for each other’s happiness and support, and for the highest of all happinesses and enjoyments, “ the intercourse of minds, the free use of our reason, and the exercise of mutual love and friendship.” ANTHONY EARL' OF SHAFTESBURY : Miscellaneous Reflections. 1711.

27. THE VIRTUES OF INSULARITY importance of the history of a country depends, not upon the splendour of its exploits, but upon the degree to which its actions are due to causes springing out of itself. If, therefore, we could find some civilized people who had worked out their civilization entirely by themselves; who had escaped all foreign influence, and who had been

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neither benefited nor retarded by the personal peculiarities of their rulers,—the history of such a people would be of paramount importance; because it would present a condition of normal and inherent development; it would show tfie laws of progress acting in a state of isolation; it would be, in fact, an experiment ready-made, and would possess all the value of that artificial contrivance to which natural science is so much indebted. To find such a people as this is obviously im­ possible ; but the duty of the philosophic historian is, to select for his especial study the country in which the conditions have been most closely fol­ lowed. Now, it will be readily admitted, not only by ourselves, but by intelligent foreigners, that in England, during, at all events, the last three cen­ turies, this has been done more constantly and more successfully than in any other country. I say nothing of the number of our discoveries, the brilliancy of our literature, or the success of our arms. These are invidious topics; and other nations may perhaps deny to us those superior merits which we are apt to exaggerate. But I take up this single position, that of all European countries, England is the one where, during the longest period, the govern­ ment has been most quiescent, and the people most active; where popular freedom has been settled on the widest basis; where each man is most able to say what he thinks, and do what he likes: where every one can follow his own bent, and propagate his own

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opinions: where, religious persecution being little known, the play and flow of the human mind may be clearly seen, unchecked by those restraints to which it is elsewhere subjected; where the profession of heresy is least dangerous, and the practice of dissent most common; where hostile creeds flourish side by side, and rise and decay without disturbance, according to the wants of the people, unaffected by the wishes of the church, and uncontrolled by the authority of the state; where all interests, and all classes, both spiritual and temporal, are most left to take care of themselves; where that meddlesome doctrine called Protection was first attacked, and where alone it has been destroyed; and where, in a word, those dangerous extremes to which inter­ ference gives rise having been avoided, despotism and rebellion are equally rare, and concession being recognized as the groundwork of policy, the national progress has been least disturbed by the power of privileged classes, by the influence of particular sects, or by the violence of arbitrary rulers. That these are the characteristics of English his­ tory is notorious: to some men a matter of boast, to others of regret. And when to these circumstances we add, that England, owing to its insular forma­ tion, was, until the middle of the last century, rarely visited by foreigners, it becomes evident that, in our progress as a people, we have been less affected than any other by the two main sources of interference,

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namely, the authority of government, and the influence of foreigners. In the sixteenth century, it became a fashion, among the English nobility, to travel abroad; but it was by no means the fashion for foreign nobility to travel in England. In the seventeenth century, the custom of travelling for amusement spread so much, that, among the rich and idle classes, there were few Englishmen who did not, at least once in their life, cross the Channel; while the same classes in other countries, partly because they were less wealthy, partly from an inveterate dislike to the sea, hardly ever entered our island, unless compelled to do so on some par­ ticular business. The result was, that in other countries, and particularly in France and Italy, the inhabitants of the great cities became gradually accustomed to foreigners, and, like all men, were imperceptibly influenced by what they often saw. On the other hand, there were many of our cities in which none but Englishmen ever set their feet; and inhabitants, even of the metropolis, might grow old without having once seen a single foreigner, except, perhaps, some dull and pompous ambas­ sador taking his airing on the banks of the Thames. And although it is often said that, after the restora­ tion of Charles II, our national character began to be greatly influenced by French example, this, as I shall fully prove, was confined to that small and insignificant part of society which hung about the court: nor did it produce any marked effect upon

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the two most important classes,—the intellectual class, and the industrious class. The movement may, indeed, be traced in the most worthless parts of our literature,—in the shameless productions of Buckingham, Dorset, Etherege, Killigrew, Mulgrave, Rochester, and Sedley. But neither then, nor at a much later period, were any of our great thinkers influenced by the intellect of France: on the contrary, we find in their ideas, and even in their style, a certain rough and native vigour, which, though offensive to our more polished neigh­ bours, has at least the merit of being the indigenous product of our own country. The origin and extent of that connexion between the French and English intellects which subsequently arose, is a subject of immense importance; but, like most others of real value, it has been entirely neglected by historians. In the present work, I shall attempt to supply this deficiency: in the mean time I may say, that although we have been, and still are, greatly in­ debted to the French for our improvement in taste, in refinement, in manners, and indeed in all the amenities of life, we have borrowed from them nothing absolutely essential, nothing by which the destinies of nations are permanently altered. On the other hand, the French have not only borrowed from us some very valuable political institutions, but even the most important event in French his­ tory is due, in no small degree, to our influence. Their revolution of 1789 was, as is well known,

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brought about, or, to speak more properly, was mainly instigated by a few great men, whose works, and afterwards whose speeches, roused the people to resistance; but what is less known, and neverthe­ less is certainly true, is, that these eminent leaders learnt in England that philosophy and those prin­ ciples by which, when transplanted into their own country, such fearful and yet such salutary results were effected. It will not, I hope, be supposed, that by these remarks I mean to cast any reflection on the French, a great and admirable people; a people in many respects superior to ourselves; a people from whom we have still much to learn, and whose deficiencies, such as they are, arise from the perpetual inter­ ference of a long line of arbitrary rulers. But, look­ ing at this matter historically, it is unquestionably true that we have worked out our civilization with little aid from them, while they have worked out theirs with great aid from us. At the same time, it must also be admitted, that our governments have interfered less with us than their governments have interfered with them. And without in the least pre­ judging the question as to which is the greater country, it is solely on these grounds that I consider our history more important than theirs: and I select for especial study the progress of English civilization, simply because, being less affected by agencies not arising from itself, we can the more clearly discern in it the normal march of society,

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and the undisturbed operation of those great laws by which the fortunes of mankind are ultimately regulated. HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE : History of Civilization in England. 1857. 28. THE TWO ENGLANDS all countries England is at once the most national and insular in its cultural tradition and the most cosmopolitan in its economic and imperial position. In this it resembles Rome, the peasant state that became the organiser of a world empire and the centre of a cosmopolitan civilisation. And as the development of Roman culture was late and backward in comparison with the Hellenic world, so was it with the English national culture as compared with that of continental Europe. The development of a native English culture was checked by the Norman Conquest, and during the best part of the Middle Ages England was under the dominion of an alien culture that had its roots across the channel. England first began to become herself in the fourteenth century, when the mediaeval unity was passing away, and it was only in the three centuries that followed the Renaissance and the Reformation that the English national culture acquired its characteristic form. A t that time civilisation on the Continent was

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following in a remarkable way the footsteps of the great Mediterranean civilisation of the past. Renaissance Italy inherited the traditions of Hellenism, while Spain and Baroque Austria and the France of Louis XIV inherited the RomanByzantine tradition of state absolutism and sacred monarchy. But in England there is no room for such comparisons. Partly, though not entirely, as a result of the Reformation, she remained apart from the main current of European life, following her own part and jealously guarding against any influence from outside, somewhat after the fashion of Japan in the Far East during this very period. Her development was in fact the exact opposite to that of Germany during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, open as the latter was to all the cultural and political currents in Europe, re­ ceiving French influence from across the Rhine, Italian influence through Austria, and Swedish influence from the Baltic. It was this accentuation of her island position which was the essential condition of England’s achievement. She was a little world, secure behind the guardian barrier of the narrow seas, the most peaceful land in Europe, almost the only spot in the world that was free from the constant menace of war and invasion. Hence there was a general relaxation of tension in the social organism. There was no need for the rigid centralisation, the standing armies, the bureaucratic organisation, which on the E

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Continent were absolutely necessary for national survival. And so, while in other countries culture concentrated itself in cities and in the courts of kings, in England it spread itself abroad over the open country. A new type of civilisation grew up that was not urban or courtly, but essentially rural and based upon the life of the family. It was this characteristic that was the source of the exceptional stability and strength of the English social organism which so impressed continental observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the Continent ever since the time of the Roman Empire every people and every state was divided against itself by a duality of culture. On the one hand there were the traditions of the court and the city which, finally, after the Renaissance, fused with one another; on the other the peasant tradition, which to a greater or less extent preserved an older and more primitive culture and possessed its own art, its own costume, its own social customs, almost its own laws. We have an extreme instance of this in Russia during the last two centuries, where the contrast of the French-speaking official or courtier of Petersburg, living by the culture of modern Europe, and the patriarchal peasant, living in a halfSlavonic, half-Byzantine, wholly mediaeval world, was so intense as to be unbearable, and ultimately caused the dissolution of Russian society. But in England, at least since the close of the Middle Ages, there has been no such contrast. Our society and

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131 culture have been single and homogeneous. We have not had a special peasant art and costume because our whole culture has been a rural culture. That characteristic figure, the eighteenth-century squire, was not the member of a noble class as was even the smallest German baron or French count; he was a glorified yeoman. No doubt he, too, was sometimes an oppressor, but he was never a stranger, and when he was most high-handed, as in the en­ closure of the commons, he was fighting the last stage of the peasant’s long battle for the Plough against the Waste. Like Tennyson’s Lincolnshire farmer, he thought that a few moral deficiencies would be overlooked in the man who “stubbed Thurnaby Waste.” Thus the English culture and the social discipline that went with it were not a civilisation imposed from above, but grew up from below out of the very soil of England. When all the great states of the Continent were shaken by revolution and disorder, England alone stood firm and preserved an un­ broken continuity with her past. Her constitution was not a paper document, based on the most admirable abstract principles and entirely altered every few years, it was herself; she could not throw it aside any more than a man can discard his own personality. One of the most original Catholic sociologists of the nineteenth century, Frederic Leplay, devoted a work to the study of English society. He had been

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impressed when first he visited England in 1836 by the stability of the social organism and by the weak­ ness of the forces of irréligion and disorder which were then in the ascendant throughout Western Europe; and he found the source of England’s greatness in the characteristics that we have just described. It was not simply the strength of family life and the home, but the way in which a whole culture and social order had been built up on these foundations. Elsewhere in those households that he studied so devotedly in the six volumes of his Ouvriers Européens, he has seen family life that was as strong or stronger, from a moral and economic point of view, but nowhere else was it the centre of the national culture and polity to the same extent as it was in England. This development had its roots far back in the Middle Ages. Long before the Reformation English society had begun to acquire its characteristic rural aspect. The English village, with its pacific manorhouse and its richly adorned parish church, was already far different from those of the war-harried castle-studded countrysides of France and Germany. But it was only in the centuries which followed the Renaissance that this English society began to bear fruit in an equally distinctive style and culture. How incomparably English are the typical Tudor and Jacobean manor and farmhouse, and how rich is their social content. They make us understand how it was possible for England to produce men like

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Herrick and Herbert and Henry Vaughan, poets who lived out of the world, far from the possibilities of the city and its culture, but whose art had a purity and freshness as far from that of the poets of the same period in Italy and France as an English meadow from a Neapolitan street. And with the following century the contrast between English and continental culture becomes even stronger. It is true that the hard brilliance and rationalism of the French eighteenth century had its parallel here in Pope and Bolingbroke, and later in Chesterfield and Gibbon, but the victory was not with them. More and more their spirit was felt to be alien, their spiritual home was at Paris and Lausanne. The heart of England was with the solid traditionalism of Dr. Johnson or the intense pietism of Cowper and the Wesleys. Moreover, the coming of the house of Hanover, so far from intro­ ducing continental influences, served rather to weaken the prestige of the court and to make the country more obstinately English than ever. Neither our society nor our art served the court and the capital, both alike centred in the family, in the country houses or in the homes of the merchants. And this is true of both the chief manifestations of English art during this period, the great portrait painters and the late Georgian school of archi­ tecture and decoration, of which the typical repre­ sentatives are the brothers Adam. In the latter the English tradition has reached

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maturity. It is no longer purely rural, it has begun to impress its image on the town and on urban life. The ordinary London house of this type, with the reserved severity of its exterior and the intimate refinement and grace of the interior, is a true type of the society which produced it. A society whose civilisation was essentially private, bound up with the family and the home, and which brings with it even into the city and its suburbs something of the quiet and retirement of the countryside. It is the complete antithesis of the Latin social ideal, which is communal and public, which finds its artistic expression in the baroque town square, with its fountains and statuary and monumental façades, a fitting background to the open-air life of a manycoloured voluble crowd. So if one compares the London of a hundred years ago, when this English culture was still practically intact, with the great cities of the Conti­ nent with their ancient tradition of a splendid civic life, the comparison is at first all in their favour. In England there was a rustic individualism and a boorishness which sink at times to downright callousness and brutality, as in the penal code and the treatment of the poor. But as soon as we leave public life and look behind the severe and some­ times dingy façade, what treasures does the interior life of that late Georgian London reveal! The harvest of Renaissance Florence was greater, may be, but there the resources of a brilliant court

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called together the talent of all Italy. In London it was a spontaneous flowering from the poorest and most unpromising soil. Blake, Keats, Charles Lamb, Thomas Girtin, and the Varleys, Turner and Dickens, were all of them poor men, for the most part completely without any of the advantages of birth or education. Yet each of them is unique, each of them is a voice of England, and some of their work possesses the same unearthly beauty and spirituality which marked English poetry in the seventeenth century. But with the close of the Georgian period a profound change begins to pass over English society. England ceases to be an agrarian state, and the new industry, which had been developing for more than half a century, becomes the dominant element in the life of the nation. The centre of gravity shifts from the village and the country house to the industrial town, the mine and the factory. This change was not a gradual modification of the older non-industrial civilisation, it was an independent growth. For the new industry de­ veloped in just those districts of England that were most backward and farthest removed from the centres of the old culture. Great masses of popula­ tion began to settle on the wild moorland of north­ western England and in the valleys of the Welsh hills, and new cities grew up, like mushrooms, without plan and forethought, without corporate

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responsibility or civic tradition. Thus two Englands stood over against one another without social con­ tact. As long as the Georgian era lasted the old England still ruled, and the new nation o f industrial workers lived a disenfranchised existence as a mere wealth-producing caste. Then came the ferment of the years after the Napoleonic War, the rise of Liberalism and the passing of the Reform Bill. Finally, with the repeal of the Corn Laws, the old rural England passed into the background, and a new financial industrial state took its place. Christopher dawson : Enquiries. 1933. 29.

just prejudice

I assert anything else, as concerning the people of England, I speak from obser­ vation, not from authority; but I speak from the experience I have had in a pretty extensive and mixed communication with the inhabitants o f this kingdom, of all descriptions and ranks, and after a course of attentive observation, begun in early life, and continued for nearly forty years. I have often been astonished, considering that we are divided from you but by a slender dyke of about twentyfour miles, and that the mutual intercourse between the two countries has lately been very great, to find how little you seem to know of us. I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of this nation from certain publications which do, very

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erroneously, if they do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent in England. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue, of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise and puffing and mutual quotation of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their abilities is a general mark of acquiescence in their opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importu­ nate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour. I almost venture to affirm that not one in a hundred amongst us participates in the “triumph” of the Revolution Society. If the King and Qpeen of France, and their children, were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in the most acrimonious of all hostilities (I deprecate such an event, I deprecate such hostility), they would be treated with another sort of triumphal entry into London. We formerly have had a king of France in that situation; you have read how he was treated by the victor in the field; and in what manner he was E

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afterwards received in England. Four hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity cf think­ ing of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been com­ pletely embowelled of our natural entrails: we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still

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native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because sill other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us per­ fectly fit for, andjustly deserving of, slavery, through the whole course of our lives. You see, sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of specula­ tion, instead of exploding general prejudices,

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employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it per­ manence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice ren­ ders a man’s virtue his habit: and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. edmund burke : Reflections on the Revolu­ tion in France, in a Letter intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris. 1790. 30. A REPUBLICAN FIRMNESS can more readily admire the liberal spirit and integrity, than the sound judgment, o f any man who prefers a republican form of government, in this or any other empire of equal extent, to a monarchy so qualified and limited as ours. I am convinced, that neither is it in theory the wisest system of government, nor practicable in this country. Yet, though I hope the English constitu-

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tion will for ever preserve its original monarchical form, I would have the manners of the people purely and strictly republican. .1 do not mean the licentious spirit of anarchy and riot. I mean a general attachment to the common-weal, distinct from any partial attachment to persons or families; an implicit submission to the laws only, and an affection to the magistrate, proportioned to the integrity and wisdom with which he distributes justice to his people, and administers their affairs. The present habit of our political body appears to me the very reverse of what it ought to be. The form of the constitution leans rather more than enough to the popular branch; while, in effect, the manners of the people (of those at least who are likely to take a lead in the country) incline too generally to a dependence upon the Crown. The real friends of arbitrary power combine the facts, and are not inconsistent with their principles when they strenuously support the unwarrantable privi­ leges assumed by the House of Commons. In these circumstances, it were much to be desired, that we had many such men as Mr. Sawbridge to represent us in Parliament. I speak from common report and opinion only, when I impute to him a speculative predilection in favour of a republic.—In the per­ sonal conduct and manners of the man, I cannot be mistaken. He has shown himself possessed of that republican firmness which the times require; and by which an English gentleman may be as usefully

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and as honourably distinguished, as any citizen o f ancient Rome, of Athens, or Lacedaemon. junius : Letter to the Printer of the Public Advertiser. October 5, 1771.

3 1 . FILIAL FEARS green and silent spot, amid the hills, A small and silent d ell! O ’er stiller place No singing skylark ever poised himself. The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope, Which hath a gay and gorgeous covering on, All golden with the never-bloomless furze, Which now blooms most profusely: but the dell, Bathed by the mist, is fresh and delicate As vernal corn-field, or the unripe flax, When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glimmers with green light. O ! ’tis a quiet spirit-healing nook! Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he, The humble man, who, in his youthful years, Knew just so much of folly, as had made His early manhood more securely w ise! Here he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, Sweet influences trembled o’er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found

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Religious meanings in the forms of Nature! And so, his senses gradually wrapt In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, That singest like an angel in the clouds! My God! it is a melancholy thing For such a man, who would full fain preserve His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel For all his human brethren—O my God! It weighs upon the heart, that he must think What uproar and what strife may now be stirring This way or that way o’er these silent hills— Invasion, and the thunder and the shout, And all the crash of onset; fear and rage, And undetermined conflict—even now, Even now, perchance, and in his native isle: Carnage and groans beneath this blessed sun! We have offended, oh! my countrymen, We have offended very grievously, And been most tyrannous. From east to west A groan of accusation pierces heaven! The wretched plead against us; multitudes Countless and vehement, the sons of God, Our brethren! Like a cloud that travels on, Steamed up from Cairo’s swamps of pestilence, Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs, And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint With slow perdition murders the whole man,

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His body and his soul! Meanwhile, at home, All individual dignity and power Engulfed in courts, committees, institutions, Associations and societies, A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting guild, One benefit-club for mutual flattery, We have drunk up, demure as at a grace, Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth; Contemptuous of all honourable rule, Yet bartering freedom and the poor man’s life For gold, as at a market! The sweet words Of Christian promise, words that even yet Might stem destruction, were they wisely preached, Are muttered o’er by men, whose tones proclaim How flat and wearisome they feel their trade: Rank scoffers some, but most too indolent To deem them falsehoods or to know their truth. O ! blasphemous! the book of life is made A superstitious instrument, on which We gabble o’er the oaths we mean to break; For all must swear—all and in every place, College and wharf, council and justice-court; All, all must swear, the briber and the bribed, Merchant and lawyer, senator and priest, The rich, the poor, the old man and the young; All, all make up one scheme of perjury, That faith doth reel; the very name of God Sounds like a juggler’s charm; and, bold with joy, Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,

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Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven, Cries out, “ Where is it?” Thankless too for peace, (Peace long preserved by fleets and perilous seas) Secure from actual warfare, we have loved To swell the war-whoop, passionate for w a r! A las! for ages ignorant of all Its ghastlier workings (famine or blue plague, Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows), We, this whole people, have been clamorous For war and bloodshed; animating sports, The which we pay for as a thing to talk of, Spectators and not combatants! No guess Anticipative of a wrong unfelt, No speculation or contingency, However dim and vague, too vague and dim To yield a justifying cause; and forth (Stuffed out with big preamble, holy names, And adjurations of the God in heaven), We send our mandates for the certain death O f thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning m eal! The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers From curses, who knows scarcely words enough To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,

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THE ENGLISH VISION

Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute And technical in victories and defeats, And all our dainty terms for fratricide ; Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which We join no feeling and attach no form ! As if the soldier died without a wound ; As if the fibres of this godlike frame Were gored without a pang ; as if the wretch, Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, Passed off to heaven, translated and not killed ; As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days Are coming on us, O my countrymen ! And what if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the agony O f our fierce doings? Spare us yet awhile, Father and God ! O ! spare us yet awhile. Oh ! let not English women drag their flight Fainting beneath the burden of their babes, O f the sweet infants, that but yesterday Laughed at the breast! Sons, brothers, husbands, all Who ever gazed with fondness on the forms Which grew up with you round the same fireside, And all who ever heard the sabbath-bells

HISTORICAL IDEALS

147

Without the infidel’s scorn, make yourselves pure! Stand forth! be men! repel an impious foe, Impious and false, a light yet cruel race, Who laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth With deeds of murder: and still promising Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free, Poison life’s amities, and cheat the heart O f faith and quiet hope, and all that soothes, And all that lifts the spirit! Stand we forth; Render them back upon the insulted ocean, And let them toss as idly on its waves As the vile sea-weed, which some mountain-blast Swept from our shores! And o h ! may we return Not with a drunken triumph, but with fear, Repenting of the wrongs with which we stung So fierce a foe to frenzy!I I have told, O Britons! O my brethren! I have told Most bitter truth, but without bitterness. Nor deem my zeal or factious or mistimed; For never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices. We have been too long Dupes of a deep delusion! Some, belike, Groaning with restless enmity, expect All change from change of constituted power; As if a Government had been a robe, On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe

148

THE ENGLISH VISION

Pulled off at pleasure. Fondly these attach A radical causation to a few Poor drudges of chastising Providence, Who borrow all their hues and qualities From our own folly and rank wickedness, Which gave them birth and nursed them. Others, meanwhile, Dote with a mad idolatry; and all Who will not fall before their images, And yield them worship, they are enemies Even of their country! Such have I been deemed— But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle! Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, A husband, and a father! who revere All bonds of natural love, and find them all Within the limits of thy rocky shores. O native Britain! O my Mother Isle! How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills, Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, Have drunk in all my intellectual life, All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, All adoration of the God in nature, All lovely and all honourable things, Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel The joy and greatness of its future being?

HISTORICAL IDEALS

H9

There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul Unborrowed from my country. O divine And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole And most magnificent temple, in the^which I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs, Loving the God that made me!— May my fears, My filial fears, be vain! and may the vaunts And menace of the vengeful enemy Pass like the gust, that roared and died away In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass. But now the gentle dew-fall sends abroad The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze: The light has left the summit of the hill, Though still a sunny gleam lies beautiful, Aslant the ivied beacon. Now farewell, Farewell awhile, O soft and silent spot! On the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill, Homeward I wind my way; and lo! recalled From bodings that have well-nigh wearied me, I find myself upon the brow, and pause Startled! And after lonely sojourning In such a quiet and surrounded nook, This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main, Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty Of that huge amphitheatre of rich And elmy fields, seems like society—

150

THE ENGLISH VISION

Conversing with the mind, and giving it A livelier impulse and a dance of thought! And now, beloved Stowey! I behold T hy church-tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend; And close behind them, hidden from my view, Is my own lowly cottage, where my babe And my babe’s mother dwell in peace! With light And quickened footsteps thitherward I tend, Remembering thee, O green and silent dell. And grateful, that by nature’s quietness And solitary musings, all my heart Is softened, and made worthy to indulge Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind. SAMUEL T A Y L O R

CO LER ID G E

’.

FtO TS

in Solitude: Written in April 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion.

32.

CIVIL LIB ER TY

an honest, and, I may truly affirm, a laborious zeal for the public service, has given me any weight in Your esteem, let me exhort and conjure You never to suffer an invasion of Your political constitution, however minute the instance may appear, to pass by, without a determined, persevering resistance. One precedent creates another. They soon accumulate, and constitute law. What yesterday was fact, to-day is doctrine. f

I

HISTORICAL IDEALS

151

Examples are supposed tojustify the most dangerous measures; and where they do not suit exactly, the defect is supplied by analogy. Be assured that the laws, which protect us in our civil rights, grow out of the constitution, and that they must fall or flourish with it. This is not the cause of faction or of party, or of any individual, but the common interest of every man in Britain. Although the King should continue to support his present system of government, the period is not very distant at which you will have the means of redress in your own power. It may be nearer perhaps than any of us expect, and I would warn You to be prepared for it. The King may possibly be advised to dissolve the present parliament a year or two before it expires of course, and precipitate a new election, in hopes of taking the nation by surprise. If such a measure be in agitation, this very caution may defeat or prevent it. I cannot doubt that You will unanimously assert the freedom of election, and vindicate your exclu­ sive right to chuse your representatives. But other questions have been started, on which your deter­ mination should be equally clear and unanimous. Let it be impressed upon your minds, let it be instilled into your children, that the liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman; and that the right ofjuries to return a general verdict, in all cases whatsoever, is an essential part of our constitution,

152

THE ENGLISH VISION

not to be controlled or limited by the judges, nor in any shape questionable by the Legislature. The power of King, Lords, and Commons, is not an arbitrary power. They are the trustees, not the owners, of the estate. The fee-simple is in us. They cannot alienate, they cannot waste. When we say that the Legislature is supreme, we mean, that it is the highest power known to the constitution;— that it is the highest in comparison with the other subordinate powers established by the laws. In this sense, the word supreme is relative, not absolute. The power of the Legislature is limited, not only by the general rules of natural justice, and the welfare of the community, but by the forms and principles of our particular constitution. If this doctrine be not true, we must admit, that King, Lords, and Commons have no rule to direct their resolutions, but merely their own will and pleasure. They might unite the Legislative and Executive Power in the same hands, and dissolve the constitution by an act of Parliament. But I am persuaded You will not leave it to the choice of seven hundred persons, notoriously corrupted by the Crown, whether seven millions of their equals shall be freemen or slaves. The certainty of forfeiting their own rights, when they sacrifice those of the nation, is no check to a brutal, degenerate mind. Without insisting upon the extravagant concession made to Harry the Eighth, there are instances, in the history of other countries, of a formal, deliberate surrender of the

HISTORICAL IDEALS

*53

public liberty into the hands of the Sovereign. If England does not share the same fate, it is because we have better resources than in the virtue of either house of parliament. I said that the liberty of the press is the Palladium of all your rights, and that the right of the juries to return a general verdict is part of your constitution. To preserve the whole system, You must correct your Legislature. With regard to any influence of the constituent over the conduct of the representa­ tive, there is little difference between a seat in parliament for seven years and a seat for life. The prospect of your resentment is too remote; and although the last session of a septennial parliament be usually employed in courting the favour of the people, consider, that at this rate your representa­ tives have six years for offence, and but one for atonement. A death-bed repentance seldomreaches to restitution. If you reflect, that in the changes of administration which have marked and disgraced the present reign, although your warmest patriots have in their turn been invested with the lawful and unlawful authority of the Crown, and though other reliefs or improvements have been held forth to the people, yet that no one man in office has ever promoted or encouraged a bill for shorten­ ing the duration of parliaments, but that (whoever was minister) the opposition to the measure, ever since the septennial act passed, has been constant

*54

THE ENGLISH VISION

and uniform on the part of government—You can­ not but conclude, without the possibility of a doubt, that long parliaments are the foundation of the undue influence of the Crown. This influence answers every purpose of arbitrary power to the Crown, with an expence and oppression to the people, which would be unnecessary in an arbitrary government. The best of our ministers find it the easiest and most compendious mode of conducting the King’s affairs; and all ministers have a general interest in adhering to a system, which of itself is sufficient to support them in office, without any assistance from personal virtue, popularity, labour, abilities, or experience. It promises every gratifica­ tion to avarice and ambition, and secures impunity. These are truths unquestionable. If they make no impression, it is because they are too vulgar and notorious. But the inattention or indifference of the nation has continued too long. You are roused at last to a sense of your danger. The remedy will soon be in your power. If Junius lives, You shall often be reminded of it. If, when the opportunity presents itself, You neglect to do your duty to yourselves and to posterity, to God and to your country, I shall have one consolation left, in common with the meanest and basest of mankind: Civil liberty may still last the life of junius : The Letters of Junius: Dedi­ cation to the English Nation. 1772.

HISTORICAL IDEALS

*55

33. THE INSTITUTION OF JURIES of the Grand Jury, There is no part in all the excellent frame of our constitution, which an Englishman can, I think, contemplate with such delight and admira­ tion ; nothing, which must fill him with such grati­ tude to our earliest ancestors, as that branch of British liberty, from which, gentlemen, you derive your authority of assembling here on this day. The institution ofJuries, gentlemen, is a privilege which distinguishes the liberty of Englishmen from those of all other nations: for as we find no traces of this in the antiquities of the Jews, or Greeks, or Romans; so it is an advantage, which is at present solely confined to this country: not so much, I apprehend, from the reasons assigned by Fortescue, in his book de Laudibus, cap. 29, namely, c‘because there are more husbandmen, and fewer freeholders, in other countries” ; as because other countries have less of freedom than this: and being for the most part subjected to the absolute will of their governors, hold their lives, liberties, and properties at the discretion of those governors, and not under the protection of certain laws. In such countries, it would be absurd to look for any share of power in the hands of the people. And if juries in general be so very signal a bless­ ing to this nation, as Fortescue, in the book I have just cited, thinks it: “A method,” says he, “ much

G

entlemen

I56

THE ENGLISH VISION

more available and effectual for the trial of truth, than is the form of any other laws of the world, as it is farther from the danger of corruption and subornation” ; what, gentlemen, shall we say of the .institution of grandjuries, by which an Englishman, so far from being convicted, cannot be even tried, not even put on his trial in any capital case, at the suit of the crown, unless, perhaps, in one or two very special instances, till twelve men at the least have said on their oaths, that there is a probable cause for his accusation! Surely we may in a kind of rapture cry out with Fortescue, speaking of the secondjury, “Who then can unjustly die in England for any criminal offence, seeing he may have so many helps for the favour of his life, and that none may condemn him, but his neighbours, good and lawful men, against whom he hath no manner of exception?” To trace the original of this great and singular privilege, or to say when and how it began, is not an easy task; so obscure indeed are the footsteps of it through the first ages of our history, that my Lord Hale, and even my Lord Coke, seem to have de­ clined it. Nay, this latter, in his account of his second or petty jury, is very succinct; and contents himself with saying, Co. Lit. 155, b, that it is very ancient and before the conquest. . . . So just a value have our ancestors always set on this great branch of our liberties, and so jealous have they been of any attempt to diminish it, that when a

HISTORICAL IDEALS

! 57

commission to punish rioters in a summary way was awarded in the second year of Richard the Second, “ It was,” says Mr. Lambard in his Eirenarcha, fol. 305, “even in the selfsame year of the same king, resumed as a thing over hard (says that writer) to be borne, that a freeman should be imprisoned without an indictment, or other trial, by his peers, as Magna Charta speaketh; until that the experience of greater evils had prepared and made the stomach of the commonwealth able and fit to digest it.” And a hard morsel surely it must have been, when the commonwealth could not digest it in that turbulent reign, which of all others in our history, seems to have afforded the most proper ingredients to make it palatable; in a reign moreover when the commonwealth seemed to have been capable of swallowing and digesting almost any thing; when judges were so prostitute as to acknowledge the king to be aboye the law; and when a parliament, which even Echard censures, and for which Mr. Rapin, with a juster indignation, tells us, he knows no name odious enough, made no scruple to sacri­ fice to the passions of the king, and his ministers, the lives of the most distinguished lords of the king­ dom, as well as the liberties and privileges of the people. Even in that reign, gentlemen, our ancestors could not, as Mr. Lambard remarks, be brought by any necessity of the times, to give up, in any single instance, this their invaluable privilege. . . .

I 58

THE ENGLISH VISION

And, gentlemen, if we have just reason to admire the great bravery and steadiness of those our ancestors, in defeating all the attempts of tyranny against this excellent branch of our constitution, we shall have no less reason, I apprehend, to extol that great wisdom, which they have from time to time demonstrated, in well ordering and regulating their juries, so as to preserve them as clear as possible from all danger of corruption. In this light, gentle­ men, we ought to consider the several laws by which the morals, the character, the substance, and good demeanor of jurors are regulated. These jurors, gentlemen, must be good and lawful men, of repu­ tation and substance in their county, chosen at the nomination of neither party, absolutely disinterested and indifferent in the cause which they are to try. Upon the whole, the excellence of our constitution, and the great wisdom of our laws, which Fortescue, my Lord Coke, and many other great writers, have so highly extolled, is in no one instance so truly admirable as in this institution of our juries. . . . To conclude, gentlemen, you will consider your­ selves as now summoned to the execution of an office of the utmost importance to the well-being of this community : nor will you, I am confident, suffer that establishment, so wisely and carefully regu­ lated, and so stoutly and zealously maintained by your wise and brave ancestors, to degenerate into mere form and shadow. Grand juries, gentlemen, are in reality the only censors of this nation. As

HISTORICAL IDEALS

*59

such, the manners of the people are in your hands, and in yours only. You, therefore, are the only correctors of them. If you neglect your duty, the certain consequences to the public are too apparent, for as in a garden, however well cultivated at first, if the weeder’s care be omitted, the whole must in time be over-run with weeds, and will resemble the wildness and rudeness of a desert; so if those immoralities of the people, which will sprout up in the best constitution, be not from time to time cor­ rected by the hand of justice, they will at length grow up to the most enormous vices, will overspread the whole nation, and in the end must produce a downright state of wild and savage barbarism. To this censorial office, gentlemen, you are called by our excellent constitution. To execute this duty with vigilance, you are obliged by the duty you owe both to God and to your country. You are invested with full power for the purpose. This you have promised to do, under the sacred sanction of an oath; and you are all met, I doubt not, with dis­ position and resolution to perform it with that zeal which I have endeavoured to recommend, and which the peculiar licentiousness of the age so strongly requires. henry fielding i A Charge delivered to the GrandJury, Westminster. 1794.

THE ENGLISH VISION

i6o

34. LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY

of the most curious peculiarities of the English people is its dislike of the executive government. We are not in this respect “un vraie peuple moderne ” like the Americans. The Americans conceive of the executive as one of their appointed agents; when it intervenes in common life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate of the sovereign people, and there is no invasion or dereliction of freedom in that people interfering with itself. The French, the Swiss, and all nations who breathe the"full atmosphere of the nineteenth century, think so too. The material necessities of this age require a strong executive; a nation desti­ tute of it cannot be clean, or healthy, or vigorous, like a nation possessing it. By definition, a nation calling itself free should have no jealousy of the executive, for freedom means that the nation, the political part of the nation, wields the executive. But our history has reversed the English feeling: our freedom is the result of centuries of resistance, more or less legal, or more or less illegal, more or less audacious, or more or less timid, to the execu­ tive government. We have, accordingly, inherited the traditions of conflict, and preserve them in the fulness of victory. We look on State action, not as our own action, but as alien action; as an imposed tyranny from without, not as the consummated

O

ne

HISTORICAL IDEALS

l 6l

result of our own organised wishes. I remember at the Census of 1851 hearing a very sensible old lady say that the “liberties of England were at an end” ; if Government might be thus inquisitorial, if they might ask who slept in your house, or what your age was, what, she argued, might they not ask and what might they not do? The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority. The introduction of effectual police­ men was not liked; I know people, old people I admit, who to this day consider them an infringe­ ment of freedom, and an imitation of the gendarmes of France. If the original policemen had been started with the present helmets, the result might have been dubious; there might have been a cry of military tyranny, and the inbred insubordination of the English people might have prevailed over the very modern love of perfect peace and order. The old notion that the Government is an extrinsic agency still rules our imaginations, though it is no longer true, and though in calm and intellectual moments we well know it is not. Nor is it merely our history which produces this effect; we might get over that; but the results of that history co-operate. Our double Government so acts: when we want to point the antipathy to the executive, we refer to the jealousy of the Crown, so deeply imbedded in the very substance of constitutional authority; so many people are loth to admit the Queen, in spite of law and fact, to be the people's appointee and F

162

THE ENGLISH VISION

agent, that it is a good rhetorical emphasis to speak of her* prerogative as something /urn-popular, and therefore to be distrusted. By the very nature of our Government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as the Swiss or the American is liked and trusted. Out of the same history and the same results pro­ ceed our tolerance of those “local authorities” which so puzzle many foreigners. In the struggle with the Crown these local centres served as props and fulcrums. In the early parliaments it was the local bodies who sent members to parliament, the counties, and the boroughs; and in that way, and because of their free life, the parliament was free too. If active real bodies had not sent the repre­ sentatives, they would have been powerless. This is very much the reason why our old rights of suffrage were so various; the Government let whatever people happened to be the strongest in each town choose the members. They applied to the electing bodies the test of “natural selection” ; whatever set of people were locally strong enough to elect, did so. Afterwards, in the civil war, many of the cor­ porations, like that of London, were important bases of resistance. The case of London is typical and remarkable. Probably, if there is any body more than another which an educated Englishman nowa­ days regards with little favour, it is the Corporation of London. He connects it with hereditary abuses perfectly preserved, with large revenues imperfectly

163

HISTORICAL IDEALS

accounted for, with a system which stops the prin­ cipal city government at an old archway, with the perpetuation of a hundred detestable parishes, with the maintenance of a horde of luxurious and useless bodies. For the want of all which makes Paris nice and splendid we justly reproach the Corporation of London; for the existence of much of what makes London mean and squalid we justly reproach it too. Yet the Corporation of London was for cen­ turies a bulwark of English liberty. The conscious support of the near and organised capital gave the Long Parliament a vigour and vitality which they could have found nowhere else. Their leading patriots took refuge in the City, and the nearest approach to an English “ sitting in permanence” is the committee at Guildhall, where all members “ that came were to have voices.” Down to George I l l ’s time the City was a useful centre of popular judgment. Here, as elsewhere, we have built into our polity pieces of the scaffolding by which it was erected. W A L T E R B A G E H O T : The English Constitution. 1872.

35. n

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DOCTRINE OF ECCEN TR IC ITY

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th e

164

THE ENGLISH VISION

ascendant power among mankind. In ancient history, in the middle ages, and in a diminishing degree through the long transition from feudality tp the present time, the individual was a power in him­ self; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power. At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of govern­ ments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses. This is as true in the moral and social relations of private life as in public transactions. Those whose opinions go by the name of public opinion are not always the same sort of public: in America they are the whole white population; in England, chiefly the middle class. But they are always a mass, that is to say, collective mediocrity. And what is a still greater novelty, the mass do not now take their opinions from digni­ taries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I am not complaining of all this. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind. But that does not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government. No government by a democracy or a

HISTORICAL IDEALS

165

numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few. The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honour and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open. I am not countenancing the sort of “heroworship” which applauds the strong man of genius for forcibly seizing on the government of the world and making it do his bidding in spite of itself. All he can claim is, freedom to point out the way. The power of compelling others into it, is not only incon­ sistent with the freedom and development of all the rest, but corrupting to the strong man himself. It does seem, however, that when the opinions of masses of merely average men are everywhere be­ come or becoming the dominant power, the counter­ poise and corrective to that tendency would be, the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought. It is in these circumstances most especially, that excep­ tional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the mass.

166

THE ENGLISH VISION

In other jtimes there was no advantage in their doing so, unless they acted, not only differently, but better. In this age the mere example of noncon­ formity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time. There is one characteristic of the present direction of public opinion, peculiarly calculated to make it intolerant of any marked demonstration of indi­ viduality. The general average of mankind are not only moderate in intellect, but also moderate in inclinations: they have no tastes or wishes strong enough to incline them to do anything unusual, and they consequently do not understand those who have, and class all such with the wild and intemper­ ate whom they are accustomed to look down upon. Now, in addition to this fact which is general, we have only to*suppose that a strong movement has set in towards the improvement of morals, and it is evident what we have to expect. In these days

HISTORICAL IDEALS

167

such a movement has set in; much has actually been effected in the way of increased regularity of conduct, and discouragement of excesses; and there is a philanthropic spirit abroad, for the exercise of which there is no more inviting field than the moral and prudential improvement ofour fellow-creatures. These tendencies of the times cause the public to be more disposed than at most former periods to pre­ scribe general rules of conduct, and endeavour to make every one conform to the approved standard. And that standard, express or tacit, is to desire nothing strongly. Its- ideal of character is to be without any marked character; to maim by com­ pression, like a Chinese lady’s foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently, and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity. As is usually the case with ideals which exclude one-half of what is desirable, the present standard of approbation produces only an inferior imitation of the other half. Instead of great energies guided by vigorous reason, and strong feelings strongly con­ trolled by a conscientious will, its result is weak feelings and weak energies, which therefore can be kept in outward conformity to rule without any strength either of will or of reason. Already ener­ getic characters on any large scale are becoming merely traditional. There is now scarcely any outlet for energy in this country except business. The energy expended in that may still be regarded as

168

THE ENGLISH VISION

considerable. What little is left from that employ­ ment, is expended on some hobby; which may be a useful, even a philanthropic hobby, but is always some one thing, and generally a thing of small dimensions. The greatness of England is now all collective: individually small, we only appear capable of anything great by our habit of com­ bining; and with this our moral and religious philanthropists are perfectly contented. But it was men of another stamp than this that made England what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline. The despotism of custom is everywhere the stand­ ing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement. The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals. The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation

HISTORICAL IDEALS

169

from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of man­ kind. The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, -unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependents of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress. A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop: when does it stop? When it ceases to possess individuality. If a similar change should befall the nations of Europe, it will not be in exactly the same shape: the despotism of custom with which these nations are threatened is not pre­ cisely stationariness. It proscribes singularity, but it does not preclude change, provided all change together. We have discarded the fixed costumes of our forefathers; every one must still dress like other people, but the fashion may change once or twice a F

2

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year. We thus take care that when there is change, it shall be for change’s sake, and not from any idea of beauty or convenience; for the same idea of beauty or convenience would not strike all the world at the same moment, and be simultaneously thrown aside by all at another moment. But we are pro­ gressive as well as changeable: w$ continually make new inventions in mechanical things, and keep them till they are again superseded by better; we are eager for improvement in politics, in education, even in morals, though in this last our idea of improvement chiefly consists in persuading or forcing other people to be as good as ourselves. It is not progress that we object to; on the contrary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progressive people who ever lived. It is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike; forgetting that the unlikeness of one person to another is generally the first thing which draws the attention of either to the imperfection of his own type, and the superiority of another, or the possibility, by com­ bining the advantages of both, of producing some­ thing better than either. We have a warning example in China—a nation of much talent, and, in some respects, even wisdom, owing to the rare good fortune of having been provided at an early period with a particularly good set of customs, the work, in some measure, of men to whom even the most en­ lightened European must accord, under certain

HISTORICAL IDEALS

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limitations, the title of sages and philosophers. They are remarkable, too, in the excellence of their apparatus for impressing, as far as possible, the best wisdom they possess upon every mind in the com­ munity, and securing that those who have appro­ priated most of it shall occupy the posts of honour and power. Surely the people who did this have discovered the secret of human progressiveness, and must have'kept themselves steadily at the head of the movement of the world. On the contrary they have become stationary—have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners. They have succeeded beyond all hope in what English philan­ thropists are so industriously working at—at making a people all alike, all governing their thoughts and conduct by the same maxims and rules; and these are the fruits. The modern regime of public opinion is, in an unorganized form, what the Chinese educa­ tional and political systems are in an organized; and unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe, not with­ standing its noble antecedents and its professed Christianity, will tend to become another China. john stuart mill i On Liberty. 1859.

THE ENGLISH VISION

172 36.

INDEPENDENCE AND L IB E R T Y

I C

o m po se d b y t h e

S e a - side ,

near

C

a l a is ,

August 1802 Star of evening, Splendour o f the* west, Star of my Country!— on the horizon’s brink Thou hangest, stooping, as might seem, to sink On England’s bosom; yet well pleased to rest, Meanwhile, and be to her a glorious crest Conspicuous to the Nations. Thou, I think, Shouldst be my Country’s emblem; and shouldst wink, Bright Star! with laughter on her banners, drest In thy fresh beauty. T here! that dusky spot Beneath thee, that is England; there she lies. Blessings be on you both! one hope, one lot, One life, one glory!— I, with many a fear For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs, Among men who do not love her, linger here. a ir

F

2 C om po sed

in

th e

V

day

alley of

near

D over,

on

th e

L a n d in g

Here, on our native soil, we breathe once more. The cock that crows, the smoke that curls, that sound O f bells;— those boys who in yon meadow-ground

HISTORICAL IDEALS

173

In white-sleeved shirts are playing; and the roar Of the waves breaking on the chalky shore;— All, all are English. Oft have I looked round With joy in Kent’s green vales; but never found Myself so satisfied in heart before. Europe is yet in bonds; but let that pass Thought for another moment. Thou art free, My Country! and ’tis joy enough and pride For one hour’s perfect bliss, to tread the grass Of England once again, and hear and see, With such a dear Companion at my side.

3 It is not to be thought of that the Flood Of British freedom, which, to the open sea Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity Hath flowed, “with pomp of waters, unwithstood,” Roused though it be full often to a mood Which spurns the check of salutary bands, That this most famous Stream in bogs and sands Should perish; and to evil and to good Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung Armoury of the invincible Knights of old: We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.—In every thing we are sprung Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.

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THE ENGLISH VISION 4

When I have borne in memory what has tamed Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart When men change swords for ledgers, and desert The student’s bower for gold, some fears unnamed I had, my Country—am I to be blamed? Now, when I think of thee, and what thou art, Verily, in the bottom of my heart, Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed. For dearly must we prize thee; we who find In thee a bulwark for the cause of men; Anc^.1 by my affection was beguiled: What wonder if a Poet now and then, Among the many movements of his mind, Felt for thee as a lover or a child!

5 Composed

by the

Side

of

Grasmere Lake

Clouds, lingering yet, extend in solid bars Through the grey west; and lo! these waters, steeled By breezeless air to smoothest polish, yield A vivid repetition of the stars; Jove, Venus, and the ruddy crest of Mars Amid his fellows beauteously revealed At happy distance from earth’s groaning field, Where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars. Is it a mirror?—or the nether Sphere Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds

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Her own calm fires?—but list! a voice is near; Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds, “Be thankful, thou; for, if unholy deeds Ravage the world, tranquillity is here!” william wordsworth : from Poems dedicated to National Inde­ pendence and Liberty. 1802-1807.

NATIONAL TEMPER

37«the

racial blend

veryone knows how well the Greek and Latin races, with their direct sense for the visible, palpable world, have succeeded in the plastic arts. The sheer German races, too, with their honest love of fact, and their steady pursuit of it,—their fidelity to nature, in short,—have attained a high degree of success in these arts; few people will deny that Albert Dtirer and Rubens, for example, are to be called masters in painting, and in the high kind of painting. The Celtic races, on the other hand, have shown a singular inaptitude for the plastic arts; the abstract, severe character of the Druidical religion, its dealing with the eye of the mind rather than the eye of the body, its having no elaborate temples and beautiful idols, all point this way from the first; its sentiment cannot satisfy itself, cannot even find a resting-place for itself, in colour and form; it presses on to the impalpable, the ideal. The forest of trees and the forest of rocks, not hewn timber and carved stones, suit its aspira­ tions for something not to be bounded or expressed. With this tendency, the Celtic races have, as I re­ marked before, been necessarily almost impotent in the higher branches of the plastic arts. Ireland,

E

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that has produced so many powerful spirits, has produced no great sculptors or painters. Gross into England. The inaptitude for the plastic art strik­ ingly diminishes, as soon as the German, not the Celtic element, preponderates in the race. And yet in England, too, in the English race, there is some­ thing which seems to prevent our reaching real mastership in the plastic arts, as the more unmixed German races have reached it. Reynolds and Turner are painters of genius, who can doubt it? but take a European jury, the only competent jury in these cases, and see if you can get a verdict giving them the rank of masters, as this rank is given to Raphael and Correggio, or to Albert Diirer and Rubens. And observe in what points our English pair succeed, and in what they fall short. They fall short in architectonic, in the highest power of com­ position, by which painting accomplishes the very uttermost which it is given to painting to accom­ plish ; the highest sort of composition, the highest application of the art of painting, they either do not attempt, or they fail in it. Their defect, therefore, is on the side of art, of plastic art. And they succeed in magic, in beauty, in grace, in expressing almost the inexpressible; here is the charm of Reynolds’ children and Turner’s seas; the impulse to express the inexpressible carries Turner so far, that at last it carries him away, and even long before he is quite carried away, even in works that arejustly extolled, one can see the stamp-mark, as the French say, of

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insanity. The excellence, therefore, the success, is on the side of spirit. Does not this look as if a Celtic stream met the main German current in us, and gave it a somewhat different course from that which it takes naturally? We have Germanism enough in us, enough patient love for fact and matter, to be led to attempt the plastic arts, and we make much more way in them than the pure Celtic races make; but at a certain point our Celtism comes in, with its love of emotion, sentiment, the inexpressible, and gives our best painters a bias. And the point at which it comes in is just that critical point where the flowering of art into its perfection commences; we have plenty of painters who never reach this point at all, but remain always mere journeymen, in bondage to matter; but those who do reach it, instead of going on to the true consummation of the masters in painting, are a little overbalanced by soul and feeling, work too directly for these, and so do not get out of their art all that may be got out of it. The same modification of our Germanism by another force which seems Celtic, is visible in our religion. Here, too, we may trace a gradation be­ tween Celt, Englishman, and German, the differ­ ence which distinguishes Englishman from German appearing attributable to a Celtic element in us. Germany is the land of exegesis, England is the land of Puritanism. The religion of Wales is more emo­ tional and sentimental than English Puritanism;

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Romanism has indeed given way to Calvinism among the Welsh,—the one superstition has sup­ planted the other,—but the Celtic sentiment which made the Welsh such devout Catholics, remains, and gives unction to their Methodism; theirs is not the controversial, rationalistic, intellectual side of Protestantism, but the devout, emotional, religious side. Among the Germans, Protestantism has been carried on into rationalism and science. The Eng­ lish hold a middle place between the Germans and the Welsh; their religion has the exterior forms and apparatus of a rationalism, so far their Germanic nature carries them; but long before they get to science, their feeling, their Celtic element catches them, and turns their religion all towards piety and unction. So English Protestantism has the outside appearance of an intellectual system, and the inside reality of an emotional system: this gives it its tenacity and force, for what is held with the ardent attachment of feeling is believed to have at the same time the scientific proof of reason. The English Puritan, therefore (and Puritanism is the charac­ teristic form of English Protestantism^, stands be­ tween the German Protestant and the Celtic Methodist; his real affinity, indeed, at present, be­ ing rather with his Welsh kinsman, if kinsman he may be called, than with his German. Sometimes one is left in doubt from whence the check and limit to Germanism in us proceeds, whether from a Celtic source or from a Norman

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source. Of the true steady-going German nature the bane is, as I remarked, flat commonness; there seems no end to its capacity for platitude; it has neither the quick perception of the Celt to save it from platitude, nor the strenuousness of the Nor­ man ; it is only raised gradually out of it by science, but it jogs through almost interminable platitudes first. The English nature is not raised to science, but something in us, whether Celtic or Norman, seems to set a bound to our advance in platitude, to make us either shy of platitude, or impatient of it. . . . just what constitutes special power and genius in a man seems often to be his blending with the basis of his national temperament, some addi­ tional gift or grace not proper to that temperament; Shakespeare’s greatness is thus in his blending an openness and flexibility of spirit, not English, with the English basis; Addison’s, in his blending a moderation and delicacy, not English, with the English basis; Burke’s, in his blending a largeness of view and richness of thought, not English, with the English basis. In Germany itself, in the same way, the greatness of their great Frederic lies in his blending a rapidity and clearness, not German, with the German basis; the greatness of Goethe in his blending a love of form, nobility, and dignity,— the grand style,—with the German basis. But the quick, sure, instinctive perception of the incongru­ ous and absurd not even genius seems to give in

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Germany; at least, I can think of only one German of genius, Lessing (for Heine was a Jew, and the Jewish temperament is quite another thing from the German), who shows it in an eminent degree. If we attend closely to the terms by which foreign­ ers seek to hit off the impression which we and the Germans make upon them, we shall detect in these terms a difference which makes, I think, in favour of the notion I am propounding. Nations in hitting off one another’s characters are apt, we all know, to seize the unflattering side rather than the flatter­ ing ; the mass of mankind always do this, and indeed they really see what is novel, and not their own, in a disfiguring light. Thus we ourselves, for instance, popularly say “the phlegmatic Dutchman” rather than “the sensible Dutchman,” or “the grimacing Frenchman” rather than “the polite Frenchman.” Therefore neither we nor the Germans should exactly accept the description strangers give of us, but it is enough for my purpose that strangers, in characterising us with a certain shade of difference, do at any rate make it clear that there appears this shade of difference, though the character itself, which they give us both, may be a caricature rather than a faithful picture of us. Now it is to be noticed that those sharp observers, the French,—who have a double turn for sharp observation, for they have both the quick perception of the Celt and the Latin’s gift for coming plump upon the fact,—it is to be noticed, I say, that the French put a curious

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distinction in their popular, depreciating, we will hope inadequate, way of hitting off us and the Germans. While they talk of the “bêtise allemande,” they talk of the “gaucherie anglaise” ; while they talk of the “Allemand balourdthey talk of the “Anglais empêtréwhile they call the German “maw,” they call the Englishman “mélancolique.” The difference between the epithets balourd and empêtré exactly gives the difference in character I wish to seize ; balourd means heavy and dull, empêtré means hampered and embarrassed. This points to a certain mixture and strife of elements in the Englishman ; to the clashing of a Celtic quickness of perception with a Germanic instinct for going steadily along close to the ground. The Celt, as we have seen, has not at all, in spite of his quick per­ ception, the Latin talent for dealing with the fact, dexterously managing it and making himself master of it ; Latin or Latinised people have felt contempt for him on this account, have treated him as a poor creature, just as the German, who arrives at fact in a different way from the Latins, but who arrives at it, has treated him. The couplet of Chrestien of Troyes about the Welsh— . . . Gallois sont tous, par nature, Plus fous que bêtes en pâture—

is well known, and expresses the genuine verdict of the Latin mind on the Celts. But the perceptive instinct of the Celt feels and anticipates, though he

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has that in him which cuts him off from command of the world of fact; he sees what is wanting to him well enough; his mere eye is not less sharp, nay, it is sharper, than the Latin’s. He is a quick genius, checkmated for want of strenuousness or else patience. The German has not the Latin’s sharp precise glance on the world of fact, and dexterous behaviour in it; he fumbles with it much and long, but his honesty and patience give him the rule of it in the long run,—a surer rule, some of us think, than the Latin gets;—still, his behaviour in it is not quick and dexterous. The Englishman, in so far as he is German,—and he is mainly German,—proceeds in the steady-going German fashion; if he were all German he would proceed thus for ever without self-consciousness or embarrassment; but, in so far as he is Celtic, he has snatches of quick instinct which often make him feel he is fumbling, show him visions of an easier, more dexterous behaviour, dis­ concert him and fill himwith misgiving. No people, therefore, are so shy, so self-conscious, so embar­ rassed as the English, because two natures are mixed in them, and natures which pull them such different ways. The Germanic part, indeed, triumphs in us, we are a Germanic people; but not so wholly as to exclude hauntings of Celtism, which clash with our Germanism, producing, as I believe, our humour, neither German nor Celtic, and so affect us that we strike people as odd and singular, not to be referred to any known type, and like nothing but

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ourselves. “Nearly every Englishman/’ says an excellent and by no means unfriendly observer, George Sand, “nearly every Englishman, however good-looking he may be, has always something singular about him which easily comes to seem comic;—a sort of typical awkwardness (gaufherie typique) in his looks or appearance, which hardly ever wears out.” I say this strangeness is accounted for by the English nature being rtiixed as we have seen, while the Latin nature is all of a piece, and so is the German nature, and the Celtic nature. Ma t t h e w Arnold : The Study of Celtic Literature. 1867.

38.

OUR EARTHLY INSTINCT

is one strange, but quite essential, character in us: ever since the Conquest, if not earlier:—a delight in the forms of burles­ que which are connected in some degree with the foulness of evil. I think the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for the most part full of thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of an April morning, there are even in the midst of this, sometimes momentarily jesting passages which stoop to play with evil—while the power of listening to and enjoying the jesting of entirely gross persons, whatever the feeling may be which permits it, afterwards degenerates into

T

h ere

188

THE ENGLISH VISION

forms of humour which render some of quite the greatest, wisest, and most moral of English writers now almost useless for our youth. And yet you will find whenever Englishmen are wholly without this instinct, their genius is comparatively weak and restricted. Now, the first necessity for the doing of any great work in ideal art, is the looking upon all foulness with horror, as a contemptible though dreadful enemy. You may easily understand what I mean, by comparing the feelings with which Dante re­ gards any form of obscenity or of base jest, with the temper in which the same things are regarded by Shakespeare. And this strange earthly instinct of ours, coupled as it is, in our good men, with great simplicity and common sense, renders them shrewd and perfect observers and delineators of actual nature, low or high; but precludes them from that speciality of art which is properly called sublime. If ever we try anything in the manner of Michael Angelo or of Dante, we catch a fall, even in litera­ ture, as Milton in the battle of the angels, spoiled from Hesiod; while in art, every attempt in this style has hitherto been the sign either of the pre­ sumptuous egotism of persons who had never really learned to be workmen, or it has been connected with very tragic forms of the contemplation of death,— it has always been partly insane, and never once wholly successful. But we need not feel any discomfort in these

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limitations of our capacity. We can do much that others cannot, and more than we have ever yet our­ selves completely done. Our first great gift is in the portraiture of living people—a power already so accomplished in both Reynolds and Gainsborough that nothing is left for future masters but to add the calm of perfect workmanship to their vigour and felicity of perception. And of what value a true school of portraiture may becomfe in the future, when worthy men will desire only to be known, and others will not fear to know them, for what they truly were, we cannot from any past records of art influence yet conceive. But in my next address it will be partly my endeavour to show you how much more useful, because more humble, the labour of great masters might have been, had they been con­ tent to bear record of the souls that were dwelling with them on earth, instead of striving to give a deceptive glory to those they dreamed of in heaven. Secondly, we have an intense power of invention and expression in domestic drama; {King Lear and Hamlet being essentially domestic in their strongest motives of interest). There is a tendency at this moment towards a noble development of our art in this direction, checked by many adverse conditions, which may be summed in one,—the insufficiency of generous civic or patriotic passion in the heart of the English people; a fault which makes its domestic affection selfish, contracted, and, therefore, frivolous. Thirdly, in connection with our simplicity and

i go

THE ENGLISH VISION

good-humour, and partly with that very love of the grotesque which debases our ideal, we have a sympathy with the lower animals which is peculiarly our o w n ; and which, though it has already found some exquisite expression in the works of Bewick and Landseer, is yet quite undeveloped. This sym­ pathy, with the aid of our now authoritative science of physiology, and in association with our British love of adventure, will, I hope, enable us to give to the future inhabitants of the globe an almost perfect record of the present forms of animal life upon it, o f which many are on the point of being extin­ guished. Lastly, but not as the least important of our special powers, I have to note our skill in landscape, of which I will presently speak more particularly. j o h n r u s k i n : Lectures on Art. 1870.

39.

GROW N CH ILDREN

“ ^■ ■ ^■ ^hey ” (the English), says Froissart, “ amused I themselves sadly after the fashion of their •A. country” — Us se rejouissoient tristement selon la coutume de leur pays. They have indeed a way of their own. Their mirth is a relaxation from gravity, a challenge to dull care to be gone; and one is not always clear at first, whether the appeal is success­ ful. The cloud may still hang on the brow; the ice may not thaw at once. To help them out in their new character is an act of charity. Any thing short

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of hanging or drowning is something to begin with. They do not enter into their amusements the less doggedly because they may plague others. They like a thing the better for hitting them a rap on the knuckles, for making their blood tingle. They do not dance or sing, but they make good cheer—‘‘eat, drink, and are merry.” No people are fonder of field-sports, Christmas gambols, or practical jests. Blindman’s-bufF, hunt-the-slipper, hot-cockles, and snap-dragon, are all approved English games, full of laughable surprises and “hair-breadth ’scapes,” and serve to amuse the winter fireside after the roast-beef and plum-pudding, the spiced ale and roasted crab, thrown (hissing-hot) into the foaming tankard. Punch (not the liquor, but the puppet) is not, I fear, of English origin; but there is no place, I take it, where he finds himself more at home or meets a more joyous welcome, where he collects greater crowds at the corners of streets, where he opens the eyes or distends the cheeks wider, or where the bangs and blows, the uncouth gestures, ridicu­ lous anger and screaming voice of the chief per­ former excite more boundless merriment or louder bursts of laughter among all ranks and sorts of people. An English theatre is the very throne of pantomime; nor do I believe that the gallery and boxes of Drury-lane or Covent-garden filled on the proper occasions with holiday folks (big or little) yield the palm for undisguised, tumultuous, inex­ tinguishable laughter to any spot in Europe. I do

IQ2

THE ENGLISH VISION

not speak of the refinement of the mirth (this is no fastidious speculation) but of its cordiality, on the return of these long-looked-for and licensed periods; and I may add here, by way of illustration, that the English common people are a sort of grown children, spoiled and sulky perhaps, but full ofglee and merri­ ment when their attention is drawn off by some sudden and striking object. The May-pole is almost gone out of fashion among us: but May-day, besides its flowering hawthorns and its pearly dews, has still its boasted exhibition of painted chimney­ sweepers and theirJack-o’-the-Green, whose tawdry finery, bedizened faces, unwonted gestures, and short-lived pleasures call forth good-humoured smiles and looks of sympathy in the spectators. There is no place where trap-ball, prison-base, foot­ ball, quoits, bowls are better understood or more successfully practised; and the very names of a cricket bat and ball make English fingers tingle. What happy days must “Long Robinson” have passed in getting ready his wickets and mending his bats, who when two of the fingers of his right hand were struck off by the violence of a ball, had a screw fastened to it to hold the bat, and with the other hand still sent the ball thundering against the boards that bounded OldLord's cricket-ground! What delightful hours must have been his in looking forward to the matches that were to come, in re­ counting the feats he had performed in those that were past! I have myself whiled away whole morn­

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ings in seeing him strike the ball (like a countryman mowing with a scythe) to the farthest extremity of the smooth, level, sun-burnt ground, and with long awkward strides count the notches that made vic­ tory sure! Then again, cudgel-playing, quarterstaff, bull and badger-baiting, cock-fighting are almost the peculiar diversions of this island, and often objected to us as barbarous and cruel; horseracing is the delight and the ruiii of numbers; and the noble science of bpxing is all our own. Foreigners can scarcely understand how we can squeeze pleasure out of this pastime; the luxury of hard blows given or received; the joy of the ring; nor the perseverance of the combatants. The English also excel, or are not excelled, in wiring a hare, in stalk­ ing a deer, in shooting, fishing, and hunting. England to this day boasts her Robin Hood and his merry men, that stout archer and outlaw, and patron-saint of the sporting-calendar. What a cheerful sound is that of the hunters, issuing forth from the autumnal wood and sweeping over hill and dale! . . . “A cry more tuneable Was never halloo’d to by hound or horn.”

What sparkling richness in the scarlet coats of the riders, what a glittering confusion in the pack, what spirit in the horses, what eagerness in the followers on foot, as they disperse over the plain, or force their way over hedge and ditch! Surely, the coloured prints and pictures of these, hung up in o

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THE ENGLISH VISION

gentlemen’s halls and village alehouses, however humble as works of art, have more life and health and spirit in them, and mark the pith and nerve of the national character more creditably than the mawkisk, sentimental, affected designs of Theseus and Pirithous, and iEneas and Dido, pasted on foreign salons d manger, and the interior of countryhouses. If our tastes are not epic, nor our preten­ sions lofty, they are simple and our own; and we may possibly enjoy our native rural sports, and the rude remembrances of them, with the truer relish on this account, that they are suited to us and we to them. The English nation, too, are naturally “brothers of the angle.” This pursuit implies just that mixture of patience and pastime, of vacancy and thoughtfulness, of idleness and business, of pleasure and of pain, which is suited to the genius of an Englishman, and as I suspect, of no one else in the same degree. He is eminently gifted to stand in the situation assigned by Dr. Johnson to the angler, “at one end of a rod, with a worm at the other.” I should suppose no language can show such a book as an often-mentioned one, Waltoris Complete Angler, —so full of naivete, of unaffected sprightliness, of busy trifling, of dainty songs, of refreshing brooks, of shady arbours, of happy thoughts and of the herb called Heart's Ease! Some persons can see neither the wit nor wisdom of this genuine volume, as if a book as well as a man might not have a personal character belonging to it, amiable, venerable from

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the spirit ofjoy and thorough goodness it manifests, independently of acute remarks or scientific dis­ coveries: others object to the cruelty of Walton’s theory and practice of trout-fishing—for my part, I should as soon charge an infant with cruelty for killing a fly, and I feel the same sort of pleasure in reading his book as I should have done in the com­ pany of this happy, child-like old man, watching his ruddy cheek, his laughing eye, the kindness of his heart, and the dexterity of his hand in seizing his finny prey! It must be confessed, there is often an odd sort of materiality in English sports and recreations. I have known several persons, whose existence consisted wholly in manual exercises, and all whose enjoyments lay at their finger-ends. Their greatest 'happiness was in cutting a stick, in mending a cabbage-net, in digging a hole in the ground, in hitting a mark, turning a lathe, or in something else of the same kind, at which they had a certain knack. Well is it when we can amuse our­ selves with such trifles and without injury to others! This class of character, which the Spectator has immortalised in the person of Will Wimble, is still common among younger brothers and gentlemen of retired incomes in town or country. The Cockney character is of our English growth, as this intimates a feverish fidgety delight in rural sights and sounds, and a longing wish, after the turmoil and confine­ ment of a city-life, to transport one’s-self to the freedom and breathing sweetness of a country

THE ENGLISH VISION

19 6

retreat. London is half suburbs. The suburbs o f Paris are a desert; and you see nothing but crazy wind-mills, stone-walls, and a few straggling visi­ tants in spots where in England you would find a thousand villas, a thousand terraces crowned with their own delights, or be stunned with the noise of bowling-greens and tea-gardens, or stifled with the fumes of tobacco mingling with fragrant shrubs, or the clouds of dust raised by half the population of the metropolis panting and toiling in search of a mouthful of fresh air. The Parisian is, perhaps, as well (or better) contented with himself wherever he is, stewed in his shop or his garret; the Londoner is miserable in these circumstances, and glad to escape from them. Let no one object to the gloomy appearance of a London Sunday, compared with a Parisian one. It is a part of our politics and our religion: we would not have James the First’s Book of Sports thrust down our throats: and besides, it is a part of our character to do one thing at a time, and not be dancing a jig and on our knees in the same breath. w i l l i a m h a z l i t t : Merry England. 1825. 40.

TH E ENGLISH R ENASCENCE

defeat of the Armada, the deliverance from Catholicism and Spain, marked the critical moment in our political development. From that hour England’s destiny was fixed. She was to

T

he

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be a Protestant power. Her sphere of action was to be upon the seas. She was to claim her part in the New World of the West. But the moment was as critical in her intellectual development. As yet English literature had lagged behind the literature of the rest of Western Christendom. It was now to take its place among the greatest literatures of the world. The general awakening of national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement, ‘and leisure that characterized the reign of Elizabeth, was accom­ panied by a quickening of intelligence. The Renascence had done little for English letters. The overpowering influence of the new models both of thought and style which it gave to the world in the writers of Greece and Rome was at first felt only as a fresh check to the revival of English poetry or prose. Though England shared more than any European country in the political and ecclesiastical results of the New Learning, its literary results were far less than in the rest of Europe, in Italy, or Germany, or France. More alone ranks among the great classical scholars of the sixteenth century. Classical learning indeed all but perished at the Universities in the storm of the Reformation, nor did it revive there till the close of Elizabeth’s reign. Insensibly however the influences of the Renascence fertilized the intellectual soil of England for the rich harvest that was to come. The court poetry which clustered round Wyatt and Surrey, exotic and imitative as it was, promised a new life for

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English verse, The growth of grammar-schools realized the dream of Sir Thomas More, and brought the middle-classes, from the squire to the petty tradesman, into contact with the masters of Greece and Rome. The love of travel, which be­ came so remarkable a characteristic of Elizabeth’s age, quickened the temper of the wealthier nobles. “Home-keeping youths,” says Shakespere in words that mark the time, “have ever homely wits;” and a tour over the Continent became part of the education of a gentleman. Fairfax’s version of Tasso, Harrington’s version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence which the literature of Italy, the land to which travel led most frequently, exerted on English minds. The classical writers told upon England at large when they were popularized by a crowd of translations. Chapman’s noble version of Homer stands high above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians of the ancient world were turned into English before the close of the sixteenth century. It is characteristic of England that the first kind of literature to rise from its long death was the literature of history. But the form in which it rose marked the difference between the world in which it had perished and that in which it reappeared. During the Middle Ages the world had been with­ out a past, save the shadowy and unknown past of early Rome; and annalist and chronicler told the story of the years which went before as a preface to

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their tale of the present without a sense of any differ­ ence between them. But the religious, social, and political change which passed over England under the New Monarchy broke the continuity of its life; and the depth of the rift between the two ages is seen by the way in which History passes on its revival under Elizabeth from the mediaeval form of pure narrative to its modem form of an investiga­ tion and reconstruction of the past. The new interest which attached to the bygone world led to the collection of its annals, their reprinting and embodiment in an English shape. A far higher development of our literature sprang from the growing influence which Italy was exert­ ing, partly through travel and partly through its poetry and romances, on the manners and taste of the time. Men made more account of a story of Boccaccio’s, it was said, than of a story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the manners of Italy became objects of almost passionate imitation, and of an imitation not always of the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham it seemed like “the enchantment of Circe brought out of Italy to mar men’s manners in England.” “An Italianate Englishman,” ran the harderproverb of Italy itself, “is an incarnate devil.” The literary form which this imitation took seemed at any rate ridiculous. John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a poet, laid aside the tradi­ tion of English style for a style modelled on the

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decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been named from the prose romance of Euphues which Lyly published in 1579, ls best known to modem readers by the pitiless caricature in which Shakespere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless monotony of its far­ fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant conceits. Its representative, Armado in Love’s Labour Lost, is “a man of fire-new words, fashion’s own knight,” “that hath a mint of phrases in his brain; one whom the music of his own vain tongue doth ravish like enchanting harmony.” But its very extravagance sprang from the general burst of de­ light in the new resources of thought and language which literature felt to be at its disposal; and the new sense of literary beauty which it disclosed in its affectation, in its love of a “mint of phrases,” and the “music of its ever vain tongue,” the new sense of pleasure which it revealed in delicacy or grandeur of expression, in the structure and arrangement of sentences, in what- has been termed the atmosphere of words, was a sense out of which style was itself to spring. For a time Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth was the most affected and detestable of Euphuists; and “that beauty in Court who could not parley Euphuism,” a courtier of Charles the First’s time tells us, “was as little regarded as she that now there speaks not French.” The fashion however passed away, but the Arcadia of Sir Philip

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Sidney shows the wonderful advance which prose had made under its influence. Sidney, the nephew of Lord Leicester, was the idol of his time, and per­ haps no figure reflects the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair as he was brave, quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in temper, dear to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of the camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He had travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older learning and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated to him as to a friend his metaphysical speculations; he was familiar with the drama of Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets of Italy. Sidney combined the wisdom of a grave councillor with the romantic chivalry of a knight-errant. “I never heard the old story of Percy and Douglas,55he says, ‘‘that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.55 He flung away his life to save the English army in Flanders, and as he lay dying they brought a cup of water to his fevered lips. He bade them give it to a soldier who was stretched on the ground beside him. “Thy necessity,55 he said, “is greater than mine.55 The whole of Sidney’s nature, his chivalry and his learn­ ing, his thirst for adventures, his freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight, pours itself out in the pastoral o2

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medley, forced, tedious, and yet strangely beautiful, of his Arcadia. In his Defence of Poetry the youthful exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour and grandiose stateliness of the rhe­ torician. But whether in the one work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness of Sidney’s style remain the same. But the quickness and vivacity of English prose was first developed in a school of Italian imitators which appeared in Elizabeth’s later years. The origin of English fiction is to be found in the tales and romances with which Greene and Nash crowded the market, models for which they found in the Italian novels. The brief formof these novel­ ettes soon led to the appearance of the “pamphlet” ; and a new world of readers was seen in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels that passed under this name were issued, and the greediness with which they were devoured. It w&s the boast of Greene that in the eight years before his death he had produced forty pamphlets. “In a night or a day would he have yarked up a pamphlet, as well as in seven years, and glad was that printer that might be blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit.” Modern eyes see less of the wit than of the dregs in the books of Greene and his compeers; but the attacks which Nash directed against the Puri­ tans and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly off the pedantry and extra­ vagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his facility,

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his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street, and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. The abundance indeed of printers and of printed books at the close of the Queen’s reign shows that the world of readers and writers had widened far beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers with which it began. But to the national and local influences which were telling on English literature was added that of the restlessness and curiosity which characterized the age. At the moment which we have reached the sphere of human interest was widened as it has never been widened before or since by the revela­ tion of a new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the later years of the sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus were brought home to the general intelligence of mankind by Kepler and Galileo, or that the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil which greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus. Hardly in­ ferior to these revelations as a source of intellectual impulse was the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of the world were brought face to face with one another through the universal passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the West were described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civilization of Mexico and Peru dis­ closed by Cortes and Pizarro, the voyages of the

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Portuguese threw open the older splendours of the East, and the story of India and China was told for the first time to Christendom by Maffei and Men­ doza. England took her full part in this work of discovery. Jenkinson, an English traveller, made his way to Bokhara. Willoughby brought back Muscovy to the knowledge of Western Europe. English mariners penetrated among the Esquimaux, or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the globe. The Collection of Voyages which was published by Hakluyt in 1582 disclosed the vastness of the world itself, the infinite number of the races of man­ kind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which it gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest which from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere’s conception of Caliban, like the ques­ tioning of Montaigne, marks the beginning of a new and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human nature and human history. The fascination exercised by the study of human character showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in the wonderful popularity of the drama. And to these larger and world-wide sources of poetic power was added in England, at the moment which we have reached in its story, the impulse which sprang from national triumph, from the

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victory over the Armada, the deliverance from Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic terror which had hung like a cloud over the hopes of the new people. With its new sense of security, its new sense of national energy and national power* the whole aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet the interest of Elizabeth’s reign had been political and material; the stage had been crowded with states­ men and warriors, with Cecils and Walsinghams and Drakes. Literature had hardly found a place in the glories of the time. But from the moment when the Armada drifted back broken to Ferrol the figures of warriors and statesmen were dwarfed by the grander figures of poets and philosophers. Amidst the throng in Elizabeth’s antechamber the noblest form is that of the singer who lays the Faerie Qyeen at her feet, or of the young lawyer who muses amid the splendours of the presence over the problems of the Novum Organum. The triumph at Cadiz, the conquest of Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up his Ecclesiastical Polity among the sheepfolds, or the genius of Shakspere rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre beside the Thames. The glory of the new literature broke on England with Edmund Spenser. . . . The appearance of the Faerie Qyeen in 1590 is the one critical event in the annals of English poetry; it settled in fact the question whether there was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national verse

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which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete death. Across the Border indeed the Scotch poets of the fifteenth century preserved something of their master’s vivacity and colour, and in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renascence had of late found echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The new English drama too was beginning to display its wonderful powers, and the work of Marlowe had already pre­ pared the way for the work of Shakspere. But bright as was the promise of coming song, no great imaginative poem had broken the silence of English literature for nearly two hundred years when Spenser landed at Bristol with the Faerie Qjieen. From that moment the stream of English poetry has flowed on without a break. There have been times, as in the times which immediately followed, when England has “become a nest of singing birds” ; there have been times when song was scant and poor; but there never has been a time when Eng­ land was wholly without a singer. The new English verse has been true to the source from which it sprang, and Spenser has always been “the poet’s poet.” But in his own day he was the poet of England at large. The Faerie Qyeen was received with a burst of general welcome. It became “the delight of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier.” The poem expressed indeed the

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very life of the time. It was with a true poetic instinct that Spenser fell back for the framework of his story on the faery world of Celtic romance, whose wonder and mystery had in fact become the truest picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around him. In the age of Cortes and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be dreamland, and no marvel or adventure that befell lady or knight was stranger than the tales which weather­ beaten mariners from the Southern Seas were tell­ ing every day to grave merchants upon ’Change. The very incongruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it had been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and priest, made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the world of incongruous feeling which we call the Renascence. To modem eyes perhaps there is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures that crowd the canvas of the Faerie Qjieen, in its fauns dancing on the sward where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the salvagemen from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in the giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy who jostle with the nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of mediaeval romance. But, strange as the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger medley of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up the life of Spenser’s contemporaries. It was not in the Faerie Qjieen only, but in the world which it pourtrayed,

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that the religious mysticism of the Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the Revival of Letters, that asceticism and selfdenial cast their spell on imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed with the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship and love lived side by side with the moral sternness and elevation which England was drawing from the Reformation and the Bible. If the Faerie Qjieen expressed the higher elements of the Elizabethan age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its higher alike, was expressed in the English drama. . . . The real origin of the English drama, in fact, lay not in any influence from without but in the influence of England itself. The temper of the nation was dramatic. . . . It was the people itself that created its Stage. The theatre indeed was commonly only the courtyard of an inn, or a7mere booth such as is still seen at a country fair. The bulk of the audience sate beneath the open sky in the “pit” or yard; a few covered seats in the galleries which ran round it formed the boxes of the wealthier spectators, while patrons and nobles found seats upon the actual boards. All the

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appliances were of the roughest sort: a few flowers served to indicate a garden, crowds and armies were represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, heroes rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told whether the scene was at Athens or London. There were no female actors, and the grossness which startles us in words which fell from women’s lips took a differ­ ent colour when every woman’s part was acted by a boy. But difficulties such as these were more than compensated by the popular character of the drama itself. Rude as the theatre might be, all the world was there. The stage was crowded with nobles and courtiers. Apprentices and citizens thronged the benches in the yard below. The rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developments of human temper, which characterized the English stage. The new drama represented “the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” The people itself brought its nobleness and its vileness to the boards. No stage was ever so human, no poetic life so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of all past tradition, of all conven­ tional laws, the English dramatists owned no

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teacher, no source of poetic inspiration, but the people itself. john richard green : H istory of the English People. 1878. 41.

THE SPIRIT OF THE REFORMATION

and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point, the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of Learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment have been per­ suaded that even the school of Pythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philo­ sophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends out yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynian wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, to learn our language and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaveil, we have g^reat argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propend­

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ing towards us. Why else was this Nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huss and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and backwardest scholars, of whom God offered to have made us the teachers. Now once again by all con­ currence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in His Church, even to the reform­ ing of Reformation itself: what does He then but reveal himself to His servants, and as His manner is, first to His Englishmen? I say, as His manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of His counsels, and are unworthy. Behold now this vast City: .a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and sur­ rounded with His protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguered Truth, than there

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be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty, the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies? We reckon more than five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks; had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already. j o h n m i l t o n : Areopagitica. 1 6 4 4 .

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CHRISTIAN PEOPLE

TH OU, that, after the impetuous rage of five bloody inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless revo­ lution of our swift and thick-coming sorrows; when we were quite breathless, of thy free grace didst motion peace and terms of covenant with us; and having first well-nigh freed us from anti-christian thraldom, didst build up this Britannic empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughterislands about her; stay us in this felicity, let not the obstinacy of our half-obedience and will-worship

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bring forth that viper of sedition, that for these fourscore years hath been breeding to eat through the entrails of our peace; but let her cast her abor­ tive spawn without the danger of this travailing and throbbing kingdom: that we may still remember in our solemn thanksgivings, how for us the northern ocean even to the frozen Thule was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish armada, and the very maw of hell ransacked, and made to give up her concealed destruction, ere she could vent it in that horrible and damned blast. O how much more glorious will those former de­ liverances appear, when we shall know them not only to have saved us from greatest miseries past, but to have reserved us for greatest happiness to come! Hitherto thou hast but freed us, and that not fully, from the unjust and tyrannous claim of thy foes; now unite us entirely, and appropriate us to thyself, tie us everlastingly in willing homage to the prerogative of thy eternal throne. And now we know, O thou our most certain hope and defence, that thine enemies have been consult­ ing all the sorceries of the great whore, and have joined their plots with that sad intelligencing tyrant that mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirstingto revenge his naval ruins that have larded our seas: but let them all take counsel together, and let it come to nought; let them decree and do thou cancel it; let them gather themselves, and be scattered; let them embattle themselves, and

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be broken; let them embattle, and be broken, for thou art with us. Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measure to sing and cele­ brate thy divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages; whereby this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and continual practice of truth and right­ eousness, and casting far from her the rags of her whole vices, may press on hard to that high and happy emulation to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day, when thou, the eternal and shortly expected King, shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of the world, and distributing national honours and re­ wards to religious and just commonwealths, shalt put an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and mild monarchy through heaven and earth; where they undoubtedly, that by their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of religion and their country, shall receive above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of principalities, legions, and thrones into their glorious titles, and in super­ eminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clasp in­ separable hands with joy and bliss, in overmeasure for ever john milton: Of Reform ation in England, 1641.

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THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

morning of Wednesday the thirteenth of February [1689], the court of Whitehall and all the neighbouring streets were filled with gazers. The magnificent Banqueting House, the masterpiece of Inigo, embellished by master­ pieces of Rubens, had been prepared for a great ceremony. The walls were lined by the yeomen of the guard. Near the northern door, on the right hand, a large number of Peers had assembled. On the left were the Commons with their Speaker, attended by the mace. The southern door opened: and the Prince and Princess of Orange, side by side, entered, and took their place under the canopy of state. Both Houses approached bowing low. William and Mary advanced a few steps. Halifax on the right, and Powle on the left, stood forth; and Hali­ fax spoke. The Convention, he said, had agreed to a resolution which he prayed Their Highnesses to hear. They signified their assent; and the clerk of the House of Lords read, in a loud voice, the Declaration of Right. When he had concluded, Halifax, in the name of all the Estates of the Realm, requested the Prince and Princess to accept the crown. William, in his own name and in that of his wife, answered that the crown was, in their estimation, the more valuable because it was presented to them

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as a token of the confidence of the nation. “We thankfully accept/* he said, “what you have offered us.” Then, for himself, he assured them that the laws of England, which he had once already vindi­ cated, should be the rules of his conduct, and that it should be his study to promote the welfare of the kingdom, and that, as to the means of doing so, he should constantly recur to the advice of the Houses, and should be disposed to trust their judgment rather than his own. These words were received with a shout of joy which was heard in the streets below, and was instantly answered by huzzas from many thousands ofvoices. The Lords and Commons then reverently retired from the Banqueting House and went in procession to the great gate of Whitehall, where the heralds and pursuivants were waiting in their gorgeous tabards. All the space as far as Charing Cross was one sea of heads. The kettle drums struck up: the trumpets pealed; and Garter King at Arms, in a loud voice, proclaimed the Prince and Princess of Orange King and Qpeen of England, charged all Englishmen to bear, from that moment, true allegiance to the new sovereigns, and besought God, who had already wrought so signal a deliverance for our Church and nation, to bless William and Mary with a long and happy reign. Thus was consummated the English Revolution. When we compare it with those revolutions which have, during the last sixty years, overthrown so

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many ancient governments, we cannot but be struck by its peculiar character. Why that character was so peculiar is sufficiently obvious, and yet seems not to have been always understood either by eulogists or by censors. The Continental revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took place in countries where all trace of the limited monarchy of the middle ages had long been effaced. The right of the prince to make laws and to levy money had, during many generations, been undisputed. His throne was guarded by a great regular army. His adminis­ tration could not, without extreme peril, be blamed even in the mildest terms. His subjects held their personal liberty by no other tenure than his pleasure. Not a single institution was left which had, within the memory of the oldest man, afforded efficient protection to the subject against the utmost excess of tyranny. Those great councils which had once curbed the regal power had sunk into oblivion. Their composition and their privileges were known only to antiquaries. We cannot wonder, therefore, that, when men who had been thus ruled succeeded in wresting supreme power from a government which they had long in secret hated, they should have been impatient to demolish and unable to construct, that they should have been fascinated by every specious novelty, that they should have pro­ scribed every title, ceremony, and phrase associated with the old system, and that, turning away with

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disgust from their own national precedents and traditions, they should have sought for principles of government in the writings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and ungraceful affectation, the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion should speedily have engendered despotism sterner than that from which it had sprung. Had we been in the same situation; had Strafford succeeded in his favourite scheme of Thorough; had he formed an army as numerous and as well disciplined as that which, a few years later, was formed by Cromwell; had a series of judicial decisions, similar to that which was pronounced by the Exchequer Chamber in the case of ship-money, transferred to the crown the right of taxing the people; had the Star Chamber and the High Com­ mission continued to fine, mutilate, and imprison every man who dared to raise his voice against the government; had the press been as completely en­ slaved here as at Vienna or at Naples; had our Kings gradually drawn to themselves the whole legislative power; had six generations of English­ men passed away without a single session of Parlia­ ment ; and had we then at length risen up in some moment of wild excitement against our masters, what an outbreak would that have been! With what a crash, heard and felt to the farthest ends of

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the world, would the whole vast fabric of society have fallen! How many thousands of exiles, once the most prosperous and the most refined members of this great community, would have begged their bread in Continental cities, or have sheltered their heads under huts of bark in the uncleared forests of America! How often should we have seen the pavement of London piled up in barricades, the houses dinted with bullets, the gutters foaming with blood! How many times should we have rushed wildly from extreme to extreme, sought refuge from anarchy in despotism, and been again driven by despotism into anarchy! How many years of blood and confusion would it have cost us to. learn the very rudiments of political science! How many childish theories would have duped us! How many rude and ill-poised constitutions should we have set up, only to see them tumble down! Happy would it have been for us if a sharp discipline of half a century had sufficed to educate us into a capacity of enjoying true freedom. These calamities our Revolution averted. It was a revolution strictly defensive, and had prescription and legitimacy on its side. Here, and here only, a limited monarchy of the thirteenth century had come down unimpaired to the seventeenth century. Our parliamentary institutions were in full vigour. The main principles of our government were excellent. They were not, indeed, formally and exactly set forth in a single written instrument: but

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they were to be found scattered over our ancient and noble statutes; and, what was of far greater moment, they had been engraven on the hearts of Englishmen during four hundred years. That, without the consent of the representatives of the nation, no legislative act could be passed, no tax imposed, no regular soldiery kept up, that no man could be imprisoned, even for a day, by the arbi­ trary will of the sovereign, that no tool of power could plead the royal command as ajustification for violating any right of the humblest subject, were held, both by Whigs and Tories, to be fundamental laws of the realm. A realm of which these were the fundamental laws stood in no need of a new constitution. But, though a new constitution was not needed, it was plain that changes were required. The misgovernment of the Stuarts, and the troubles which that misgovernment had produced, sufficiently proved that there was somewhere a defect in our polity ; and that defect it was the duty of the Con­ vention to discover and supply. Some questions of great moment were still open to dispute. Our constitution had begun to exist in times when statesmen were not much accustomed to frame exact definitions. Anomalies, therefore, in­ consistent with its principles and dangerous to its very existence, had sprung up almost imperceptibly, and, not having, during many years, caused any serious inconvenience, had gradually acquired the

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force of prescription. The remedy for these evils was to assert the rights ofthe people in such language as should terminate all controversy, and to declare that no precedent could justify any violation of those rights. When this had been done it would be impossible for our rulers to misunderstand the law: but, unless something more were done, it was by no means improbable that they might violate it. Unhappily the Church had long taught the nation that heredi­ tary monarchy, alone among our institutions, was divine and inviolable; that the right of the House of Commons to a share in the legislative power was a right merely human, but that the right of the King to the obedience of his people was from above; that the Great Charter was a statute which might be repealed by those who had made it, but the rule which called the princes of the blood royal to the throne in order of succession was of celestial origin, and that any Act of Parliament inconsistent with that rule was a nullity. It is evident that, in a society in which such superstitions prevail, constitu­ tional freedom must ever be insecure. A power which is regarded merely as the ordinance of man cannot be an efficient check on a power which is regarded as the ordinance of God. It is vain to hope that laws, however excellent, will permanently restrain a king who, in his own opinion, and in the opinion of a great part of his people, has an authority infinitely higher in kind than the authority which

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belongs to those laws. To deprive royalty of these mysterious attributes, and to establish the principle that Kings reigned by a right in no respect differing from the right by which freeholders chose knights of the shire, or from the right by whichJudges granted writs of Habeas Corpus, was absolutely necessary to the security of our liberties. Thus the Convention had two great duties to perform. The first was to clear the fundamental laws of the realm from ambiguity. The second was to eradicate from the minds, both of the governors and of the governed, the false and pernicious notion that the royal prerogative was something more sublime and holy than those fundamental laws. The former object was attained by the solemn recital and claim with which the Declaration of Right commences; the latter by the resolution which pronounced the throne vacant, and invited William and Mary to fill it. The change seems small. Not a single flower of the crown was touched. Not a single new right was given to the people. The whole English law, substantive and adjective, was, in the judgment of all the greatest lawyers, of Holt and Treby, of Maynard and Somers, almost exactly the same after the Revolution as before it. Some controverted points had been decided according to the sense of the best jurists; and there had been a slight devia­ tion from the ordinary course of succession. This was all; and this was enough.

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As our Revolution was a vindication of ancient rights, so it was conducted with strict attention to ancient formalities. In almost every word and act may be discerned a profound reverence for the past. The Estates of the Realm deliberated in the old halls and according to the old rules. Powle was conducted to his chair between his mover and his seconder with the accustomed forms. The Serjeant with his mace brought .up the messengers of the Lords to the table of the Commons; and the three obeisances were duly made. The conference was held with all the antique ceremonial. On one side of the table, in the Painted Chamber, the managers for the Lords sate covered and robed in ermine and gold. The managers for the Commons stood bare­ headed on the other side. The speeches present an almost ludicrous contrast to the revolutionary oratory of every other country. Both the English parties agreed in treating with solemn respect the ancient constitutional traditions of the state. The only question was, in what sense those traditions were to be understood. The assertors of liberty said not a word about the natural equality of men and the inalienable sovereignty of the people, about Harmodius or Timoleon, Brutus the elder or Brutus the younger. When they were told that, by the English law, the crown, at the moment of a demise, must descend to the next heir, they answered that, by the English law, a living man could have no heir. When they were told that there was no

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precedent for declaring the throne vacant, they pro­ duced from among the records in the Tower a roll of parchment, near three hundred years old, on which, in quaint characters and barbarous Latin, it was recorded that the Estates of the Realm had declared vacant the throne of a perfidious and tyrannical Plantagenet. When at length the dispute had been accommodated, the new sovereigns were proclaimed with the old pageantry. All the fan­ tastic pomp of heraldry was there, Clarencieux and Norroy, Portcullis and Rouge Dragon, the trumpets, the banners, the grotesque coats embroidered with lions and lilies. The title of King of France, assumed by the conqueror of Cressy, was not omitted in the royal style. To us, who have lived in the year 1848, it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, with so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of Revolution. And yet this revolution, of all revolutions the least violent, has been of all revolutions the most beneficent. It finally decided the great question whether the popular element which had, ever since the age of Fitzwalter and De Montfort, been found in the English polity, should be destroyed by the monarchical element, or should be suffered to develop itself freely, and to become dominant. The strife between the two principles had been long, fierce, and doubtful. It had lasted through four

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reigns. It had produced seditions, impeachments, rebellions, battles, sieges, proscriptions, judicial massacres. Sometimes liberty, sometimes royalty, had seemed to be on the point of perishing. During many years one half of the energy of England had been employed in counteracting the other half. The executive power and the legislative power had so effectually impeded each other that the state had been of no account in Europe. The King at Arms, who proclaimed William and Mary before Whitehall Gate, did in truth announce that this great struggle was over; that there was entire union between the throne and the Parliament; that England, long dependent and degraded, was again a power of the first rank; that the ancient laws by which the prerogative was bounded would thence­ forth be held as sacred as the prerogative itself, and would be followed out to all their consequences; that the executive administration would be con­ ducted in conformity with the sense of the repre­ sentatives of the nation; and that no reform, which the two Houses should, after mature deliberation, propose, would be obstinately withstood by the sovereign. The Declaration of Right, though it made nothing law which had not been law before, contained the germ of the law which gave religious freedom to the Dissenter, of the law which secured the independence of the judges, of the law which limited the duration of Parliaments, of the law which placed the liberty of the press under the proH

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tection of juries, of the law which prohibited the slave trade, of the law which abolished the sacra­ mental test, of the law which relieved the Roman Catholics from civil disabilities, of the law which reformed the representative system, of every good law which has been passed during more than a century and a half, of every good law which may hereafter, in the course of ages, be found necessary to promote the public weal, and to satisfy the demands of public opinion. The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the revolution of 1688 is this, that it was our last revolution. Several generations have now passed away since any wise and patriotic Englishman has meditated resistance to the established government. In all honest and reflecting minds there is a con­ viction, daily strengthened by experience, that the means of effecting every improvement which the constitution requires may be found within the constitution itself. Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart. All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations. Governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. The proudest capitals of Western Europe have streamed with civil blood. All evil passions, the thirst of gain and the thirst of vengeance, the antipathy of class to class, the

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antipathy of race to race, have broken loose from the control of divine and human laws. Fear and anxiety have clouded the faces and depressed the hearts of millions. Trade has been suspended, and industry paralysed. The rich have become poor; and the poor have become poorer. Doctrines hostile to all sciences, to all arts, to all industry, to all domestic charities, doctrines which, if carried into effect, would in thirty years undo all that thirty centuries have done for mankind, and would make the fairest provinces of France and Germany as savage as Congo or Patagonia, have been avowed from the tribune and defended by the sword. Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians, compared with whom the barbarians who marched under Attila and Alboin were en­ lightened and humane. The truest friends of the people have with deep sorrow owned that interests more precious than any political privileges were in jeopardy, and that it might be necessary to sacrifice even liberty in order to save civilisation. Mean­ while in our island the regular course of govern­ ment has never been for a day interrupted. The few bad men who longed for licence and plunder have not had the courage to confront for one moment the strength of a loyal nation, rallied in firm array round a parental throne. And, if it be asked what has made us to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what others are wildly and blindly seeking to regain. It is because we had

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&

a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst o f servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy. For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our homes, our gratitude is due, under Him who raises and pulls down nations at His pleasure, to the Long Parliament, to the Conven­ tion, and to William of Orange. l o r d m a c a u l a y : History of England. 1848.

44.

TH E EPIC OF JOHN BU LL

English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them. Like the old Romans, and some few others, their Epic Poem is written on the Earth’s surface: England her m ark! It is complained that they have no artists: one Shakespeare indeed; but for Raphael only a Reynolds; for Mozart nothing but a Mr. Bishop: not a picture, not a song. And yet they did produce one Shakespeare: consider how the element of Shake­ spearian melody does lie imprisoned in their nature; reduced to unfold itself in mere Cotton-mills, Con­ stitutional Governments, and such like— all the more interesting when it does become visible, as even in such unexpected shapes it succeeds in doing! Goethe spoke of the Horse, how impressive, almost

T

he

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affecting it was that an animal of such qualities should stand obstructed so; its speech nothing but an inarticulate neighing, its handiness mere hoofiness, the fingers all constricted, tied together, the finger-nails coagulated into a mere hoof, shod with iron. The more significant, thinks he, are those eyeflashings of the generous noble quadruped; those prancings, curvings of the neck clothed with thunder. . . . Of all the Nations in the world at present the English are the stupidest in speech, the wisest in action. As good as a “dumb” Nation, I say, who cannot speak, and have never yet spoken—spite of the Shakespeares and Miltons who show us what possibilities there arc! Oh, Mr. Bull, I look in that surly face of thine with a mixture of pity and laughter, yet also with wonder and veneration. Thou complainest not, my illustrious friend; and yet I believe the heart of thee is full of sorrow, of unspoken sadness, seriousness—profound melan­ choly (as some have said) the basis of thy being. Unconsciously, for thou speakest of nothing, this great Universe is great to thee. Not by levity of floating, but by the stubborn force of swimming, shalt thou make thy way. The Fates sing of thee that thou shalt many times be thought an ass and a dull ox, and shalt with a godlike indifference believe it. My friend—and it is all untrue, nothing ever falser in point of fact! Thou art of those great ones whose greatness the small passer-by does not dis­

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cern. Thy very stupidity is wiser than their wisdom. A grand vis inertia is in thee; how many grand qualities unknown to small men! Nature alone knows thee, acknowledges the bulk and strength of thee: thy Epic, unsung in words, is written in huge characters on the face of this Planet—sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New Hollands; legible through­ out the Solar System! But the dumb Russians too, as I said, they, drill­ ing all wild Asia and wild Europe into military rank and file, a terrible yet hitherto a prospering enter­ prise, are still dumber. The old Romans also could not speak:, for many centuries: not till the world was theirs; and so many speaking Greekdoms, their logic-arrows all spent, had been absorbed and abolished. The logic-arrows, how they glanced futile from obdurate thick-skinned Facts; Facts to be wrestled down only by the real vigour of Roman thews! As for me, I honour, in these loud-babbling days, all the Silent rather. A grand Silence that of Romans; nay, the grandest of all, is it not that of the gods! Even Triviality, Imbecility that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison! The “talent of silence” is our fundamental one. Great honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexa­ meter Iliad; not a jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters and forms merely. But still greater honour, if his Epic be a mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty Series of

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Heroic Deeds—a mighty Conquest over Chaos; which Epic the “Eternal Melodies” have, and must have, informed and dwelt in, as it sung itself! There is no mistaking that latter Epic. Deeds are greater than Words. Deeds have such a life, mute but undeniable, and grow as living trees and fruittrees do; they people the vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy. Why should the oak prove logically that it ought to grow, and will grow? Plant it, try it; what gifts of diligent judicious assimilation and secretion it has, of progress and resistance, offorce to grow, will then declare them­ selves. My much-honoured, illustrious, extremely inarticulate Mr. Bull! Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter—often­ times the force of dullness can no further go. You stand silent, incredulous, as over a platitude that borders on the Infinite. The man’s Churchisms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unex­ ampled in this world. Fate’s prophecy is fulfilled; you call the man an ox and an ass. But set him once to work—respectable man! His spoken sense is next to nothing, nine-tenths of it palpable mwsense: but his unspoken sense, his inner silent feeling of what is true, what does agree with fact, what is doable and what is not doable—this seeks its fellow in the world. A terrible worker; irresistible against marshes, mountains, impediments, disorder, incivil­ isation; everywhere vanquishing disorder, leaving

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it behind him as method and order. He “retires to his bed three days,” and considers! Nay, withal, stupid as he is, our dear John—ever, after infinite tumblings, and spoken platitudes innumerable from barrel-heads and parliamentbenches, he does settle down somewhere about the just conclusion; you are certain that his jumblings and tumblings will end, after years or centuries, in the stable equilibrium. Stable equilibrium, I say; centre-of-gravity lowest—not the unstable, with centre-of-gravity highest, as I have known it done by quicker people ! For, indeed, do but jumble and tumble, sufficiently, you avoid that worst fault, of settling with your centre-of-gravity highest; your centre-of-gravity is certain to come lowest, and to stay there. If slowness, what we in our impatience call “stupidity,” be the price of stable equilibrium over unstable, shall we grudge a little slowness? Not the least admirable quality of Bull is, after all, that of remaining insensible to logic ; holding out for considerable periods, ten years or more, as in this of the Corn-Laws, after all arguments and shadow of arguments have faded away from him, till the very urchins on the street titter at the argu­ ments he brings. Logic—Aoyucf), the “Art of Speech”—does indeed speak so and so; clear enough : nevertheless Bull still shakes his head ; will see whether nothing else illogical' not yet “spoken,” not yet able to be “spoken,” do not lie in the busi­ ness, as there so often does ! My firm belief is, that,

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finding himself now enchanted, hand-shackled, foot-shackled, in Poor-Law Bastilles and elsewhere, he will retire three days to his bed, and arrive at a conclusion or two! His three-years “ total stagnation of trade,” alas! is not that a painful enough “ lying in bed to consider himself” ? Poor Bull! Bull is a born Conservative; for this too I inex­ pressibly honour him. All great Peoples are con­ servative ; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and for ever certain of the greatness that is in Law, in Custom once solemnly established, and now long recognised as just and final. t h o m a s c a r l y l e : Past and Present. 1843.

45. ENGLISH RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY l t h o u g h England before the Reformation was culturally an integral part of the civilized West, our insular position, our distance from Rome, and the character of our people encouraged many assertions of independence on the part of the National Church, long before the final breach in the sixteenth century. In the reign of Edward I the Pope, supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury, claimed that the clergy should be exempt from the King’s taxes, and those who paid were excommuni­ cated. The King outlawed the Archbishop and his

A h

2

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supporters, seized their lands, and obliged the clergy to pay their share to the national exchequer. The standing quarrel with the Papacy was aggra­ vated while the Popes lived at Avignon, and actively supported France against England, and also by the shameless extortions connected with the sale of ecclesiastical offices. The Kings began to confiscate monastic lands on a large scale; Win­ chester, Eton, and some colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, were endowed in this way. A new imperialistic theory was advocated, by which the temporal sovereign was supreme over the spiritual power ; this theory was acted upon later, under the Tudors. .Wyclif preached bolder doctrines. The temporal power might take away Church property if it was no longer usefully employed; excom­ munication does no harm to a man who does not deserve to be excommunicated. The Great Schism, which broke out at this time and lasted for two generations, encouraged Wyclif to ask why, if there were two Popes, there should be a Pope at all. Wyclif was condemned and the Schism was ter­ minated, but the scandals and extortions of the Papacy became worse than ever. The breach with Rome under Henry VIII was popular, and it was truly said at the time that if the King had wished to go back, he would have found it impossible to do so. In spite of the burnings under Mary, religious persecution in England was mild as compared with

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the continental nations. Cruelty was even then odious to the conscience of Englishmen. In Scot­ land, for example, torture was far more common, and was continued later, than in the southern part of the island, and England saw none of the holo­ causts of victims who died for their faith in France and the Low Countries. The multiplications of quaint religious sects in England must be regarded as characteristic, since on the Continent Protestantism was fairly successful in avoiding these disruptions. The Englishman, as has already been said, likes to find his own way to heaven, and has no scruple in leaving the beaten track with a few friends to accompany him. Freakreligions have been more bizarre in the United States; but such books as Sir Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son show what strange vagaries of belief are or were possible even to men of high intellectual distinction. Faddism of every kind is a national defect; the English mind is singularly ill-protected against it. The Church of England, which cannot bring to bear the coercive and terrorist methods of the Roman Church, loses, and generally loses permanently, any body of recalcitrants against her authority. The Methodist secession was unneces­ sary ; but having taken place, it cannot be undone. The spirit of compromise has guided the Church of England at all times. It has aimed at being the nation on its spiritual side, and has not thought it necessary to be more logical or consistent than the

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people as a whole. For this reason, it has been abused and valued like any other English institu­ tion. It has been, on the whole, Conservative or at least anti-revolutionary; in time of national danger it is always vehemently patriotic; but it allows the utmost latitude of divergence in all questions upon which good citizens are divided. It has kept the via media between “the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome, and the squalid sluttery of fanatical conventicles,” to quote a seventeenthcentury divine. It has tended to produce good men and women rather than saints. Professional holiness has not been held in much esteem among us, and the saintly type is not altogether agreeable to our taste. Such being the character of the established Church, there has seldom been any strong anti­ clerical feeling such as exists on the Continent. There is no Church party in politics, and no antiChurch party. The interests of the Church are consciously bound up with the welfare of the people of England; but its critics complain of inertia and want of enthusiasm of any reform. . . . England has been singularly rich in religious, or semi-religious poetry. The tradition has been that poetry should exercise a moral influence; and in the Elizabethan age it was almost the mode for poets like Spenser and Sidney to express penitence for the “lewd lays” (in reality quite innocuous love poetry) which they had written before they became Platonic

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idealists. Three at least of the greatest names in English poetry, Spenser, Milton, and Wordsworth, have claimed to be and are religious teachers. Much of our prose has also been characterized by a prophetic spirit of moral earnestness, with denuncia­ tion of social evils. The England of the last century, which in action avoided revolutionary violence, in its literature often copies the pessimism and the menaces of the Jewish prophets. It is quite in accordance with the anti-professional prejudices of the English people that for the last hundred years our most influential religious teachers have been laymen. Boutmy’s statement that the English temper is alien to mysticism needs some qualification. We have produced no Suso or John of the Cross; but that type of mysticism which is related on one side to the philosophy of Plato and on the other to the love of nature has been well represented among us. There was a school of English mystics in the late middle ages, of whom Julian of Norwich is the most attractive. Later, there are the poets George Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Quarles, and Crashaw; the Cambridge Platonists, and the devotional works of William Law in the unmystical eighteenth century. All these belong to the mystical type of religious faith, which is indeed very congenial to the inwardness and individualism of English piety. The tradition has been well maintained till our own day, especially in our great poets.

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The freedom of our social life from sacerdotal influences has kept England relatively immune from superstition. The curious belief that epilepsy can be cured by the royal touch, was fostered by the Stuarts for political reasons, and died a natural death when that dynasty was expelled.:~Lecky and other writers have told the shameful story of trials and executions for witchcraft, a form of superstition which was at first rather encouraged than checked by the Reformation. Beliefs of this kind are not quite extinct in remote country districts, but are now interesting only as survivals. The new workingclass population of the large towns is not super­ stitious; the extreme materialism of their outlook has had at least this advantage. Not much import­ ance need be attached to the fashionable recrudes­ cence of necromancy among men and women of the richer class. It has been made easier by the decay of militant rationalism since the beginning of the century, and by the spread of anti-rationalistic philosophies; but the main cause has been the pathetic desire to establish communications with beloved husbands, sons, and brothers who gave their lives for the country in the Great War. The phenomenon, nevertheless, has its importance in reminding us that the improvement in education has not been accompanied by any intrinsic advance in the intelligence of the people. When we turn from religion to philosophy, we find that a few English names, such as Hobbes, Hume,

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and Berkeley, are prominent in continental histories of metaphysics, and that the usual verdict is that the English are thorough-going empiricists. The national character of English philosophy is not apparent till the Renaissance, when Bacon and, after him, Hobbes were both pioneers. The course of English philosophy after Hobbes may be repre­ sented as a reaction against Descartes, in which the antagonism between the English and French genius is very apparent. Descartes, with his clear-cut French intellect, had so separated the sphere of extension from the sphere of thought, that they could not be brought together, and Hegel’s criticism that he had cut the world in two with a hatchet was justified. Nature seemed to be divorced from man, and man from nature; the lower animals, he even taught, were mere automata. He put his faith in “reason,” which may be recognised by the clearness and distinctness of its ideas. This criterion led to an undue simplification, which precluded the study of anything so complex as human psychology. Under the influence of Cartesian methods, congenial at all times to the French temperament, we find, from Racine to Victor Hugo, a literature in which men appear as character types, walking. It is admirably lucid, while the real springs of action are always foggy and mysterious. The genius of Shakespeare had already held up the mirror of life in a very different fashion; and from the time of Addison a new dignity began to be given to the imagination, as

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the revealer of the deep things of God and of nature. This reverence for the imagination opens a door into those chambers of experience which to rationalism are an illusion or a scandal—to the sphere of half-lights, “worlds not realised” but dis­ cerned in symbol and shadow; so that to Words­ worth the imagination is “reason in her most exalted mood.” Some may fancifully suggest that a philosophy of dim lights and blurred outlines was likely to arise in such a climate as ours. WILLIAM

RALPH

INGE,

c.v.o., d .d .: England. 1926.

NATIVE GENIUS LITERATURE

46. WE TOO SERVE PHCEBUS ,

though a stranger youth, who come Chill’d by rude blasts that freeze my northern home, Thee dear to Clio, confident proclaim, And thine, for Phoebus’ sake, a deathless name. Nor thou, so kind, wilt view with scornful eye A muse scarce rear’d beneath our sullen sky, Who fears not, indiscreet as she is young, To seek in Latium hearers of her song. We too, where Thames with its unsullied waves The tresses of the blue-hair’d Ocean laves, Hear oft by night, or, slumbering, seem to hear, O’er his wide stream, the swan’s voice warbling clear; And we could boast a Tityrus of yore Who trod, a welcome guest, your happy shore. Yes—dreary as we own our northern clime, E’en we to Phoebus raise the polish’d rhyme, We too serve Phoebus; Phoebus has received (If legends old may claim to be believed) No sordid gifts from us, the golden ear, The burnish’d apple, ruddiest of the year, The fragrant crocus, and, to grace his fane, Fair damsels chosen from the Druid train;

I

therefore,

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244

Druids, our native bards in ancient time, Who gods and heroes praised in hallow’d rhym e! Hence, often as the maids of Greece surround Apollo’s shrine with hymns of festive sound, They name the virgins who arrived of yore With British offerings on the Delian shore, Loxo, from giant Corineus sprung, Upis, on whose blest lips the future hung, And Hacaerage, with the golden hair, All deck’d with Pictish hues, and all with bosoms bare. w i l l i a m c o w p e r : Translations from Milton's Latin Poems: To Giovanni Battista Manso.

47.

THESE ISLANDS M Y W O R LD

, I should not chuse this manner of writing, wherein knowing my self inferior to my self, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand. And though I shall be foolish in saying more to this purpose, yet since it will be such a folly as wisest men, going about to commit, have only confest and so committed, I may trust with more reason, because with more folly, to have courteous pardon. For although a Poet, soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him, might without apology speak more of himself than I mean to do, yet for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a

L

astly

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mortall thing among many readers of no Empyreall conceit, to venture and divulge unusual things of my selfe, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to me. I must say therefore that after I had from my first yeeres by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, whom God recompence, bin exercis’d to the tongues, and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers both at home and at the schools, it was found that whether aught was impos’d me by them that had the overlooking, or betak’d to of mine own choise, in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the stile, by certain vital signes it had, was likely to live. But much latelier in the privat Academies of Italy, whither I was favor’d to resort, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, compos’d at under twenty or thereabout (for the manner is that every one must give some proof of his wit and reading there), met with acceptance above what was lookt for, and other things which I had shifted in scarsity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst them were re­ ceiv’d with written Encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps, I began thus farre to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home, and not lesse to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joyn’d with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave some­

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thing so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die. These thoughts at once possest me, and these other: That if I were certain to write as men buy Leases, for three lives and downward, there ought no regard be sooner had than to God’s glory by the honour and instruction of my country. For which cause, and not only for that I knew it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among the Latines, I apply’d my selfe to that resolution which Ariosto follow’d against the perswasions of BembOy to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue: not to make verbal curiosities the end (that were a toylsom vanity), but to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Hand in the mother dialect: That what the greatest and choycest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old, did for their country, I in my proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might doe for mine; not caring to be once nam’d abroad, though perhaps I could attaine to that, but content with these British Hands as my world, whose fortune hath hitherto bin, that if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds great and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskilfull handling of monks and mechanicks. john milton: The Reason of Church Government. 1641.

NATIVE GENIUS—LITERATURE 48.

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unkiste, Sayde the olde famous Poete Chaucer; whom for his excellencie and wonderfull skil in making, his scholler Lidgate, a worthy scholler of so excellent a maister, calleth the Loadestarre of our Language: and whom our Colin clout in his iEglogue calleth Tityrus the God of shepheards, comparing hym to the worthiness of the Roman Tityrus Virgile. Which proverbe, myne owne good friend Ma. Harvey, as in that good old Poete it served well Pandares purpose, for the bolstering of his baudy brocage, so very well taketh place in this our new Poete, who for that he is uncouthe (as said Chaucer) is unkist, and unknown to most men, is regarded but of few. But I dout not, so soone as his name shall come into the knowledg of men, and his worthines be sounded in the tromp of fame, but that he shall be not onely kiste, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most, and wondred at of the best. No lesse I thinke, deserveth his wittinesse in devising, his pithinesse in uttering, his complaints of love so lovely, his discourses of pleasure so pleas­ antly, his pastorall rudenesse, his morall wisenesse, his deue observing of Decorum everye where, in personages, in seasons, in matter, in speach, and generally in al seemely simplycitie of handeling his matter, andframing his words: the which of many thinges whiteh in him be straunge, I know will

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seeme the straungest, the words them selves being so auncient, the knitting of them so short and in­ tricate, and the whole Periode and compasse of spcache so delightsome for the roundnesse, and so grave for the straungenesse. And firste of the wordes to speake, I graunt they be something hard, and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent Authors and most famous Poetes. In whom whenas this our Poet hath bene much traveiled and throughly redd, how could it be, (as that worthy Oratour sayde) but that walking in the sonne although for other cause he walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt; and having the sound of those auncient Poetes still ringing in his eares, he mought needes in singing hit out some of theyr tunes. But whether he useth them by such casualtye and custome, or of set pur­ pose and choyse, as thinking them fittest for such rusticall rudenesse of shepheards, eyther for that theyr rough sounde would make his rymes more ragged and rustical, or els because such olde and obsolete wordes are most used of country folke, sure I think, and think I think not amisse, that they bring great grace and, as one would say, auctoritie to the verse. For albe amongst many other faultes it specially be objected of Valla against Livie, and of other against Saluste, that with over much studie they affect antiquitie, as coveting thereby credence and honor of elder yeeres, yet I am of opinion, and eke the best learned are of the lyke, that those

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auncient solemne wordes are a great ornament both in the one and in the other; the one labouring to set forth in hys worke an eternal 1 image of antiquitie, and the other carefully discoursing matters of gravitie and importaunce. For if my memory fayle not, Tullie in that booke, wherein he endevoureth to set forth the pateme of a perfect Oratour, sayth that oft-times an auncient worde maketh the style seeme grave, and as it were reverend: no otherwise then we honour and rever­ ence gray heares for a certein religious regard, which we have of old age. Yet nether every where must old words be stuffed in, nor the commen Dialecte and maner of speaking so corrupted there­ by, that as in old buildings it seme disorderly and ruinous. But all as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze and portraict not onely the daintie lineaments of beautye, but also rounde about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy clifts, that by the basenesse of such parts, more excellency may accrew to the principall; for oftimes we finde our­ selves, I knowe not how, singularly delighted with the shewe of such naturall rudenesse, and take great pleasure in that disorderly order. Even so doe those rough and harsh termes enlumine and make more clearly to appeare the brightnesse of brave and glorious words. So oftentimes a dischorde in Musick maketh a comely concordaunce; so great delight tooke the worthy Poete Alceus to behold a blemish in the joynt of a wel shaped body. But if

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any will rashly blame such his purpose in choyse of old and unwonted words, him may I more justly blame and condemne, or of witlesse headinesse in judging, or of heedelesse hardinesse in condemning for not marking the compasse of hys bent, he wil judge of the length of his cast. For in my opinion it is one special prayse, of many whych are dew to this Poete, that he hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage, such good and naturall English words as have ben long time out of use and almost cleane disherited. Which is the onely cause, that our Mother tonge, which truely of it self is both ful enough for prose and stately er\pugh for verse, hath long time ben counted most bare and barrein of both. Which default when as some endevoured to salve and recure, they patched up the holes with peces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the french, there of the Italian, every where of the Latine, not weighing how il those tongues accorde with themselves, but much worse with ourfe: So now they have made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodge-podge of al Gther speches. Other some not so wel seene in the English tonge as perhaps in other languages, if they happen to here an olde word albeit very naturall and significant, crye out streight way, that we speak no English, but gibbrish, or rather such, as in old time Evanders mother spake. Whose first shame is, that they are not ashamed, in their own mother tonge straungers to be counted and aliens.

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1

The second shame no lesse then the first, that what so they understand not, they streight way deeme to be sencelesse, and not at al to be understode. Much like to the Mole in ^Esopes fable, that being blynd her selfe, would in no wise be perswaded, that any beast could see. The last more shameful then both, that of their owne country and natural speach, which together with their Nources milk they sucked, they have so base regard and bastard judgement, that they will not onely themselves not labor to garnish and beautifie it, but also repine, that of other it shold be embellished. Like to the dogge in the maunger, that him selfe can eate no hay, and yet barketh at the hungry bullock, that so faine would feede: whose currish kind though it cannot be kept from barking, yet I conne them thanke that they refrain from byting. e . k . : Epistle to Gabriel Harvey, commending Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar. 1579.

4 9 . THE VU LG AR TONGUE

21s there was no art in the world till by experience found out, so if Poesie be now an Art, & of al antiquitie hath bene among the Greeks and Latines, & yet were none untill by studious persons fashioned and reduced into a method of rules and precepts, then no doubt may there be the like with us. And if th’art of Poesie be but a skill appertaining to utterance, why may not

T

hen

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the same be with us aswel as with them, our lan­ guage being no lesse copious, pithie, and signifi­ cative then theirs, our conceipts the same, and our wits no lesse apt to devise and imitate than theirs were? If againe Art be but a certaine order of rules prescribed by reason, and gathered by experience, why should not Poesie be a vulgar Art with us as well as with the Greeks and Latines, our language admitting no fewer rules and nice diversities than theirs? but peradventure moe by a peculiar, which our speech hath in many things differing from theirs; and yet, in the generall points of that Art, allowed to go in.common with them: so as if one point perchance, which is their feete whereupon their measures stand, and in deede is all the beautie of their Poesie, and which feete we have not, nor as yet never went about to frame (the nature of our language and wordes not permitting it), we have in stead thereof twentie other curious points in that skill more then they ever had, by reason of our rime and tunable concords or simphonie, which they never observed. Poesie therefore may be an Art in our vulgar, and that verie methodicall and commendable. GEORGE PUTTENHAMI The Arte of English Poesie. 1589.

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50. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (i) have somewhere read of an eminent Person, who used in his private Offices of Devotion to give Thanks to Heaven that he was Born a Frenchman: For my own part I look upon it as a peculiar Blessing that I was born an Englishman. Among many other Reasons, I think my self very happy in my Country, as the Language of it is wonderfully adapted to a Man who is sparing of his Words, and an Enemy to Loquacity. As I have frequently reflected on my good For­ tune in this Particular, I shall communicate to the Publick my Speculations upon the English Tongue, not doubting but that they will be acceptable to all my curious Readers. The English delight in Silence more than any other European Nation, if the Remarks which are made on us by Foreigners are true. Our Discourse is not kept up in Conversation, but falls into more Pauses and Intervals than in our Neighbouring Countries; as it is observed, that the matter of our Writings is thrown much closer together, and lies in a narrower Compass than is usual in the Works of Foreign Authors: For, to favour our Natural Taciturnity, when we are obliged to utter our Thoughts, we do it in the shortest way we are able, and give as quick a Birth to our Conceptions as possible. This Humour shews it self in several Remarks

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that we may make upon the English Language. As first of all by its abounding in Monosyllables, which gives us an Opportunity of delivering our Thoughts in few Sounds. This indeed takes off from the Elegance of our Tongue, but at the same time ex­ presses our Ideas in the readiest manner, and conse­ quently answers the first Design of Speech better than the Multitude of Syllables, which make the Words of other Languages more Tunable and Sonorous. The Sounds of our English Words are commonly like those of String Musick, short and transient, which rise and perish upon a single Touch; Those of other Languages are like the Notes of Wind Instruments, sweet and swelling, and lengthen’d out into variety of Modulation. In the next place we may observe, that where the Words are not Monosyllables, we often make them so, as much as lies in our Power, by our Rapidity of Pronunciation; as it generally happens in most of our long Words which are derived from the Latin, where we contract the length of the Syllables that gives them a grave and solemn Air in their own Language, to make them more proper for Dispatch, and more conformable to the Genius of our Tongue. This we may find in a Multitude of Words, as Liberty, Conspiracy, Theatre, Orator, &c. The same natural Aversion to Loquacity has of late Years made a very considerable Alteration in our Language, by closing in one Syllable the Ter­ mination of the Praeterperfect Tense, as in these

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words, drown'd, walk'd, arriv'd, for drowned, walked, arrived, which has very much disfigured the Tongue, and turned a tenth part of our smoothest Words into so many Clusters of Consonants. This is the more remarkable, because the want of Vowels in our Language has been the general Complaint of our politest Authors, who nevertheless are the Men that have made these Retrenchments, and conse­ quently very much increased our former Scarcity. This Reflection on the Words that end in edy I have heard in Conversation from one of the greatest Genius’s this Age has produced. I think we may add to the foregoing Observation, the Change which has happened in our Language, by the Abbreviation of several Words that are terminated in ethy by substituting an s in the room of the last Syllable, as in drowns, walks, arrivesy and innumer­ able other Words, which in the Pronunciation of our Fore-fathers were drownethy walkethy arriveth. This has wonderfully multiplied a Letter which was before too frequent in the English Tongue, and added to that hissing in our Language, which is taken so much notice of by Foreigners; but at the same time humours our Taciturnity, and eases us of many superfluous Syllables. I might here observe, that the same single Letter on many occasions does the Office of a whole Word, and represents the His and Her of our Forefathers. There is no doubt but:the Ear of a Foreigner, which is the best Judge in this Case, would very much

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disapprove of such Innovations, which indeed we do our selves in some measure, by retaining the old Termination in Writing, and in all the Solemn Offices of our Religion. As in the Instances I have given we have epitom­ ized many of our particular Words to the Detriment of our Tongue, so on other Occasions we have drawn two Words into one, which has likewise yery much untuned our Language, and clogged it with Consonants, as mayn't, can't, sha'n't, wo'n't, and the like, for may not, can not, shall not, will not, &c. It is perhaps this Humour of speaking no more than we needs must, which has so miserably cur­ tailed some of our Words, that in familiar Writings and Conversations, they often lose all but their first Syllables, as in mob., rep., pos., incog, and the like; and as all ridiculous Words make their first Entry into a Language by familiar Phrases, I dare not answer for these that they will not in time be looked upon as a part of our Tongue. We see some of our Poets have been so indiscreet as to imitate Hudibras's Doggrel Expressions in their serious Composi­ tions, by throwing out the Signs of our Substantives, which are essential to the English Language. Nay, this Humour of shortning our Language had once run so far, that some of our celebrated Authors, among whom we may reckon Sir Roger L'Estrange in particular, began to prune their Words of all superfluous Letters, as they termed them, in order to adjust the Spelling to the Pronunciation; which

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would have confounded all our Etymologies, and have quite destroyed our Tongue. J o s e p h a d d i s o n : The Spectator. 17 11.

5 1 . THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (2 )

then is the explanation of the fact that language should be thus instructive for us, that it should yield us so much, when we come to analyse and probe it; and the more, the more deeply and accurately we do so. It is full of instruction, because it is the embodiment, the in­ carnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long cen­ turies they have attained to and won. It stands like the pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress o f these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have enriched it for ever— making in that new word a new region of thought to be hence-

H

1

ere

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forward in some sort the common heritage of all. Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand light­ ning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning. “Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.” And for all these reasons, far more and mightier in every way is a language than any one of the works which may have been composed in it. For that work, great as it may be, is but the embodying of the mind of a single man, this of a nation. The Iliad is great, yet not so great in strength or* power or beauty as the Greek language. Paradise Lost is a noble possession for a people to have inherited, but the English language is a nobler heritage yet. Great then will be our gains, if, having these treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying round about us, so far more precious than mines of Cali­ fornian gold, we determine that we will make what portion of them we can our own, that we will ask the words which we use to give an account of them­ selves, to say whence they are, and whither they tend. Then shall we often rub off the dust and rust

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from what seemed but a common token, which we had taken and given a thousand times, esteeming it no better, but which now we shall perceive to be a precious coin, bearing the “image and superscrip­ tion” of the great King: then shall we often stand in surprise and in something of shame, while we behold the great spiritual realities which underlie our common speech, the marvellous truths which we have been witnessing for in our words, but, it may be, witnessing against in our lives. And as you will not find, for so I venture to promise, that this study of words will be a dull one when you under­ take it yourselves, as little need you fear that it will prove dull and unattractive when you seek to make your own gains herein the gains also of those who may be hereafter committed to your charge. Only try your pupils, and mark the kindling of the eye, the lighting up of the countenance, the revival of the flagging attention, with which the humblest lecture upon words, and on the words especially which they are daily using, which are familiar to them in their play or at their church, will be wel­ comed by them. There is a sense of reality about children which makes them rejoice to discover that there is also a reality about words, that they are not merely arbitrary signs, but living powers; that, to reverse the words of one of England’s “false prophets,” they may be the fool’s counters, but are the wise man’s money; not, like the sands of the sea, innumerable disconnected atoms, but growing

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out of roots, clustering in families, connecting and intertwining themselves with all that men have been doing and thinking and feeling from the beginning of the world till now. And it is of course our English tongue, out of which mainly we should seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it contains, from which we should endeavour to remove the veil which custom and familiarity have thrown over it. We cannot employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will help more to form an English heart in ourselves and in others than will this. We could scarcely have a single lesson on the growth of our English tongue, we could scarcely follow up one of its significant words, without having unawares a lesson in English history as well, without not merely falling on some curious fact illustrative of our national life, but learning also how the great heart which is beating at the centre of that life was gradually shaped and moulded. We should thus grow too in our feeling of connexion with the past, of gratitude and reverence to it; we should estimate more truly, and therefore more highly, what it has done for us, all that it has bequeathed us, all that it has made ready to our hands. It was something for the children of Israel, when they came into Canaan, to enter upon wells which they digged not, and vine­ yards which they had not planted, and houses which they had not built; but how much greater a boon, how much more glorious a prerogative,

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for any one generation to enter upon the inherit­ ance of a language which other generations by their truth and toil have made already a receptacle of choicest treasures, a storehouse of so much un­ conscious wisdom, a fit organ for expressing the subtlest distinctions, the tenderest sentiments, the largest thoughts, and the loftiest imaginations, which at any time the heart of men can conceive. RICHARD CftENEVIX TRENCH :

On the Study of Words.

18 5 1.

52. IMPORTATIONS

by Virgil, I beseech your Lordship, and all my better sort of judges, when you take up my version; and it will appear a passable beauty when the original Muse is absent. But, like Spenser’s false Florimel made of snow, it melts and vanishes when the true one comes in sight. I will not excuse, but justify myself, for one pretended crime, with which I am liable to be charged by false critics, not only in this translation, but in many of my original poems; that I latinize too much. ’Tis true, that, when I find an English word significant and sounding, I neither borrow from the Latin, nor any other language; but, when I want at home, I must seek abroad. If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder me to import them

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ay

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from a foreign country? I carry not out the treasure of the nation, which is never to return; but what I bring from Italy, I spend in England: here it re­ mains, and here it circulates; for, if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrich­ ment of our native language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity; but, if we will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by commerce. Poetry requires orna­ ment ; and that is not to be had from our old Teuton monosyllables: therefore, if I find any elegant word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized, by using it myself; and, if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man cannot distinguish between pedantry and poetry: every man, there­ fore, is not fit to innovate. Upon the whole matter, a poet must first be certain that the word he would introduce is beautiful in the Latin, and is to con­ sider, in the next place, whether it will agree with the English idiom: after this, he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned in both languages: and, lastly, since no man is in­ fallible, let him use this licence very sparingly; for if too many foreign words are poured in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives, but to conquer them. John dryden : Dedication of the JEneis. 1697.

NATIVE GENIUS—LITERATURE 53.

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ENGLISH ELOQUENCE

N after years, when an under-graduate at Oxford, I had an opportunity of reading as it were in a mirror the characteristic pre­ tensions and the average success of many cele­ brated schools. Such a mirror I found in the ordinary conversation and in the favourite reading of young gownsmen belonging to the many differ­ ent colleges of Oxford. Generally speaking, each college had a filial connection (strict or not strict) with some one or piore of our great public schools. These, fortunately for England, are diffused through all her counties: and, as the main appointments to the capital offices in such public schools are often vested by law in Oxford or Cambridge, this arrange­ ment guarantees a sound system of teaching; so that any failures in the result must presumably be due to the individual student. Failures, on the whole, I do not suppose that there were. Classical attainments, that might be styled even splendid, were not then, nor are now, uncommon. And yet in one great feature many of those schools, even the very best, when thus tried by their fruits, left a painful memento of failure; or rather not of failure as in relation to any purpose that they steadily recognised, but of wilful and intentional disregard, as towards a purpose alien from any duty of theirs or any task which they had ever undertaken—a

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failure, namely, in relation to modern literature—a neglect to unroll its mighty charts: and amongst this modem literature a special neglect (such as seems almost brutal) of our own English literature, though pleading its patent of precedency in a voice so trumpet-tongued. To myself, whose homage ascended night and day towards the great altars of English Poetry or Eloquence, it was shocking and revolting to find in high-minded young country­ men, burning with sensibility that sought vainly for a corresponding object, deep unconsciousness of an all-sufficient object—namely, in that great in­ heritance of our literature which sometimes kindled enthusiasm in our public enemies. How painful to see or to know that vast revelations of grandeur and beauty are wasting themselves for ever—forests teeming with gorgeous life, floral wildernesses hid­ den inaccessibly; whilst, at the same time, in contra­ position to that evil, behold a corresponding evil— viz., that with equal prodigality the great capacities of enjoyment are running also to waste, and are everywhere burning out unexercised—waste, in short, in the world of things enjoyable, balanced by an equal waste in the organs and the machineries of enjoyment! This picture—would it not fret the heart of an Englishman? Some years (say twenty) after the era of my own entrance at that Oxford which then furnished me with records so painful of slight regard to our national literature, behold at the court of London a French ambassador, a

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man of genius blazing (as some people thought) with nationality, but, in fact, with something in­ expressibly nobler and deeper—viz., patriotism. For true and unaffected patriotism will show its love in a noble form by sincerity and truth. But nationality, as I have always found, is mean; is dishonest; is ungenerous; is incapable of candour; and, being continually besieged with temptations to falsehood, too often ends by becoming habitually mendacious. This Frenchman above all things valued literature: his own trophies of distinction were all won upon that field: and yet, when called upon to review the literature of Europe, he found himself conscientiously coerced into making his work a mere monument to the glory of one man, and that man the son of a hostile land. The name of Milton, in his estimate, swallowed up all others. This Frenchman was Chateaubriand. The personal splendour which surrounded him gave a corre­ sponding splendour to his act. And, because he, as an ambassador, was a representative man, this act might be interpreted as a representative act. The tutelary genius of France in this instance might be regarded as bending before that of England. But homage so free, homage so noble, must be inter­ preted and received in a corresponding spirit of generosity. It was not, like the testimony of Balaam on behalf of Israel, an unwilling submission to a hateful truth: it was a concession, in the spirit of saintly magnanimity, to an interest of human nature 12

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that, as such, transcended by many degrees all considerations merely national. Now, then, with this unlimited devotion to one great luminary of our literary system emblazoned so conspicuously in the testimony of a Frenchman —that is, of one trained, and privileged to be a public enemy—contrast the humiliating spectacle of young Englishmen suffered (so far as their train­ ing is concerned) to ignore the very existence of this mighty poet. Do I mean, then, that it would have been advisable to place the Paradise Lost, and the Paradise Regained, and the Samson, in the library of schoolboys? By no means. That mode of sensibility which deals with the Miltonic sub­ limity is rarely developed in boyhood. And these divine works should in prudence be reserved to the period of mature manhood. But then it should be made known that they are so reserved, and upon what principle of reverential regard for the poet himself. In the meantime, selections from Milton, from Dryden, from Pope, and many other writers, though not everywhere appreciable by those who have but small experience of life, would not gener­ ally transcend the intellect or sensibility of a boy sixteen or seventeen years old. And, beyond all other sections of literature, the two which I am going to mention are fitted (or might be fitted by skilful management) to engage the interest of those who are no longer boys, but have reached the age which is presumable in English university matricu­

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lation—viz., the close of the eighteenth year. Search through all languages, from Benares the mystical, and the banks of the Ganges, travelling westwards to the fountains of the Hudson, I deny that any two such bibliotheca for engaging youthful interest could be brought together as these two which follow:— First, In contradiction to M. Cousin’s recent audacious assertion (redeemed from the suspicion of mendacity simply by the extremity of ignorance on which it reposes) that we English have no toler­ able writer of prose subsequent to Lord Bacon, it so happens that the seventeenth century, and specially that part of it concerned in this case— viz., the latter seventy years (a .d . 1628-1700)— produced the highest efforts of eloquence (philo­ sophic, but at the same time rhetorical and im­ passioned, in a degree unknown to the prose litera­ ture of France) which our literature possesses, and not a line of it but is posterior to the death of Lord Bacon. Donne, Chillingworth, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, Barrow, form a pleiad, a constellation of seven golden stars, such as no literature can match in their own class. From these seven writers, taken apart from all their con­ temporaries, I would undertake to build up an entire body of philosophy 1 upon the supreme inter1 “ Philosophy” :—At this point it is that the main miscon­

ception would arise. Theology, and not philosophy, most people will fancy, is likely to formthe staple of these writers. But I have elsewheremaintained that the main bulkof English

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ests of humanity. One error of M. Cousin’s doubt­ less lay in overlooking the fact that all conceivable problems of philosophy can reproduce themselves under a theological mask: and thus he had absolved himself from reading many English books, as pre­ sumably mere professional pleadings of Protestant polemics, which are in fact mines inexhaustible of eloquence and philosophic speculation. Secondly, A full abstract of the English Drama from about the year 1580 to the period (say 1635) at which it was killed by the frost of the Puritanical spirit seasoning all flesh for the Parliamentary War. No literature, not excepting even that of Athens, has ever presented such a multiform theatre, such a carnival display, mask and anti-mask, of im­ passioned life—breathing, moving, acting, suffering, laughing: Quicquid agunt homines—votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus ;* l

—all this, but far more truly and adequately than was or could be effected in that field of com­ position which the gloomy satirist contemplated philosophy has always hiddenitselfin the Englishdivinity. In Jeremy Taylor, for instance, are exhibited all the practical aspects of philosophy; of philosophy as it bears upon Life, upon Ethics, and upon Transcendent Prudence—i.e. briefly upon the Greeksummum bonum. 1 “All that is done by men—movements of prayer, panic, wrath, revels of the voluptuous, festivals of triumph, or gladiatorship of the intellect’,—Juvenal, in the prefatory lines which rehearse the prevailing themes of his own Satires gathered in the great harvests of Rome.

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—whatsoever, in fact, our mediaeval ancestors ex­ hibited in their “Dance of Death,” drunk with tears and laughter—may here be reviewed, scenically grouped, draped, and gorgeously coloured. What other national drama can pretend to any competition with this? The Athenian has in a great proportion perished; the Roman was killed prema­ turely by the bloody realities of the amphitheatre, as candlelight by daylight; the Spanish, even in the hands of Calderon, offers only undeveloped sketch­ ings ; and the French, besides other and profounder objections, to which no justice had yet been done, lies under the signal disadvantage of not having reached its meridian until sixty years (or two generations) after the English. In reality, the great period of the English Drama was exactly closing as the French opened: consequently the French lost the prodigious advantage for scenical effects of a romantic and picturesque age. This had vanished when the French theatre culminated; and the natural result was that the fastidiousness of French taste, by this time too powerfully developed, stifled or distorted the free movements of French genius. I beg the reader’s pardon for this disproportioned digression, into which I was hurried by my love for our great national literature, my anxiety to see it amongst educational resources invested with a ministerial agency of far ampler character, but at all events to lodge a protest against that wholesale neglect of our supreme authors which leaves us

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open to the stinging reproach of “ treading daily with our clouted shoon” (to borrow the words of Comus) upon that which high-minded foreigners regard as the one paramount jewel in our national diadem. THOMAS DE QUINCEY l Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 1821.

54. THE TURN FOR STYLE I were asked where English poetry got these three things, its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way,— I should answer, with some doubt, that it got much of its turn for style from a Celtic source; with less doubt, that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source; with no doubt at all, that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic. Any German with penetration and tact in matters of literary criticism will own that the principal deficiency of German poetry is in style; that for style, in the highest sense, it shows but little feeling. Take the eminent masters of style, the poets who best give the idea of what the peculiar power which lies in style is,— Pindar, Virgil, Dante, Milton. An example of the peculiar effect which these poets produce, you can hardly give from German poetry. Examples enough you can give from German poetry f

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of the effect produced by genius, thought, and feel­ ing expressing themselves in clear language, simple language, passionate language, eloquent language, with harmony and melody; but not of the peculiar effect exercised by eminent power of style. . . . In poetical races and epochs this turn for style is peculiarly observable; and perhaps it is only on condition of having this somewhat heightened and difficult manner, so different from the plain manner of prose, that poetry gets the privilege of being loosed, at its best moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid style, which is the supreme style of all, but the simplicity of which is still not the simplicity of prose. The simplicity of Menander’s style is the simplicity ofprose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that which Goethe’sstyle . . . exhibits; but Menander does not belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it is the simple passages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect, being masterpieces of poetical simplicity. One may say the same of the simple passages in Shakspeare; they are perfect, their simplicity being a poetical simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, crowning moments of a manner which is always pitched in another key from that of prose, a manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style, regnant in most of our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the continua­ tion of this manner of Shakspeare’s. It was a manner much more turbid and strewn with

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blemishes than the manner of Pindar, Dante, or M ilton; often it was detestable; but it owed its existence to Shakspeare’s instinctive impulse towards style in poetry, to his- native sense of the necessity for it ; and without the basis of style every­ where, faulty though it may in some places be, we should not have had the beauty o f expression, unsurpassable for effectiveness and charm, which is reached in Shakspcare’s best passages. The turn for style is perceptible all through English poetry, proving, to my mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race; this turn imparts to our poetry a stamp o f high distinction, and sometimes it doubles the force of a poet not by nature of the very highest order, such as Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness and power seem to promise. MATTHEW ARNOLD I The Study of Celtic Literature. 1867. 55. THE FIRST OF THE ENGLISH t is a very extraordinary fact, when considered historically, that Chaucer should have been so unmistakably English almost before the exist­ ence o f England. It is the details of language, like the details of landscape, that give this entirely unique and unmistakable touch. It is an elvish touch, to use a term that was actually used about the poet. It almost suggests that the other name of England is Elfland. Yet it has nothing whatever of

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the thin ethereal spirit of faerie; as we see it, for instance, in the Celtic myths and the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats. It is a solid and almost smug sort of goblin market; a real town where the goblins are really marketing. The nearest we can come to a more serious definition is that it is a certain spirit of nonsense even in landscape. We find it in the names of some real English villages, which might have come out of the wild geography books of Mr. Edward Lear. We feel it in some of the impossible places invented by Mr. Edward Lear, which might have been the names of real English villages, valleys or downs; such as that typical title, “The Hills of the Chankly Bore.” Now this touch is instantly felt in Chaucer. The Pilgrims’ Way does not run merely, in the mediaeval manner, through meadows patterned with flowers or forests dark with enchantment. But neither does it run merely through reasonable and recognizable places like Southwark and Sittingboume. There is something selective in the eye of Chaucer, which is already open for other and special things. Nobody at home with the nonsense element I mean can read that phrase, in the account of the pilgrimage, about passing a town “which that i-clepd is Bob-Up-andDown,” without his heart leaping with joy, and bobbing up and down with that buoyant and unconquerable city. I do not know exactly what it means; and there have been all sorts of speculations about it. I do not know whether Chaucer made it

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up out of his own head, which is quite possible; or whether it was a real English village, which is also quite possible; or whether it was a nickname con­ nected with some local jest, which is perhaps most probable. Some have suggested that it was so called because something in the winding, rising and falling road made it appear to be on different levels at different stages; and that sort of rambling road probably was then, and certainly is now, rather specially characteristic of the English countryside. But the feeling of the curious primeval kinship between England and Chaucer is justified in either case. I do not care whether it was something that England invented and Chaucer glorified; or whether it was something that Chaucer invented and England glorified. The spirit of a man who loves that landscape can sometimes run so close to the land, that it invents something that exists already. I remember composing, when I was quite young, the first rough form of a song about the round hills and rolling, almost revolving roads, of which a man dreams after a day in Sussex. In that song I in­ vented an entirely imaginary town of Roundabout as the mystic centre of this rotatory landscape. And it was some time afterwards that I discovered that there really is a town in Sussex called Roundabout, because the men of Sussex had seen the same scenes and dreamed the same dream. Therefore there is, it seems, something primitive about this poet, because he is as large as the land

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and as old as the nation. There was little enough in him of the mystic, in the narrow or special sense; yet it is impossible not to feel something mystical about his magnitude as an emblem of England. He had somehow got into his head and into his note­ book a certain national quality, centuries before the nation attempted to understand or describe its own quality. He had, for instance, the humour that is at once broadened and blunted by good humour. He had the particular sort of soft-heartedness that can be seen in the English; sometimes an incom­ plete and illogical sort; but not far removed from that of Chaucer’s Prioress, who might have been frightened of a mouse, but wept over its being in a trap. He had the same type of tolerance and in some things the English type of irresponsible individualism; there is that amount of truth in Matthew Arnold’s view that he was lacking in “seriousness.” He was not the stuff of which Reformers are made. He took things as they came, and the world as he found it, and men as God had made them, or even as they had made themselves. He had a curious sort of abstract liberality under­ lying concrete conservatism, which was very national, and can be seen in many Tories who are devoted to a Monarchy and explain that it is just as republican as a Republic. In all this he is the First of the English; and his figure has therefore this quality of a type and even an archetype. That figure is seen in the sunlight of history walking

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among the gay pavilions and palaces of French kings and French-speaking knights and nobles; negotiating war and peace in what was practically a French quarrel about a French pedigree; he is seen learning a thousand things from the sonneteers of Italy and the troubadours of Provence; but within him something is born, and it is the name by which we live. He may or may not have made the somewhat dreary attempt to translate Le Roman de la Rose into English. But nobody could possibly trans­ late The Canterbury Tales into French. There is something personal about England. Rome or France or Bolshevist Russia or Republican America, each in its own way, is a principle; but England is a person. And it is very like the very indescribable sort of person this book has to de­ scribe. I will not be so daring as to define what William Blake meant by The Giant Albion; but we n>ay agree that if the country called by poets Albion could be conceived as a single figure, it would be a giant. And when I think of Chaucer in this primary and general fashion, I do not think of a Court poet receiving a laurel from the King or a flagon from the King’s butler, nor even of a stout and genial gentleman with a forked beard setting forth from the Tabard upon the Canterbury road; but of some such elemental and emblematic giant, alive at our beginnings and made out of the very elements of the land. Perhaps if we were caught up by that eagle that whirled away the poet to the

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gates of The House of Fame, we might begin to see spread out beneath us the titanic outlines of such a prehistoric or primordial Anak or Adam, with our native hills for his bone and our native forests for his beard; and see for an instant a single figure outlined against the sea and a great face staring at the sky. g . k . Chesterton : Chaucer. 1932.

5 6 . town and country poets

are certain principles, causes, passions, affections, acting on and influencing com­ munities at large, permeating their life, ruling their principles, directing their history, working as a subtle and wandering principle over all their existence. These have a some­ what abstract character, as compared with the soft ideals and passionate incarnations of purely individual character, and seem dull beside the stirring lays of eventful times, in which the earlier and bolder poets delight. The tendency of civilisa­ tion is to pare away the oddness and licence of personal character, and to leave a monotonous agreeableness as the sole trait and comfort of man­ kind. And this very effect obviously tends to increase the efficacy of general principles, to bring to view the daily efficacy of constant causes, to suggest the hidden agency of subtle abstractions. Accord-

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ingly, as civilisation augments and philosophy grows, we commonly find a school of “commonsensepoets,” as they may be called, arise and develop, who proceed to describe what they see around them, to describe its natura naturans, to delineate its natura naturatdy to evolve its productive agencies, to pursue their subtle ramifications. Complete, as the most characteristic specimen of this class of poets, stands Pope. He was the sort of person we cannot even conceive existing in a barbarous age. His subject was not life at large, but fashionable life. He described the society in which he was thrown— fhe people among whom he lived. His mind was a hoard of small maxims, a quintessence of petty observations. When he described character, he de­ scribed it not dramatically, not as it is in itself; but observantly and from without, calling up in the mind not so much a vivid conception of the man, of the real, corporal, outward substantial being, as an idea of the idea which a metaphysical bystander in an elaborate moment might refine and excruciate concerning him. Society in Pope is scarcely a society of people, but of pretty little atoms, coloured and painted with hoops or in coats —a miniature of metaphysics, a puppet-show of sylphs. Yet exactly on this account it the more elucidates the doctrine, that the tendency of civilised poetry is towards an analytic sketch of the existing civilisation. Nor is the effect diminished by the pervading character of keen judgment and

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minute intrusive sagacity; for no great painter of English life can be without a rough sizing of strong sense; or he would fail from want of sympathy with his subject. In short, Pope does but the more re­ present the class and type of “common-sense” poets who substitute an animated “catalogue raisonni” of working thoughts and operative principles—a sketch of the then present society, as a whole and as an object, for the /cAea avhpwv, the tale of which is one subject of early verse and the stage effect of living, loving, passionate, impetuous men aind women, which are special topics of another. What Pope is to our fashionable and town life, Cowper is to our domestic and rural life. This is perhaps the reason why he is so national. It has been said no foreigner can live in the country. We doubt whether any people, who felt their whole heart and entire exclusive breath of their existence to be concentrated in a great capital, could or would appreciate such intensely provincial pictures as are the entire scope of Cowper’s delineation. A good many imaginative persons are really plagued with him. Everything is so comfortable; the teaurn hisses so plainly, the toast is so warm, the break­ fast so neat, the food so edible, that one turns away, in excitable moments, a little angrily from anything so quiet, tame, and sober. Have we not always hated this life? What can be worse than regular meals, clock-moving servants, a time for everything, and everything then done, a place for everything

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without the Irish alleviation, “Sure, and I’m rejiced to say, that’s jist and exactly where it isn’t,” a common gardener, a slow parson, a heavy assort­ ment of near relations, a placid house flowing with milk and sugar—all that the fates can stuff together ofsubstantial comfort, and fed and fatted monotony? Aspiring and excitable youth stoutly maintains it can endure anything much better than the “gross fog Boeotian”—the torpid, in-door, tea-tabular felicity. Still a great deal of tea is really consumed in the English nation. A settled and practical people are distinctly in favour of heavy relaxations, placid prolixities, slow comforts. A state between the mind and the body, something intermediate, half-way from the newspaper to a nap—this is what we may call the middle-life theory of the influential English gentleman—the true aspiration of the ruler of the world. “’Tis then the understanding takes repose In indolent vacuity of thought, And sleeps and is refreshed. Meanwhile the face Conceals the mood lethargic with a mask Of deep deliberation.”

It is these in-door scenes, this common world, this gentle round of “calm delights,” the trivial course of slowly-moving pleasures, the petty detail of quiet relaxation, that Cowper excels in. The post-boy, the winter’s evening, the newspaper, the knitting needles, the stockings, the waggon—these are his subjects. His sure popularity arises from his

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having held up to the English people exact de­ lineations o f what they really prefer. Wa l t e r bageh ot : Literary Studies. “ William Cowper.” 1855.

57. LICENSED FOOLING

humour of English writing and description has often been wondered a t; and it flows from the same source as the merry traits of our character. A degree of barbarism and rusticity seems necessary to the perfection of humour. The droll and laughable depend on peculiarity and incongruity of character. But with the progress o f refinement, the peculiarities of individuals and o f classes wear out or lose their sharp, abrupt edges; nay, a certain slowness and dulness of understand­ ing is required to be struck with odd and unaccount­ able appearances, for which a greater facility of apprehension can sooner assign an explanation that breaks the force of the seeming absurdity, and to which a wider scope of imagination is more easily reconciled. Clowns and country people are more amused, are more disposed to laugh and make sport of the dress of strangers, because from their ignorance the surprise is greater, and they cannot conceive any thing to be natural or proper to which they are unused. Without a given portion of hardness and repulsiveness of feeling the ludicrous cannot well exist. Wonder, and curiosity, the

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attributes of inexperience, enter greatly into its composition. Now it appears to me that the English are (or were) just at that mean point between intelligence and obtuseness, which must produce the most abundant and happiest crop of humour. Absurdity and singularity glide over the French mind without jarring or jostling with it; or they evaporate in levity:—with the Italians they are lost in indolence or pleasure. The ludicrous takes hold of the English imagination, and clings to it with all its ramifications. We resent any difference or peculiarity of appearance at first, and yet, not having much malice at our hearts, we are glad to turn it into a jest—we are liable to be offended, and as willing to be pleased—struck with oddity from not knowing what to make of it, we wonder and burst out a laughing at the eccentricity of others, while we follow our own bent from wilful­ ness or simplicity, and thus afford them, in our turn, matter for the indulgence of the comic vein. It is possible that a greater refinement of manrfers may give birth to finer distinctions of satire and a nicer tact for the ridiculous: but our insular situation and character are, I should say, most likely to foster, as they have in fact fostered, the greatest quantity of natural and striking humour, in spite of our plodding tenaciousness, and want both of gaiety and quickness of perception. A set of raw recruits with their awkward movements and unbending joints are laughable enough: but they

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cease to be so, when they have once been drilled into discipline and uniformity. So it is with nations that lose their angular points and grotesque qualities with education and intercourse : but it is in a mixed state of manners that comic humour chiefly flourishes, for, in order that the drollery may not be lost, we must have spectators of the passing scene who are able to appreciate and embody its most remarkable features,—wits aswell asbuttsfor ridicule. I shall mention two names in this department, which may serve to redeem the national character from absolute dulness and solemn pretence,—Fielding and Hogarth. These were thorough specimens of true English humour; yet both were grave men. In reality, too high a pitch of animal spirits runs away with the imagination, instead of helping it to reach the goal ; is inclined to take the jest for granted when it ought to work it out with patient and marked touches, and it ends in vapid flippancy and impertinence. Among our neighbours on the Continent, Molière and Rabelais carried the freedom of wit and humour to an almost incredible height ; but they rather belonged to the old French school, and even approach and exceed the English licence and extravagance of conception. I do not consider Congreve’s wit (though it belongs to us) as coming under the article here spoken of; for his genius is anything but merry. Lord Byron was in the habit of railing at the spirit of our good old comedy, and of abusing Shakspeare’s Clowns and Fools, which

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he said the refinement of the French and Italian stage would not endure, and which only our gross­ ness and puerile taste could tolerate. In this I agree with him; and it is pat to my purpose. I flatter myself that we are almost the only people left who understand and relish nonsense. We are not “merry and wise,” but indulge our mirth to excess and folly. When we trifle, we trifle in good earnest; and having once relaxed our hold of the helm, drift idly down the stream, and delighted with the change are tossed about “by every little breath” of whim or caprice “That under Heaven is blown.“

All we then want is to proclaim a truce with reason, and to be pleased with as little expense of thought or pretension to wisdom as possible. This licensed fooling is carried to its very utmost length in Shakspeare, and in some other of our elder dramatists, without, perhaps, sufficient warrant or the same excuse. Nothing can justify this extreme relaxation but extreme tension. Shakspeare’s trifling does indeed tread upon the very borders of vacancy « : his meaning often hangs by the very slenderest threads. For this he might be blamed if it did not take away our breath to follow his eagle flights, or if he did not at other times make the cordage of our hearts crack. After our heads ache with thinking, it is fair to play the fool. The clowns were as proper an appendage to the gravity of our antique literature, as fools and dwarfs were to the

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stately dignity of courts and noble houses in former days. Of all people, they have the best right to claim a total exemption from rules and rigid formality, who, when they have any thing of importance to do, set about it with the greatest earnestness and perseverance, and are generally grave and sober to a proverb. Poor Swift, who wrote more idle or nonsense verses than any man, was the severest of moralists; and his feelings and observations morbidly acute. Did not Lord Byron himself follow up his Childe Harold with his Don Juan?—not that I insist on what he did as an illustration of the English character. He was one of the English Nobility, not one of the English People; and his occasional ease and familiarity were in my mind equally constrained and affected, whether in relation to the pretensions of his rank or the efforts of his genius. w il lia m h a z l it t : M erry England. 1825.

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D

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ENGLISH HUMOUR

s ir :

You write to me that you have Entertained your selftwo or threedays with readingseveral Comedies of several Authors; and your Observa­ tion is that there is more of Humour in our English Writers than in any of the other Comick Poets, Ancient or Modern. You desire to know my Opinion, and at the same time my Thought, of that which is generally calYd Humour in Comedy. I agree with you in an Impartial Preference of our English Writers in that Particular. But if I tell you my Thoughts of Humour, I must at the same time confess that what I take for true Humour has not been so often written even by themas is generally believed: And some who have valued themselves and have been esteem’d by others for that kind of Writing have seldom touch’d upon it. To make this appear to the World would require a long and labour’d Discourse, and such as I neither am able nor willing to undertake. But such little Remarks as may be contained within the Compass of a Letter, and such unpremeditated Thoughts as may be Communicated between Friend and Friend without incurring the Censure of the World k

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or setting up for a Dictator, you shall have from me, since you have enjoyn’d it. To Define Humour perhaps were as difficult as to Define Wit; for like that it is of infinite variety. To Enumerate the several Humours of Men were a Work as endless as to sum up their several Opinions. And in my mind the Qyot homines tot Sententia might have been more properly interpreted of Humour; since there are many Men of the same Opinion in many things who are yet quite different in Humours. But tho we cannot certainly tell what Wit is, or what Humour is, yet we may go near to shew something which is not Wit or not Humour, and yet often mistaken for both. And since I have mentioned Wit and Humour together, let me make the first Distinction between them, and observe to you that Wit is often mistakenfor Humour. I have observed that when a few things have been Wittily and Pleasantly spoken by any Character in a Comedy, it has been very usual for those who make their Remarks on a Play while it is acting to say, Such a thing is very Humorously spoken; There is a great Deal of Humour in that Part. Thus the Character of the Person speaking, may be, Surprizingly and Pleasantly is mistaken for a Character of Humour, which indeed is a Character of Wit. But there is a great Difference between a Comedy wherein there are many things Humorously, as they call it, which is Pleasantly spoken, and one where there are several Characters of Humour,

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distinguish’d by the Particular and Different Humours appropriated to the several Persons represented, and which naturally arise from the different Constitutions, Complexions, and Dis­ positions of Men. The saying of Humorous Things does not distinguish Characters; For every Person in a Comedy may be allow’d to speak them. From a Witty Man they are expected; and even a Fool may be permitted to stumble on ’em by chance. Tho I make a Difference betwixt Wit and Humour, yet I do not think that Humorous Characters exclude Wit: No, but the Manner of Wit should be adapted to the Humour. As, for Instance, a Character of a Splenetick and Peevish Humour should have a Satyrical Wit. A Jolly and Sanguine Humour should have a Facetious Wit. The Former should speak Positively; the Latter, Carelessly: For the former observes and shews things as they are; the latter rather overlooks Nature, and speaks things as he would have them, and his Wit and Humour have both of them a less Alloy ofJudgment than the others. As Wit, so its opposite, Folly, is sometimes mistaken for Humour. When a Poet brings a Character on the Stage committing a thousand Absurdities, and talking Impertinencies, roaring Aloud, and Laughing immoderately on every or rather upon no occasion, this is a Character of Humour. Is any thing more common than to have a

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pretended Comedy stuff’d with such Grotesques, Figures, and Farce Fools? Things that either are not in Nature, or, if they are, are Monsters and Births of Mischance, and consequently, as such, should be stifled and huddled out of the way, like Sooterkinsy that Mankind may not be shock’d with an appearing Possibility of the Degeneration of a God-like Species. For my part, I am as willing to Laugh as any body, and as easily diverted with an Object truly ridiculous; but at the same time I can never care for seeing things that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature. I dont know how it is with others, but I confess freely to you I could never look long upon a Monkey without very Mortifying Reflections, tho I never heard any thing to the Contrary why that Creature is not Originally of a distinct Species. As I dont think Humour exclusive of Wity neither do I think it inconsistent with Folly; but I think the Follies should be only such as Mens Humours may incline ’em to, and not Follies intirely abstracted from both Humour and Nature. Sometimes Personal Defects are misrepresented for Humours. I mean, sometimes Characters are barbarously exposed on the Stage, ridiculing Natural De­ formities, Casual Defects in the Senses, and Infirmities of Age. Sure the Poet must both be very Ill-natur’d himself, and think his Audience so, when he proposes by shewing a Man Deform’d or Deaf, or Blind, to give them an agreeable

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Entertainment, and hopes to raise their Mirth by what is truly an object of Compassion. But much need not be said upon this Head to any body especially to you, who, in one of your Letters to me concerning Mr. Johnson's Fox, have justly excepted against this Immoral part of Ridicule in Corbaccio's Character; and there I must agree with you to blame him whom otherwise I cannot enough admire for his great Mastery of true Humour in Comedy. External Habit of Body is often mistakenfor Humour. By External Habit I do not mean the Ridiculous Dress or Cloathing of a Character, tho that goes a good way in some received Characters. (But un­ doubtedly a Man’s Humour may incline him to dress differently from other People.) But I mean a Singularity of Manners, Speech, and Behaviour, peculiar to all or most of the same Country, Trade, Profession, or Education. I cannot think that a Humour which is only a Habit or Disposition con­ tracted by Use or Custom; for by a Disuse, or Complyance with other Customs, it may be worn off or diversify’d. Affectation is generally mistakenfor Humour. These are indeed so much alike that at a Distance they may be mistaken one for the other. For what is Humour in one may be Affectation in another; and nothing is more common than for some to affect particular ways of saying and doing things, peculiar to others whom they admire and would

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imitate. Humour is the Life, Affectation the Picture. He that draws a Character of Affectation shews Humour at the Second Hand; he at best but publishes a Translation, and his Pictures are but Copies. But as these two last distinctions are the Nicest, so it may be most proper to Explain them by Particular Instances from some Author of Reputa­ tion, Humour I take either to be born with us, and so of a Natural Growth, or else to be grafted into us by some accidental change in the Constitution, or revolution of the Internal Habit of Body, by which it becomes, if I may so call it, Naturaliz’d. Humour is from Nature, Habit from Custom, and Affectation from Industry. Humour shews us as we are. Habit shews us as we appear under a forcible Impression. Affectation shews what we would be under a Voluntary Disguise. Tho here I would observe by the way that a continued Affectation may in time become a Habit. The Character of Morose in the Silent Woman I take to be a Character of Humour. And I choose to instance this Character to you from many others of the same Author, because I know it has been Condemn’d by many as Unnatural and Farce: And you have yourself hinted some dislike of it for the same Reason, in a Letter to me concerning some of Johnson's Plays.

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Let us suppose Morose to be a Man Naturally Splenetick and Melancholly; is there anything more offensive to one of such a Disposition than Noise and Clamour? Let any Man that has the Spleen (and there are enough in England) be Judge. We see common Examples of this Humour in little every day. ’Tis ten to one but three parts in four of the Company that you dine with are Discompos’d and Startled at the Cutting of a Cork or Scratching a Plate with a Knife. It is a Proportion of the same Humour that makes such or any other Noise offensive to the Person that hears it; for there are others who will not be disturb’d at all by it. Well, But Morose, you will say, is so Extravagant, he cannot bear any Discourse or Conversation above a Whisper. Why, It is his excess of this Humour that makes him become Ridiculous, and qualifies his Character for Comedy. If the Poet had given him but a Moderate proportion of that Humour, ’tis odds but half the Audience would have sided with the Character and have Con­ demn’d the Author for Exposing a Humour which was neither Remarkable nor Ridiculous. Besides, the distance of the Stage requires the Figure represented to be something larger than the Life; and sure a Picture may have Features larger in Proportion, and yet be very like the Original. If this Exactness of Quantity were to be observed in Wit, as some would have it in Humour, what would become of those Characters that are de­

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sign’d for Men of Wit? I believe if a Poet should steal a Dialogue of any Length from the Extempore Discourse of the two Wittiest Men upon Earth, he would find the Scene but coldly receiv’d by the Town. But to the purpose. The Character of Sir John Daw in the same Play is a Character of Affectation. He everywhere discovers an Affectation of Learning, when he is not only Conscious to himself, but the Audience also plainly perceives, that he is Ignorant. Of this kind are the Characters of Thraso in the Eunuch of Terence, and Pyrgopolinices in the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus. They affect to be thought Valiant, when both themselves and the Audience know they are not. Now, such a boasting of Valour in Men who were really Valiant would undoubtedly be a Humour; for a Fiery Disposition might naturally throw a Man into the same Extravagance, which is only affected in the Characters I have mentioned. The Character of Cob in Every Man in his Humour and as most of the under Characters in Bartholomew Fair discover only a Singularity of Manners, appropriated to the several Educations and Pro­ fessions of the Persons represented. They are not Humours but Habits contracted by Custom. Under this Head may be rangedall Country-Clowns, Sailors, Tradesmen, Jockeys, Gamesters, and such like, who make use of Cants or peculiar Dialects in their several Arts and Vocations. One may almost give a Receipt for the Composition of such a

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Character: For the Poet has nothing to do but to collect a few proper Phrases and terms of Art, and to make the Person apply them by ridiculous Metaphors in his Conversation with Characters of different Natures. Some late Characters of this kind have been very successful; but in my mind they may be Painted without much Art or Labour, since they require little more than a good Memory and Superficial Observation. But true Humour cannot be shewn without a Dissection of Nature, and a Narrow Search to discover the first Seeds from whence it has its Root and growth. If I were to write to the World, I should be obliged to dwell longer upon each of these Distinc­ tions and Examples, for I know that they would not be plain enough to all Readers. But a bare hint is sufficient to inform you of the Notions which I have on this Subject: And I hope by this time you are of my Opinion, that Humour is neither Wit, nor Folly, nor Personal defect, nor Affectation, nor Habit, and yet that each and all of these have been both written and received for Humour. I should be unwilling to venture even on a bare Description of Humour, much more to make a Definition of it, but now my hand is in, lie tell you what serves me instead of either. I take it to be A singular and unavoidable manner of doing or saying any thing, Peculiar and Natural to one Man onlyy by which his Speech and Actions are distinguish'd from those of other men. k2

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Our Humour has relation to us and to what proceeds from us, as the Accidents have to a Substance; it is a Colour, Taste, and Smell, Diffused through all; tho our Actions are never so many and different in Form, they are all Splinters of the same Wood, and have Naturally one Com­ plexion, which tho it may be disguised by Art, yet cannot be wholly changed: We may Paint it with other Colours, but we cannot change the Grain. So the Natural sound of an Instrument will be distinguish’d, tho the Notes expressed by it are never so various, and the Divisions never so many. Dissimulation may by Degrees become more easy to our practice; but it can never absolutely Tran­ substantiate us into what we would seem: It will always be in some proportion a Violence upon Nature. A Man may change his Opinion, but I believe he will find it a Difficulty to part with his Humour, and there is nothing more provoking than the being made sensible of that difficulty. Sometimes one shall meet with those who perhaps Innocently enough, but at the same time impertinently, will ask the Question, Why are you not Merry? Why are you not Gay, Pleasant, and Cheerful? then, instead of answer­ ing, could I ask such a one, Why areyou not handsome? Why haveyou not Black Eyes and a better Complexion? Nature abhors to be forced. The two Famous Philosophers of Ephesus and Abdera have their different Sects at this day.

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Some Weep and others Laugh at one and the same thing. I dont doubt but you have observed several Men Laugh when they are Angry, others who are Silent, some that are Loud: Yet I cannot suppose that it is the passion of Anger which is in it self different, or more or less in one than t’other, but that it is the Humour of the Man that is Predominant, and urges him to express it in that manner. Demon­ strations of pleasure are as Various: one Man has a Humour of retiring from all Company, when any thing has happen’d to please him beyond expecta­ tion ; he hugs himselfalone, and thinks it an Addition to the pleasure to keep it Secret. Another is upon Thorns till he has made Proclamation of it, and must make other people sensible of his happiness before he can be so himself. So it is in Grief and other Passions. Demonstrations of Love and the Effects of that Passion upon several Humours are infinitely different; but here the Ladies who abound in Servants are the best Judges. Talking of the Ladies, methinks something should be observed of the Humour of the Fair Sex, since they are sometimes so kind as to furnish out a Character for Comedy. But I must confess I have never made any observation of what I Apprehend to be true Humour in Women. Perhaps Passions are too powerful in that Sex to let Humour have its Course; or may be by Reason of their Natural Coldness, Humour cannot Exert it self to that extravagant

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Degree which it often does in the Male Sex. For if ever any thing does appear Comical or Ridiculous in a Woman, I think it is little more than an acquir’d Folly or an Affectation. We may call them the weaker Sex, but I think the true Reason is because our Follies are Stronger and our Faults are more prevailing. One might think that the Diversity of Humour, which must be allowed to be diffused throughout Mankind, mightafford endless matter for the support of Comedies. But when we come closely to consider that point, and nicely* to distinguish the Difference of Humours, I believe we shall find the contrary. For tho we allow every Man something of his own, and a peculiar Humour, yet every Man has it not in quantity to become Remarkable by it: Or, if many do become Remarkable by their Humours, yet all those Humours may not be Diverting. Nor is it only requisite to distinguish what Humour will be diverting, but also how much of it, what part of it to shew in Light, and what to cast in Shades, how to set it off by preparatory Scenes, and by opposing other humours to it in the same Scene. Thro a wrong Judgment, sometimes, Mens Humours may be opposed when there is really no specific Difference between them, only a greater proportion of the same in one than t’other, oc­ casion’d by his having more Flegm, or Choller, or whatever the Constitution is from whence their Humours derive their Source. There is infinitely more to be said on this Subject,

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tho perhaps I have already said too much; but I have said it to a Friend, who I am sure will not expose it, if he does not approve of it. I believe the Subject is intirely new, and was never touch’d upon before; and if I would have any one to see this private Essay, it should be some one who might be provoked by my Errors in it to Publish a more Judicious Treatise on the Subject. Indeed I wish it were done, that the World, being alittle acquainted with the scarcity of true Humour and the difficulty of finding and shewing it, might look a little more favourably on the Labours of them who endeavour to search into Nature for it and lay it open to the Publick View. I dont say but that very entertaining and useful Characters, and proper for Comedy, may be drawn from Affectations and those other Qualities which I have endeavoured to distinguish from Humour; but I would not have such imposed on the World for Humour, nor esteem’d of Equal value with it. It were perhaps the Work of a long Life to make one Comedy true in all its Parts, and to give every Character in it a True and Distinct Humour. Therefore every Poet must be beholding to other helps to make out his Number of ridiculous Characters. But I think such a One deserves to be broke, who makes all false Musters; who does not shew one true Humour in a Comedy, but entertains his Audience to the end of the Play with every thing out of Nature. I will make but one Observation to you more,

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and have done; and that is grounded upon an Observation of your own, and which I mention’d at the beginning of my letter, viz. That there is more of Humour in our English Comick Writers than in any others. I do not at all wonder at it, for I look upon Humour to be almost of English Growth; at least, it does not seem to have found such Encrease on any other Soil. And what appears to me to be reason of it is the greater Freedom, Privilege, and Liberty which the Common People of England enjoy. Any Man that has a Humour is under no restraint or fear of giving it Vent; they have a Proverb among them, which may be will shew the Bent and Genius of the People as well as a longer Discourse: He that will have a Maypole shall have a Maypole. This is a Maxim with them, and their Practice is agreeable to it. I believe something Considerable too may be ascribed to their feeding so much on Flesh, and the Grossness of their Diet in general. But I have done; let the Physicians agree that. Thus you have my Thoughts of Humour, to my Power of Expressing them in so little Time and Compass. You will be kind to shew me where­ in I have Err’d; and as you are very Capable of giving me Instruction, so I think I have a very Just title to demand it from you, being without Reserve, Tour real Friend, and humble Servant, W. C o n g r e v e . w illiam c o n g r e v e : Letter to Mr. D ennis Concerning Humour in Comedy. 1695.

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59. THE ENGLISH STAGE shall grant Lisideius, without much dispute, a great part of what he has urged against us; for I acknowledge that the French contrive their plots more regularly, and observe the laws of comedy, and decorum of the stage (to speak generally),with more exactness than the English. Further, I deny not but he has taxed us justly in some irregularities of ours, which he has mentioned; yet, after all, I am of opinion that neither our faults nor their virtues are considerable enough to place them above us. For the lively imitation of Nature being in the definition of a play, those which best fulfil that law ought to be esteemed superior to the others. ’Tis true, those beauties of the French poesy are such as will raise perfection higher where it is, but are not sufficient to give it where it is not: they are indeed the beauties of a statue, but not of a man, because not animated with the soul of Poesy, which is imita­ tion of humour and passions: and this Lisideius him­ self, or any other, however biassed to their party, cannot but acknowledge, if he will either compare the humours of our comedies, or the characters of our serious plays, with theirs. He that will look upon theirs which have been written till these last ten years, or thereabouts, will find it an hard matter to pick out two or three passable humours amongst them. Corneille himself, their arch-poet, what has

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he produced except The Liar, and you know how it was cried up in France ; but when it came upon the English stage, though well translated, and that part of Dorant acted to so much advantage by Mr. Hart as I am confident it never received in its own country, the most favourable to it would not put it in competition with many of Fletcher’s or Ben Johnson’s. In the rest of Corneille’s comedies you have little humour ; he tells you himself, his way is, first to show two lovers in good intelligence with each other; in the working up of the play to embroil them by some mistake, and in the latter end to clear it, and reconcile them. But of late years Molière, the younger Corneille, Quinault, and some others, have been imitating afar off the quick turns and graces of the English stage. They have mixed their serious plays with mirth, like our tragi-comedies, since the death of Cardinal Richelieu; which Lisideius and many others not observing, have commended that in them for a virtue which they themselves no longer prac­ tise. Most of their new plays are, like some of ours, derived fromthe Spanish novels. There is scarce one of them without a veil, and a trusty Diego, who drolls much after the rate of the Adventures. But their humours, if I may grace them with that name, are so thin-sown, that never above one of them comes up in any play. I dare take upon me to find more variety of them in some one play of Ben Johnson’s, than in all theirs together ; as he who has

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seen The Alchymist, The Silent Woman, or Bartholo­ mew-Fair, cannot but acknowledge with me. I grant the French have performed what was pos­ sible on the ground-work of the Spanish plays; what was pleasant before, they have made regular: but there is not above one good play to be writ on all those plots; they are too much alike to please often; which we need not the experience of our own stage to justify. As for their new way of mingling mirth with serious plot, I do not, with Lisideius, condemn the thing, though I cannot approve their manner of doing it. He tells us, we cannot so speedily recollect ourselves after a scene of great passion and concernment, as to pass to another of mirth and humour, and to enjoy it with any relish: but why should he imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses? Does not the eye pass from an unpleasant object to a pleasant in a much shorter time than is required to this? and does not the unpleasantness of the first commend the beauty of the latter? The old rule of logic might have con­ vinced him, that contraries, when placed near, set off each other. A continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent; we must refresh it sometimes, as we bait in a journey, that we may go on with greater ease. A scene of mirth, mixed with tragedy, has the same effect upon us which our music has betwixt the acts; and that we find a relief to us from the best plots and language of the stage, if the discourses have been long. I must therefore have stronger

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arguments, ere I am convinced that compassion and mirth in the same subject destroy each other; and in the mean time cannot but conclude, to the honour of our nation, that we have invented, increased, and perfected a more pleasant way of writing for the stage, than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any nation, which is tragi-comedy. And this leads me to wonder why Lisideius and many others should cry up the barrenness of the French plots, above the variety and copiousness of the English. Their plots are single; they carry on one design, which is pushed forward by all the actors, every scene in the play contributing and moving towards it. Our plays, besides the main design, have under-plots or by-concernments, of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with the motion of the main plot: just as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled about by the motion of the Primum Mobile, in which they are contained. That similitude expresses much of the English stage; for if contrary motions may be found in nature to agree; if a planet can go east and west at the same time, one way by virtue of his own motion, the other by the force of the First Mover, it will not be difficult to imagine how the under-plot, which is only different, not contrary to the great design, may naturally be conducted along with it. Eugenius has already shown us, from the con­ fession of the French poets, that the Unity of Action

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is sufficiently preserved, if all the imperfect actions of the play are conducing to the main design; but when those petty intrigues of a play are so ill ordered that they have no coherence with the other, I must grant that Lisideius has reason to tax that want of due connexion; for co-ordination in a play is as dangerous and unnatural as in a state. In the mean time he must acknowledge, our variety, if well ordered, will afford a greater pleasure to the audience. As for his other argument, that by pursuing one single theme they gain an advantage to express and work up the passions, I wish any example he could bring from them would make it good; for I confess their verses are to me the coldest I have ever read. Neither, indeed, is it possible for them, in the way they take, so to express passion, as that the effects of it should appear in the concernment of an audience, their speeches being so many declamations, which tire us with the length; so that instead of persuading us to grieve for their imaginary heroes, we are con­ cerned for our own trouble, as we are in the tedious visits of bad company; we are in pain till they are gone. When the French stage came to be reformed by Cardinal Richelieu, those long harangues were introduced, to comply with the gravity of a church­ man. Look upon the Cinna and the Pompey; they are not so properly to be called plays, as long discourses of reason of state; and Polieucte in matters of religion is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs.

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Since that tíme it is grown into a custom, and their actors speak by the hour-glass, as our parsons do; nay, they account it the grace of their parts, and think themselves disparaged by the poet, if they may not twice or thrice in a play entertain the audience with a speech of an hundred or two hun­ dred lines. I deny not but this may suit well enough with the French; for as we, who are a more sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come thither to make themselves more serious: and this I conceive to be one reason why comedy is more pleasing to us, and tragedies to them. But to speak generally: it cannot be denied that short speeches and replies are more apt to move the passions and beget concern­ ment in us, than the other; for it is unnatural for any one in a gust of passion to speak long together, or for another in the same condition to suffer him, without interruption. Grief and passion are like floods raised in little brooks by a sudden rain; they are quickly up; and if the concernment be poured unexpectedly in upon us, it overflows us : but a long sober shower gives them leisure to run out as they came in, without troubling the ordinary current. As for Comedy, repartee is one of its chiefest graces; the greatest pleasure of the audience is a chace of wit, kept up on both sides, and swiftly managed. .And this our forefathers, if not we, have had in Fletcher’s plays, to a much higher degree of per­ fection than the French poets can arrive at.

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There is another part of Lisideius his discourse, in which he has rather excused our neighbours, than commended them; that is, for aiming only to make one person considerable in their plays. ’Tis very true what he has urged, that one character in all plays, even without the poet’s care, will have advan­ tage of all the others; and that the design of the whole drama will chiefly depend on it. But this hinders not that there may be more shining charac­ ters in the play: many persons of a second mag­ nitude, nay, some so verv near, so almost equal to the first, that greatness may be opposed to great­ ness, and all the persons be made considerable, not only by their quality, but their action. ’Tis evident that the more the persons are, the greater will be the variety of the plot. If then the parts are managed so regularly, that the beauty of the whole be kept entire, and that the variety become not a perplexed and confused mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it. And that all this is practicable, I can produce for examples many of our English plays: as The Maid's Tragedy, The Alchymist, The Silent Woman: I was going to have named The Fox, but that the unity of design seems not exactly observed in it; for there appear two actions in the play; the first naturally ending with the fourth act; the second forced from it in the fifth: which yet is the less to be condemned in him,

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because the disguise of Volpone, though it suited not with his character as a crafty or covetous person, agreed well enough with that of a voluptuary; and by it the poet gained the end he aimed at, the punishment of vice, and the reward of virtue, which that disguise produced. So that to judge equally of it, it was an excellent fifth act, but not so naturally proceeding from the former. But to leave this, and pass to the latter part of Lisideius his discourse, which concerns relations: I must acknowledge with him, that the French have reason when they hide that part of the action which would occasion too much tumult on the stage, and choose rather to have it made known by narration to the audience. Further, I think it very convenient, for the reasons he has given, that all incredible actions were removed; but, whether custom has so insinuated itself into our countrymen, or nature has so formed them to fierceness, I know not; but they will scarcely suffer combats and other objects of horror to be taken from them. And indeed, the indecency of tumults is all which can be objected against fighting: for why may not bur imagination as well suffer itself to be deluded with the proba­ bility of it, as with any other thing in the play? For my part, I can with as great ease persuade myself that the blows which are struck, are given in good earnest, as I can, that they who strike them are kings or princes, or those persons which they represent. For objects of incredibility, I would be

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satisfied from Lisideius, whether we have any so removed from all appearance of truth, as are those of Corneille’s Andromède; a play which has been frequented the most of any he has writ. . . .—To conclude on this subject of relations ; if we are to be blamed for showing too much of the action, the French are as faulty for discovering too little of it : a mean betwixt both should be observed by every judicious writer, so as the audience may neither be left unsatisfied by not seeing what is beautiful, or shocked by beholding what is either incredible or undecent. I hope I have already proved in this discourse, that though we are not altogether so punctual as the French, in observing the laws of Comedy, yet our errors are so few, and little, and those things wherein we excel them so considerable, that we ought of right to be preferred before them. But what will Lisideius say, if they themselves acknow­ ledge they are too strictly tied up by those laws, for breaking which he has blamed the English? I will allege Corneille’s words, as I find them in the end of his Discourse of the Three Unities :—Il estfacile auxspéculatifs d'estre sévères, &c. “’Tis easy for specu­ lative persons to judge severely ; but if they would produce to public view ten or twelve pieces of this nature, they would perhaps give more latitude to the rules than I have done, when, by experience, they had known how much we are bound up and constrained by them, and how many beauties of the

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stage they banished from it.” To illustrate a little what he has said: by their servile observations of the Unities of Time and Place, and integrity of scenes, they have brought on themselves that dearth of plot, and narrowness of imagination, which may be observed in all their plays. How many beautiful accidents might naturally happen in two or three days, which cannot arrive with any probability in the compass of twenty-four hours? There is time to be allowed also for maturity of design, which, amongst great and prudent persons, such as are often represented in Tragedy, cannot, with any likelihood of truth, be brought to pass at so short a warning. Farther; by tying themselves strictly to the Unity of Place, and unbroken scenes, they are forced many times to omit some beauties which cannot be shown where the act began; but might, if the scene were interrupted, and the stage cleared for the persons to enter in another place; and there­ fore the French poets are often forced upon absurdi­ ties; for if the act begins in a chamber, all the persons in the play must have some business or other to come thither, or else they are not to be shown that act; and sometimes their characters are very unfitting to appear there. As, suppose it were the king’s bed-chamber; yet the meanest man in the tragedy must come and dispatch his business there, rather than in the lobby or courtyard (which is fitter for him), for fear the stage should be cleared, and the scenes broken. Many times they fall by it

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in a greater inconvenience; for they keep their scenes unbroken, and yet change the place; as in one of their newest plays, where the act begins in the street. There a gentleman is to meet his friend; he sees him with his man, coming out from his father’s house; they talk together, and the first goes out: the second, who is a lover, has made an appointment with his mistress; she appears at the window, and then we are to imagine the scene lies under it. This gentleman is called away, and leaves his servant with his mistress; presently her father is heard from within; the young lady is afraid the servingman should be discovered, and thrusts him in through a door, which is supposed to be her closet. After this, the father enters to the daughter, and now the scene is in a house; for he is seeking from one room to another for this poor Philipin, or French Diego, who is heard from within, drolling, and breaking many a miserable conceit upon his sad condition. In this ridiculous manner the play goes on, the st^ge being never empty all the while: so that the street, the window, the houses, and the closet, are made to walk about, and the persons to stand still. Now what, I beseech you, is more easy than to write a regular French play, or more difficult than write an irregular English one, like those of Fletcher, or of Shakespeare? If they content themselves, as Corneille did, with some flat design, which, like an ill riddle, is found out ere it be half proposed, such plots we can make

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every way regular, as easily as they; but whene’er they endeavour to rise to any quick turns and counterturns of plot, as some of them have at­ tempted, since Corneille’s plays have been less in vogue, you see they write as irregularly as we, though they cover it more speciously. Hence the reason is perspicuous, why no French plays, when translated, have, or ever can succeed on the English stage. For, if you consider the plots, our own are fuller of variety; if the writing, ours are more quick and fuller of spirit; and therefore ’tis a strange mistake in those who decry the way of writing plays in verse, as if the English therein imitated the French. We have borrowed nothing from them; our plots are weaved in English looms: we en­ deavour therein to follow the variety and greatness of characters which are derived to us from Shake­ speare and Fletcher; the copiousness and well­ knitting of the intrigues we have fromJohnson; and for the verse itself we have English precedents of elder date than any of Corneille’s plays. . . . But to return from whence I have digressed: I dare boldly affirm these two things of the English drama;—First, that we have many plays of ours as regular as any of theirs, and which, besides, have more variety of plot and characters; and secondly, that in most of the irregular plays of Shakespeare or Fletcher (for Ben Johnson’s are for the most part regular) there is a more masculine fancy and greater spirit in the writing, than there is in any of the

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French, I could produce, even in Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s works, some plays which are almost exactly formed; as The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Scornful Lady: but because (generally speaking) Shakespeare, who writ first, did not perfectly observe the laws of Comedy, and Fletcher, who came nearer to perfection, yet through carelessness made many faults; I will take the pattern of a perfect play from Ben Johnson, who was a careful and learned observer of the dramatic laws, and from all his comedies I shall select The Silent Woman; of which I will make a short examen, according to those rules which the French observe. As Neander was beginning to examine The Silent Woman, Eugenius, looking earnestly upon him; “ I beseech you, Neander,” said he, “gratify the com­ pany, and me in particular, so far, as before you speak of the play, to give us a character of the author; and tell us frankly your opinion, whether you do not think all writers, both French and English, ought to give place to him.” “I fear,” replied Neander, “that in obeying your commands I shall draw a little envy on myself. Besides, in performing them, it will be first necessary to speak somewhat of Shakespeare and Fletcher, his rivals in poesy; and one of them, in my opinion, at least his equal, perhaps his superior. “To begin, then, with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All

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the images of Nature were still present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is every where alike; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is pre­ sented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets, Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi.

The consideration of this made Mr. Hales of Eaton say, that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had contemporaries with him, Fletcher and Johnson, never equalled them to him in their esteem: and in the last King’s court, when Ben’s reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him. “Beaumont and Fletcher, of whom I am next to

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speak, had, with the advantage of Shakespeare’s wit, which was their precedent, great natural gifts, improved by study: Beaumont especially being so accurate a judge of plays, that Ben Johnson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and, ’tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not contriving, all his plots. What value he had for him, appears by the verses he writ to him; and therefore I need speak no farther of it. The first play that brought Fletcher and him in esteem was their Philaster\ for before that, they had written two or three very unsuccessfully, as the like is reported of Ben Johnson, before he writ Every Man in his Humour. Their plots were generally more regular than Shakespeare’s, especially those which were made before Beaumont’s death; and they understood and imitated the conversation of gentle­ men much better; whose wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in repartees, no poet can ever paint as they have done. Humour, which Ben Johnson derived from particular persons, they made it not their business to describe: they represented all the passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection: what words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than ornamental. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare’s or Johnson’s: the reason is, because there is a certain

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gaiety in their comedies, and pathos in their more serious plays, which suits generally with all men’s humours. Shakespeare’s language is likewise a little obsolete, and Ben Johnson’s wit comes short of theirs. “As for Johnson, to whose character I am now arrived, if we look upon him while he was himself (for his last plays were but his dotages), I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had. He was a most severe judge of himself, as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit, and lan­ guage, and humour also in some measure, we had before him; but something of art was wanting to the Drama, till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an height. Humour was his proper sphere; and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply con­ versant in the Ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them: there is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated in Sejantis and Catiline. But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any

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law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him. With the spoils of these writers he so represents old Rome to us, in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had seen less of it than in him. If there was any fault in his language, ’twas that he weaved it too closely and laboriously, in his serious plays: perhaps too, he did a little too much Romanize our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them: wherein, though he learnedly followed the idiom of their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours. If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare. To conclude of him; as he has given us the most correct plays, so in the precepts which he has laid down in his Discoveries, we have as many and profitable rules for perfecting the stage, as any wherewith the French can furnish us. “Having thus spoken of the author, I proceed to the examination of his comedy, The Silent Woman. “Examen of the SILENT WOMAN. “To begin first with the length of the action; it is so far from exceeding the compass of a natural day,

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that it takes not up an artificial one. ’Tis all included in the limits of three hours and a half, which is no more than is required for the presentment on the stage. A beauty perhaps not much observed ; if it had, we should not have looked on the Spanish translation of Five Hours with so much wonder. The scene of it is laid in London; the latitude of place is almost as little as you can imagine; for it lies all within the compass of two houses, and after the first act, in one. The continuity of scenes is observed more than in any of our plays, except his own Fox and Alchymist. They are not broken above twice or thrice at most in the whole comedy; and in the two best of Corneille’s plays, the Cid and Cinna, they are interrupted once apiece. The action of the play is entirely one; the end or aim of which is the settling Morose’s estate on Dauphine. The intrigue of it is the greatest and most noble of any pure unmixed comedy in any language; you see in it many persons of various characters and humours, and all delight­ ful : as first, Morose, or an old man, to whom all noise but his own talking is offensive. Some who would be thought critics, say this humour of his is forced: but to remove that objection, we may con­ sider him first to be naturally of a delicate hearing, as many are, to whom all sharp sounds are un­ pleasant; and secondly, we may attribute much of it to the peevishness of his age, or the wayward authority of an old man in his own house, where he may make himself obeyed; and this the poet seems

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to allude to in his name Morose. Besides this, I am assured from divers persons, that Ben Johnson was actually acquainted with such a man, one alto­ gether as ridiculous as he is here represented. Others say, it is not enough to find one of such an humour ; it must be common to more, and the more common the more natural. To prove this, they instance in the best of comical characters, Falstaff: there are many men resembling him; old, fat, merry, cowardly, drunken, amorous, vain, and lying. But to convince these people, I need but tell them, that humour is the ridiculous extravagance of conversa­ tion, wherein one man differs from all others. If then it be common, or communicated to many, how differs it from other men’s? or what indeed causes it to be ridiculous so much as the singularity of it? As for Falstaff, he is not properly one humour, but a miscellany of humours or images, drawn from so many several men : that wherein he is singular is his wit, or those things he says prater expectation, unexpected by the audience; his quick evasions, when you imagine him surprised, which, as they are extremely diverting of themselves, so receive a great addition from his person ; for the very sight of such an unwieldy old debauched fellow is a comedy alone. . . . “If this comedy and some others of his were trans­ lated into French prose (which would now be no wonder to them, since Molière has lately given them plays out of verse, which have not displeased L

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them), I believe the controversy would soon be decided betwixt the two nations, even making them the judges. But we need not call our heroes to our aid; be it spoken to the honour of the Eng­ lish, our nation can never want in any age such who are able to dispute the empire of wit with any people in the universe. And though the fury of a civil war, and power for twenty years together abandoned to a barbarous race of men, enemies of all good learning, had buried the Muses under the ruins of monarchy; yet, with the restoration of our happiness, we see revived Poesy lifting up its head, and already shaking off the rubbish which lay so heavy on it. We have seen since his Majesty’s return, many dramatic poems which yield not to those of any foreign nation, and which deserve all laurels but the English. I will set aside flattery and envy: it cannot be denied but we have had some little blemish either in the plot or writing of all those plays which have been made within these seven years (and perhaps there is no nation in the world so quick to discern them, or so difficult to pardon them, as ours): yet if we can persuade ourselves to use the candour of that poet, who, though the most severe of critics, has left us this caution by which to moderate our censures— • . . ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis Offendar masculis;—

if, in consideration of their many and great beauties,

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we can wink at some slight and little imperfections, if we, I say, can be thus equal to ourselves, I ask no favour from the French. And if I do not venture upon any particular judgment of our late plays, ’tis out of the consideration which an ancient writer gives me: vivorum, ut magna admiratio, its censura difficilis: betwixt the extremes of admiration and malice, ’tis hard to judge uprightly of the living. Only I think it may be permitted nte to say, that as it is no lessening to us to yield to some plays, and those not many, of our own nation in the last age, so can it be no addition to pronounce of our present poets, that they have far surpassed all the Ancients, and the modern writers of other countries.55 John dryden : An Essay of Dramatic Poesy. 1668.

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60. THE ENGLISH SCHOOL N the study of our art, as in the study of all arts,

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something is the result of out own observation of Nature; something, and that not a little, the effect of the example of those who have studied the same Nature before us, and who have cultivated before us the same art, with diligence and success. The less we confine ourselves in the choice of those examples, the more advantage we shall derive from them, and the nearer we shall bring our perform­ ances to a correspondence with nature and the great general rules of art. When we draw our examples from remote and revered antiquity,—with some advantage undoubtedly in that selection,—we sub­ ject ourselves to some inconveniences. We may suffer ourselves to be too much led away by great names, and to be too much subdued by overbearing authority. Our learning, in that case, is not so much an exercise of our judgment, as a proof of our docility. We find ourselves, perhaps, too much over­ shadowed; and the character of our pursuits is rather distinguished by the tameness of the follower, than animated by the spirit of emulation. It is sometimes of service, that our examples should be near us; and such as raise a reverence, sufficient to induce us carefully to observe them, yet not so great

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as to prevent us from engaging with them in some­ thing like a generous contention. We have lately lost Mr. Gainsborough, one of the greatest ornaments of our Academy. It is not our business here, to make panegyrics on the living, or even on the dead, who were of our body. The praise of the former, might bear appearance of adulation; and the latter, of untimely justice; perhaps, of envy to those whom we have still the happiness to enjoy, by an oblique suggestion of invidious comparisons. In discoursing, therefore, on the talents of the late Mr. Gainsborough, my object is, not so much to praise or to blame him, as to draw from his excel­ lences and defects, matter of instruction to the students in our academy. If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to pos­ terity, in the history of the art, amqng the very first of that rising name. That our reputation in the arts is now only rising, must be acknowledged; and we must expect our advances to be attended with old prejudices, as adversaries, and not as supporters; standing in this respect, in a very different situation from the late artists of the Roman School, to whose reputation ancient prejudices have certainly con­ tributed : the way was prepared for them, and they may be said rather to have lived in the reputation of their country, than to have contributed to it; whilst whatever celebrity is obtained by English

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artists, can arise only from the operation of a fair and true comparison. And when they communicate to their country a share of their reputation, it is a portion of fame not borrowed from others, but solely acquired by their own labour and talents. As Italy has, undoubtedly, a prescriptive right to an administration bordering on prejudice, as a soil peculiarly adapted, congenial, and, we may add, destined to the production of men of great genius in our art, we may not unreasonably suspect that a portion of the great fame of some of their late artists has been owing to the general readiness and dis­ position of mankind, to acquiesce in their original prepossessions in favour of the productions of the Roman School. On this ground, however unsafe, I will venture to prophesy, that two of the last distinguished painters of that country, I mean Pompeio Battoni and Raffaelle Mengs, however great their names may at present sound in i^ur ears, will very soon fall into the rank of Impériale, Sebastian Concha, Placido Constanza, Masuccio, and the rest of their immediate predecessors ; whose names, though equally re­ nowned in their lifetime, are now fallen into what is little short of total oblivion. I do not say that those painters were not superior to the artist I allude to, and whose loss we lament, in a certain routine of practice, which, to the eyes of common observers, has the air of a learned composition, and bears a sort of superficial resemblance to the manner of the L2

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great men who went before them. I know this per­ fectly well, but I know likewise, that a man, looking for real and lasting reputation, must unlearn much of the common-place method so observable in the works of the artists whom I have named. For my own part, I confess, I take more interest in, and am more captivated with the powerful impression of nature, which Gainsborough exhibited in his por­ traits and in his landscapes, and the interesting sim­ plicity and elegance of his little ordinary beggarchildren, than with any of the works of that school, since the time of Andrea Sacchi, or perhaps we may say Carlo Maratti; two painters, who may truly be said to be Ultimi Romanorum. I am well aware how much I lay myself open to the censure and ridicule of the academical pro­ fessors of other nations, in preferring the humble attempts of Gainsborough to the works of those regular graduates in the great historical style. But we have the sanction of all mankind in preferring genius in a lower rank of art, to feebleness and insipidity in the highest. It would not be to the present purpose, even if I had the means and materials, which I have not, to enter into the private life of Mr. Gainsborough. The history of his gradual advancement, and the means by which he acquired such excellence in his art, would come nearer to our purposes and wishes, if it were by any means attainable; but the slow progress of advancement is in general imperceptible to the man himself who makes it; it is the conse­

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quence of an accumulation of various ideas which his mind has received, he does not perhaps know how or when. Sometimes, indeed, it happens, that he may be able to mark the time when from the sight of a picture, a passage in an author, or a hint in conversation, he has received, as it were, some new and guiding light, something like inspiration, by which his mind has been expanded; and is morally sure that his whole life and conduct have been affected by that accidental circumstance. Such interesting accounts we may, however, some­ times obtain from a man who has acquired an uncommon habit of self-examination, and has attended to the progress of his own improvement. It may not be improper to make mention of some of the customs and habits of this extraordinary man; points which come more within the reach of an observer; I, however, mean such only as are connected with his art, and indeed were, as I apprehend, the causes of his arriving to that high degree of excellence, which we see and acknow­ ledge in his works. Of these causes we must state, as the fundamental, the love which he had to his art; to which, indeed, his whole mind appears to have been devoted, and to which everything was referred; and this we may fairly conclude from various circumstances of his life, which were known to his intimate friends. Among others he had a habit of continually remarking to those who hap­ pened to be about him whatever peculiarity of countenance, whatever accidental combination of

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figure, or happy effects oflight and shadow, occurred in prospects, in the sky, in walking the streets, or in company. If, in his walks, he found a character that he liked, and whose attendance was to be obtained, he ordered him to his house: and from the fields he brought into his painting-room, stumps of trees, weeds, and animals of various kinds; and designed them, not from memory, but immediately from the objects. He even framed a kind of model of landscapes on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of lookingglass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water. How far this latter practice may be useful in giving hints, the professors of landscape can best determine. Like every other technical practice, it seems to me wholly to depend on the general talent of him who uses it. Such methods may be nothing better than contemptible and mis­ chievous trifling; or they may be aids. I think upon the whole, unless we constantly refer to real nature, the practice may be more likely to do harm than good. I mention it only, as it shows the solicitude and extreme activity which he had about everything that related to his art; that he wished to have his objects embodied, as it were, and distinctly before him; that he neglected nothing which could keep his faculties in exercise, and derived hints from every sort of combination. SIRJOSHUA REYNOLDSI The Fourteenth Discourse. 1788.

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6l. STAY AT HOME have already spoken of my brother’s taste for painting, and the progress he had made in that beautiful art. It is probable that, if circum­ stances had not eventually diverted his mind from the pursuit, he would have attained excellence, and left behind him some enduring monument of his powers, for he had an imagination to conceive, and that yet rarer endowment, a hand capable of giving life, body, and reality to the conceptions of his mind; perhaps he wanted one thing, the want of which is but too often fatal to the sons of genius, and without which genius is little more than a splendid toy in the hands of the possessor—perseverance, dogged perseverance, in his proper calling; other­ wise, though the grave had closed over him, he might still be living in the admiration of his fellowcreatures. O ye gifted ones, follow your calling, for, however various your talents may be, ye can have but one calling capable of leading ye to eminence and renown; follow resolutely the one straight path before you, it is that of your good angel, let neither obstacles nor temptations induce ye to leave it; bound along if you can; if not, on hands and knees follow it, perish in it, if needful; but ye need not fear that: no one ever yet died in the true path of his calling before he had attained the pinnacle. Turn into other paths, and for a momentary advan­ tage or gratification ye had sold your inheritance,

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your immortality. Ye will never be heard of after death. “My father has given me a hundred and fifty pounds/’ said my brother to me one morning, “and something which is better—his blessing. I am going to leave you.” “And where are you going?” “Where? to the great city; to London, to be sure.” “I should like to go with you.” “Pooh,” said my brother, “what should you do there? But don’t be discouraged, I dare say a time will come when you too will go to London.” And, sure enough, so it did, and all but too soon. “And what do you purpose doing there?” I demanded. “Oh, I go to improve myself in art, to place myself under some master of high name, at least I hope to do so eventually. I have, however, a plan in my head, which I should wish first to execute; indeed, I do not think I can rest till I have done so; every one talks so much about Italy, and the wondrous artists which it has produced, and the wondrous pictures which are to be found there; now I wish to see Italy, or rather Rome, the great city, for I am told that in a certain room there is contained the grand miracle of art.” “And what do you call it?” “The Transfiguration, painted by one Rafael, and it is said to be the greatest work of the greatest

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painter which the world has ever known. I suppose it is because everybody says so, that I have such a strange desire to see it. I have already made myself well acquainted with its locality, and think that I could almost find my way to it blindfold. When I have crossed the Tiber, which, as you are aware, runs through Rome, I must presently turn to the right, up a rather shabby street, which com­ municates with a large square, the farther end of which is entirely occupied by the front of an immense church, with a dome, which ascends almost to the clouds, and this church they call St. Peter’s.” “Ay, ay,” said I, “I have read about that in Keysler’s Travels.” “Before the church, in the square, are two foun­ tains, one on either side, casting up water in showers; between them, in the midst, is an obelisk, brought from Egypt, and covered with mysterious writing; on your right rises an edifice, not beautiful nor grand, but huge and bulky, where lives a strange kind of priest whom men call the Pope, a very horrible old individual, who would fain keep Christ in leading-strings, calls the Virgin Mary the Queen of Heaven, and himself God’s LieutenantGeneral upon earth.” “Ay, ay,” said I, “I have read of him in Fox’s Book of Martyrs.” “Well, I do not go straight forward up the flight of steps conducting into the church, but I turn to

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the right, and, passing under the piazza, find myself in a court of the huge bulky house; and then ascend various staircases, and pass along various corridors and galleries, all of which I could describe to you, though I have never seen them; at last a door is unlocked, and we enter a room rather high, but not particularly large, communicating with another room, into which, however, I do not go, though there are noble things in that second room —immortal things, by immortal artists; amongst others, a grand piece of Corregio; I do not enter it, for the grand picture of the world is not there: but I stand still immediately on entering the first room, and I look straight before me, neither to the right nor left, though there are noble things both on the right and left, for immediately before me at the farther end, hanging against the wall, is a picture which arrests me, and I can see nothing else, for that picture at the farther end hanging against the wall is the picture of the world. . . Yes, go thy way, young enthusiast, and, whether to London town or to old Rome, may success attend thee; yet strange fears assail me and mis­ givings on thy account. Thou canst not rest, thou say’st, till thou hast seen the picture in the chamber at old Rome hanging over against the wall; ay, and thus thou dost exemplify thy weakness—thy strength too, it may be—for the one idea, fantastic yet lovely, which now possesses thee, could only have originated in a genial and fervent brain. Well, go, if thou must

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go; yet it perhaps were better for thee to bide in thy native land, and there, with fear and trembling, with groanings, with straining eyeballs, toil, drudge, slave, till thou hast made excellence thine own; thou wilt scarcely acquire it by staring at the picture over against the door in the high chamber of old Rome. Seekest thou inspiration? thou needest it not, thou hast it already; and it was never yet found by crossing the sea. What hast thou to do with old Rome, and thou an Englishman? “Did thy blood never glow at the mention of thy native land?” as an artist merely? Yes, I trow, and with reason, for thy native land need not grudge old Rome her “pictures of the world” ; she has pictures of her own, “pictures of England” ; and is it a new thing to toss up caps and shout—England against the world? Yes, against the world in all, in all; in science and in arms, in minstrel strain, and not less in the art “which enables the hand to deceive the intoxicated soul by means of pictures.” (Klopstock.) Seek’st models? to Gainsborough and Hogarth turn, not names of the world, may be, but English names— and England against the world! A living master? why, there he comes! thou hast had him long, he has long guided thy young hand towards the excel­ lence which is yet far from thee, but which thou canst attain if thou shouldst persist and wrestle, even as he has done, midst gloom and despondency—ay, and even contempt; he who now comes up the creaking stair to thy little studio in the second floor

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to inspect thy last effort before thou departest, the little stout man whose face is very dark, and whose eye is vivacious; that man has attained excellence, destined some day to be acknowledged, though not till he is cold, and his mortal part returned to its kindred clay. He has painted, not pictures of the world, but English pictures, such as Gainsborough himself might have done; beautiful rural pieces, with trees which might tempt the wild birds to perch upon them: thou needest not run to Rome, brother, where lives the old Mariolater, after pic­ tures of the world, whilst at home there are pictures of England; nor needest thou even go to London, the big city, in search of a master, for thou hast one at home in the old East Anglian town who can instruct thee whilst thou needest instruction: better stay at home, brother, at least for a season, and toil and strive ’midst groanings and despondency till thou has attained excellence even as he has done —the little dark man with the brown coat and the top-boots, whose name will one day be considered the chief ornament of the old town, and whose works will at no distant period rank amongst the proudest pictures of England—and England against the world!—thy master, my brother, thy, at present, all too little considered master—Crome. g e o r g e b o r r o w : Lavengro. 1851.

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62.

AN ENGLISH COMPOSER

this time Mr. Jno. Jenkins began to be famous, and his compositions much sought after: he was a lutinist profest, & used the Lyra way upon ye violl, which followed the manner of the lute, and he had a very great hand upon ye consort viol, and encouraged & probably assisted Mr. Sympson in his edition of the devision violist; he was once carryed to play on ye viol before King Charles I. which he did in his voluntary way, with wonderful agillity, and odd humours, as (for instance) touching ye Great strings with his thumb, while ye rest were held imployed in another way. And when he had done the King sayd he did wonders upon an incon­ siderable instrument. But this gentleman made him­ self more famous for his compositions of all sorts. There were more consorts of his composing went about among the performers in his time then of all the rest o f his contemporarys, till he had got almost the monopoly of consort musick; he lived to a great age, and had composed so much that he knew not half of what he had done: a Spanish Don sent over to ye late Sir Peter Lely, the leaves of one part of a three part consort of his, with a desire to procure the rest, costa che costa, for his musick had got n

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abroad and was more esteemed there then at home; I shewed him ye papers, but he could tell nothing of them, when or where they were made, or might be found, onley he knew they were his owne. He was a great Reformer of musick in his time, for he got the better of ye dullness of ye old fancys, and introduced a pleasing air in everything he composed, interspersing frequent devisions & triplas, in his fancys as well as lessons, & composed for the hand divers devision consorts, and condiscended to humor very much, as in his Newgate Cryes & his famous bell-consort to the great solace of ye country fidlers. In his fancys his points were for the most part elegant & wrought with no small industry yet easy & familiar, but never insipid as had bin then lately ye musick cheifly in request. His early compositions, done in his full strength, and being likely to pass among his owne faculty, were his best, & parcells of them may yet be extant in some gentlemens collections, whereof the greatest part would bear ye test of ye present time, if a violent prejudice did not prepossess it. The greatest disadvantages of his works is, that most of his early peices are lost, & his latter consorts chiefly remain; and those were calculated for low hands little better then scollars who were not composers of anything more masterly, & for ye same reason, they were moulded in ye way of Lessons rather then fancys. But in all that plaineness, adapted to ye capacity of his scollars; there is to be observed a genuine air, according to ye true

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modes of conducting ye keys & changing, as might be owned in consort at this day, & if in the per­ formance by a good moderne hand an agreeable spirit were infused, as ye manner is at present, and an ample Orchester to set it off, the most ordinary of his musick would make a lively appearance. But to do right in shewing what was most amiss in ye manner of Mr. Jenkins, it was wholly devoid of fire & fury, such as the Itallian musick affects, in their stabbs & stoccatas, which defect is onely excusable upon ye humour of ye times, those were pleased with ye sedate, which these will not bear, and for that matter, as to reall vertue, or goodness of the musick, I referre to what hath bin sayd. Another more considerable failing is the manner of movement, which he & his contemporarys used & others since. It was cheifly (as it were) going up and downe staires, and had less of the sault or Itterations then ye Itallians have, in which respect it must be allowed the latter style is better as more conforme to mens ordinary behaviour. And it may be alledged also as a defect, that Jenkins did not dash upon harsh notes, as ye Itallians doe, which makes their consorts more Saporite, than the musick was when the parts did but hunt one and other, from concord to concord. As to that, its allowd ye English rules of composition did not permit such freedoms but Jenkins used his discords always properly & with sincopation, according to law, yet in that he dared more & rather outwent

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then came short of his contemporarys. But to con­ clude Mr. Jenkins was a very gentile & well bred gentleman, and was always, not onely Wellcome, but greatly valued by ye familys wherever he had taught & converst. He was constantly complaisant in every thing desired of him and wherever he went mirth & solace (as ye song hath it) attended him; after his whole profession was driven from ye Court, he past his time mostly in ye country at gentlemens houses, and then he composed numerous consorts, & in his effete age was no less acceptable, where he chose to reside, then when he was in his vigor, and at last layd his old bones at Kimberly in Norfolk, leaving an old freind a competent legacy to be remembered by. He was not morose nor puft at other mens works as at noveltys. I shewed him the piece of old Nichola 1 which begins ye second booke & consists of double notes in G #; he touched them over & pulling off his spectacles clapt his hand on ye book & declared he had never heard so good a peice of musick, in all his life. He had a vivacious spirit & often proffered at poetry, and his talent that way may be seen in his verses before Mr. Sympsons piece. At ye Restauration he had his place at Court restored, but ye masters indulged his non attendance, on account of his Great Age, for they were (to a man) all kind to him, but there was a particular freindship cultivated between old Mr. Stephkins & him, & he often sent him kind 1 i.e. Nicholas Mateis.

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tokens, which were pieces of fresh musick, & ye old gentleman (Stephkins) very much esteemed them. In short Mr. Jenkins was a most happy person for he lived & dyed beloved & unenvyed: and was sensible that he was capitall of his profession, during most of his life; and that made hiip amends for his living so long to be sensible, of his being left behind & almost wholly layd aside: and if ye moderne musick is improved upon him, it is not more, I was saying nothing near so much, as he improved musick upon those who went before him. Roger north : The Musicall Grammarian. 1728. 63. ENGLISH MELODY o w pleasant it is, in reviewing one’s life, to look back on the circumstances that origin­ ated or encouraged any kindly tendency! I behold, at this moment, with lively distinctness, the handsome face of Miss C., who was the first person I remember seeing at a pianoforte; and I have something of a like impression of that of Miss M., mother, if I mistake not, or, at all events, near relation, o f my distinguished friend Sheridan Knowles. M y parents and his were acquainted. My mother, though fond of music, and a gentle singer in her way, had missed the advantage of a musical education, partly from her coming of a half-quaker stock, partly (as I have said before) from her having been too diffident to avail herself of the kindness

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of Dr. Franklin, who offered to teach her the guitar. The reigning English composer at that time was “Mr. Hook,” as he was styled at the head of his songs. He was the father of my punctilious editor of the magazine, and had a real, though small vein of genius, which was none the better for its being called upon to flow profusely for Ranelagh and Vauxhall. He was composer of the “Lass of Rich­ mond Hill” (an allusion to z.penchant oiGtorgt IV.), and of another popular song more lately remem­ bered “’Twas within a mile of Edinborough town.” The songs of that day abounded in Strephons and Delias, and the music partook of the gentle inspira­ tion. The association of early ideas with that kind of commonplace, has given me more than a tolera­ tion for it. I find something even touching in the endeavours of an innocent set of ladies and gentle­ men, my fathers and mothers, to identify them­ selves with shepherds and shepherdesses, even in the most impossible hats and crooks. I think of the many heartfelt smiles that must have welcomed love letters and verses containing that sophisticate imagery, and of the no less genuine tears that were shed over the documents when faded; and criticism is swallowed up in those human drops. This is one of the reasons why I can read even the most faded part of the works of Shenstone, and why I can dip again and again into such correspondence as that of the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret, and of

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my Lady Luxborough, who raises monuments in her garden to the united merits of Mr. Somerville and the god Pan. The feeling was true, though the expression was sophisticate and a fashion; and they who cannot see the feeling for the mode, do the very thing which they think they scorn; that is, sacrifice the greater consideration for the less. But Hook was not the only, far less the most fashionable composer. There were (if not all per­ sonally, yet popularly contemporaneous) Mr. Lampe, Mr. Oswald, Dr. Boyce, Linley, Jackson, Shield, and Storace, with Paesiello, Sacchini, and others at the King’s Theatre, whose delightful airs wandered into the streets out of the English operas that borrowed them, and became confounded with English property. I have often, in the course of my life, heard “Wither, my love?” and “For tenderness formed,” boasted of, as specimens of English melody. For many years I took them for such my­ self, in common with the rest of our family, with whom they were great favourites. The first, which Stephen Storace adapted to some words in the Haunted Tower, is the air of “La Rachelina” in Paesiello’s opera La Molinara. The second, which was put by General Burgoyne to a song in his comedy of the Heiress, is “Io sono Lindoro” in the same enchanting composer’s Barbiere di Seviglia. The once popular English songs and duets, &c., “How imperfect is expression” ; “For me, my fair a wreath has wove” ; “Henry cull’d the flow’ret’s

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bloom” ; “Oh, thou wert bom to please me” ; “Here’s a health to all good lasses” ; “Youth’s the season made for joys” ; “Gently touch the warbling lyre” ; “No, ’twas neither shape nor feature” ; “ Pray, Goody, please to moderate” ; “Hope told a flattering tale” ; and a hundred others, were all foreign compositions, chiefly Italian. Every bur­ lesque, or buffo song, of any pretension, was pretty sure to be Italian. When Edwin, Fawcett, and others, were rattling away in the happy comic songs of O’Keeffe, with his triple rhymes and illustrative jargon, the audience little suspected that they were listening to some of the finest animal spirits of the south—to Piccini, Paesiello, and Cimarosa. Even the wild Irishman thought himself bound to go to Naples, before he could get a proper dance for his gaiety. The only genuine English compositions worth any­ thing at that time, were almost confined to Shield, Dibdin, and Storace, the last of whom, the author of “Lullaby,” who was an Italian born in England, formed the golden link between the music of the two countries, the only one, perhaps, in which English accentuation and Italian flow were ever truly amalgamated ; though I must own that I am heretic enough (if present fashion is orthodoxy) to believe, that Arne was a real musical genius, of a very pure, albeit not of the very first water. He has set, indeed, two songs of Shakspeare’s (the “Cuckoo song,” and “Where the bee sucks”) in a spirit of

NATIVE GENIUS—MUSIC

349

perfect analogy to the words, as well as of the live­ liest musical invention; and his air of “Water parted,” in Artaxerxes, winds about the feelings with an earnest and graceful tenderness of regret, worthy in the highest degree of the affecting beauty of the sentiment. leigh hunt: Autobiography. 1850.

THE ULTIMATE IDEAL

64.

Albion ’ s l an d

fields from Islington to Marylebone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold, And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

T

he

Her Little-ones ran on the fields, The Lamb of God among them seen, And fair Jerusalem his Bride, Among the little meadows green. Pancras and Kentish-town repose Among her golden pillars high, Among her golden arches which Shine upon the starry sky. The Jew’s-harp-house and the Green Man, The Pond where Boys to bathe delight, The fields of Cows by Willan’s farm, Shine in Jerusalem’s pleasant sight. She walks upon our meadows green, The Lamb of God walks by her side. And every English Child is seen Children of Jesus and his Bride. M

353

354

THE ENGLISH VISION

Forgiving trespasses and sins Lest Babylon with cruel Og With Moral and Self-righteous Law Should Crucify in Satan’s Synagogue! What are those golden Builders doing Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington, Standing above that mighty Ruin Where Satan the first victory won, Where Albion slept beneath the Fatal Tree, And the Druids’ golden Knife Rioted in human gore, In Offerings of Human Life? They groan’d aloud on London Stone, They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook, Albion gave his deadly groan, And all the Atlantic Mountains shook. Albion’s Spectre from his Loins Tore forth in all the pomp of War: Satan his name: in flames of fire He stretch’d his Druid Pillars far. Jerusalem fell from Lambeth’s Vale Down thro’ Poplar and Old Bow, Thro’ Malden and across the Sea, In War and howling, death and woe.

THE ULTIMATE IDEAL The Rhine was red with human blood, The Danube roll’d a purple tide, On the Euphrates Satan stood, And over Asia stretch’d his pride. He wither’d up sweet Zion’s Hill From every Nation of the Earth; He wither’d up Jerusalem’s Gates, And in a dark Land gave her birth. He wither’d up the Human Form By laws of sacrifice for sin, Till it became a Mortal Worm, But O ! translucent all within. The Divine Vision still was seen, Still was the Human Form Divine, Weeping in weak and mortal clay, O Jesus, still the Form was thine. And thine the Human Face, and thine The Human Hands and Feet and Breath, Entering thro’ the Gates of Birth And passing thro’ the Gates of Death. And O thou Lamb of God, whom I Slew in my dark self-righteous pride, Art thou return’d to Albion’s Land? And is Jerusalem thy Bride?

355

356

THE ENGLISH VISION Come to my arms and never more Depart, but dwell for ever here: Create my Spirit to thy Love: Subdue my Spectre to thy Fear. Spectre of Albion! warlike Fiend! In clouds of blood and ruin roll’d, I here reclaim thee as my own, My Selfhood! Satan! arm’d in gold. Is this thy soft Family-Love, Thy cruel Patriarchal pride, Planting thy Family alone, Destroying all the World beside? A man’s worst enemies are those Of his own house and family; And he who makes his law a curse, By his own law shall surely die. In my Exchanges every Land Shall walk, and mine in every Land, Mutual shall build Jerusalem, Both heart in heart and hand in hand. w illiam b l a k e : from Jerusalem . 1804-1820.

THE ULTIMATE IDEAL

357

65. THE NEW AGE Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to Pronounce, all will be set right, and those Grand Works of the more ancient and con­ sciously and professedly Inspired Men will hold their proper rank, and the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare and Milton were both curb’d by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves o f the Sword. Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental and prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for con­ temptible works, or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ and his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds o f Eternity in which we shall live for ever in J esus

T

O

ur

he

L ord.

THE ENGLISH VISION

358

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills? Bring me my Bow of burning gold : Bring me my Arrows of desire : Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire. I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant Land. " Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets.” N umbers, xi. ch., 29 v. w il lia m b l a k e :

66.

o ne

Preface to Milton.

great

1804-8.

fe d e r atio n

I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning matters are in question, it is most likely to go astray. In general, its course is determined for it by the idea which is the law of its being; the idea of a dis­ interested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and f

I

THE ULTIMATE IDEAL

359

thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas. By the very nature of things, as England is not all the world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is streaming in upon us from all sides and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence; the English critic, therefore, must dwell much on foreign thought, and with par­ ticular heed on any part of it, which, while sig­ nificant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic’s one business; and so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic’s great concern for himself; and it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it,—but insensibly, and in the second place not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract law-giver, —that he will generally do most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author’s place in literature, and his relation to a central standard (and if this is not done how are we to get at our best in the world?), criticism may have to deal with a subject-matter so familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation and detailed

360

THE ENGLISH VISION

application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still, under all circumstances, this mere judgment and application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity. But stop, some one will say; all this talk is of no practical use to us whatever; this criticism of yours is not what we have in our minds when we speak of criticism; when we speak of critics and criticism, we mean critics and criticism of the current English literature of the day; when you offer to tell criticism its function, it is to this criticism that we expect you to address yourself. I amsorry for it, for I am afraid I must disappoint these expectations. I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. How much of current English literature comes into this “best that is known and thought in the world*5? Not very much, I fear; certainly less, at this moment, than of the current literature of France or Germany. Well, then, am I to alter my definition of criticism, in order to meet the requirements of a number of practising English critics, who, after all, are free in their choice of a business? That would be making criticism lend

THE ULTIMATE IDEAL

36 1

itself just to one of those alien practical considera­ tions, which, as I have said, are so fatal to it. One may say, indeed, to those who have to deal with the mass,—so much better disregarded,—of current English literature, that they may at all events endeavour, in dealing with this, to try it, so far as they can, by the standard of the best that is known and thought in the world; one may say, that to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better. But, after all, the criticism I am really concerned with, —the criticism which alone can much help us for the future, the criticism which, throughout Europe, is at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism and the critical spirit,—is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have, for their proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intel­ lectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this programme. And what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as individuals, the more thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more progress? m a tth ew Ar n o ld i Essays in Criticism . 1865.

362

THE ENGLISH VISION 67. ENGLAND AND EUROPE

ou say that the war does not prevent personal life from going on, that the individual can still love and be complete. It isn’t true. The one quality of love is that it universalises the individual. If I love, then I am extended over all people, but particularly over my own nation. It is an extending in concentric waves over all people. This is the process of love. And if I love, I, the individual, then necessarily the love extends from me to my nearest neighbour, and outwards, till it loses itself in vast distance. This is love, there is no love but this. So that if I love, the love must beat upon my neigh­ bours, till they too live in the spirit of the love, and so on, further and further. And how can this be, in war, when the spirit is against love? The spirit of war is, that I am a unit, a single entity that has no intrinsic reference to the rest: the reference is extrinsic, a question of living, not of being. In war, in my being I am a detached entity, and every one of my actions is an act of further detaching my own single entity from all the rest. I f I love, then, I am in direct opposition to the principle of war. If war prevails, I do not love. I f love prevails, there is no war. War is a great and necessary disintegrating autumnal process. Love is the great creative process, like spring, the making of an integral unity out of many disintegrated factors. We have had enough of the disintegrating

Y

THE ULTIMATE IDEAL

363

process. If it goes on any further, we shall so thoroughly have destroyed the unifying force from among us, we shall have become each one of us so completely a separate entity, that the whole will be an amorphous heap, like sand, sterile, hopeless, useless, like a dead tree. This is true, and it is so great a danger, that one almost goes mad facing it. That is why I almost went away out of the country: I may still have to go: because in myself I can never agree to the complete disintegration, never stand witness to it, never. Then the Prussian rule. The Prussian rule would be an external evil. The disintegrating process of the war has become an internal evil, so vast as to be almost unthinkable, so nearly overwhelming us, that we stand on the very brink of oblivion. Better anything than the utter disintegration. And it is England who is the determining factor for Europe: if England goes, then Europe goes: for we are at this time the vital core of the whole organism. Let the leaves perish, but let the tree stand, living and bare. For the tree, the living organismof the soul of Europe is good, only the external forms and growths are bad. Let all the leaves fall, and many branches. But the quick of the tree must not perish. There are un­ revealed buds which can come forward into another epoch of civilisation, if only we can shed this dead form and be strong in the spirit of love and creation. d. h. La w r e n c e : Letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 2nd November, 1915.

Routledge Revivals

Herbert Read

As a poet and critic of art and literature, and as a social and political philosopher, Sir Herbert Read exerted an important influence on the culture of his time. Not only did he assist and inspire many writers and artists, but through his work for the idea of ‘education through art’, he greatly influenced education, in particular the teaching of art and literature in schools. For this symposium, first issued in 1969 as the ninth number of The Malahat Review, University of Victoria, Professor Skelton gathered together original essays, poems and drawings which illustrate many still relevant aspects of Sir Herbert Read’s life and work.

Herbert Read A Memorial Symposium

Edited by Robin Skelton

First published in 1970 by Methuen & Co. This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1968 The Malahat Review All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 79479937 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

13: 13: 13: 13:

978-1-138-91486-5 (hbk) 978-1-315-69059-9 (ebk) 978-1-138-91407-0 (Set) 978-1-315-69097-1 (Set) (ebk)

JACOB KRAMER

: The Toung Herbert Read

Herbert Read A MEMORIAL

SYMPOSIUM

Edited by

ROBIN S K E L T O N

M E T H U E N & CO LTD II

NEW

FETTER

LANE

• LONDON

EC4

First issued as the J a n u a r y 196g number of The Aialahat Review, An International Quarterly of Life and Letters, published by the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. This edition first published in 1970 by Methuen & Co Ltd, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4. © 1968 by The Malahat Review Text printed offset in Great Britain by T h e Camelot Press Ltd, London and Southampton Illustrations printed by W. & J . Mackay & Co Ltd, C h a t h a m SBN 4 1 6 15120 5

Distributed in the U.S.A. by Barnes & Noble Inc.

CONTENTS Frontispiece : The Young Herbert Read

JACOB KRAMER

7 Preface PASMORE

8

Point & Contact No.

GEORGE BARKER

9

Whipmawhopmagate

DENISE LEVERTOV

10

Herbert Read: A Memoir

MICHAEL HAMBURGER

14

Herbert Read: Instead of an Elegy

GROPius

27

On Herbert Read

HENRY MOORE

31

A Tribute

HENRY MOORE

32

Four Drawings

HERBERT READ

37

The Limits of Permissiveness in Art

BEN NICHOLSON

51

A Tribute

BEN NICHOLSON

52

Two Etchings and Two Drawings

SAM BLACK

57

Herbert Read: His Contribution to Art Education and to Education through Art

STEPHEN SPENDER

66

Four Sketches for Herbert Read

GEORGE WOODCOCK

68

The Philosopher of Freedom

HEPWORTH

88

Four Drawings

NORMAN NICHOLSON

93

The Borehole

VICTOR

WALTER

BARBARA

DENISE LEVERTOV

94 Craving

JJ,

ig6$

EDWARD DAHLBERG AND HERBERT READ

THOMAS

KiNSELLA

JOHN HOLLOWAY G. WILSON KNIGHT KATHLEEN RAINE

95 An Exchange of Letters Edited by Reginald C. Terry 127 Drowsing Over the Arabian Nights 128 Flower of the Mountain 130 Herbert Read and Byron 135 Herbert Read as a Literary Critic

DONALD DAVIE

158

Emigrant, to the Receding Shore

ANTHONY KERRIGAN

610

The Green Child

ROBIN

SKELTON

161

The Poetry of Herbert Read

ROBIN

SKELTON

175 Song of Honour

ROY FULLER BONAMY DOBREE AND HERBERT READ

ROLAND PENROSE HOWARD GERWING

176

The Final War

178 Beauty—Or the Beast ? A Conversation in a Tavern 187 Herbert Read 192 A Checklist of the Herbert Read Archive in the McPherson Library of the University of Victoria 259

Notes on Contributors

Preface No SINGLE BOOK could pay adequate tribute to the many ways in which Sir Herbert Read vitalized the culture of his time, and no one symposium could represent more than a very few of the many writers and artists whom he encouraged, assisted and inspired. He confessed, in an essay published in Twentieth Century shortly before his death, " . . . in dissipating my talents in half-a-dozen fields I have made it difficult for my contemporaries to recognize the underlying unity of my purpose and my practice. I am left with the hope that someday someone will take the trouble to trace 'the figure in the carpet5." The following pages cannot pretend to do more than begin the study he wished for and deserves; they are simply an attempt by one of many who profited from his advice and encouragement at a time when advice and encouragement were most needed to gather together a selection of essays, poems, and pictures which may indicate a few of those qualities of his life and work which made him one of the truly great men of our civilization. They are also an attempt to say thank you. In editing this symposium I have been greatly assisted by many people. I must thank, first of all, Lady Read and Mr. Benedict Read for their kindness, generosity, and advice during a difficult and distressful time. I must also thank Liam Miller, Peter Kahn, and Donald Harvey for making a number of useful suggestions, and Mr. Harold Billings for his assistance with the Edward Dahlberg correspondence. Most of all, however, I would like to express my gratitude to the contributors who, on receiving my invitation, dropped all other work in order to provide me as soon as possible with the material I desired. No editor can have been less disturbed by the rapid approach of his deadline. Mr. Howard Gerwing demands special thanks. He has, in the middle of an extremely busy life, contrived to produce an enormous body of work in an exceedingly short time ; he has accomplished this by working hours which would have felled a lesser man. Finally, I must thank the University of Victoria Publications Committee which made a special grant to The Malahat Review in order to make the creation of this symposium possible. R.S.

7

VICTOR PASMORE:

Point & Contact No. 3. 1965.

GEORGE BARKER

Whipmawhopmagate (In memory of Herbert Read) I walked down Whipmawhopmagate one morning in the winter ("The death of man stands up inside him like a heron in water.") I saw an old friend staring into the rain that ran in the gutter : ("Death is a hole in the ground, my dear. I am the dirty water.55) I thought to speak, but I could feel the cancer in his throat. He turned and, lifting his hand, walked up through Whipmawhopmagate. There is a silence we hear when the lonely heron cries : the silence that falls when death itself mourns what dies.

9

Denise Levertov

HERBERT READ: A MEMOIR

• M . HAD BEGUN TO READ some of Herbert Read's books on art when I was 14 or 15; then his poems, and perhaps The Green Child, though that may have been a little later. So that, in 1939, when I was 16, and the ballet school at which I was a fulltime student was evacuated to Seer Green, Buckinghamshire, it was tremendously exciting to find that the Reads lived at the next house up the road. My first visit there, with some other ballet students, was, I think, part of an expedition to sell tickets for our first local recital. I said not a word, but used every minute to scan the wonderful paintings — one was a Miro, I recall — and the bookshelves, which, even though I had grown up in a house full of books, were the most enticing I had ever seen. Before long Mrs. Read was kindly filling in as class accompanist when the regular pianist was ill; and I believe she once played for one of our recitals. I seized every opportunity to be the bearer of messages from my teacher to Mrs. Read, in order to return to that magical house, thatched with Norfolk Reeds, in which the world of contemporary art and poetry, which I already dreamed of entering (as a painter as well as a writer, in those ambitious days — yes, and a ballerina as well, though I never really believed that part would come true). Sometimes Mr. Read would appear, and I would gaze at him, my hero, so intensely that it must have embarrassed him had he not been too modest to notice it. At least once the senior students — five or six of us — were invited to dinner at the Reads, which gave me the chance to go upstairs to wash, and peer at more paintings and sculptures, more beautifully arranged, brightbacked books. But I 10

never, during that whole year, had courage to say to Herbert Read, "I draw and paint and write poems and I've read your books and I long to talk with you." I remember one day in the summer of 1940, during the "Battle of Britain" when sudden explosions of white cloud in the blue skies would reveal the reality of a war that still didn't seem quite real : a day when the ballet school gave a garden party to mark the opening of an art exhibition in our dance studio. The artist was a child prodigy, Plato Chan, who with his mother and sister was a member of the strange assemblage of dancers, evacuees, refugees, Russian exiles, and misfits that formed our household; and Herbert Read had consented to give a short speech on the exhibit. After he'd done so, I escaped from the crowded room filled with local gentry. But the garden was full of them too. Shy and lonely, and imagining Mr. Read to be somewhere among them having a brilliant conversation I wished I were privileged to overhear, I retreated to the garden's furthest edge and slipped behind the tall hedge to be by myself and moon over my poems — and who should I find there but Herbert Read himself, with his little boy, then about two. They were hiding ! He too had escaped! I'll never forget the guilty, embarrassed look he gave me. I fled, with a startled "Sorry!" — and said nothing when, back in the crowd, with a tray of glasses thrust into my hand to pass round, I heard people chattering, "Where is Herbert? Where can Mr. Read be?" . . . I was happy in my sense of complicity. That fall, when the bombing began, I went back to London to be with my parents, and I did not see him again for several years. But when I was 18 I wrote to him, sending some poems and asking for criticism. He wrote back encouraging me, giving quite detailed comments, and gently reproving me for never having spoken to him when I was his neighbour. Thereafter for three or four years I would send my work to him about every six or eight months, never failing to receive an encouraging but helpfully critical reply. Isolated as I was at that time — in the first two years especially — such letters from a man I so respected and admired were of inestimable value to me. (For years I kept them all safely throughout my many moves and travels; alas, it is now a long time since I have been able to find them — but I don't believe they are really lost: I expect to rediscover them some day. ) And meanwhile poems of his — Cranach and The Sorrows of Unicume for instance—were working in me in deep, still unacknowledged ways. When my first book, The Double 11

Image, was published by Cresset Press, in 1946, I dedicated it to Herbert, to John Hay ward (who had, as reader for Cresset, accepted the book for publication) and to Charles Wrey Gardiner (who was then editing Poetry Quarterly, the first magazine in which my work was printed). At some point in the ig40 J s I introduced Gardiner to Herbert's romance, The Green Child, which was then out of print, and suggested that his Grey Walls Press bring out a new edition of it. ( Grey Walls Press being long since defunct, I suppose this edition also has now become rare.) This was the only opportunity I ever had to do something for Herbert in return for all his unfailing kindnesses to me — which included, in 1945, writing a reference for me to get a job in a bookstore (where, being incapable of making correct change, I was an abysmal failure) and, a decade later, recommending me for a Guggenheim Fellowship. After I came to America in 1948 I saw Herbert occasionally on his visits here to read and lecture. He never forgot to have me invited to parties and receptions given for him in New York — and always on these loud, crowded occasions I was reminded of that moment of stumbling upon him hiding behind the hedge at Seer Green, for the guest of honour obviously shrank from being lionized and seemed to long to be invisible. On one such occasion he said to my husband that he believed he had made a crucial mistake at some point in his life, that he never should have let himself become a "public figure," that he would have been a great deal happier raising sheep in Yorkshire or even in Australia, writing more poetry and fiction and less criticism. The very last time I saw him, at Bill Bueno's house in Middletown, Connecticut, during one of his two or more long visits to Wesleyan University, I was deeply saddened by his evident weariness and illness and that sense he had, despite all his achievements, of unfulfilment as an artist. Yet his gentleness, and his enthusiasm and concern for the work of others, were untinged with bitterness. Here is the text of his very last letter to me; even though I feel some embarrassment at making public his praise of my poems, I want to show, in tribute to him, that gentleness of his, that integrity and simplicity so characteristic of him : Stonegrave, York, 16.iv.67 Dear Denise: Thank you very much for 'The Sorrow Dance' — I've told you again and again how much I like your poetry and this new volume does not disappoint me — indeed, it is better than ever. I like what I 12

would call the objective poems better than the 'didactic' ones — how difficult it is to write about 'events' rather than perceptions. But most of your poems are visual in the sense I mean, the images so clearly seen. The 'Olga Poems' are very moving. Your letter must have arrived near to the day (April 4) that Sophie had her second baby, here in Stonegrave. She is living in Liverpool now, where her husband Nick is studying architecture. Her first child, Eliza, is now an enchanting girl of eighteen months, very lively and intelligent. I, alas, have been in and out of hospital and am still not quite better. I went to Portugal in search of sun and warmth, but it was just as cold as Yorkshire. It is lovely here now, thousands of daffodils and all the trees beginning to show their fresh green leaves. Our second son, Piers, is coming to New York in September on a Harkness Fellowship and will be in the States for 2 years. He has decided to get married first and will bring his bride (18!) with him. He is to take Frank MacShane's course in Creative Writing at Columbia as a beginning. I hope you will see something of him. We all send our love — Herbert. Finally, I would like to quote these words of his, copied into my notebook in 1942: It is only an unintelligent and superficial realism that demands of the artist a mechanical reflection of the objects which lie in his field of vision, Nor is it much more intelligent to restrict the artist to what is called an interpretation of those objects — the running commentary of the impressionistic journalist. What history demands in its long run, is the object itself — the work of art which is itself a created reality, an addition to the sum of real objects in the world. That definition — the work of art as an addition to the sum of real objects in the world — gave me, at eighteen, floundering in the beginnings of my life as an artist, a ground to stand on, a measure to try and fill. I think there was much experience that came to me later that I would not have been ready for if I had not then taken those words into my life. Herbert Read was a wonderful friend to me for nearly 30 years. I shall miss him always.

13

Michael Hamburger

HERBERT READ: INSTEAD OF AN ELEGY

I

LIKE YOUR LINES ABOUT HIM," Herbert

Read wrote to me on November 15, 1943, "but I think it is frightfully difficult to be successfully elegiac. I mean that the very consciousness of the attitude or expression is somehow false. I feel this even about a poem like 'Adonais'." Herbert Read was commenting on a poem I had written for Sidney Keyes, who had been reported missing in North Africa and — as the same letter confirmed — almost certainly killed. I took the indirect stricture to heart and never published the poem. Now that Herbert Read is dead I shall take his advice again, though no elegy I might write for him could be quite as inadequate as those early conventional lines, written for someone whom I liked and respected as a poet but had known only briefly as a friend, for a term or two at Oxford. For more than a quarter of a century Herbert Read was a friend to me, and the words quoted are an example of the special kind of friendship he was generous enough to give a writer more than thirty years younger than himself. I don't remember exactly how it came about that I got to know him when I was only seventeen. His earliest letter to me, of December 1941, suggests that I approached him at that time, sending him a poem. Possibly we had already met, either at Oxford or in London. What his letters bring home to me now is how much I owe to his advice and criticism in those early years. It is characteristic of the man, and of the role he adopted toward me, that his letters reveal more about my preoccupations over the years than of his. Herbert Read was 14

shy, gentle and reticent; but he was also unassuming to the point of self-effacement. That is why he could take on young people like me without expecting any sort of allegiance, let alone idolatry or adulation. As he knew well enough, my supreme idol in those early years was T. S. Eliot, whose very remoteness as a person made him a better object of idolatry; but Herbert Read himself was devoted to Eliot and never tried to assert any kind of authority that might have counteracted the other. For the same reason there was never any need for me to revolt against Herbert Read's guidance, as I had to revolt against Eliot's authority before I could begin to be myself; and the simple human affection which I felt for Herbert Read from the first could grow without strain or disturbance. Yet the record presented here instead of an elegy is a record of Herbert Read's unselfishness in a thankless task — almost inevitably thankless, because I was simply not able to help Herbert Read in the way he helped me; not, at least, until the last years of our friendship, and no letter records the meeting at which our roles, for once, were reversed, and Herbert Read broke his reticence to tell me about the harrowing stresses and frustrations in his life. It was then that I urged him to reduce his public and professional commitments before it was too late, and to return to the kind of work which I had always considered his true vocation — the work that included his poetry, his novel The Green Child, the autobiographical Annals of Innocence and Experience, essays on literature like those in his early book The Sense of Glory, and some of his writings on anarchosyndicalism. Only his illness forced him into the partial retirement which he had desperately needed ever since his middle years, but thought he could not afford. It may have come too late, after all. For a long time I took his kindness too much for granted; perhaps all the time, since it was the shock of his death that made me re-read his letters and discover the extent of his self-effacing furtherance of my work. If this sounds like conventional piety, as false as the elegiac sort, I must be specific here and confess a real sin of omission. It was Herbert Read who did more than anyone to bring about the publication of my Hõlderlin: Poems and Fragments, a translation whose progress he had followed and encouraged since the beginning of our association. I cannot understand what made me dedicate the book not to him but to the memory of Arthur Waley, a man I had never met or corresponded with. Was it a ghostly residue of Eliot's "doctrine of impersonality" haunting me 15

still? A temporary absence of mind or heart? A perverse kind of tribute to the unselfishness of Herbert Read's motives? Whatever the cause, I was taking his help for granted, long after I had learnt that his readiness to be bothered has always been rare among writers, and is becoming still rarer than it used to be. In his own quiet and uncomplaining way, Herbert Read was yet another victim of the philistinism that punishes British poets with more neglect and indifference than most of them can bear, while insidiously tempting each to become "somebody," which means almost anybody rather than a poet. Herbert Read preserved his innocence and his romanticism, but those very qualities proved detrimental to some of the activities — such as art criticism, sociology and psychology — into which he was led by genuine enthusiasms, only to find himself trapped in a variety of institutionalized functions. The elegy which I cannot and will not write was written by himself — in the form of a tribute to Hõlderlin, the same poet who presided over our friendship, linking Herbert Read's first letters to his last. It is the poem A Gift for Scardanelli, from Herbert Read's Moon Farm: . . . The clouds are unanchored : they might fall from the sky to cover you I have brought you a basket of figs and some fine linen but alas no white goat to slaughter and fingers have faltered that should have played the flute. I wish I could be sure what poem I sent to Herbert Read in November or December 1941, buí I should think it was the persona poem Holderlin, which was also the first poem I ever published. Herbert Read wrote: "I like it very much. I would like to read it again & perhaps I could say something more critical about it when we meet." His letter was from his office at Routledge, but he gave me his home address in Buckinghamshire and suggested a meeting in London. Our earliest meetings were over tea at Yarners, near Broadcasting House, and I remember our being joined there on one occasion by George Orwell, whose gaunt appearance and forthright manner impressed me, though I scarcely knew his work at the time. During those war years, too, Herbert Read once came to my mother's house, where I was still living when on vacation from Ox16

ford or on army leave, to look at a collection of ancient glass phials and jars — Phoenician, he said — that had belonged to my grandfather. The visit stands out not only because it was an instance of Herbert Read's extraordinary kindness — such glassware, it turned out, was fairly common and of little archeological interest to an expert — but because I recall only one later meeting on either's home ground, in the flat which the Reads occupied in London for a time. Most of our later meetings were over lunch at his London club — where he introduced me to tripe and onions, a plain demotic dish as incongruous with the menu of the Reform Club, even in war-time conditions, as Herbert Read himself with London club society. From time to time we met in other people's homes or in wholly public places like the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1964 I was to stay with Herbert Read in Yorkshire, but the lecture that was taking me to York was postponed, and the new date clashed with an engagement of his elsewhere. Of our meetings all I can say is that every one of them was a delight, since he bridged the thirty years' gap between us without effort or condescension. He never seemed bored or moody, though he had the habit of suddenly absenting himself inwardly from indifferent social gatherings. When there were silences between us, tb^y were as congenial to me, and as relaxed, as our conversation. Herbert Read's letters of 1942 are mainly concerned with my early Hõlderlin versions, which he read in typescript but was unable to accept for Routledge, and with a surrealist fantasy by my friend John Symonds which I had also sent him. (John Symonds's The Shaven Head — a prose poem rather than a novel — was declined "chiefly because of its awkward length," and it has never been published. My Hõlderlin versions were published in 1943 by Tambimuttu's Editions Poetry London.) In February of that year I invited Herbert Read to address the English Club at Oxford, but he replied : "I only manage to get through my work by a strict rationing of such obligations, & I am afraid I have more than enough for the next six months." I was too young and inexperienced to realize that he had more than enough for the next six years, or sixteen years; but the more I saw of him the better I understood that business and busy-ness were his chronic affliction. "I am really sorry to have missed you this time," he wrote in April, "but I have been so overwhelmed with work and business. I have to address two con17

ferences next week, & have had to prepare the lectures, in addition to my usual work. And all kinds of engagements in town. "I am returning your Hõlderlin translations, after reading them again. I like them very m u c h — they don't read at all 'literally,' but at the same time they give such an exact rendering of the form and tone of the poems. I wish I could be more optimistic about publication, but I don't see much chance as long as the present conditions continue. But I think that when publication does become possible, you ought to make a substantial volume — a long introduction and all the best poems. . . . I hope you will write about Blake. I would like to see a fresh point of view on a poet I am so devoted to." The really substantial volume had to wait another twenty-five years or so, and it was published by Routledge when Herbert Read had already left the firm. The long introduction, on the other hand, got written in time for the 1943 edition, packed with all my youthful pseudo-learning and miscellaneous references to almost any other writer who preoccupied me at the time, including Blake. That introduction had to be scrapped for later editions, and I was never able to replace it. By October 1942 I must have begun to feel uneasy about burdening Herbert Read with my work and letters, but his answer was characteristically generous: "The apology should be mine, for neglecting your letter. But you know how busy I am, & you must never feel conscious-stricken if I seem indifferent. I am always glad to hear from you and wish I could find time to see more of you. "I have read the poems with real interest, & do not find anything for definite criticism — But that rather implies, & it is true, that their virtues are rather negative. If only there were more lines like 'To the soft tyranny of drums,' — that gave me the authentic thrill. But mostly I find just the clever twist of rhetoric. It interests me, but it does not move me. The Hõlderlin poem is surely the best. "I am being honest with you, because that is my way of encouraging you. I don't want to dismiss you with conventional praise — I want you to press on, & to show me more of your work in the future . . . " No one could have done more for me than that. The "clever twist of rhetoric" was not to be expunged for a long time, because ideas remained more real to me than people, places and things. I could not act on Herbert Read's advice until that had changed — and it 18

was a matter of learning to live, rather than to write. Yet at least I knew what was needed — thanks to that letter, and another, of April 15, 1943: "The relatively leisurely intervals of a conference at Oxford give me a chance to catch up with my correspondence. I have, since I got your letter, read the poems three or four times. 'Profane Dying' is an ambitious & on the whole successful effort. I think it is rhetorical rather than poetic — a distinction I am always in the habit of making. The images are apt, the expression forceful : but not essentially poetic. But this does not mean that it is not worth writing. Fine rhetoric, indeed, is an art we don't sufficiently practice these days & perhaps we have lost the tradition. It demands a high degree of technical 'finish' & in this respect I think your poem falls short. The rhythm is occasionally too staccato & there are awkward compressions and ellipses. But the force of the poem wins through." It wasn't Herbert Read's fault that I took this response to be ultimately favourable. My principle in later years was to ignore all favourable comments on my work and make what use I could of the unfavourable. What I took to be his approval in this case made me publish that poem sequence — written at fever heat while I was waiting in London for my call-up, over several days and nights of such intense absorption that I refused to talk to anyone and had to have food brought up to my room — only to freeze with embarrassment every time I was confronted with the printed text. Yet the point about rhetoric did sink in, leaving an irritation that made me look for a remedy. In November Herbert Read wrote again to praise the Hõlderlin book and comment on the elegy for Sidney Keyes. By then I had almost finished my infantry training in the same regiment, the Royal West Kent, in which Keyes had served, and Herbert Read expressed the hope that I wasn't having too bad a time. We met again once or twice when I was on leave in London; but my first literary — too literary — phase was over, and for many years I struggled to come to terms with experiences that made all I had written seem worthless. I must have said or written as much to Herbert Read, who tried to reassure me in a letter of March 1945. That year a poem of mine was published as a pamphlet without my knowledge, with a mangled text and a largely fictitious "biographical" introduction. I was serving in Austria at the time and could do little about it. Herbert Read's advice helped me to get all but a few copies destroyed. In his letter of January 19, 1946, dealing 19

with this matter, he mentioned that he hoped to see me, but would "probably be in USA from mid-March to mid-May." I doubt that I saw him again until after my demobilization and return to England in the summer of 1947. The following year, on July 12, he wrote about a new batch of poems I had sent him, telling me that he had been travelling a great deal since receiving them ("USA and twice Paris"). Again he found a "lack of essentially poetic expression" in the poems, and I agree with him in retrospect, though I could not take his advice to try drama. "I feel you need a dramatic myth to give pregnancy to what you have to say," he commented; but after my early persona poems I was trying to get away from myths and fictions of every kind, reacting too strongly towards a prosy literalness. "I am glad you found the Adelphi article of interest," he added in one of his rare references to his own work. "Now that even Middleton Murry has given up pacifism, I feel very lonely." My long absence from London and the anti-romanticism induced by my army life, or by the impact of what I saw in Italy and Austria, must have caused a temporary estrangement between us. I notice that in his letters of 1948 and 1950 he reverted to the address "Dear M.H.," after the "Dear Michael" of earlier letters. Something of the kind is also suggested by a note of January 24, 1948: "I am always glad to hear from you & I don't want to lose touch with you or your work. So please don't feel that you are being a nuisance. If I lived in London I would try to be more social, but my few days every week are taken up with 'business' of various kinds. I shall hope to see you occasionally & to hear what you are doing." We never lost touch, but I sent him no more poems for criticism. Though I was still far from being satisfied with my work I no longer believed that anyone else could help me to make it better. It was not a question of this word or that, this line or that, but of finding a modus vivendi between the poet and the anti-poet in myself. In 1950 I added to Herbert Read's too many commitments once more by asking him to see a refugee German poet, Peter Hõfler, who wrote under the name of Jesse Thoor. The desperate financial situation of this extraordinary poet, whose posthumous work I was to edit a decade later, was perpetuated by his absolute refusal to do anything only for money and by a state of mind close to paranoia. Hõfler also went to see T. S. Eliot at Fabers to present him with a 20

symbolic golden flower he had made and ask Eliot to provide him with a ship, so that he could spend the rest of his life at a healthy distance from the civilization he had come to loathe. He never managed to see Eliot. Herbert Read wrote on April 24: "I will see Peter Hõfler, but I have not much hope of being able to help him. I see so many of these refugees & it is always the same hopeless outlook. If he is a good silversmith, it should be possible to make a position for himself. The Clerk to the Goldsmiths' Company might help . . . " I have forgotten whether the meeting took place. Even if it did, it can only have ended in a total misunderstanding. What Peter Hõfler wanted was a gesture of recognition, not a recommendation to the Goldsmiths' Company or commissions which he would not have accepted in any case, preferring to live on horse meat and give away the jewels and ornaments which he made. The tragic irony of it was that Hõfler, a self-educated visionary who had lived either as a vagrant or by his various manual skills, came as close as any poet alive at that time to embodying Herbert Read's ideas about "the grass roots of art" and his anarcho-syndicalist theories generally; and even outwardly he bore a striking resemblance to William Blake. Two years later, after a coronary thrombosis, Hõfler bought a oneway ticket to Austria, climbed a mountain, collapsed and died. My elegy for Hõfler, A Wreath of Thistles, appeared in a book of mine which Herbert Read accepted for Routledge. That was one elegy which I could not help writing, since it bore witness to an extreme and hidden agony. By this time Herbert Read had moved from Broom House, near Beaconsfield, to Stonegrave House in Yorkshire. After 1952 our relations became cordial once more. In that year he advised the Bollingen Foundation on a project, their Hofmannsthal edition, in which I had some part as a translator at the time, together with Stephen Spender. After long delays and complications I took over the editing of the two projected volumes of poems and plays, to be published by Routledge in England. In 1955 Herbert Read was also instrumental in getting Routledge ^to accept a book of my essays and my third collection of poems. He had also tried to get them to publish an enlarged and revised edition of my Hõlderlin translations, which another firm brought out in 1952. Most of our correspondence of those years was confined to those matters. In 1955 I reviewed Herbert Read's Moon Farm, showing a preference for those poems in which he presented images rather than arguments. He thanked 21

me for the review and commented: "It is very perceptive, and I agree with you (and not the general public) in the estimate of the relative merit of the two kinds of verse which I write." He had probably forgotten that it was he who had made me wary of rhetoric and cogitation in verse. On January 25, 1961 Herbert thanked me for sending him the Penguin Hòlderlin : "I had been looking for it on the bookstalls. He is the one poet I return to again & again, and my German being so imperfect, I need just this kind of edition . . . I wish I could see you occasionally, but it is my fault for being so inaccessible.55 In September of the following year I wrote to tell him how much I liked his essay What is the left to say? in Encounter. The diffidence and vulnerability to criticism that beset him in his later years were distressingly evident in his reply: "I had been rather shy of the appearance of that Encounter article — they have had it for more than 12 months & I thought there must be something wrong with it. It is good to be reassured by you. "I am glad that you like Ned 05G.5s poems. They have been badly received — very few reviews & not a single good one. I thought that there must be something wrong with the judgment of Kathleen Raine & myself, who recommended them to Hamish Hamilton. I have just returned from 5 weeks5 absence & have to go to Washington on October 20 for the National Poetry Festival, at which I am 'the voice from abroad.5 Not an easy assignment.55 The same number of Encounter contained a contribution by me. Four days after that letter, on September 28, Herbert wrote again: "You must have thought (me) very self-centred not to have mentioned your article on Nietzsche when you had been so kind about my piece in Encounter. The truth is, I did not look into the magazine until last night, when I read and was quite absorbed by your essay. I was, as you know, a Nietzschean in my time, one of the circle around Orage. If only we had known how the Master had been betrayed by those nearest to him we might have remained more faithful!55 I never thought Herbert Read self-centred — and his accidental omission of the "me55 in that context bears me out — but wished he had been more so, if that had meant more securely centred in himself. Yet his dependence on the judgments of others was inseparable from his fatalism and his humility. "My life has been guided by chance,55 he wrote in the same Encounter essay, "and that I accept 22

as a natural condition. The people I tend to dislike are those who have successfully planned their careers: there is no conflict or contradiction in them because they have imposed a human ideal (of logic, of purpose, of consistency) on the divine irresponsibility." That is a poet's creed, a reaffirmation of Keats's "negative capability" ; and in his best work Herbert Read was open to this "divine irresponsibility." That year I had to find a new publisher for my next book of poems. Herbert Read wrote in July: "I am sorry about this. Routledge has a habit of dropping an author just at the moment he is about to make good. It has happened so many times that I have become cynical about it. But it does the author no harm . . . I could fight for your retention, but in such cases a victory leaves unhealing wounds. So you had better go, for your sake. "But I should be glad if you could exclude the Hõlderlin volume from any transfer of options. This is something I have worked on behind the scenes, as you know, and I would like to keep it under my wing . . . " One way in which Herbert continued to work for it, even after leaving Routledge, was by sponsoring me for the Bollingen Foundation Fellowship which enabled me to complete what I hoped was my definitive selection and rendering. His wish was fulfilled, though his wing was no longer visibly over the book by the time it appeared — all the more reason for me to have acknowledged it by dedicating the book to him. That same year I decided to try to live as a writer once more, after twelve years of university teaching. "I believe (or hope) you are wise to seek freedom," Herbert wrote on August 8. "I feel like a new man (at 70!) since I left Routledge. I wish now I had broken away long ago. As for London, I share your views and never want to go near the place again." My projected visit to Stonegrave that autumn fell through. "I am spending the weekend with Henry Moore," Herbert wrote on October 1, "collecting information for a book on him (biography) which I have to write, & for various reasons I can't change the date. It is a great disappointment to me, and one more reason why I should dislike politics. "I've been to Germany (Berlin, Kassel) for a fortnight — a congress of poets in Berlin, but no evidence of any poetry. Ingeborg Bachmann, whom I had hoped to meet, did not turn up. I met 23

Günter Grass & rather liked him — perhaps I will make another attempt to read his books, which hitherto have defeated me." Our last meeting, over lunch at his London club, must have taken place before his retirement from Routledge, since it was then that I begged him to give up some of his many functions and commitments; but my unchronological memory tells me only that it began like earlier meetings, with Herbert as a quietly attentive adviser, before taking the turn I have mentioned. My only regret is that this did not happen sooner, and that we never met again. It had taken me too long to grow up and understand that being a father — literary or otherwise — is at least as hard as being a son. In 1966, before leaving for America, I received this answer to a letter I had written Herbert about his recollections of T. S. Eliot: "Thank you for writing about my T.S.E. Memoir. I am glad Wesleyan sent you a copy & that you enjoyed it. I did not know you had been to Wesleyan — we enjoyed our two visits there very much. I went to Mount Holyoke once to give a lecture & it seemed a very pleasant college. You should be happy there . . . "I come to London as little as possible. I find it very exhausting. But I would like to see you again & will let you know when there is an opportunity. I am very sorry I missed you when you came to York, but I hope you will come again & then you must stay with us. I see a little of the University & they were kind enough to give me one of their first honorary degrees. "I always read your poems and reviews with pleasure when I come across them & hope you will always keep me in touch with your published work." I did so, and he read it carefully enough to point out one of two technical errors in Holderlin: Poems and Fragments so serious that part of the edition had to be withdrawn and reset. His wing was over me almost to the end, for it was in his letter of February 26, 1967 that he did me this service. On January 23 he had written: "An advance copy of your noble Holderlin volume reached me this morning, & I rejoice to see the fruition of so many years of labour. I shall spend many happy hours with your book, especially in my present invalidish state, which has reduced my extravert activities to a minimum..." Alarmed by this reference to his illness, of which I knew nothing, I wrote to ask him what it was. His reply gives precedence to the errors in the book. It continues: "You ask what is wrong with me, 24

so I will tell you — cancer of the tongue. It is accessible & therefore can be effectively treated, but I have had three separate manifestations. But at the moment it seems to be under control & I feel well enough. I hope to go to Portugal for a holiday in about four weeks' time. "I am sorry you have had such an exhausting time. I did too much at your age & can only advise moderation. "If you come this way we would love to see you, at any time — there is always room for a guest or two. Yours affectionately, Herbert" That was his last letter to me. If I wrote again, as I think I did, offering to take up his invitation, he did not reply; and I was halfreluctant, in any case, to intrude on him now that his illness had given him something like the leisure which he ought to have enjoyed throughout his active life. Yet I am sure that his illness did not change him, that he remained stoical and unselfish to the end. As late as 1962 he had written to me: "I no longer understand poetic standards in this country. But I did enjoy an article by an unknown (to me) person called Falck in The Review — do you know anything about him?" I was able to tell him something about Colin Falck, and he returned to this in a later letter. Sketchy and faint though it is, this record may have the negative merit of not falsifying that side of Herbert Read which he chose to reveal in letters to one of many friends. His more essential self should be looked for in his works. For the greater part of his life Herbert Read was a neglected and misunderstood writer. His public honours were awarded to the public man he became out of a mixture of excessive modesty and a fatalism rooted in the trauma of his experiences in the First World War. The essential Herbert Read could have been honoured only by a realization of his vision, or at least by the kind of sympathy and concern with which he responded to the works of other men. If I had presumed to write an elegy for him, it would have had to be as unassertive as the best of his own poems, with the quiet strength often concealed by his outward faltering; as unassertive, too, as the man whose tragedy was of the distinctly modern kind recognized long ago by Hõlderlin, when he wrote in 1801: "For this is tragic among us, that we leave the realm of the living quite 25

calmly, packed into a container, not that devoured by flames we atone for the flame which we could not master." Holderlin went on to write that this modern predicament was "less imposing, but deeper" than that of the ancient tragic heroes ; and that noble souls confronted with it will "persevere in the teeth of exasperation." Herbert Read was often exasperated and often isolated; but the constancy of his affections is one instance of his power to persevere.

26

Walter Gropius

ON HERBERT READ

o

F THE MANY BOOKS Herbert Read has written, his Education Through Art (Faber & Faber, London, 1943) has left the most lasting impressions on me. When I left Hitler Germany in 1934 and settled for a new life in London, I found in Read a kindred soul who was wide open to the problems of art and architecture which had occupied my life. My attempts to bring my longing for a reunification of the arts to a practical test in the Bauhaus had found his vital interest. He later told me that our exchange about the basic educational problems to be solved had fortified his decision to venture into a major study of creative education for children. He became deeply absorbed in a vast amount of literature on art education, psychology and other behavioral sciences, from Plato to Freud, the result of which was the thesis for his book, That Art Should Be the Basis of Education. I have come to believe that this book is of fundamental importance for the future education of man and his relation to society. The evidence offered by Read for his thesis is overwhelming, of scientific weight and accuracy. In it he stands up with rare vigour and resoluteness to fight the inertia, "the universal sense of insensibility" of our society, charging that "the secret of our collective ills is to be traced to the suppression of spontaneous creative abilities in the individual." Overcoming his Puritan heritage and its frustrations which clip the wings of artistic impulses, Read envisages the possibility of a new way of life, of which "love is the tempering flame." He thinks that "art should so dominate our lives that we might say: there are no longer works of art but art only. For art is then the way of life." 27

He wonders why Plato's idea of the powerful influence of art has been misunderstood by generations and gives it a new convincing interpretation, namely, that Plato's aim had been: "to give the individual a concrete, sensuous awareness of the harmony and rhythm which enters into the constitution of all living bodies and plants, which is the formal basis of all works of art." With precise conceptual thinking, he then investigates the biological roots of human reactions and studies them in the child's uninhibited natural behaviour, being convinced that to do this is a fundamental necessity because "Society was no longer either ideally or practically based on natural law: its codes, stabilized from habits and conventions, became an end in themselves and the business of education was to subdue the untamed spirits, the 'unruliness' of young children, and to train them to conformity." Instead, he felt that creative education must counter conformity and imitation, a thought which all too slowly is just beginning to penetrate into today's educational blueprints, for "in the occupation with art lie the powerful means to educate independence and strength of character." In all stages of education, therefore, occupation with art must not be treated anymore as a dispensable luxury or a status symbol at the margin of teaching programs only, but should be put right into the centre of any educational plan from the nursery on up. This is a precondition for the flowering of the arts as a mighty equal to science and the economics of affluence. How to implement this idea for the most decisive part of human life, early childhood, has been painstakingly spelled out by Herbert Read, but first he states with passionate force what education should not be: "If we have no a priori notions of what art should be — if we realize that art is as various as human nature — then it is certain that a mode of aesthetic expression can be retained by every individual beyond the age of n and throughout and beyond the adolescent period in general — if we are prepared to sacrifice to some extent that exclusive devotion to the learning of logical modes of thought which characterizes our present system of education. The art of the child declines after the age of 11 because it is attacked from every direction — not merely squeezed out of the curriculum, but squeezed out of the mind by the logical activities which we call arithmetic and geometry, physics and chemistry, history and geography, and even literature as it is taught. The price we pay for this distortion of the adolescent mind is mounting u p : a civilization of 28

hideous objects and misshapen human beings, of sick minds and unhappy households, of divided societies and a world seized with destructive madness. We feed these processes of dissolution with our knowledge and science, with our inventions and discoveries, and our educational system tries to keep pace with the holocaust; but the creative activities which could heal the mind and make beautiful our environment, unite man with nature and nation with nation — these we dismiss as idle, irrelevant and inane." Read's own scope of a fundamental aesthetic education is marked out by these five points : (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

the preservation of the natural intensity of all modes of perception and sensation; the co-ordination of the various modes of perception and sensation with one another in relation to the environment; the expression of feeling in communicable form; the expression in communicable form of modes of mental experience which would otherwise remain partially or wholly unconscious. the expression of thought in required form.

Proceeding in his treatise, Read subdivides the technique of aesthetic education in distinctive aspects of visual, plastic, musical, verbal, and constructive education and elaborates on each. The system he proposes all throughout his book "has for its only object the integration of all biologically useful faculties in a single organic activity." To the all-important teacher, Read gives this advice: "To confer the gift of drawing we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task the whole life must cooperate. In this sense life itself is the only preparation for drawing. . . . Balance and symmetry, proportion and rhythm, are basic factors in experience : indeed, they are the only elements by means of which experience can be organized into persisting patterns, and it is of their nature that they imply grace, economy and efficiency. What feels right, works right; and the result, for the individual, is that heightening of the senses which is aesthetic enjoyment." If a teacher wants to promote such fruitful learning, he needs humility in view of the wonder of the child's growth, a patient devotion to generate a creative climate, "an atmosphere of spontaneity . . . the main and perhaps the only secret of successful teaching." I have come to believe myself that for the whole range of education 29

the capability of the teacher to stimulate the student is of paramount importance. A loving teacher who has the gift of motoric power to excite and stimulate his pupil can activate his initiative to explore and to discover. Then the student goes by himself into new ventures. I remember the story of a famed successful teacher in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He mostly abstained from criticizing his pupils but was always present in a state of excitement, shouting to them with a challenging voice: "Continuez, continuez." The learning process no doubt thrives better in laboratory-like surroundings than in the formal classroom. "It should always be remembered that the school is a workshop and not a museum, a center of creative activity and not an academy of learning." This article can offer a very general outline only of Read's ideas on education, while it does not even touch on the many other facets of his creative life. I hope it will persuade the reader to go back to the original book, the lesson of which I agree with him must be brought to realization lest "civilization loses its balance and topples over into social and spiritual chaos." In'his Annals of Innocence and Experience (1933), Read gives some lively glimpses into his childhood when he grew up happily on a farm but felt abysmally agonized when in school: "no wild animal from the Pampas imprisoned in a cage could have felt so hopelessly thwarted." Did his courageous fight for creative education subconsciously begin already here? In 1954 Read finally succeeded in establishing under the auspices of UNESCO an "International Society for Education through Art," which now has many branches throughout the world. Still — in order to summarize again his credo in education — he published in 1966 The Redemption of the Robot with the subtitle "My Encounter with Education through Art" (Trident Press, New York). In it he states: "This volume . . . constitutes my educational beliefs . . . it represents my life's work and is as clear and forceful as I can make it." The essence of this book is Read's most precious bequest.

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HENRY MOORE: A TRIBUTE I'VE KNOWN Herbert Read intimately for forty years. He was one of my oldest and very dearest friends. His death is a great sadness to me personally and a great loss to the world of literature and the world of art, not only in England but in countries all over the world where his books are read and his gentle influence felt. His work helped to change the whole situation for art in this country. For example his book Education through Art altered the whole balance of our educational system and showed younger people how important art should be in our lives. Indirecdy it certainly helped to produce the larger number of gifted artists who have made England count in the international scene. But quite apart from the effect of his books, he gave his time unstintedly, both at an official level and to individual artists in whom he saw promise. At a time when English art life was beset by provincial attitudes and a narrow small mindedness, he consistently promoted a philosophical world view. Yet as a fellow Yorkshireman I never failed to find in his character, and in his actions, the authentic ring of our native county. Herbert Read had a great impact on the world of art, but I believe *hat his most lasting achievement will be found to lie in his own creative writing, in his Collected Poems, in his novel The Green Child and in the account of his childhood in Yorkshire, which he called The Innocent Eye; these words will live, but on this very day of his death, what I feel most strongly is that I have lost a wonderful friend and beautiful human being.

From a B.B.C. broadcast June is, ig68

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HENRY MOORE

Four Drawings

i Sculpture in Setting, 1937. Coloured Chalk. 42 J/ 2 "x 1434". Collection : Mrs. Irina Moore. 11 F/z;¿ Figures in a Setting. 1937. Chalk and Watercolour. 14 5/8" x 21 J/2". Collection : Mrs. Irina Moore. m Two Forms: Drawing for Sculpture, 1937. I5"x 17^2". Chalk and Watercolour. Collection: Mrs. Irina Moore. iv Square Forms: Drawing for Stone Sculpture, 1936. 17 J/2" x 11". Chalk and Watercolour. Collection: Mrs. Irina Moore.

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Herbert Read

THE LIMITS OF PERMISSIVENESS IN ART

JL -His ESSAY will be concerned with recent developments in modern art (including literature, but excluding music, which I do not feel competent to deal with) —developments that in my opinion are excessive, that in my opinion exceed the limits that define the very concept of art. My intention is not in any sense reactionary. The great experimental artists of the modern period—Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian in painting; Brancusi, Arp, Moore, Lipchitz in sculpture; Proust, Pound, Eliot and Joyce in literature — these remain great artists, pioneers who have established a new basis for the fine arts. We might call this basis superrealism to distinguish it, not only from the nineteenth century of realism, but also more decisively from those so-called neo-realists who have reacted against the experimentalism of the modern period and now attempt to re-establish the older conventions. Modernism in art is a very complex phenomenon and our generalizations are more likely to obscure than illuminate it. But it must be affirmed that one principle, common to all the representative artists I have mentioned and to artists everywhere who are distinctively "modern," is fundamental and cannot be sacrificed without calling into question the whole movement. I would call this the principle of symbolism as distinct from the principle of realism. The modern artist claims that there is not one level of experience to be presented or re-presented in the work of art, but several, and that some of these levels are as important as, if not more important than, the imitation of phenomena from the outer world. Subjectivism is, of course, common to the whole romantic tradition in art; but what

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has been discovered or reaffirmed in our own time is that subjective images have their own laws of being, and can be adequately represented only by symbols. The word "symbol," as an American philosopher of art, Richard Bernheimer, has remarked, "is admittedly one of the most protean in the language. But however it is defined . . . it clearly suggests a mode of functioning different from that which we attribute to simple likenesses. Transcending the realm of mere visual similarities, all symbols tend to bring us into contact with realities otherwise partly or totally inaccessible."1 Such is the philosophic bedrock upon which the modern movement in art rests, and nothing that I am going to say will in any way call into question this basic principle. Movements in modern art, such as the Cubist movement, the Surrealist movement, or the Constructivist movement, are usually regarded as attempts by a group of artists to organize themselves to further their common interests. Since the aims of a movement are not always formulated in words, the bond may be no more than the practice of a certain style. Sometimes the movement is first defined and made conscious of itself by critics; sometimes, as in the Futurist and Surrealist movements, a manifesto is drawn up by the leaders of the movement, and adherents are invited to sign the manifesto and follow its precepts. In the case of the Surrealist movement the discipline was strict, resignations and excommunications were the order of the day. Edicts were issued whenever the social or political situation seemed to demand an expression of the group's solidarity. Movements in this strict sense did not survive the Second World War. In 1947 an attempt was made to reassemble the forces of Surrealism, but after one more manifestation it finally expired. The so-called movements that have followed — Action Painting in the United States, Pop Art and O p Art — have been pseudo movements, without stylistic unity, without manifestoes, without common action or association of any kind — the creation of journalists, anxious to find a label for phenomena they do not understand, even anxious to create an order where only confusion seems to exist. If one looks at a survey of the present scene, such as The Art of Our Time edited by Will Grohmann in 1966, one notices in the first place that there is no attempt to classify contemporary art according to stylistic categories: the survey is made country by 1

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The Nature of Representation: University Press, 1961, p. 4.

A Phénoménologieal

Enquiry.

New York

country, and within each country, artist by artist. If one then turns to the numerous and excellent illustrations in the volume, though these are again classified by country, no national characteristics can be detected. Instead there is a multiplicity of styles which cut across all frontiers, so that an extreme geometrical abstraction may be found in Great Britain, Venezuela, Italy or Japan and an extreme expressionistic abstraction in the United States, Spain, Germany and Argentina. But even these categories are meaningless, for there is nothing in common between the paintings in each category except a tendency towards one or other extreme of the formal spectrum. We must next observe that the extremes are, like the North and South Pole, sparsely inhabited: a Ben Nicholson, a Jesús Soto at one extreme, a Karel Appel or a Vedova at the other extreme. I do not imply that there is any identity of style even between Nicholson and Soto; much less between Appel and Vedova. They merely represent extremes in a spectrum that consists of an infinite gradation of individualistic styles. Even the "pop" artists, Rauschenberg or Kitaj, when seen in a survey of this kind, cease to have any distinctive style — they merge imperceptibly into styles we have been accustomed to call surrealist or abstract. The only quality all these painters of our time have in common is eccentricity, their apparently deliberate avoidance of stylistic unity. Each is an individual speaking a private language, and the total effect is a Babel. But the Babel is not cacophonous: the separate sounds merge into an overall harmony. Since this harmony is not stylistic we must seek some other definition of its total effect. The only common quality left in contemporary art is perceptual coherence. That is to say, however extreme the permissive freedom enjoyed by the artist, an instinctive visual balance seems to assert itself in his work: the muscular action of the painter's hand as it moves over the canvas automatically conforms to laws of perception. This automatic nature of this control is confirmed by the paintings executed by a chimpanzee some years ago under the direction of Dr. Desmond Morris at the London Zoo. I possess two of these paintings and they do not differ in essential characteristics from typical examples of American action painting. This does not imply that the American painters are comparable in their general abilities to chimpanzees, but when they allow their brushes to be guided by instinctive gestures (and they proudly admit that this is what they do) then in that moment they gesticulate in the same manner as the 39

chimpanzee. Of course, the chimpanzee cannot stretch and frame the canvas that has been presented to him : he cannot perform any of the ancillary activities that lead up to and follow the action of human painting. He cannot, for example, enter into a contract with an art dealer. But he can perform the gestures necessary to paint a picture of a certain kind, and the perceptual process ensures that this picture is organized into a significant pattern. A significant pattern — there we have a phrase that may give us a clue to the unity underlying the diversity of the art of our time. That every work of art possesses a pattern — even in spite of the desperate efforts of some painters to avoid anything so commonplace— is evident from the illustrations in Professor Grohmann's book, or from any international exhibition of art such as the Venice Biennale. If we take two extremes illustrated in the same page of The Art of Our Time, such as those by Philip Guston and Barnett Newman or those by Obrégon and Soto, the extreme contrast of free and disciplined forms cannot disguise the fact that all four paintings are visually coherent — and this is true of colour as well as spatial values. It was long ago demonstrated by the Dada artists that the more deliberately the painter sets out to destroy the traditional conventions of art the more markedly he reveals his innate aesthetic sensibility. The work of Kurt Schwitters is the best demonstration of that paradox. Is the good Gestalt good enough to constitute a work of art? I think it is, if by a work of art we mean what Matisse meant by a work of art — "an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter, an art which might be for every mental worker. . . like an appeasing influence, like a natal soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue." Matisse's statement has never been very popular with critics of art: it seems to deprive them of their very function, which is to reveal spiritual or social or psychological profundities in art. No doubt such profundities exist, or have existed in the past. But the modern artist has proved that the artist can dispense with them. For him the good Gestalt is good enough, and though this looks suspiciously like the old doctrine of art for art's sake, the Gestalt psychologist will tell you that the intelligence itself, and our whole ability to order experience for conceptual apprehension and assessment, depends on this fundamental perceptual process. From this point of view the work of art becomes, not a reflection of experience, 40

but the foundation of experience, the mental event from which all intellection proceeds. From infinite possibilities of form and colour the eye selects images that have visual significance, and though these images may not be matched in the world of appearance, nevertheless they become part of the world of appearance, in so far as man is given the power to create a visual order out of the confused material presented to his organs of perception. The task of the critic remains, unaffected and perhaps clarified by this reduction of the work of art to its aesthetic nakedness. His duty is simply to assess the aesthetic effectiveness of any particular work of art, in relation to human faculties of feeling, emotion and prudence. This last word may cause you some surprise, but the work of art is always created in a social context, and it is legitimate to distinguish between aesthetic permissiveness, which in principle should be total and unrestricted, and a social permissiveness whose limits are determined by reason or discretion or consideration for the innocence and well-being of other people. There are many manifestations in the art of today which are vulgar and moronic, and there is no reason why, in the sacred name of liberty, we should condone them. Perhaps I am only repeating the most important conclusion reached by Albert Camus in Uhomme révolté, an idea which I emphasized in my introduction to the English translation of this book. It is the idea that excess either dies or creates its own "measure" or moderation. T o quote Camus: "Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout history and its eternal disturbances. The very origin of this value guarantees us that it can only be partially destroyed. Moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion. It is a perpetual conflict, continually created and mastered by intelligence. It does not triumph either in the impossible or in the abyss. It finds its equilibrium through them. Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others." 2 Camus is writing of rebellion in its social or political context, but a The Rebel p. 268.

Trans, by Anthony Bower. London (Hamish Hamilton) 1953,

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his words are equally true in a cultural context. Here, too, we are in the presence of a paradox: the necessity, in order to establish an equilibrium, of constant revolt. But as Camus indicates, the problem is essentially one for the individual. We should not expose our private paranoia to the world, but seek to master it in art and through art. The alternative is an unrestrained exposure of mental conflicts or mental confusion that in terms of visual or poetic form is aesthetic nihilism. I have, on another occasion,3 dealt with the disintegration of form in modern art, but I would now like to be a little more specific, both in relation to literature and to the visual arts. Accepting perceptual coherence as the universal requirement in a work of art, at what point, in the history of modern art and literature, do we find this requirement set aside? I will begin with literature and will briefly examine the later work of Joyce and Pound. Joyce claimed that both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were composed on a structural principle. Ulysses has strict correspondences with Homer's Odyssey: each incident is a reflection of a similar incident in Homer's poem. Ezra Pound, writing in French for the Mercure de France when Ulysses was first published, asserted that as a book it was more formal than the carefully wrought novels of Flaubert. "Not a line, not half-a-line, that does not have an intellectual intensity unparalleled in a book of such length." It has never seemed to me that Ulysses needed this kind of justification, and I suspect that Joyce used the Odyssey, not so much as a source of inspiration but rather as a structural prop for the images that welled up from his unconscious — a clothes-horse for his unwashed linen. At the same time a painter such as Giorgio di Chirico was using the classical structure of academic painting as a prop for the incoherent visual images that welled up from his unconscious. Any writer or painter knows that inspiration flows more freely if a ready-made channel is available. At this point I should perhaps ask you to distinguish between the aesthetic and the social aspects of permissiveness in literature. Ulysses is a decisive document in this great debate, and as you know in 1934 an American court allowed the plea of aesthetic merit to prevail over the charge of obscenity. That such a distinction can be sus3 The Origins of Form in Art. London and New York, 1965, pp. 174-87.

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tained is obvious to anyone with sufficient knowledge of the history of literature: literature, in this respect, is simply a faithful reflection of the behaviour of "the naked ape," as it is now fashionable to call man. If we want our literature to be decent, we must clothe the ape; that is to say, falsify the reality. What we are discussing now is not the nature of the reality reflected by art, but the manner in which the mirror distorts reflected images. If Joyce's Ulysses had not been succeeded by Finnegans Wake we might exempt Joyce from the charge of formal incoherence, of lack of mesure. But in Joyce's own view, and obviously from any serious critical point of view, Finnegans Wake is a logical (or illogical) sequence to Ulysses. Finnegans Wake, too, has its prototype — La Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico, with its cyclical theory of history and its new conception of the relationship between history and imagination. Joyce, we are told, read this book in Trieste and used it centrally in Finnegans Wake.4 But the structural parallel between these two works is not so close as it is in the case of Ulysses and the Odyssey. Joyce was inspired by Vico's structural ideas in relation to history, not in relation to the structure of the book he was writing. He took over a theory of history and applied it very loosely to the art of fiction. Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, was a fearless and perceptive critic of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. James owed a lot to his brother — perhaps the very notion of using structural prototypes (Stanislaus had pointed out to him the resemblance between the "Bacchanals" of Euripides and Ibsen's "Ghosts") .5 Stanislaus was critical of many aspects of Ulysses, but accepted it for its realism, its stylistic energy and beauty. He took the talent for granted: "Dublin lies stretched out before the reader, the minute living incidents start out of the pages. Anybody who reads can hear the people talk and feel himself among them." But he went on to complain that at every turn of this, the longest day on record, there are things to give him pause. "There is many a laugh, but hardly one happy impression. Everything is undeniably as it is represented, yet the 'cumulative effect' as Grant Richards would say, makes him doubt truth to be a liar. You try to shift the burden of your melancholy to the reader's shoulders without being yourself relieved. To me you seem to have escaped from the toils of the priest and the king only to fall under the 4 Richard Ellmann: Letters of James Joyce (1966), Vol. I l l , p. 118 n. 5 Ellmann, Ibid., p. 104.

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oppression of a monstrous vision of life itself. There is no serenity or happiness anywhere in the whole book."6 These are shrewd thrusts, but for the most part they belong to the moralistic criticism I have put on one side. It is far otherwise, however, with Stanislaus's criticism of Finnegans Wake. The first instalment he read seemed to him to be "drivelling rigmarole," "or perhaps — a sadder supposition — it is the beginning of softening of the brain." He found it all "unspeakably wearisome," "the witless wandering of literature before its final extinction." These expressions are found in a letter to his brother, and there is no reason to suppose that they were inspired by jealousy : as he was later to show in My Brother's Keeper, Stanislaus was, in spite of latent antagonisms nattural in the family situation, full of affection and admiration for James, and for this very reason he criticized his brother with "a startling lucidity of vision."7 At any rate, the witless wandering of literature before its final extinction is the phenomenon we are investigating. Though the wandering in Finnegans Wake may not be witless, it is certainly "inconsequent, desultory, heterogeneous" — words Stanislaus used to describe Ulysses. Thought, he added, might be anything you like, "but it must never be obscure to the thinker.... Bloom's woolgatherings as often as not leave the reader guessing."7 But if this can be said "as often as not" about Ulysses, it must be said without qualification about Finnegans Wake. The whole work is designed on the principle of the Anglo-Saxon riddle : the more difficult to guess the meaning the better it is. I do not altogether discount the continuous musical phrasing of the writing, the humour, the latent fire of the embedded images. Finnegans Wake will survive as a curiosity of literature, the obsessive spinning of a word-master. It should rest at that. It is its influence that has been disastrous. What in Joyce was a masterpiece of sick humour became in his imitators a simple failure to communicate any meaning but the meaninglessness of all forms of communication, and therefore the meaninglessness of social existence, indeed, the meaninglessness of life itself, individual or communal. Samuel Beckett has been the chief instigator in this permissive process — again a process with its moments of tragic or comic vision, but from a stylistic point of view leading to an apotheosis of futility. As one of his characters says: 6

Ibid., p. 104. 7 Letters, III, 105.

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"At no moment do I know what I am talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how, nor why, but I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of a fifty-first, to close the circuit, that I know, without knowing what it means. The essential is never to arrive anywhere, neither where Mahood is, nor where Worm is, nor where I am, it little matters to what dispensation. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are water and banks and ravening in heaven or sporting God to plague his creature. . . . I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity." This comes from page 341 of the Molloy trilogy8 but it might have come from any of the 418 pages of this book, or any other book of the same author. Again I am teetering on the edge of a moral judgment, but a moral judgment is not my intention. A writer may express a philosophy of futility and still be a great writer: what I criticize in Beckett is a permissive logorrhoea that compels the reader to plunge into a sea of words with so little aesthetic reward. The trouble with works like Finnegans Wake and the Molloy trilogy (Molloy, M alone Dies, The Unnamable) is that they are superficially exciting but fundamentally boring. The underlying reason is a simple one : literature, from Homer to Henry James, has been essentially a dialogue, a dialogue between the author and the "dear reader." With the invention of the "interior monologue," literature became an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, uncontrolled by any intention or desire to communicate to an auditor. Now the stream of consciousness, whether in the related dream or in simulated narrative, is inevitably boring, simply because it lacks form, which is a device evolved by the tradition of art for the effective exchange of meaning. Without this dialogic structure, the auditor's attention wanders: he becomes indifferent to what is being said. I would like to suggest that from this point of view an interesting comparison may be made between the style and structure of Beckett's prose and those linear designs which decorate the great illuminated manuscripts and jewellery of the seventh to ninth cen8

Calder (London), 1959.

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tunes in Ireland — the Book of Kells, for example, or the Gospel at St. Gall. The same phenomenon is found in early Nordic art generally. Here is a description of it by a German art historian (Lamprecht) : There are certain simple motives whose interweaving and commingling determines the character of this ornament. At first there is only the dot, the line, the ribbon; later the curve, the circle, the spiral, the zigzag, and an S-shaped decoration are employed. Truly, no great wealth of motives! But what variety is attained by the manner of their employment! Here they run parallel, then entwined, now latticed, now knotted, now plaited, then again brought through one another in a symmetrical checker of knotting and plaiting. Fantastically confused patterns are thus evolved, whose puzzle asks to be unravelled, whose convolutions seem alternately to seek and avoid each other, whose component parts, endowed as it were with sensibility, captivate sight and sense in passionately vital movement. Wilhelm Worringer, who quotes this passage in his Form in Gothic (English translation, London, 1927, p. 41) notes that Lamprecht's words expressly bear witness to the impression of passionate movement and vitality, a questing, restless tumult in this confused medley of lines. "Since line is lacking in all organic timbre, its expression of life must, as an expression, be divorced from organic life . . . The pathos of movement which lies in this vitalised geometry . . . forces our sensibility to an effort unnatural to it. When once the natural barriers of organic movement have been overthrown, there is no more holding back : again and again the line is broken, again and again checked in the natural direction of its movement, again and again it is forcibly prevented from peacefully ending its course, again and again diverted into fresh complications of expression, so that, tempered by all these restraints, it exerts its energy of expression to the uttermost until at last, bereft of all possibilities of natural pacification, it ends in confused, spasmodic movements, breaks off unappeased into the void or flows senselessly back upon itself."9 These sentences, which eloquently and exactly describe the character of early northern ornament, seem to me to serve as an equally eloquent and exact description of Beckett's prose style in Molloy and later works. But while we can follow this linear movement with pleasure and even excitement when the medium is visual, the same method used verbally demands a concentration and tolerance to 9 Op. cit., p. 42.

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which we are not accustomed in literature, and in my opinion never can become accustomed. Celtic ornament was used to decorate the Gospels — a very simple narrative. In Finnegans Wake, Molloy, How it is and other works of this kind, the ornament has invaded the narrative, and the line of this fused expression "breaks off unappeased into the void or flows senselessly back upon itself.55 I should perhaps at this point say something about "the new French school55 of novelists that acknowledges the decisive influence of Beckett — the anti-novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras, but I shall refrain, partly because I have always found it difficult to read their works, but mainly because the criticisms I have made of Joyce and Beckett apply to them equally. Always a vital word-play, a glimmering imagery, a sense of despair or loneliness or futility, but no forward movement, no organic growth, no dramatic tension, no resolution of a tragic destiny such as we find in the great literature of the past. The creative imagination of the poet sinks in a sea of words. I shall not deal with other examples of logorrhoea that have followed Joyce and Beckett as inevitably as the little fishes follow a receding tide, but instead say a few words about Ezra Pound in this same connection. Again I would not like to be misunderstood. Pound is a great poet, perhaps the greatest of our time. But his work, as Yeats already perceived in his Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, in spite of its nobility — "at moments more style, more deliberate nobility and the means to convey it than in any contemporary poet known to me . . . is constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion . . .55 The words were written by Yeats in September 1936, at which time only the first 41 Cantos had been published. Since that year the stammering confusion has grown worse with every successive batch of cantos, until in the latest cantos the incoherence is absolute. Stanislaus Joyce's "sadder supposition,55 a softening of the brain, is almost inescapable in Pound's as in Joyce's case, and one can only contemplate the spectacle with awe and compassion. But this stammering confusion is the characteristic of Pound's work that is now imitated by young poets who wish to be considered of his school. Of Pound's great qualities — his acute sense of musical cadence, his vivid imagery, his poetic vision and skill — these later poets show no trace. They mirror a great confusion and call it the modern style. 47

I must now turn to the visual arts, for the process of progressive disintegration is even more evident in painting and sculpture than in literature. Again we have a number of artists whose greatness cannot be questioned — at least, not by me. But their greatness lies in the past : either they are dead or they have reached an advanced age in which their work has become repetitive. The great creative period lasted from about 1905 to about 1955. In those fifty years all the major painters and sculptors of the modern movement had completed their characteristic work. I do not imply that the work done by artists such as Picasso, Miró or Henry Moore since 1955 is in any sense necessarily inferior to their earlier work: I am merely asserting that the peak of their creative achievement had been reached before mid-century and that what follows is an expansion or necessary development of their established styles. The artists who have come to maturity since the end of the Second World War (1945) are desperately striving to escape from the influence of the masters of the modern movement, but the more original they try to be, the more they are compelled to deviate arbitrarily from the prototypes. There is no stylistic element in actionpainting, in pop-art or in op-art, that was not present in some phase of cubism, dadaism, surrealism or expressionism. I must emphasize the word "stylistic," for it is easy to be original if one abandons the sensibility and discipline that constitute the essence of art. Art, in any meaningful sense of the word, must have three essential qualities: a formal correspondence to emotion or feeling, clarity (what that great contemporary critic Wilson Knight calls "a swift forwardflowing transparency"), 10 and a vital imagination, the struggle, as Coleridge defined it, "to idealize and to unify." The visual arts especially must exemplify this last quality, but it is the quality singularly lacking in the fragmented painting and sculpture of recent years. Again we must discriminate. Kandinsky, who occupies in relation to modern painting an initiatory influence comparable to Joyce's in modern writing, has been grossly misunderstood. His principle that the work of art is an abstract expression of internal necessity has been applied without its corollary, which is, that what is necessary must also be significant to the spectator, must therefore be composed in a form that can be assimilated by the spectator. Kandinsky's final insistence is on composition — melodic composition and symphonic 10

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In describing Swift's prose style: Poets of Action, London (Methuen), 1967, p. 164.

composition. Composition is defined as "an expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, tested and worked over repeatedly and almost pedantically," and he looks forward, in the final paragraph of his pioneer work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, to "a time of reasoned and conscious composition, in which the painter will be proud to declare his work constructional — this in contrast to the claim of the impressionists that they could explain nothing, that their art came by inspiration."11 No convincing classification of the painting and sculpture that has proliferated in Western Europe, America and Japan since the end of the Second World War is possible. Terms such as abstract impressionism or abstract expressionism are not distinctive enough; terms such as "pop-art" or "op-art" are inexact and unhistorical. It is a confused situation in which one is conscious of new sources of imagery and content, and of an almost desperate attempt to be tough or ambiguous. An English critic whom I greatly respect, writing in 1964 of the "new generation" of British painters, uses these two words to explain the aesthetic aims and style of these artists, and defines toughness as "a desire to play it cool, be objective, unsentimental, detached and at the same time to pull no punches, be firm, decisive, hard." Ambiguity is defined as "a common enough element in all modern art, though not with the new value set on puns, puzzles, and double meanings. . . . The ambiguity goes beyond the sort of vision that anthropomorphized landscapes. It is not the metaphor that equates two known images, so much as a central uncertainty that leaves interpretation open. And beyond that, it suggests wit, or a puzzle, or a game, as the only terms on which interpretation can rest."12 The parallel with the later writings of Joyce and Beckett will be obvious. One of the artists in the exhibition which these remarks prefaced, Paul Huxley, is quoted as saying that "Paintings today should be about question-making, not story-telling ('it happened like this'), or recording ('I was there and it looked like this'). The sermon and the conducted tour have been dealt with and painting can only be enlightened by posing questions and making reconnaissance trips rather than by supplying answers. We become more wise by not knowing." 11 18

Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York (Wittenborn), 1947, p. 77. Catalogue of "The New Generation" Exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, March-May, 1964, p. 8.

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As a paradoxical, even a mystical saying, this is very interesting, but the alternatives implied — question-making or story-telling — evade the central issue in art, which is the creation of a form, the ability "to idealize and to unify." Clarity, which I suggested as another essential quality in the work of art, is deliberately sacrificed. Again it is not a question of upholding traditional values against revolutionary values: it is a question of communication, of a dialogue between artist and spectator. If instead of a symbol of feeling we are offered a symbol of nescience, of "not knowing," then we can only turn away in indifference. In conclusion I return to my beginning, to Camus' plea for "mesure" or moderation, for the moderation created throughout history by rebellion. "Moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion." The artist, like any other citizen, must protest when political liberty is threatened or a censorship imposed on the freedom of thought. His moral behaviour is determined by the ancient precept: beauty is truth, truth beauty, though for "beauty" we might now substitute another concept, such as unity. Beauty is not necessarily the aim of the contemporary artist. But if he substitutes another principle, such as vitality, he must still accept this other necessity, which I have called unity. Contemporary nihilism in art is simply a denial of art itself, a rejection of its social function. The refusal to recognize the limits of art is the reason why as critics we must withhold our approval from all those manifestations of permissiveness characterized by incoherence, insensibility, brutality and ironic detachment. The exercise of such judgment calls for the utmost critical rectitude — for the maintenance of the supremacy of aesthetic criteria — if we are not to fall into old errors of judging art according to values that belong to another sphere of life — religious, moral, hedonistic or technological. What we seek is "a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism." We cannot yet determine the outlines of such a renaissance, but we know that they must remain within the sphere of art.

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BEN NICHOLSON: A TRIBUTE HERBERT READ was one of those enlightened few whose creative spirit, whose gentleness and courage does not die and as I write I am very conscious of his thought and presence. I met him first in the 305s and soon after this he came to live in The Mall, Belsize Park, nearly next door to Barbara Hepworth's and my studio. His immediate understanding of what Moore, Hepworth and I were working on was invaluable to us : among writers he and Geoffrey Grigson were the two who understood. His contribution as art-historian to the whole international art movement was also invaluable. When during later years he was living in Yorkshire and I was living in Ticino our correspondence was lively and it was always a pleasure to see his handwriting and the clarity with which he wrote. Added to this was his annual visit to lecture at the Ascona "Éranos" cultural conference near here, and since he was always too much in demand there my wife, Felicitas Vogler, used to bring him up to our house where he could sleep or rest in a reclining chair in our quiet mountain garden overlooking Lago Maggiore. Others can speak far better of his literary and philosophical contribution. But I can at least say that each year as he became older the expression in his face became more beautiful and the quality of his voice revealed more and more the depth of experience in his life. It had a special quality of great beauty which I can recall vividly at this moment and is a part of that enlightenment by which his spirit remains with us as something very much alive.

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BEN NICHOLSON

Two Etchings and Two Drawings

i

Tweedledum & Tweedledee. 1959. Collection: Sarah and Alan Bowness.

11 Single Goblet. Drawing. 1968. m Rafael. 1967. iv

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Column, Tree, and Moon. Etching. 1967.

Sam Black

HERBERT READ: HIS CONTRIBUTION TO ART EDUCATION AND TO EDUCATION THROUGH ART

s

IR HERBERT READ once recounted how he found solace and inspiration in poetry while serving as an infantry officer in the grim holocaust in Flanders in 1914-18. In those dark days, when the Renaissance in Europe was ending in flames and hatred, he found, through art, new hope for humanity not a mere aid to temporary escape from his present and pressing anxieties and their attendant doubts and fears. Some twenty years after World War I when the second world war was emphatically underlining so many of man's failures, hope was given to me by Sir Herbert Read's Education Through Art. I carried, not poems in my knapsack, but the inspiration of Sir Herbert Read's writing and his vision of a better system of education for all — and his words sang as poetry to me. My bookmark was a portion of a German Iron Cross ribbon, a souvenir picked up casually in a shattered, deserted gun emplacement, somewhere along the torn, embattled coast of France. I have it to this day. It was destined to have interesting significance for me and a connection with Sir Herbert and his fundamental beliefs. The ribbon had belonged to an enemy, nameless and separated by the abyss of war, impersonal, unnatural and dehumanized by propaganda. Not long after the war's end, 1951 to be exact, I participated in the now famous U.N.E.S.C.O. Seminar on the visual arts held in Bristol, England. Many former wartime enemies sat down together, freely exchanging ideas and sharing a belief in the

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value of the common language of art and the universal necessity for an Education through Art. So strong were the convictions of the seminar participants, at that assembly of nations, that they founded I.N.S.E.A. (The International Society for Education Through Art) and installed Sir Herbert Read as Honorary President. Among the many lasting associations that were formed in Bristol, one person, who was to become an especially close friend, was the German representative — an artist and an art teacher, a man of humour, tolerance and understanding. Herbert Read's own words sum up the point of this anecdote: "Art is the name that we give to the only human activity that can establish a universal order in all we do and make, in thought and in imagination. Education through Art is education for peace." 1 The aims of education have varied with the changing times, the needs and even the dictates of society. Circumstances have dictated specialties and man has imposed, sometimes accidentally but often deliberately, restrictions, limitations and retrograde diversions. The instinct for survival pressed man to cultivate self-development and acquire personal skills; later, as family and group mutuality increased the chances of survival, education was designed to strengthen this. The expansion of population and the growth of man's knowledge directed his efforts towards greater control and use of the powers and resources of nature, and an education to prepare and fit people for work, in large numbers, at the seemingly endless number of jobs being produced, as well as to mould them into useful, fairly uncomplaining citizens, grew to be the common practice. Those were days of confidence. Educators, reflecting how pleased man was with himself and deluded into thinking they knew all there was to know, believed they could, simply by patient thorough teaching, impart, or by impatient and no less thorough strappings or canings, instil an adequate education in all for all life's needs. Now we are not so sure. Thirty or forty years ago smug and satisfied physicists might have rejoiced in the comfort and completeness of their knowledge, but nuclear science has changed all that. In recent years developments in medicine, chemistry, electronics and communications have been phenomenal. The magnitude of the discoveries only serves to underline the paucity of our knowledge. We are beginning to realize that there is no such thing as the "last 1

Sir Herbert Read, The Redemption

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of the Robot, 1966, p. 254.

word," at least as far as learning is concerned. The mechanical inventions of the Industrial Revolution, which provided more work, and gradually affected the behaviour and habits of man, also led him slowly towards an awareness of the impermanence of life's forms and to an acceptance of change. Today — and day after day, change is upon us. This time it is rapid, spreading, escalating change and man is powerless to stop, or even briefly halt, what is happening. The immense cybernetic developments, which provide more leisure than work ; the promising yet fearful medical discoveries that assure longer life, as well as the swelling material progress and growth will go on proliferating and multiplying at increasing rates. The light winds of change issuing from the great knowledge explosion, which are already affecting society and our environment, steadily and inexorably will become like a powerful hurricane that could engulf and destroy or clear the way for an unprecedented richer age and vital creative life for mankind. The rapid pace of developments sets up uncertainties in the minds of men and the magnitude of their possibilities, though felt by some, and sensed by many, are only comprehended by a few. Indeed even those involved most directly in affecting change, the scientists, are beginning to admit their uncertainties and are unable to give a sure answer about what is going to happen. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media states: "I think of Art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it." Our technological civilization has come to stay and the urgent task before society is to prevent its own engulfment and self-destruction through lack of any controlling vision. Herbert Read believed that the traditional systems of education, with their emphasis on knowing and memory are disintegrative and productive of the present disordered state of civilization: "In our exclusive preoccupation with knowledge and science we have omitted to educate those human faculties which are concerned with the emotional and integrative aspects of human life. We have carefully nurtured inhuman monsters with certain organs of the intelligence gigantically enlarged, others completely atrophied."2 He goes on to say that an Education through Art is the key to a true, balanced, integrative education that would produce individual serenity and social harmony. "The « Sir Herbert Read, The Grass Roots of Art (London, 1955).

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foundations of a civilization rest not in the mind but in the senses, and, unless we can use the senses, educate the senses, we shall never have the biological conditions for human survival, let alone human progress." 3 Herbert Read clearly foresaw man's increasing dilemma — a scientific superman who, in spite of all his achievements and advances remains biologically and emotionally a poor simple primitive. There has been little evidence of change in his basic nature since the first recorded knowledge of him, and the Arts have but served as the surface trappings on the shallow veneer called civilization. Twenty-five and more years ago Herbert Read was a prophet and far in advance of his time. Today his thoughts and vision are still ahead of these times and his message is even more important and more urgent because events and directions, barely guessed twenty-five years ago are bringing about a new and very different technological civilization whose existence can only be constructive and beneficial if rooted in an Education through Art, as Herbert Read has defined i t — a n education which gives predominant attention to the creative, poetic and aesthetic and which values perception, imagination and feeling — one aimed at "the progressive perfection of man as an individual," which will help him to help himself become progressively more human. T o suggest the overthrow of the current system of education with its basis on memory training and the almost exclusive verbalization of experience and replace it with an aesthetic education in which the arts become the core and growing point for human development — is surely a revolutionary policy and is indeed advocating basic change in the very structure of society itself. "Docility, apathy, insensibility — these are the achievements of education in our time, and they are achieved by the suppression of individuality, sensitivity, creativity. Social conformity or convention demands a general frustration of personal instincts, the surrender to herd instincts, which then carry the individual in the ebb and flow of their aggressive attitudes. For when the individual has been deprived of his creative functions, he is ready to take part in collective destruction. And then, if he can't have the real thing, which is war, he will indulge in fantasies of cruelty and murder, mass produced for one and all." These words of Herbert Read's are both a fearful 3 Sir Herbert Read, The Grass Roots of Art (London, 1955).

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accusation and damning denunciation of a system by which society teaches, trains and influences its youth. To suggest that education should be based on aesthetic theory, not on economic and political matters and expediency, may indeed be a new and revolutionary idea in the light of current educational practice, yet it is as old as Plato whose theories of aesthetic and moral education greatly influenced Herbert Read. Herbert Read's belief that education should be based on a training of the senses, human personality being largely formed by the aesthetic experiences of early childhood and adolescence, aesthetic experience being a vital and essential part of the fabric of life rather than a minor, even indispensable fringe, is drawn from Plato's theory of education. The popular reaction to the word "revolution" is to think of violence and negative behaviour. Herbert Read may use the word but would replace it with the word "Education" and would endeavour to effect change in society biologically rather than politically — on this point he has written: "it is only in so far as we can liberate the growing shoots of mankind, shoots not yet stunted by an environment of hatred and injustice, that we can expect to make any enduring change in society."4 Sir Herbert Read's influence on Education and Education through Art has produced no explosive, instant revolution. This however is no cause for dismay because a great deal has been happening quietly and unobtrusively. Other great thinkers have supported Herbert Read's views on the limitations of an education based on the verbalization of experience and discursive reasoning alone. Aldous Huxley speaks of the individual being, "the victim of the linguistic tradition," and Suzanne Langer adds, "Everybody knows that language is a very poor medium for expressing our emotional nature." An effective education must educate the whole man, not merely the conscious part of his mind. Similarly, as Herbert Read himself readily admitted, the visual arts cannot constitute the whole of education. In his inspiring address to the 1951 U.N.E.S.C.O. Seminar, Herbert Read said: "Education is the fostering of growth, but apart from physical maturation, growth is only made apparent in expression — audible or visual signs and symbols. Education may therefore be defined as the cultivation of modes of symbolic communication — it is teaching children and adults how to express themselves 4 Sir Herbert Read, Anarchism, Past and Future, Freedom Press (London, May 17, 1947), P- 6.

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in sound, images, movements, tools and utensils. A man who can make such things well is a well educated man. If he can make good sounds, he is a good speaker, a good musician, a good poet; if he can make good images, he is a good painter or sculptor; if good movements, a good dancer or labourer; if good tools or utensils, a good craftsman. All faculties—of thought, logic, memory, sensibility and intellect — are eventually involved in such processes, and no aspect of education is excluded in such processes. And they are all processes of art, for art is nothing but the good making of sounds, images, etc. The aim of education is, therefore, the creation of artists — of people efficient in the various modes of expression and communication." Herbert Read's theories have been, and are, far more widespread and his vision more influential in education, or perhaps in society, than many will understand or most may care to admit. Throughout the world art educators and teachers supporting Read's beliefs have steadily influenced growing youth over almost three decades, and have done so in spite of handicaps imposed by pseudo-art teachers whose aim has been the production of sentimental trash and trivial novelty. Insecure and insincere, their product-oriented teaching is revealed in their desire for "showy" results. Long ago, before current trends, the artist-teachers of the world demonstrated belief in the individualization of the educational process and experience and encouraged learning by discovery through personal involvement and activity. Art rooms long ago were the havens in schools where young people could associate with older mature, creative personalities who saw education not merely as a method of giving out knowledge, but rather a way of helping youth to realize and use what they already knew and so expand their individual capabilities. Art teachers believed with Read that young growing people learn not so much by cold, formal logic as by an education of the senses and a "creative communion with sounds and colours, textures and consistencies, a communion with nature in all its substantial variety."5 Art educators have deplored the lack of support or understanding demonstrated by those in authority who through the exercise of administrative power have controlled their destiny and relegated them, so often, to a second class position, and the public generally, who at best have paid lip-service to the "fringe" subjects, indicating 5 Sir Herbert Read, The Grass Roots of Art (London, 1955), p. 156.

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their true beliefs, however, by insisting on a job training education. But after all the countless, patient years during which Art Educators have been teaching, speaking and demonstrating their convictions and have been supported by the strength, scholarship and sensitivity of Herbert Read a great and, I believe, an irrevocable change is clearly under way. Society is now beginning to suspect that it, or its predecessors, perhaps chose the wrong kind of educational direction — at least it is very evident that the educational methods widely practiced are not adequate for the present changing times or the needs and aspirations of the new and stirring growing generation. It would be a gross exaggeration to claim that the surging global movement for change, spearheaded by youth, can be attributed to the teachings of Herbert Read, although I am convinced that his theories and persuasion have indeed had global effect. The multitudes striving to break down the barriers of alienation of self, alienation from others, alienation from nature and who seriously question the worth of an education which fragments experience, dulls sensibilities, cultivates distrust and scorns intuition and feeling may never have heard of Herbert Read, but that alone does not deny his possible widespread and quietly subtle influence. The young reformers would I'm sure subscribe to Herbert Read's belief that; "man, by his very nature and of his own accord strives toward self-realization . . . and cannot.. . develop his full human potentialities unless he is truthful to himself; unless he is active and productive; unless he relates himself to others, in a spirit of mutuality." And many would accept Read's list of aims of aesthetic education : "to preserve the natural intensity of all modes of perception and sensation; to co-ordinate the various modes of perception and sensation with one another and in relation to environment; to express feeling in communicable form." Based on this development of sensibility Read sees the final aim to be "to teach children how to express thought in required form," not however in the exact sense that this may be interpreted in relation to present practice. Read means (and his own words make his intention clear) : "Education in constructive crafts, a practical craft like engineering, a conceptual craft like logic.. . however, constructive education only makes sense if it is firmly based on . . . visual, plastic, musical, kinetic, verbal and symbolic education." The decay of civilization and the decomposition of human values 63

in a world where materialism rules, where work becomes a relieving escape, and where playing a role is more profitable than personal integrity is seen and sensed by young people and they don't like what they see, and more than that they are saying so and endeavouring to practice a mode of living opposed to false values and of more human concern. Professor J. R. Seeley of the centre for the study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, California, writes : "They are everywhere, the drop-outs, disaffiliates and true and honorable rebels. For those who love facts I have it on reliable authority that for the first time in the history of the United States, the average I.Q., if you like to deal in such terms, of the dropouts is above the average I.Q. of the graduating classes. Their hero is the sage, not the master of anything. Their heaven is the 'high'... like everything else, passing... but, while lasting, and whether procured by drugs, contemplation, fatigue, music or discipline, that state in which the experience that is unitive of the self, unitive of the other selves, unitive to nature, and unitive to an All, is had. Their mode is childlike . . . not childish . . . renewedly capable of total absorption in the instant experience free of over-calculation, sensorily aware, experientially open and vulnerable, rapt, accepting, surrendercapable, and in grace and trust. They play, but they are not caught up in, or seek to disentangle themselves from games. They seek their 'thing,' each their 'thing,' and occasion and liberty to do it. Most delightedly so if it furthers the doing by others of their 'things.' They go gentle in the world, hoping that if they cannot be good, they may at least be harmless. And aimed at the conventional culture, hold no one as evil, believing that, good or bad, one should be effective. They make life move into theatre and theatre move into life. They would be and let be, trusting rather to the force of example than the force of persuasion or the persuasion of force, to win others into another way of life. They seek the honest, the authentic, the immediate. Getting the shit out of your head (as they say) is both the first and the never-ending task. They are present-oriented and discount, perhaps over-discount, past and future, though that is beginning rapidly to change also. They may well be the contemporary analogue of the little ragged band of eleven confused fishermen and others somewhere in Galilee, 2,000 years ago."6 The revolution is upon us; change is now a way of life. In man's 6

Professor J. R. Seeley, The Person in the Process, Beyond Tinkering & Toying, March 30, 1968.

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search for reality and life-style values art and education are finding their roots once more in the lives of men, everywhere. A growing concern for the common humanity of all men is leading educators to discover why and how man everywhere, and from the beginning of recorded time, has made life meaningful through art — that art, by helping him to live more fully, more humanely, to see and feel more keenly helped him to know and understand himself and others better. Herbert Read's words sum up succinctly the integrative qualities of art. "I cannot regard art as something external which has to be imported into the sphere of education. Nor can I regard education as something which has an existence separate from art. In my view art is nothing less than a way of life. And since it is a way of life it must also be a way of education, for education is merely a prelude to life, the opening of the way, the pioneering and the pathfinding activity upon which we must all engage, individually and collectively." As more and more men come to realize that Herbert Read, by an Education through Art, did not mean acquiring a narrow, specialized skill or set of skills, but believed that the most important art of ? ly people is that which they create for themselves, through living their own lives, fully and creatively, here and now, both in and out of school, then perhaps we shall be able to claim that an Education through Art is an education for peace. And my threadbare Iron Cross ribbon will be but a reminder that the twentieth century by its present revolution is profoundly different from all previous centuries — not by reason of wars or vast and complicated technological inventions and achievements but by man's simple realization and expansion of his own powers, his greater knowledge and discovery of himself and the assertion and enjoyment of his humanness.

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STEPHEN SPENDER

Four Sketchesfor Herbert Read INNOCENCE Farm house, green field. Stone White in grey eyes. The innocent gaze Simplifies forms To rectangle, circle. The sun in the skull Dissolves a world to light.

YOUNG O F F I C E R Young officer, leaning Against a bayonet hedge Of blackthorn, its white Blossom, your medals. Your soldiers graze Like sheep. You are their shepherd. Mournful bugles Engraved those lines Either side your mouth.

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CONFERENCIER I took a pencil up Idly at some conference, Drew the lick of hair Surround to your face, The bow tie beneath Made a question mark's dot. In the hall of chairs Fat platitudes sat. You stood out like a question.

ANARCHIST When you died, I was in France. Supposing you were sad, Listen. I saw the students Tread the streets in dance. Their heels struck fire. Their hands uprooted pavements. Their mouths sang the chant Of a poet's final hour: Imagination seizes power.

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George Woodcock

THE PHILOSOPHER OF FREEDOM

I

* HAVE NEVER BEEN an active politician, merely a sympathizing intellectual," said Herbert Read in 1940, and the statement is generally true of his whole career as a social and political philosopher. Yet I do not think the title "philosophic anarchist," which has so often been applied to him, is really justified. It suggests the detached thinker who conceives an ideal ungoverned commonwealth, but does not concern himself with the means by which that society might come into being. Read, as I shall show, was deeply concerned with the means by which, through art and education, men could be made receptive to the great political and social changes needed to create a libertarian world. He was also, on occasion, willing to take other action. But he certainly did not become involved in the day-to-day business of politics—even anarchist politics. This was mainly because he held strongly the anarchist idea that the struggle for freedom must be initiated by the worker within his own occupational group, and Read's vocation was that of poet and critic of art and literature. He believed the freedom of the arts was linked intimately with general freedom; he believed also that the artist had a function as mediator between the individual and society; these were the paths he mainly followed when he approached political terms. To stand as a representative of the workers, or even a preacher to them, would have seemed to him presumptuous. "Intellectuals writing for proletarians will not do," he wrote to me in 1949. "It is merely another form of la trahaison des clercs." I knew Read for the last quarter of a century of his life, and during the i94o's, until I came to Canada at the end of the decade, I saw him often. As a publisher he brought out two of my books, 68

one of verse and the other a biography of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. That combination marked the areas of our common interests in those days — literature and anarchism; not until a decade later did I also begin to write on the visual arts. But it was anarchism rather than literature that first brought us together, and, when I look over the letters Read wrote to me, I realize that it remained the subject we discussed more than any other until our last contact late in 1966. During the 1940's I observed direcdy the voluntary limitations of Read's engagement in anarchism, and his inclination to remain aloof, even among anarchists, from anything that resembled political organization. He did not aspire to be a leader. "Power corrupts even the intellect," he once said. But he had no intention, either, of being caught in the net of group orthodoxy. I first met Read in 1942. I was then publishing in Cambridge a little magazine, Now, and, having come through pacifism to what still seems to me its logical end of non-violent anarchism, I asked Read for a contribution. He sent me "The Paradox of Anarchism," and a few weeks later he came to Cambridge. We met in a chintzy café on King's Parade, Read in the black pork-pie hat and bowtie which in those years were almost a customary uniform, and I remember my slight bewilderment when I talked to him of the anarchist group which then ran Freedom Press and published War Commentary, and he replied vaguely. I thought then that he was an initiate being politic with a stranger; within a couple of months, when I myself had made contact with the movement in London, and became active in it, I realized that his vagueness was, on the contrary, due to his own very loose connection with the militants. At that time the militant anarchists in Britain had a double organization. The Freedom Press group was a circle of intellectuals, some of them personal friends of Read, who operated openly and were concerned mainly with publication. It was part of a larger, secret organization, The Anarchist Federation of Great Britain, which balanced the grandiosity of its title by the thinness of its ranks. I was admitted to both groups, but Read did not belong to either, partly from his own choice, but partly also because, like Kropotkin before him, he supported Britain's participation in World War II, which the other British anarchists, except for a small Jewish group in the East End of London, opposed. In 1943 or 1944 — I cannot now remember the exact date — the Anarchist Federation decided to come into the open, and, with the 69

pressure of secrecy removed, immediately broke apart, the anarchosyndicalist faction (which included a few real workers) retaining the title, a hollow victory, since the intellectuals retained the printing press, the stocks of literature, the paper license (vital in wartime) and the Freedom Press bookshop. A new organization of "pure" anarchists led by the intellectuals was formed in 1945, with a London Group and a Federation of Anarchist Groups, and Read took a close interest in the developments. He attended at least one of the organizational meetings, and in August he wrote me from a summer villa at Braemar ("a Victorian house with all its period equipment — amusing but exhausting, a relic of the slave age") "I am glad to hear that the London Group is taking shape. I would like to see a copy of the programme." I think he hoped it would be a true guild of anarchist intellectuals, which he could have joined, but the old pseudo-proletarian line prevailed, and he held aloof, as did Alex Comfort. I joined for a while, and withdrew in 1948; my reasons, discussed elsewhere, have no place in this essay. If Read evaded involvement, he did not avoid action. As he wrote in one of his poems of this period : But even as you wait like Arjuna in his chariot the ancient wisdom whispers: Live in action. He wrote pamphlets to be published by Freedom Press (The Philosophy of Anarchism and Marxism, Existentialism and Anarchism) ; he wrote occasionally for Freedom, the propagandist sheet that followed War Commentary, and more often for Now; he spoke at meetings commemorating the Spanish Civil War. When four members of the Freedom Press group were arrested in 1945 on charges under a wartime press law, he spent a great deal of time and energy in their defence. I remember drafting with him a letter which we persuaded a group of writers to sign, denouncing the arbitrariness of the government's action. Spender, Eliot and Forster were among them. Spender was censured by the Foreign Office, for which he was then working, and refused to sign any more protests. Forster insisted on altering a few words in the letter after Eliot had signed it. Eliot was angry that we had allowed Forster to change anything he had signed, but stood by the protest, a fact which I am always happy to quote against those who describe him as a reactionary. Read also became chairman of the committee which was set up to 70

18th April,1945 Dear T*r Eu3sell, Thank you very much for your letter cf the 15th. I enclose a copy of "War Coamentray",the anarchist periodical,\7hich givc'ü a detailed account of the police court proceedings of Karch 9th when the four anarchists were charged,and details of the charges brought against them. I also attach a copy of the Circuler Letter on which the prosecution a œ x is apparently to be mainly based. From these documents I hope you will conclude that this is an outrageous interference by the political police with the ordinary rights of freedom of expression,and that you will have no hesitation in allowing your name to appear as a sponsor to our appeal. Personate ly I hope you may be prepared to go even farther. I remember the sympathetic account which you gave of anarchism in "Roads to Preedora:' ,and if you still feel as you did then, you might be inclined to appear as a witness when the case is tried at the Old Bailey next week,before I"? Justice Birlcett. The Attorney General is r>rosecuting:our Counsel is Mr ííaude K.C.

If you have the inclination and the time to do this for us,I will at once ask Counsel to communicate with you. What we should ask you to establish is the philosophical integrity of the views we anarchists hoId,and our right to propagate them freely* Yours sincerely.

HERBERT READ : File carbon copy of letter to Bertrand Russell. Collection : McPherson Library of the University of Victoria.

conduct the defence of the four anarchists, made speeches, wrote articles, raised money. Later this committee was continued as a semi-permanent organization, the Freedom Defence Committee, to take up the cases of people arrested under the more oppressive wartime regulations, and to protest against police violations of civil rights. Read remained its chairman until the committee came to an end in 1949. Orwell was vice-chairman, Julian Symons a member of the working committee, and I the secretary. Read and Orwell, libertarians of different shades who shared the inability to live happily with organized political groups, were closer than their differing life styles and ways of writing might suggest. "His personality, which remains so vivid after all these years, often rises like some ghost to admonish me," Read wrote to me of Orwell in 1966. "I suppose I have felt nearer to him than to any other English writer of our time, and though there were some aspects of his character that irritated me — his proletarian pose in dress, &c, his insensibility to his physical environment, his comparatively narrow range of interests — yet who was, in general, nearer in ideals & even in eccentricities?" To me, when I met Read in 1942, anarchism was new and dazzling. To Read, who held it as almost a life-time faith, it was already a familiar doctrine to which he had been converted in his own youth almost thirty years before. "Actually," he tells us in The Contrary Experience, "there was an unfailing continuity in my political interests and political opinions. I would not like to claim that they show an unfailing consistency, but the general principles which I found congenial as a young man are the basic principles of the only political philosophy I still find congenial." The continuity was not quite as unbroken as Read suggests, for as a teenage bank clerk he followed the traditions of his class of Yorkshire farmers by becoming a fanatical Tory: "I worshipped my King with a blind emotional devotion, and even managed to make a hero out of Lord Salisbury." He also read all of Disraeli's novels, and these — with their doctrine of the two nations—appear to have disturbed rather than confirmed his conservatism, for as soon as he entered Leeds University, he began to read socialist writings, discovered Nietzsche and Sorel, and remained true to his ancestry by finding the opposing pole of peasant politics to Toryism — anarchism. 72

In spite of my intellectual pretensions, I am by birth and tradition a peasant. I remain essentially a peasant. I despise this foul industrial epoch — not only the plutocracy which it has raised to power, but also the industrial proletariat which it has drained from the land and proliferated in hovels of indifferent brick. The class in the community for which I feel a natural sympathy is the agricultural class, including the genuine remnants of a landed aristocracy. This perhaps explains my early attraction to Bakunin, Kropotkin and Tolstoy, who were also of the land, aristocrats and peasants. {Poetry and Anarchism) "Proudhon, Tolstoy and Kropotkin were the predilections of my youth," Read remarks elsewhere; add William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Sorel, and one Jias the central political influences over Read in the years of his early twenties after the Tory enthusiasm passed. Add Nietzsche on the individualist periphery, and Marx on the collectivist, and the pattern of shaping influences is complete. It was a pattern not unusual at the time among the literary young; Joyce in Dublin and Kafka in Prague were studying roughly the same writers at the same period. But Read remained permanently and profoundly under their influence; the others did not. In his early thoughts, Marxist and Anarchist attitudes were intermingled, and he still believed — as he did not in later years — that nationalization of the means of production might be the prelude to the dissolution of the state. In a note written in 1914, and quoted in The Contrary Experience, he says: . . . For the present, both Collectivism and Syndicalism have their respective duties. The role of Collectivism is the expropriation of Capital. This is to be brought about by the nationalization of industry. But Collectivists are wrong in regarding nationalization as an end in itself: it is only a means. For whilst the Collectivist state is evolving, Syndicalism will be playing its role — i.e. it will be developing the economic, industrial and educational functions of the Trade Unions. Trade Unions are, I am convinced, the units upon which the future society will be built. They must be organized and extended so as to be powerful enough to demand, and fit enough to undertake, the control of industry when it has been nationalized by the state By a devolution of power, a decentralization of control, and, above all, by a development in the social conscience of the nation, the ideals of today will become the realities of tomorrow. Read was always to respect the doctrines of anarcho-syndicalism, and to regard the natural organization of society as one based on workers' control of industry; it was his trust in the state as a mech73

anism for achieving any social good that rapidly dissolved under the impact of his wartime experiences. Read had been — as most socialists and anarchists were in 1914 — a theoretical pacifist, but at the same time he was a member of the O.T.C. at Leeds University. When he found himself thrust incontinently into the war, and realized that the international working class was unprepared to halt the militarists by a universal general strike, he made the Nietzschean best of a bad job, and set out to meet what he saw as a challenge. As late as May 1917, when he had reached the front but had not yet experienced war's full horrors, he could still write to a woman friend in England : . . . I've no doubt about my position. If I were free today, I'm almost sure I should be compelled by every impulse within me to join this adventure. For I regard it as an adventure, and it is as an adventure that it appeals to me. I'll fight for Socialism when the day comes, and fight all the better for being an 'old soldier'. (The Contrary Experience) Eight months later he had again become a pacifist, and this time with the conviction of experience. He remarked that "the means of war had become more portentous than the aim" and that among the soldiers there had been "an immense growth of pacifist opinion." And during 1917 and 1918, while he was writing articles for the New Age supporting both Syndicalism and Guild Socialism (variants of the doctrine of the control of production by producers) he was experiencing a cumulative revulsion against static social orders and the state in particular. In January 1917, he wrote to the same friend : I've a theory that all the evil things in the world are static, passive and possessive; and that all good things are dynamic, creative. Life is dynamic: death is static. And as life is dynamic, passive remedies of society are false. Hence the folly of having cut and dried Utopias as ultimate aims: by the time you get to them, life has left them behind. Hence the folly of basing society on possessive institutions (such as property and marriage, as a rule). Our institutions should appeal to our creative impulses: what a man does and not what he has. In April 1918: I don't think I'm ready to discuss the change that is taking place in my 'political sentiment'. It is a revolt of the individual against the association which involves him in activities which do not interest him: a jumping to the ultimate anarchy which I have always seen as the ideal of all who value beauty and intensity of life. CA beautiful anarchy' — that is my cry.

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In May 1918: But simply because we are united with a callous inhuman association called a State and because a State is ruled by politicians whose aim (and under the circumstances their duty) is to support the life and sovereignty of this monster, life and hope are denied and sacrificed. In a positive as well as a negative way, Read's anarchist tendencies were intensified during the war, for he found — like Orwell during the Spanish Civil War — a comradeship in the trenches of a kind he had never before known, "a feeling of unanimity aroused by common stresses, common dangers," and so, in this unlikely setting, his convictions of the validity of the anarchist doctrine of mutual aid seemed justified. Looking back in 1962 over the period after 1918, Read felt that "the no-man's-years between the wars" had been "largely futile, spent unprofitably by me and my kind," largely, he felt, because of forces outside their power to change — "blind forces of economic drift and political ineptitude with the walls of faith and reason turning to air behind us." At the same time, he adds that "in spite of a disillusion at once personal and universal, I persisted in a simple faith in the natural goodness of man," and it was towards the end of the inter-war period that he began to develop his theories of the inter-relationship of art and anarchism, and to write the series of essays and books that contain his socio-political arguments. From 1919 to 1931 were in these respects years of enforced silence. There are points in Read's career when he surprises the observer — as he surprised many of his friends — by acting with an inconsistency that seems to exceed even the licence to impulsiveness which he allowed himself as a proclaimed romantic. A pacifist, he fought in World War I. After declaring in Poetry and Anarchism (1938) that "anarchism naturally implies pacifism," he came out in 1939 in support of Britain's participation in World War II. In 1953 he bent the knee to receive a knighthood, and set off an international storm among anarchists in which — so far as I remember — Augustus John and I were alone among his comrades in defending the right of a libertarian to make his own choices — even in his relations with the state. 1919 was another such time; after considering such strange careers for a professed anarchist as a permanent commission in the army and professional politics, Read finally elected for the Civil Service, in which he felt he would have more time and energy to devote to literature. He served for several years in the 75

Treasury, where he acquired a lifelong loathing for bureaucrats, and then moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he gathered the knowledge on which he was to base his career as an art critic. In 1931 he was liberated when the University of Edinburgh offered him its Professorship of Fine Arts. For twelve years the rules of the Civil Service had prevented him from publishing anything expressing his political views, and even when he was set free, it was some years before, in 1938, he expounded his complete libertarian views in Poetry and Anarchism. In the meantime, however, The Green Child ( 1935) was written with at least an oblique political intent. Read tells us that in this novel he "described symbolically" how "the realization of a rational blue-print leads to the death of a society." And if we look at The Green Child we see this process happening on two levels. Olivero, the hero, became the ruler of Roncador, a mountainbound South American Republic — a minute, self-supporting, agrarian land. After establishing a democratic constitution based on the best theories of the Enlightenment, he discovers that the simple people of Roncador are willing to accept the good government he gives them, and he finds himself — with no effort of his own — established as a kind of philosopher-king, able to apply the "sense of order" which he regards as "the principle of government as well as of art." He constructs a self-contained world in which his people enjoy sufficiency, security and freedom from oppression. But it is almost an axiom of Read's political doctrines that the only healthy political order is a natural order, sustained by tensions between the individual and society. Olivero's imposed order merely produces stagnation: In the absence of conflicts, of contending interests, of anguish and agitation, I had introduced into my environment a moral flaccidity, a fatness of living, an ease and a torpor which had now produced in me an inevitable ferment. Olivero arranges his own fake assassination, to free Roncador from his good-intentioned but deadly rationalism, but he does not free himself; instead he enters the underground world of the green people, who have lost sense of time and space, who regard living flesh and the life-breath with disgust, and whose vision is bounded by the contemplation of crystalline forms and the mathematical structures of music, in preparation for death, when the green people themselves are turned into rational shapes of crystals in a world 76

growing even more narrow because of the encroaching multitude of the petrified dead who fill its caves. It is a narrative told in deceptively attractive prose; it must nevertheless be read, the author makes clear, as a minatory parable as well as a poetic fantasy. The hopes generated by the Russian Revolution died hard and slowly during the 1930's even among many who were in no way orthodox Marxists. From 1917 onwards and for as long as I could preserve the illusion [Read confesses in Poetry and Anarchism] communism as established in Russia seemed to promise the social liberty of my ideals. So long as Lenin and Stalin promised a definitive 'withering away of the State', I was prepared to stifle my doubts and prolong my faith. But when, five, ten, fifteen, and then twenty years passed, with the liberty of the individual receding at every stage, a break became inevitable. The suicide in 1930 of the poet Mayakovsky, hounded by the Stalinist bureaucrats, began to stir Read's doubts, and in the Introduction to Surrealism (1936) he complained that "even Communism, the creed of liberty and fraternity, has made the exigencies of a transitional epoch the excuse for an unnecessary and stupid form of aesthetic intolerance." Two more or less simultaneous events in 1936 left Read with the conviction that he had no alternative but to break openly with Marxist communism and declare just as openly for anarchism. These were the Moscow Trials, and the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, where anarchism emerged from the shadows Marxist had cast over it and attempted, in a land at conflict, to lay the foundations of a libertarian society. Read wrote for Spain and the World, the anarchist paper of the time, addressed meetings, and wrote two of the best poems about the civil war, the compassionate and angry "Bombing Casualties in Spain" and "Song for the Spanish Anarchists," in which is condensed his whole vision of the organic strength of a free and natural society where the individual is defined by what he does, and where men have in common. The golden lemon is not made but grows on a green tree: A strong man and his crystal eyes is a man born free. The oxen pass under the yoke and the blind are led at will:

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But a man born free has a path of his own and a house on the hill. And men are men who till the land and women are women who weave: Fifty men own the lemon grove and no man is a slave. Read's socio-political writings, with minor exceptions, appeared between 1938 and 1954, and the most important had seen first publication by the end of 1943; one can perhaps fairly assume that Read's impulse to write on anarchism began to fail as the sense of glory associated with the early days of the Spanish civil war faded in his mind. There is a great deal of confusion in the publication history of these writings because of the various combinations in which Read issued and re-issued them. Poetry and Anarchism (1938), The Philosophy of Anarchism (1940), and Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism (1950) all appeared first as separate volumes, or at least pamphlets, while "The Paradox of Anarchism," printed first in Now ( 1942) was later collected in A Coat of Many Colours (1945). All these eventually came together, with a new introductory essay, "Revolution and Reason," in Anarchy and Order (1954). "Chains of Freedom" appeared first in Now (1947), in an expanded version in Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism, and in an even more expanded version in Anarchy and Order. To Hell with Culture appeared separately as a small pamphlet in 1941, and in 1943 was included as a chapter in The Politics of the Unpolitical, but a new volume in 1963, comprising most of The Politics of the Unpolitical, plus a few essays mainly concerning problems of the arts, was entitled To Hell with Culture. As I go on to discuss the leading themes of Read's socio-political philosophy, I shall do my best to avoid confusion by giving each book or pamphlet the title under which it was originally published. The opening lines of "Song for the Spanish Anarchists" contain the image which most concisely expresses Read's view of the nature of a free society : The golden lemon is not made but grows on a green tree . . . The free society cannot be developed according to a plan; it must grow according to nature; it is not Utopian, but organic. 78

The laws that govern its development may be according to reason, but they are not in the narrow sense rational, and perhaps it is from this distinction that one can begin the examination of Read's attitudes towards society and its political development. He calls himself a materialist; he declares that we must "admit the universalism of truth and submit our Ufe to the rule of reason." The life of the reason he sees as "a practical ideal, extending to wider and wider circles of humanity, and promising an earthly paradise never to be attained only because each stage towards its realization creates its superior level." (The Politics of the Unpolitical) But he says also that reason is much more than rationality or mechanistic logic. Reason should rather connote the widest evidence of the senses, and of all processes and instincts developed in the long history of man. It is the sum total of awareness, ordained and ordered to some specific end or object of attention. (Reason and Romanticism) In Read's view, a society that tried to exist on a purely rational basis "would probably die of a kind of communal accidie." We are involved inevitably in "certain intangible and imponderable elements which we call emotion and instinct," and while himself adhering to no religion, Read grants that "a religion is a necessary element in any organic society" and that a new religion might even develop out of anarchism. (The Philosophy of Anarchism) For "if . . . religion is the life of contemplation, the fruit of pure meditation, spiritual joy, then it cannot help but prosper in a society free from poverty, pride and envy." (Poetry and Anarchism) Freedom and anarchism are synonymous, but anarchism is not nihilism, and freedom is not license. It is, on the contrary, Read insists, part of natural law, and intimately linked with the phenomenon of evolution. "Freedom is not an essence only available to the sensibility of men ; it is germinatively at work in all living beings as spontaneity and autoplasticity." (Anarchy and Order) But just as society gains life from its dialectical opposition to the individual, so freedom is made real by its dialectical opposition to existence. And so with the individual and the community: complete freedom means inevitable decadence. The mind must feel an opposition — must be tamped with hard realities if it is to have any blasting power. (Politics of the Unpolitical) Thus Max Stirner's egoism is rejected by Read in favour of the libertarianism of Kropotkin. 79

In all that concerns the planning of economic life, the building up of a rational mode of living in a social community, there can be no question of absolute liberty. For, so long as we live in a community, in all practical affairs the greatest good of the greatest number is also the greatest good of the individual. (Poetry and Anarchism) The "duty to create a world of freedom" is far removed from the "freedom to do as you like," which is the characteristic excuse of the capitalist and the imperialist. In opposition to such anti-social concepts of freedom Read is even willing to use that word shunned by most anarchists — government — though he quickly makes clear that he means some form of control quite different from the processes of the State we know. Government — that is to say, control of the individual in the interests of the community, is inevitable if two or more men combine for a common purpose; government is the embodiment of that purpose. But government in this sense is far removed from the conception of an autonomous state. (Poetry and Anarchism) In choosing his political forms, Read rejects both authoritarianism (including Communist as well as fascist totalitarianism) and democracy as history has known it. A single passage of dismissal is enough to express his rejection of the authoritarians. The authoritarian believes in discipline as a means; the libertarian in discipline as an end, as a state of mind. The authoritarian issues instructions; the libertarian encourages self-education. The one tolerates a subjective anarchy below the smooth surface of his rule; the other has no need of rule because he has achieved a subjective harmony reflected in personal integrity and social unity. (Anarchy and Order) There is of course no essential difference between ideal democracy and anarchy, since neither has in fact been tried. The democracy that has been tried has failed because it was tied to the notions of universal suffrage and majority rule. The theory of majority rule and the concentration of power in central parliaments have between them imposed on democracy the tendency to seek continually "some form of centralized control," and hence to increase the power of the state. As for universal suffrage, Read condemns it as emphatically as Proudhon did. It is a myth, a quite illusory delegation of power... a fiction of consent where in fact no liberty of choice exists. (Poetry and Anarchism) It is the myth of universal suffrage that allows even communists and 80

fascists to claim that they are democrats: "They all obtain popular consent by the manipulation of mass psychology." What else, Read implies, do parliamentary politicians do? The ideal democracy is another matter, and, as one sees by the three conditions which Read lays down for its fulfilment, it is, in his mind, not different essentially from anarchism. The first condition is that all production is for use, and not for profit. The second condition is that each should give according to his ability and each receive according to his needs. The third condition is that the workers in each industry should collectively own and control that industry. {Politics of the Unpolitical) These conditions represent Read's view of necessary organization as functional and economic rather than political and social, and of equality as dependent on community. For the essential is not to make all incomes equal — the ideal of the average democratic socialist — but to abolish all incomes and hold all things in common ... It is essential to stress the radical nature of this distinction between equal partition, and community ownership. It is the distinction between false communism and true communism, between the totalitarian conception of the State as a controlled herd, and the libertarian conception of society as a brotherhood. Once this conception is fully realized, the ambiguities of the doctrine of equality disappear: the concept of equality is dissolved in the concept of community. {Anarchy of Order) This, of course, brings us to the classic anarchist position: the denunciation of the state, the proclamation that societies must be built, like houses, from the ground up. For a culture "grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work. It is a spontaneous expression of their joy in life, of their joy in work, and if this joy does not exist, the culture will not exist." {Politics for the Unpolitical) Like all anarchists, Read is reluctant to create elaborate plans for the ideal society. Warnings against such presumptuousness are scattered through his writings. "The Utopia fades the moment we try to actualize it." Anarchism is planless, "a point on the horizon" towards which we progress. "It is foolish to indulge in anything but relatively short-term policies for the human race." "It is always a mistake to build a priori constitutions. The main thing is to establish 81

your principles — the principles of equality, of individual freedom, of workers' control." Decentralization and arbitration instead of normal legal procedures are the main additions that Read makes to these simple requirements on the rare occasions when he draws a sketch plan for the future, as in the early 1940's he did in The Politics of the Unpolitical, He listed as follows the features of his plan for a "natural society." I The liberty of the person. II The integrity of the family. III The reward of qualifications. IV The self-government of the guilds. V The abolition of parliament and centralized government. VI The institution of arbitrament. VII The delegation of authority. VIII The humanization of industry. Read differs from most anarchists other than Proudhon in the stress he laid on the family as the basic natural social unit. It is "the integral unit," "the most effective unit" because it is the smallest, and it is the basis on which can be built the next unit upwards, the parish, "the local association of men in contiguous dwellings." Such local associations may form their courts, and these courts are sufficient to administer a common law based on common sense. [A Coat of Many Colours) Next in importance comes the guild, which anarchists with a different background from Read's early connection with The New Age might call the syndicate — "the association of men and women according to their calling or practical function." With "political power" distributed among families and parishes ("human tangible units"), with economic power vested in the guilds and workshops, with financial power "altogether excluded from society," with "productive labour" recognized as "the basic reality and honoured as such," the organizational shell of Read's vision of the free society is complete. So far it is little different from other anarchist sketches of the future. One finds the same ideas more forcefully expressed by Proudhon and more elaborately by Kropotkin. What most distinguishes Read's anarchism from the anarchism of past theoretician?, and brings it closer to the socialism of William Morris, is the stress he 82

places on the role of the arts — on the artist as mediator, and on art itself as the vehicle of a revolutionary form of education. In my view this particular emphasis is much more important than the other novel feature of Read's anarchism, the wide introduction of psychoanalytical concepts and terminology, which mainly serve to replace the somewhat outdated scientism of Kropotkin and Reclus, who used evolutionary concepts in much the same way as Read uses psychoanalytical ones, to prove that anarchism was given support — and hence credibility — by the most contemporary scientific developments. I have always found Read's borrowings from Freud, Jung et al the least convincing features of his literary and artistic criticism, and I doubt if such borrowings have greatly strengthened his case for anarchism, though he has drawn out of them a few entertaining aphorisms, e.g. "I would define the anarchist as the man who, in his manhood, dares to resist the authority of the father" (a definition I am inclined to dispute, since I have known many anarchists with gentle fathers and domineering, hated mothers). The place of art in Read's ideal society becomes clear as soon as we move away from his plans for its organizational functioning, and sense the kind of life he would like to see lived in that future. It is, needless to say, the rural world of a self-proclaimed peasant, rather like that of News from Nowhere without its earnest laboriousness, for Read, while at times he denounces the factory system, realizes that "industrialism must be endured," and goes beyond that to search for means by which the machine can not merely perform the unpleasant tasks, which Morris eventually allowed, but can also produce beautiful objects, which Morris would never admit. At the same time, Read is aware that no civilization or people can lose touch with things, can abandon organic processes, can forget the feel of wood and clay and metal worked with the hands, and still remain healthy. Therefore he wishes to use machinery to simplify existence, to bring more leisure, to end pointless labours, so that when men leave the cities they will find "a world of electric power and mechanical plenty where man can once more return to the land, not as a peasant, but as a lord." In such a world play will resume its true place in human life, and . . . it was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties — everything we mean by the word 'culture' . . . Play is freedom, is disinterestedness, and it is only by virtue of disinterested free activity that man has created his cultural values. Perhaps it is this 83

theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy. (Anarchy and Order) Of play, of course, art is the highest form, and Read sees for the artist a high role in the free society, for he is . . . the man who mediates between our individual consciousness and the collective unconsciousness, and thus ensures social re-integration. It is only in the degree that this mediation is successful that a true democracy is possible. (Poetry and Anarchism) Read wrote almost all his works on anarchism from the viewpoint of the artist or poet; in this he resembled and may have been influenced by Oscar Wilde, whose Soul of Man Under Socialism also envisaged a libertarian society as the best environment for the arts to flourish. But Read did not express an elitist point of view. He might intend artists to be, in Shelley's phrase which he quotes approvingly, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," but he does not see them in this role as a minority, since what he hopes for, following on the development of a free society, is the universalization of art, in the sense that its standards will be applied to all human work (factory-made or hand-made) and that by this token all men will become artists. As the aim of work changes from profit to use, so will the life-view of the workers change. The worker has as much latent sensibility as any human being, but that sensibility can only be awakened when meaning is restored to his daily work and he is allowed to create his own culture. (Politics of the Unpolitical) Then we shall realize that "every man is a special kind of artist," for "art is skill: a man does something so well that he is entitled to be called an artist." So art is brought down from the isolation to which bourgeois cultures have condemned it, and becomes a matter of everyday activity. This does not mean that art itself has progressed, for it is impossible to see any pattern of qualitative evolution from the painters of prehistoric Lascaux to those of the School of Paris. But it does mean that civilization has progressed because it has admitted artistic impulses into its life and its relationships. What applies to the man also applies to the child, who is a potential artist from the beginning, and in whom a system of education through art can induce — in Read's view — inner harmonies which will make him better prepared for social initiation. Undoubtedly 84

Read saw such a system of education as a potent agent of social liberation, but he also held, for long periods, to more orthodox views of change by physical means. In a general sense Read regarded revolt as an inevitable and regenerative element in any human society. "Freedom is not a state of rest, of least resistance. It is a state of action, of projection, of selfrealization." But this natural and spontaneous revolt was different from the specific kind of rebellion which Read deemed necessary in the unregenerate present. Poverty must be abolished, the classless society brought to an end, at the very least the more monstrous injustices of the social order must be ended, "and if we do not revolt . . . we are either morally insensitive or criminally selfish." (Anarchy and Order) During the late 1930's Read envisaged revolt in activist terms. "Naturally the abolition of poverty and the consequent establishment of a classless society is not going to be accomplished without a struggle," he said in Poetry and Anarchism ( 1938). "Certain people have to be dispossessed of their autocratic power and of their illegitimate profits." And two years later, in The Philosophy of Anarchism, he declared that "an insurrection is necessary for the simple reason that when it comes to the point, even your man of good will, if he is on the top, will not sacrifice his personal advantages to the general good." Read did not however think in terms of violent action. He insisted that anarchist rebellion must be non-violent, that the example of Gandhi must be followed, and the only insurrectionary strategy he discussed at any length was the general strike, which he believed had never been used to its full effect. And, though he saw himself as a rebel, he did not admit to being, at least in the political sense, a revolutionary. As early as 1940 he accepted the validity of Max Stirner's distinction between revolution and insurrection, and later, when Camus made in The Rebel his even sharper distinction between revolution (a totalitarian act) and rebellion (a libertarian act), Read adopted it. Revolutions, as has often been remarked, change nothing; or rather, they merely substitute one set of masters for another set. Social groups acquire new names, but retain their former inequality of status. Rebellions or insurrections, on the other hand, being guided by instinct rather than reason, being passionate and spontaneous rather than cool and calculated, do act like shock therapy on the body of society, 85

and there is a chance that they may change the chemical composition of the societal crystal... [Rebellion] eludes the world of power — that is the point, for it is always power that crystallizes into a structure of injustice. It was, ironically, not until long after the period of his anarchist writings, not until the early 1960's (his own late sixties) that Read eventually moved into practical activism, and became involved in the passive resistance tactics of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Committee of 100, sitting down in Whitehall not to usher in anarchy but to protest, with more conviction than hope, against the destructive aspects of the existing unfree society. Read's later years were marked by a steady loss of hope of seeing a better world in his time or foreseeing one for his children. He seized comfort where he could, and sometimes in unlikely places, for I find a letter written in November 1959, with a postscript on his recent trip to China: "China — very exciting! The communes as near to our kind of anarchism as anything that is likely to happen." But soon he realized that even here his optimism had been misplaced, and it was with a flickering confidence in the world that he performed in 1962 the symbolic act of putting his autobiographical writings together in the final form of The Contrary Experience. Nihilism — nothingness, despair, and the nervous hilarity that goes with them — remains the universal state of mind [he wrote then]. From such an abyss the soul of man does not rise in a decade or two. If a human world survives the atomic holocaust — and it is now difficult to see how such a holocaust is to be avoided — it will only be because man has first overcome his Nihilism. A few prophets have already pointed the way — Gandhi, Buber, Simone Weil, C. G. Jung — but the people are also few who pay heed to them. Spiritually the world is now one desert, and prophets are not honoured in it. But physically it still has a beautiful face, and if we could once more learn to live with nature, if we could return like prodigal children to the contemplation of its beauty, there might be an end to our alienation and fear, a return to those virtues of delight which Blake called Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. Resignation, with a little hope: a melancholy but not an unusual end for an anarchist. One cannot help contrasting the mood of this passage with that in which The Philosophy of Anarchism was brought to an end twenty-two years before. Faith in the fundamental goodness of man; humility in the presence of natural law; reason and mutual aid — these are the qualities that can 86

save us. But they must be unified and vitalized by an insurrectionary passion, a flame in which all virtues are tempered and clarified, and brought to their most effective strength. It is such words that evoke for me the Read I knew. Though in many ways his life was curiously bourgeois, his anarchism had fostered — or perhaps merely refined — a limpidity of nature and outlook such as I have always imagined Kropotkin possessed. His periodical relapses into the Tory conformity of his youth one had to balance against the occasions when he took public stands, particularly in the defence of other people, that cost him a great deal materially and in terms of his career. One blamed at times his inconsistency, but never doubted his sincerity. I still do not know what romantic aberration leaping from a Yorkshire childhood induced him to become Sir Herbert, but I do know that Queen Elizabeth II never dubbed a gentler knight. When one tries to sum up his achievements as a social and political writer, if one leaves out The Green Child and the poems of war and anarchism, they seem perhaps less than those in his other fields. He gave a new and attractive expression, a luminous clarification, to the few and simple truths that make up the anarchist doctrine. He investigated more thoroughly than any of his predecessors the relationship between freedom, art and the artist. He was largely responsible for the libertarian attitudes which dominated much English and American poetry during the 1940's. But one cannot say that in any of these fields—except in his work on education through art — he was a great originator. I believe his anarchist beliefs and writings attract and give most light when they are seen in the context of his entire achievement, in relation to his poetry, to his writings on education and revolutionary art, on industry and romantic poetry, for then one sees his world-view complete, with the love of freedom its moving spirit.

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BARBARA HEPWORTH

Four Drawings

i

Touchstone. Oil and Pencil. 41" x 18". 1966. Collection : Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd.

11 Construction IL Oil and Pencil. 40" x 35". 1966. in

Equinox. Oil and Pencil. 30 1/8" x 24 1/8". 1966. Collection : Lady Debenham.

rv

Genesis III. Oil and Pencil. 3o"x4o". 1966. Collection: Geoffrey Jellicoe,

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C.B.E.

NORMAN NICHOLSON

The Borehole A huddle of iron jammy-cranes 1 Straddles the skear, shanks Rusty from salt rains, Or halfway up their barnacled flanks In the flood tide. Paid-up pits Lounge round the banks, Turning out red pockets. The cranking waders stand, Necks down, bills grinding in their sockets, Drilling the sand. A steam-pipe whistles, the clanged iron bells; Five hundred feet of limestone shudders and Creaks down all its strata'd spine of ammonites and shells, And a vertical worm of stone is worried Out from the earth's core. The daylight falls Westward with the ebb, before The night-shift buzzer calls : But what is it sticks in the bird's gullet — Rubble or crystal, dross or ore? 1

Herons.

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DENISE LEVERTOV

Craving Wring the swan's neck, seeking a litde language of drops of blood. How can we speak of blood, the sky is drenched with it. A little language of dew, then. It dries. A language of leaves underfoot. Leaves on the tree, trembling in speech. Poplars tremble and speak if you draw near them.

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Edward Dahlberg and Herbert Read

AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS* Edited by Reginald C. Terry

I am, as always, your socratic gadfly and friend, EDWARD DAHLBERG

F

TWENTY-THREE YEARS Herbert Read was the most perceptive critic of Edward Dahlberg's work, his devoted .JL.OR friend, and certainly the man who did most to introduce this unique American writer to readers in England. In a foreword to the English edition of Dahlberg's literary studies, Sing O Barren, Read said :

There is not a page which lacks its vivid imagery, its memorable phrase. It is not the slick prose of the smart journalist, nor the careful prose of the timid intellectual, and least of all the intricate jewellery of the aesthete. It is the crystalline vein of the English Bible, of Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, running through the torpid substance of modern life.1 *The letters of Herbert Read are part of the Edward Dahlberg Collection in the University of Texas. Dahlberg's letters are among the Read papers and mss. at the University of Victoria. Sir Herbert Read approved this brief selection shortly before his death. Mr. Dahlberg's letters were corrected by the author when he was preparing material for The Edward Dahlberg Reader, New Directions, 1967, when he made certain excisions of a personal nature. Quotations in this introductory note are from the letters with dates given in brackets where a text is indicated. 1

Sing O Barren, Routledge, 1947, p. vii, (first published in the United States as Do These Bones Live, 1941 ; reissued as Can These Bones Live, with illustrations by James Kearns, New Directions, N.Y., i960.

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Both writers share a concern for clear and correct expression. Read's is the style of a "lissomy deer" says Dahlberg in a typically vigorous metaphor. He finds Annals of Innocence and Experience a "faultless elegy." "I never quarrel with you as a remarkable stylist" (January 14, 1955). And the phrase he savours from Read's English Prose Style is "Word is act" (April 14, 1959). For it is the relation of style to the living experience and the quality of a culture which is the constant theme of the Read-Dahlberg letters. He [Dahlberg] tells u s . . . that what our genius lacks most is being simple, and though he is as ever thinking of style, the style is not separable from the way of life . . . [he] believes that bad writing shows a lack of love . . . a poet concerned for style is likely to have a stronger sense of social values than the styleless sociologue . . . his style is another name for his perception and his wisdom.2 Or, as Dahlberg affirms: "It is not possible to tell truth in ill assorted words." (January 14, 1955) Both writers are dedicated to direct and vivid utterance of a simple truth, which in the broadest sense is Tolstoy's belief that men live by love. Their letters are an earnest and often acrimonious debate on two issues : the forces sundering man from his brother, and the way in which art, particularly literary art, may heal and inspire. Literature is, in Dahlberg's phrase, "the sacred occupation of the heart (October 11, 1957) demanding a purity and asceticism that sets the teacher apart and condemns him to loneliness and exile. Ishmael is Edward Dahlberg's symbolic figure. As he says in Sing O Barren : American Ishmaels are our artists, — "Call me Ishmael" prophetically utters Herman Melville in the first lines of Moby Dick — doomed to be cut away, afar from earthly mortal beginnings, the human vineyards, the beauteous Genesis of the protean and warming race-experience. We are brute giant pathfinders, without a remembrance of the past or tradition, discoverers of brand-new nostrums for sex, life, science, art, religion^ Most of Dahlberg's poetic impulse is implicit here : the rejection of modern culture and the rediscovery of meaning in time past. By nature Dahlberg is thus a teller of parables ; his work is surrounded by terms such as "vision," "prophet," "apocalyptic." To Paul Car3 Foreword by Sir Herbert Read to Alms For Oblivion, Essays by Edward Dahlberg, University of Minnesota Press, 1964, pp. viii-ix. 3 From "Can These Bones Live" in Sing O Barren.

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roll he is "our one mythological poet." 4 As Dahlberg confesses to Read, "I have little patience with description, relying upon maxim, myth, and w i t . . . I am a coney-catcher of the past." (January 19, 1958). His work is a kind of diary of apothegms and epigrams from wide reading and meditation; thus his letters are always exciting, for they are the perfect medium for the confessional, anecdotal mind. Style, dedication, learning are valued, but both writers also recognize their debt to nature. In the literal as well as the metaphorical sense "Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors."5 Relishing this phrase from Dahlberg's essay, "For Sale," Read continues to quote: "unless we return to the old handicrafts, to the wheat, stable, and horse village, to poems, houses, bricks, and tables, which are manual, we will become a nation of killers."6 The letters are full of such thoughts. "Our separation from mountains, channels, rivers, and isthmus has left our intellects barren . . . The sentence is void of the mountain, poplar, ash, the seas of Poseidon, the chanting bivalve." (February 3, 1955). Read's "cell of good living" (November 19, 1951) is intimately bound up with the land and rural community of his beloved York: "It is only so far as a culture keeps close to nature and the soil that it expresses any intensity of feeling or sensibility for beauty." (September 15, 1952). "Something has happened to our hands" laments Dahlberg in "Our Vanishing Cooperative Colonies." 7 Such thoughts provide the poetic symbols of his best work, the "knowledge before reason and science," (once again Read's extrapolation from the American writer's work), "a secret wisdom that is prior to logic — the vibrant god-telling PULSE," 8 the equivalent of Read's own "true voice of feeling." With such shared values it is not surprising that both reject the contemporary wasteland. Dahlberg unlocks a word-hoard against man's inventions, bourgeois values, American cities, modern art, grammarians; against Read himself for his concessions to the age and for his non-literary activities. Read calls him "a relentless scourge of all human frailties, especially those that threaten the in4 Introduction to The Edward Dahlberg xvii. 5 Foreword to Alms For Oblivion, p. ix. 6 ibid. 7 ibid., p. 92. 8 Sing O Barren, p. viii.

Reader,

New Directions, 1967, p.

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tegrity of the writer."9 For Dahlberg is whole-hearted and uncompromising in his rejection of modern civilization. Moving restlessly around the world he preaches destruction on "the iron and macadam cities" (October 4, 1947). American dreams have produced a "nation of garage keepers and mechanics." (October 16, 1946). His first novel, Bottom Dogs (1930), for which another homeless spirit, D. H. Lawrence, wrote a preface, he describes as "a chronicle of a scrawny and unhallowed land." (December 19, 1946). America, he concludes, is "an iron-bowelled matriarchy." (March 29, 1962). Rejection of contemporary society includes its literature. He dismisses poetry: "Our modern verse is bullet and machine gun originality" (October 4, 1951 ) ; Sinclair Lewis writes "craven, newspaper prose" (March 1, 1955); Huxley is "the Hollywood mystagogue (March 1, 1955). One by one modern poets are assailed: "Joyce has annihilated a whole generation of values" (April 5, 1955) ; Eliot is "a sterile pedant" (October 9, 1957) ; and Pound is "a deranged Polonius of letters (March 5, i960). In their place he exalts the great writers of the past, among whom he mentions frequently the Greek philosophers, Shakespeare, Swift — "that dour and stony intellect" (April 14, 1959) —and Blake. "What is important to me," Dahlberg has written, "is honest workmanship, learning and human poetry."10 If Read falls short of Dahlberg's exacting standards he is roundly abused, for it is the duty of a real friend to tell plain truth, according to the Socratic maxim "Truth is more sacred than friendship" (April 1, 1956), the tide of their published exchange of letters on literary themes." A constant aggravation is Read's neglect of his poetic vocation in order to spend time with "the exchequer gents of the arts" (November 15, 1951), to lecture and write books on art, and to "travel the world giving nosegays to painters" (March 5, 1954). Read meets the lava flow of criticism calmly. It is the classic confrontation between the uncompromising dissenter and the moderate, pragmatic liberal. For Read there is no sense in reviling the world to the point at which men will cease to take any notice. Listen, persuade, is his counsel. 9 Alms For Oblivion, p. viii. Poetry, vol. 78, no. 1, April 1951. 11 Truth Is More Sacred, Horizon Press, 1961. 10

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What drives one out into the world is not the desire for fame (to which I am as indifferent as anyone could honestly and humanly be), nor the desire for lucre,... but simply a missionary zeal, which may be vain in itself, but is surely not despicable. (February 13, 1949) Remonstrating with Dahlberg for his Ishmaelism he urges "the capacity to compromise with life without sacrificing . . . integrity as an artist." (March 6, 1949). Withdrawal and rejection logically lead to silence. The more positive doctrine is one of reconciliation, or, as he puts it in a characteristic phrase "to continue as a child; to preserve the innocent eye. I have pruning shears in my garden, but no thunderbolts." (November 19, 1951 ). "The mood the poet strives for, for himself, is serenity." (December 9, 1951 ). But serenity does not mean sloth, and reconciliation admits of no weakness: "there is no question of compromising with the prevailing vulgarism." (December 25, 1956). This is the crux: But there is no audience for our belles lettres, so we must be content with whatever faith we have in the immortality of good writing, or we must make the necessary gestures to attract an audience. And to do this without losing our integrity! (December 25, 1956) The qualities he urges on Dahlberg are those he has found in an essay on Henry James: "his [James's] vision, his harmony, his judgement, and above all his justice." (October 7, 1957) While they share fundamentally the same beliefs in literary ideals, they are often in conflict because of their dissimilar temperaments. "You are a very quiet nature," writes Dahlberg, "and I am always an upboiling Vesuvius" (January 12, 1952). On one occasion Read called him "a boiling Diogenes" (April 18, 1956). But Dahlberg's anger is not that of the cynic but of the reformer — "a good primitive Jew of the Old Testament" (February 6, 1956) he calls himself — and the volume of his rage is equalled by the extent of his love: "Unless literature is for love it is a vice" (October 4, 1951 ). His best work, such as The Sorrows Of Priapus (New Directions, 1957) and the autobiography, Because I Was Flesh (New Directions, 1964), are ample proof of this. His "vexsome diatribes" and "constant admonitions" are no less instinct with love and respect: "You are the kindest Man in the world of Letters." (October 30, 1959)

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February 19, 1949 New York City Dear Herbert, I am pained by your letter. Why should you believe evil in the mouths of others is in mine? What resentment have I toward you? I honor the quiddity of your identity, and tell you plainly when I believe you are departing from it. I risk your rancour, and for what profit? I am very alone, and can whisper to you what Christ asked Peter, "Will you go away?" and if you love the W O R D , as I devoutly do, you will reply, "Whither shall I go?" Examine my heart as closely as I can, I do not know what I could say about you that could be regarded as coarse or base. Do you earnestly believe these rude, little anarchs, who do not respect you as I do, have the "Conscience of the ear" to have properly understood any remark I may have made about you? Are these unread men who feed and gander and spill their bile everywhere the troubled, enquiring hearts to whom you write a hundred letters a week? Then you have lived in an error. I told you you had forsaken me, but that I have said to you and to nobody else. It is the ethical duty of a man of letters to prevent the W O R D from dying in the earth ; let the living word perish, and the seed, the plants, and the green, sticky leaves wither too. This is our burden. Were it not for me, [Charles] Olson whom you cite, would neither have written nor published the book [Call Me Ishmael] from which you cite. What I did for him I did at my disadvantage. When I was coeditor of Twice a Year, and had had not one jot of my soul on a page for six years and was as hungered as crusty Lazarus was for some morsel, I labored so ardently for his work that he was published instead of me. You should not be angry with me for telling you that as a director of Routledge you must do something for literature, or in some chemic and baleful way you will mire upon your own spirit. It is more important to guard the vestal fires of a poet than to weep over the ruins of Germany. Had there been a half dozen soothsayers in that land the people would have been less predacious, and their earth not a cairn of asphalt and bitumen. People expire from their own decay, and it is very doubtful that any great nation has ever been destroyed by enemies from without. The weakness of Greece was in Demosthenes rather than in the might of the Persians. Your allusion to my Ishmaelism is not just. You forget your own 100

feeling of revulsion against America. Do you think you have more fortitude than Herman Melville who regarded himself as an Ishmael? But he was not a wanderer. For bread and the oil and blubber of the whale he had travelled to northerly boreal streams. But after his twenty-fifth year he spent some eighteen months in Pittsfield, Mass. ; and with the exception of one brief and disenchanted pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he settled on Bleecker Street, and on 23rd, New York City, and remained in tenements here until his death. You write that "Ishmaelism has none of the serenity of true resignation and retirement," but you admire a peripatetic Christ. If you mean that the wisdom of the Ishmaelite is bitter, pariah knowledge, you are right. But then you must set aside the parables of Christ, the anger of Jeremiah, Matthew and Luke who has the Nazarene cry out, "O I have overcome the world!" You make a snare for yourself when you bring fillets, rams, and the olive of Minerva to the world which Plato, Heraclitus and Nietzsche profoundly rejected. I do not believe you are discerning, speaking on the quick of your spirit, when you fleer at Melville's and my own feeling, "to live in the world without being of it" by adding, "Yes, but to live." But let us consider travel. Plato's Socrates says it is foolish to travel since you always take yourself with you. Christ, as I have written in "The Rational Tree" was a sick nature, wandering even after he was the Holy Ghost. There was no greater injury to the deceased among the ancients than to be deprived of quiet sepulchre which the migratory Holy Ghost was denied. Plato, in his desire to shape a martial Socrates, writes that he was at Potidaea and at Delium; Plato also states elsewhere that Socrates never left Athens. Thucydides makes no mention at all of Socrates as a soldier. Socrates was supposed to have stood in one place from one sunrise to the next solely to be quiet (Please see "The Rational Tree" and forgive the gimcrack pretence of an unpublished author). It is doubtful that Shakespeare ever left England. If you must travel, go then as Menelaus did to hear the oracles of Proteus in Egypt's Nile. I wonder also whether you did not write the following in some haste, and would not, perhaps, after reflection, relinquish this: "You hate the world and because you revile it the world will not listen to you." It would be vain and repetitious to tell you that every sage and votary of the Muse has denounced the World. One of the three great curses, it is said in the Chester or the Miracle Plays, 101

is the world. Heraclitus himself said that all the Ephesians should hang themselves. Democritus could not endure his countrymen, nor could Baudelaire, or Nietzsche, who was despised by the world which rejected him and heeds you. I cannot accept your acts as the palm branches and garlands to be laid at the altar of life. You cannot relinquish the forces to life and have enough strength for FORM. I deeply appreciate your letter and have more tenderness for your G I F T than you appear to know; I beg you to guard it, and not to cast it to those who come to you for the five barley leaves and the two fishes. They pay the homage of a toady to your reputation, and would disregard you as much as they do me if you had none. I know how fatigued you are; when I was with you last April I was dismayed. I work as an academic drudge for penury that I may write an occasional book which no one will publish, and give counsel to dear, good Herbert Read who will not heed me. My tender affections to you, and my love to your children and to Ludo [Mrs. Herbert Read]. March 6, 1949 Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire Dear Edward, We must not waste our correspondence on mutual recriminations. Such resentment as I did feel on the receipt of your letter about Education for Peace has long ago evaporated — but has left, perhaps, a clearer realisation of our different points of view. You attempt to impose on me some antithesis of Life and Form, or the World and Art, which fundamentally I don't accept. There is a certain sense in which form kills life, and my Green Child was written to demonstrate that fact. But it is life that must triumph — otherwise we are victims of that Death Wish which is the secret of so much corruption in German and Russian literature. Life is a continuous process of anamorphosis — of the progressive creation of form. It is the realisation of that fact which gives Goethe his greatness and makes him (and here I suspect we diverge) the representative modern man — the precursor of Nietzsche and still more viable than Nietzsche. What makes Goethe relevant, for my personal argument, is that he had the capacity to compromise with life without sacrificing his integrity as an artist. Instead of being overwhelmed 102

by the busy-ness of life, he swept it all into the creative mould — he made the occasional the excuse for the immortal. "If you want to go into infinity," he said, "go within the finite in all directions." That, I suspect, is the fundamental wisdom, and I see it working in Shakespeare. The difficulty is a dynamic one — to have enough energy (spiritual and physical) and to expend it wisely. The curse of our modern age with its penny post and public telephones, mass publicity and swift communications, is that the impact of life, on any one individual, is almost unbearable. Goethe in Weimar is one thing — transport him to modern London or New York and I guess he would be as frustrated as any of us. Nevertheless, the complexity of modern life is no excuse for rejecting it. My desire to return to Yorkshire is a weakness unless I can be confident that I take life with me, stored in memorable experience. Melville in Bleecker Street surely had that confidence. There is a patent paradox in rejecting the world and yet continuing to address it, even if only to revile it. Would not silence in such circumstances be more dignified? I cannot believe that the man who wrote the Laws at the age of seventy had hated the world and rejected it. Surely he loved it so much that he spent his life in a vain effort to reform it nearer to his heart's desire. You often mention Dostoevsky with respect. Was there ever a man more cruelly caught in the sticky web of life — and yet doesn't his greatness emerge from that fact? I am trying to extract your MS [The Flea of Sodom] from [Geoffrey] Grigson because I have found a young publisher who has expressed an interest in it. Do not be too premature in hope; but I believe that I have some conscience in the matter and always look for an opportunity to give your words currency. Ben is not too well — the least cold or fever upsets his carefully controlled metabolism and it is a constant worry to keep him "balanced". The others are happy — it has snowed for the first time this winter and they have been busy building an igloo all day. Our love to you all. October 4, 1951 New York City Dear Herbert, Seeing you was that Balm of Gilead for which man no longer thirsts or hungers, for appetite has died, and Boredom is King. I 103

would walk to Capernaum and to Sidon and return to this sooty nihilistic hole, New York, just to smell the first potherbs and nettles. I would yield up my poor, slain life to smell the First. I abhor baring my poverty, for it is the only raiment I have left. None will let me teach, and very few will permit me to write. We hate the Buddha, a Socrates, and man no longer imitates them, for he wants above all to be original which is the source of modern spite and destruction. Look in vain for the milk of the Vedic heifer, or the curd of the Rig Veda in your poet. Our modern verse is bullet and machine gun originality, for to be new is to want to destroy the world. You spoke of conventions; yes, they are good when uttered by Solon, or Jesus, or Samuel, and I have scant respect for those who overturn them. The present occidental Atlas does not hold the skies on his shoulders; he changes them, and when the weather of his soul is constant is wretched. You will pardon me if I was rather astounded, and wounded, when you wrote in one of your books such barren words. Unless literature is for love it is a vice. I read your Phases of English Poetry with admiration, and I could only find fault with the amount of attention you give to pentameters, for I cannot see of what avail is that. When a man thirst for Rachel's Well, what can he drink that will not leave his throat more parched if he is offered iambics or other such grammar gruel? I want the Cana marriage wine, yes, I want the stones that have not been turned into bread or into Cain's rubble. The other is that though you ask for a communal prose, it seems to me that you will do little toward this end. If I say that the most accursed sin is to labor for one's self, for this is dropping one's seed alone, and that is what solitude has brought men, do I deceive anybody? I still think, Herbert, you have some belief in the cunning of the brain. I, of course, warmly believe in your grass roots in art, though I must own, that I suspect that art today is not the plain, simple illiteracy, and nihilism, but is the most sly and baffling illiteracy. It is a brush and typewriter brain pretending that he is using the reed that grows by the Chaldaic Tigris. Then you take a great deal of interest in inventions which I think is man's folly, for the more he invents, the greater is his inertia, and you cannot get two inert men either to trust or to love one another. For love is inward energy, and men who are concerned with the Cherubim, or with Daniel's Vision, do not make machines. In your 104

graceful little introduction to Klee you again lament that art and society are two, and yet how are we going to make them one? Man will always be divisible as long as he makes new and more machines, for the purpose of mechanical devices is not to ease the spirit, but to make him spiritless and altogether outward. Maybe when Thaïes passed water he thought it was a first cause, and Cyrus, we know, had great concern for his own voiding, at least in a dream or a vision, and maybe we will have to go back to a naked, pissing Adam, for an Eden. I would rather know how to pass water straight than make the most cunning lines, for I am more afraid of the skilled mind than Erebus or death. You have gone to wise Plato to pasture your soul, and I see in your good, seemly face what I have always imagined Vergil to be, but why will you not come all the way through unto your own nature? Are we to be together by being apart? Are we to sow seeds on the page, but say it is not the age in which to be such a planter? All my life I have said that we must not sow in a book what we do not intend to reap in the life. I know you are a Good Man, and I tell you what the Angel said to Lot, Haste Thee from Sodom. For it is a kind of Gomorrah perversity to give two heads to one animal, the book and the life, for if we do we then give ourselves two faces too. I am, as you see, Herbert, sorely tried, but I am a learner, and would not presume to teach him from whom I would not seek instruction. I have thought of you a long time, and it is my belief, or am I wrong in this, that I was in some way responsible for your removal to York. Then I begged you not to waste your rich gifts going everywhere, and now I again beseech you not to fatten evil men whom you enlarge by your companionship . . . I have long ago perished, and even now at this instant I am still in my rags and in my grave. Who will give us the spittle to open our eyes, and is it our most evil paradox, that what man hates most today is poverty and human spittle, for both are so communal? We are all despised and on the ground. Please, remember, do not judge men by the way they praise you; ask them rather whether they despise Edward Dahlberg, reckon him hard and difficult. It is very easy to respect you, but only a man who has the old Pharoah's riddle in his soul, will bow to my obscurity and indigence. Charles Olson had said many years ago that the measure of a man was his ability to be my friend. He has since left me, and no book has come from his nature worthy of his first, the result of our great affections for each other, Call Me IshmaeL Do I brag? I 105

do not think so, for it will matter little to the world whether I do or not. I am sending you several manuscripts. There is the critical volume. It is not nearly as good as your Coat of Many Colors, nor as well written. I do not mind that it is not, or in saying so. It is honest and that at the present is enough. There is a part of a long Kansas City poem on my Mother, which may or may not entice you, and there is about twenty thousand words of a novel, some of which must be rewritten, and sharpened. What will you think of these? I do not know. I do not know how long it takes for a Lazarus to die and to be reborn between books. The bitterness of getting my bread has given me little quiet, and though I was born to be unquiet, I must have repose, for one must have some beast strength in him to save his will without which a book is very feeble and vicious. I send you my love, as Hamlet gave it to Horatio. Had we love and trusting hearts our conventions would be savory, but when the loam, and the apple, and the goats have died, O Herbert, do not concern yourself with codes, but with the living waters between two people, and if they have perished, I then know that I am Lazarus in the grave, and not Lazarus reborn. I am really happy about the Louis Zukofsky matter. I beg you to work for the publication of a collection of his poetry and prose after you have settled The Test of Poetry. Tell me, please, when you are to come down, and do not be vexed with my rebuke, for it comes from my heart. It is a part of what Pascal calls the desire to finish, and it is what we must speak to each other. Remember, I reprehend the man to whom I am most indebted in this world, so I need not apologize. November 19, 1951 Stonegrave, York Dear Edward, Your letter provokes a quick reaction ! Not of anger — almost of amusement. Here you are again, insisting that my temperament should be like yours, my philosophy of life like yours, my social behaviour like yours. Or at least insisting that I should adopt some quixotic policy of anti-social isolation which, you assume, would give me some warm feeling of self-righteousness. Let me, once and for all, try to make myself clear on this issue. What kind of anarchist am I? My own kind, no doubt. I do not 106

believe that I shall bring the anarchist ideal one step nearer by joining an artificial commune, accepting the standard of life of savages, or wearing a loin-cloth in a sub-arctic climate. I do not believe that I shall bring that ideal any nearer realization by selling all I possess and giving the proceeds to the poor. I believe that I can best serve that ideal by cultivating my small-holding of seven acres, by establishing a sense of community in this village, by living at peace with my neighbours, by creating what [Eric] Gill called a cell of good living. You accuse me of consorting with publicans and sinners — with the bankers of art and letters. You do not go so far as suggesting that I have been defiled by these contacts, but you obviously think I am in that danger. In this waste land we inhabit I go where the spirit calls me. I listen to those who would speak to me, and I help those who cry for help — to the best of my ability. That ability depends on the confidence I have established with the people in high places as well as the people in low places, and no one has yet accused me of a lack of integrity in the office of mediation which I have quite humbly assumed. In this sense I tried to help you, but I failed. It was not for any lack of force in my application. It was to these people that you now revile that you asked me to appeal on your behalf. I am sorry I failed, but because I failed in your case I cannot forego the possibility of doing some good in other cases. Besides, I do not find these people so evil as you do. They are dispensers of charity, and this was never an easy task. They make mistakes, but so do we all. For the most part I find them decent human people, perplexed but not sinister, foolish but not wicked. I have no uneasy conscience when I sup with them. I will say something which will shock you even more: the most decent people I have met in the world have been among the richest, and for a good reason — they have been put beyond envy, spite and uncharitableness. They have lived a life without anxiety or care — the life we should all lead, the life of the citizen of an ideal republic. That a millionaire should consort with an anarchist might seem to you monstrous; it is merely the paradox of the infinite, where extremes meet. One more personal retort. If I am a money-changer of literature, a Barabbas, a Pharisee, a Pilate and much else that is reprehensible, remember that you too receive your mite from the same tainted sources. The Freeman is not only subsidized by capitalists: it exists 107

to promote an extreme form of capitalistic ideology. I do not blame you for picking up these crumbs from the tables of the rich; on the contrary, I believe that we cannot individually contract out of the prevailing economy. A Gandhi attempted to do so, and though I admire him greatly, and think him possibly the greatest figure of our age, he was perversely wrong in some of his ideas (sex, for example), and his economic experiments were always disastrous. He was a fanatic (as perhaps you are), and had over-much policy. "He who tries to govern the kingdom by policy is only a scourge to it; while he who governs without it is a blessing." That is the Tao te ching, and from the same source I would quote a passage which is as near to my philosophy of life as anything: "The wise man has no fixed opinions to call his own. He accommodates himself to the minds of others. I would return good for good ; I would also return good for evil. Virtue is good. I would meet trust with trust; I would likewise meet suspicion with confidence. Virtue is trustful. The wise man lives in the world with modest restraint, and his heart goes out in sympathy to all men. The people give him their confidence, and he regards them all as his children." Not very different from the Sermon on the Mount perhaps; or from certain of Keats's letters. You quote the Greeks, or the ancient prophets. I prefer the Chinese, for they had the virtue of simplicity. And if I must take a model I will not take him from a distant and unintelligible civilization (think of their attitude to women!), but from my own. Now you are going to be surprised, and shocked. For wisdom, serenity and achievement, I do not know anyone I so much admire as Goethe. A name that has never, so far as I remember, passed your lips. Of course he had his faults — he was all too human. He has been called a philistine, and I doubt if he was an anarchist! He supped with Grand Dukes and he too was a well-fed votary of Helicon. Mais, voilà un homme ! Why should I hate when there is no hatred in my soul? Why should I scourge and attack when it is not in my nature to kill a fly? "By restraining the passions and letting gentleness have sway it is possible to continue as a child." That is my deepest wish — to 108

continue as a child; to preserve the innocent eye. I have pruning shears in my garden, but no thunderbolts. What else is there to say? Nothing, except that I hope we can continue to respect one another, and love one another, and exclude these acrimonious bickerings over our irreconcilable natures. We should profit by our differences. "The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow ; nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey." An ambiguous proverb, perhaps, but you see its drift. I am deeply sorry for your physical ills, and fear they are aggravated by your fretting spirit. When you left me at Idlewild the other day the following lines came into my mind — from where? Be calm, and strive all you can To live the life of natural man. Perhaps I invented them for the occasion. I shall hope for better news of your health. Please thank R'lene for her kind note. My love to you both. January 12, 1952 New York City Dear Herbert, I have no reply to my last letter, and it may be that you are very vexed with me, and do not want to write. Whatever your reasons are I want you to know that I shall never be unmindful of your numerous kindnesses to me. If I cannot accept your encomia upon the rich, you cannot blame me. It also occurs to me that you would not care to print some of the remarks you made in anger. You could not reconcile anarchism with what appears to me to be a despisal of the poor. I do not think that you realize how needy we are. You imagine, perhaps, that people living in this Caliban's money sty must have goods and dollars. There is a great deal of poverty in America, with many sweating industries and much hopelessness. I brought my unfiinished novel [The Sorrows of Priapus] to one publisher and he is very moved by it. He is also a great admirer of The Flea of Sodom. You, doubtless, imagine that I am a very arrogant man, and in some respects I am. However, I should tell you that I am always a learner and a very humble one. I never for an instant was irritated with you for rejecting the novel. Surely, there must be bad writing in it which I shall have to mend. What astonishes me is that no matter how long a man writes he is certain to write badly. I have a few lines here from the unfinished novel which 109

I wish to quote, and I hope you won't reckon it coarse to ask you to look at the lines again, for a great deal of this "bitter and bile book" is written in this manner: "We should have the deepest reverence for poverty, because we are New Testament ground, and every day I offer a sacrifice to the extinct buffalo, the horse and the savage Iroquois, who is our Muse of cereal, string beans and maize, and when somebody strokes my head, I walk to Mt. Shasta, to the Oregon apple orchards which are my epistles to the Corinthians." The above may have to be reworded, but I don't think lines like that are hyssop. You recall you said that my writing is not art because it is bitter. Yet I must tell you that it was D. H. Lawrence who once said to me, "Always write with a great bitterness; that is your strength." I think he was right although at the time I did not understand him. You know that Mephistopheles is the denying spirit, and the learned Grote asserts that Socrates has a negative intellect, and since Socrates is Plato's hero, we must then grant that this same trait so admired by Plato was an essential of his nature. I send you this epistle as another token of my thanks. I have a few astringent credoes, and never unsaying my thanks is one of them. What you are doing for [Louis] Zukofsky is an act of goodness, and I hope earnestly that his Test of Poetry will have a sale so that you can publish a volume of his poetry. I sent his Shakespeare essay to [James] Laughlin, [publisher of New Directions Books] quoting your fine praise of it. You must remember, Herbert, you are a very quiet nature, and I am always an upboiling Vesuvius. We need both natures in the world. This morning I stepped into a bookshop and read a few lines out of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister that pierced my spirit. He speaks of the art of the living experience and it is a remarkable truth. But I have no Duke of Weimar as a patron. Heine, a great nature, did not have it either, for he was a Mephisto to the end, but he was a rare heart who mocked what he hated, and he derided much and with truth. I have known so many thankless churls and I did not want you to think me a Nabal no matter what our differences are. When the Freeman essay on you appears I shall send it to you. I do not know how long I shall last there, and besides I fervently hope that my novel may be taken so that I can go back to that, and 110

it may be that by the time I have expunged what is dross in it, that you may find some pages to your liking. Give my love to Benedict; maybe some day he will read The Flea of Sodom, and will not regard me as waspish as his father does. No matter, Horace says that the poet belongs to an irritable race of men. September 15, 1952 Stonegrave, York My dear Edward, Again I have to apologise for a long gap in our correspondence, but I have had a very busy summer, and even now have not finished — I go to Venice again this week for another congress ( U N E S C O ) . But that, I hope, is the last of them for many months. When I get back I shall look forward to several months of relative peace. I was very pleased to hear that you had found it possible to move to California. Delightful as you had made your little cell in Washington Square, I could not help feeling that the City was destroying you physically, and irritating your spirit. I feel sure that you will both feel better and write better in Topanga. Tell me a little of your new surroundings when you write. I was very interested to read what you had written about Tolstoy, not only in the article from the Freeman but also in your letters. It is hardly true to say that I have a scant regard for his tract on art — on the contrary it is such a powerful polemic that it calls out all one's powers of resistance. One simply cannot ignore such massive arguments, but I still cannot accept it, nor your gloss on its arguments. If I have to choose between aesthetics and morality I should still choose aesthetics. Living in England I am too conscious of what I have called the "Puritan blackout". The moralists killed art in England — killed music, killed poetry, killed the theatre; they gave us only some good prose and perhaps some architecture. Fundamentally, as I have argued in more than one book, only following in this matter your beloved Plato, I do not see any real necessity to oppose aesthetics and morality. I agree that aesthetics as interpreted by 19th century aesthetes is a thin and inhuman creed, but why should we accept such a limited conception of the nature and function of art? The moralists hide their sensibility. They inevitably become harsh authoritarians and reject not only Shake///

speare and Beethoven, but everything that expresses a love of life — or as one might say the life of love. I was reading [W. R.] Worringer's book on Egyptian art last night and he has a good sentence or two which are relevant. He says that they lacked "the dimensions of true metaphysical consciousness because creative Eros was wanting in their thin blooded severity". This I believe to be very true. It is only so far as a culture keeps close to nature and the soil that it expresses any intensity of feeling or sensibility for beauty. Morality is abstract, conceptual, the letter that killeth. I believe that you must agree with me about this, and that once again we are only quarrelling about words. The very fact that you are now turning your thoughts to a literature that is concerned with man's conquest of nature suggests that your morality is not written on tables of law. I am glad to hear that Laughlin is publishing something by you in his new magazine Perspectives. He wrote to me about this project some months ago and was to have come to see me in London to discuss it, but he never turned up. I shall write again to the New Republic, and give them your new address and chide them for their neglect. Thank you for sending me R'lene's poems which I like very much. The children have had a wonderful summer, and are all active and gay. Ben had one relapse, but after two or three days in hospital he is as well and happy as ever. My warm love to you both and urgent hope for better news of your health. April io, 1956 Bornholm, Denmark Dear Herbert, I have written you several letters but have had no word from you. There is a transport strike, and what with the rain and fog few planes come to Bornholm. My epistles have been waspish though I have great affection for you. Let me not be unmindful of many kindnesses shown to me by you. Let me also not be covetous, and may I be plain in the diction of my soul to you regarding this point. I do not care whether you print three or four books a year though I do not think this is healthful for your spirit. It is bad medicine for the head to write too much ; the more one writes the less one thinks. I have admonished you many times over the years, and we are 112

still friends, and whether I was right or wrong, that is a great credit to you. Few people can endure any sort of a rebuke, and few who reproach others ever trouble to examine their own faults. We dearly love every vice we have, and gently stroke our sins. I may be the most self-loving worm in the earth, but I tremble with despair when I consider it, and try very hard to correct myself. I do not think I have succeeded very much. I say these things to you because it would be unjust otherwise to criticise you. I am an admirer of certain books of yours and hate some of my writings. I have told you before, and pardon me for repeating Tolstoy's wonderful remarks: "Many men write books, but very few are ashamed of them afterwards." Now, my dear friend, you have given my work great praise, enough to give me ease and to relieve me to some extent of those gnawing doubts which well-nigh make nihilists of us. You may deem it the act of Narcissus when you tell me there are no voices in the occident, and I am sorely wounded, and my entrails pierced, write to you in return that you have called me a voice, nay, have compared me to Nietzsche, Blake and Landor. Am I wrong in crying out to you? Why do you name me a mountain, a strong torrent, a hundred rivers one day, and deny me altogether the next? Suppose that I write to you that nobody can write any more, will you not want to go at once, like the blind, the maimed, and the cripple, and wash in the pool of Bethesda? Now, we come to the most crucial perplexity, the relation between art and literature. Can we go to painting, especially a modern canvas devoid of all legends, maxims, and lore and ritual of the past, and find therein definitions we can employ for our lives? Will an abstract drawing teach us how to be a friend, a lover, or enable us to walk more meditatively, be less busy with idle matters, and have more time for discerning human beings? Are we likely to be more just after looking at Picasso, or more tender when we have filled our eyes with the skill of a Dali? Do they increase our reverence for the Universe, and can any one compose one good day or act following a surrealist experience in paints? Ch'en Su-want once wrote, or was said to have done so: "The art of literary composition was originated by scholars, while the art of painting was originated by men of skill." What does an abstract painting mean? Why is it that almost no one risks a human figure or face any longer, or that when we see 113

a person done in oils today he looks as though he had been embo welled or bombed? Most of the abstractions resemble the carnage after a war or a plague. Whether you assent or not, can we have a nobler commonwealth when painting takes the place of the Word? How much inertia has modern art produced? People seldom read because music and painting have made them very lazy. Even my own book [The Sorrows of Priapus], and this distresses me rather than delights me, will appear, whenever it does, as an art-book, which means that you cannot draw a reader to serious or important words except by enticing his eyes, or rather betraying them. I think our eyes and ears have become very perfidious and that they are consequently so indolent and froward that they prefer to gaze with the most undefined rapture at colors or lie down whenever Bach or Mozart are played? Is this good or baneful? I have not met a single lover of music who employed his higher faculties. I met a whole covey of artists in New York when I lived there; they were crude and unlearned, and I regarded their paintings, and with all the will to care for them, as the absolute perversion of design, form, and art. One ancient Chinese painter, though all of his work is lost, is still remembered as an astronomer. That is very good, and such a man is likely to be a benefit to a commonality. Whatever you may think of yourself, you will be remembered as a most gracious stylist (which is internal) and a bénéficient critic of literature. You will, however, be blamed for your writings on art; that is, every thoughtful person will turn away from them, just as the herd-reader at present neglects your literary volumes to look at the plates and reproductions of other men's drawings and oils in your books on art. If literature is dying out, and who can deny it, why don't you give more of your energies to preserve the few who are laboring for those meanings, ideas, and learning which cannot be found in painting? You are a publisher as well as a very serious author, and you yourself know that what is best and most noble in you are your essays on writers. I would gladly relinquish every art-book you have ever done just to save your wonderful essay on Swift. You know, too, my deep yea on Phases of English Poetry, A Coat of Many Colours, and Annals of Innocence and Experience. Some of your later poems I care for a great deal. You, however, reprint everything you have done in the past, and you cannot hope to be as good 114

in the past as you are when you are at your best now. I was sharp with you because you had put everything together in your True Voice of Feeling, and much of it was far beneath the way you think and pulse now. Still, even here, you show good sense, and you may have been annoyed when I said that your essay on Coleridge was exceedingly sensible. Here I was only following the dictum of La Bruyère; Johnson says the same and so does Coleridge himself. But if you are to give us savants in letters you must also present us with sages of the brush; otherwise, you do yourself much harm, neglect your companions in literature, and confuse many readers. I repeat, and I cannot say this too often to you, painting without the Word is barbaric, and is no more than a tool of the megalopolitan savage. You must, please, heed me when I say this to you. The artist now is the most passive vessel of all the mechanical filths which have dropped into our soul and made our cities wicked, dark, sooty, and hopeless. We have factory painters and authors, street-urchins of art and literature who curse and despise and demolish what they seem to practise. Most of the painters cannot draw a circle. When a messenger sent by the pope to see whether Giotto was the genius he was reputed to be, the latter to prove that he was took a piece of paper and drew a perfect circle which he asked the messenger to take back to his master as the evidence of his abilities. I have not received your Epistle on [Henry] James; it distresses me deeply that with all your understanding you cannot see that James could not write. We do not read 20 novels to find a few lines when we can peruse one book by a gifted writer and learn as we read page after page. Why do you occupy yourself with so many dwarfs when you can fill your head with Erasmus, Longinus, Herodotus, Ovid, Virgil, Strabo, some of the early Christian Fathers, and countless other men who have disburdened so many of our days of tedium, sorrow, and hopeless disbelief? I cannot blame you for writing for bread; Tolstoy did that, and he did not need a rye or black crust as much as you do, but let no one think that his work did not suffer and is not inglorious because he wrote for money and because he is so unlearned. But he had wondrous though sometimes gross energy, and he had a fierce passion which saved him from mediocrity. You despise What Is Art? I learn much from it though I violate many of his own canons, screeds, and even pure assertions of anger. But you must be vigilant and own that some of your work is for bread ; it is as easy to forget that 115

as it is to ignore our worst turpitudes. We write for heaven and earth, for the intellect and the body, but shun one or the other, and you write only for the worst citizens of the world. It is your duty first to heal the void in letters. If you fail to come to the rescue of one good author you must blame yourself and quite mercilessly for helping to increase illiteracy which will one day lead to apocalyptic violence. We are close to it now, and our books and paintings damage our nerves, sicken our hearts, and spoil our flesh, and the flowers and herbs thereof, and are more like machine guns, tractors, fierce implements of war than gentle, murmuring rivers, kind and loving glades, slopes, and trees which feed the hungry soul and the dry bones. I beg you, as your friend and as your most affectionate companion in letters to listen to me. You know, my dear Herbert, that The Nation is going to print some of our Letters. I am very happy about this; at first [Carey] McWilliams, [Editor of The Nation] wanted to do a page of my epigrams as he called them. I was not very content because I could not see what advantage readers could reap from perusing a page of wit. I have since asked him, if he could, to print two letters of yours and two of mine so that our values could be seen and weighed and understood. Whether he publishes more of you than of me is of no import, but that he is printing us pleases me deeply. Now, please, Herbert find a publisher for our volume [Truth Is More Sacred], I have not been sluggish, though I have been sick, nor did I sit back and wait for you to act, and I do not have your influence in the world. Your loving friend. April 20, 1956 Stonegrave, York Dear Edward, Ruskin to his father, January 28, 1852 : "I could not—or should not work at all — if I thought these things trifling. All my labour and all my writing are done under the conviction of pictures being of enormous importance, and of our neglect of them being Sin." Ruskin was lucky in having a great artist — Turner — to write about. You do not think that the artists I write about — Picasso or Klee or Henry Moore or Ben Nicholson — are as great as Turner. You seize on one relatively obscure American painter, de Kooning, 116

about whom I have never written a word, and impugn my activities in his name. I don't think that de Kooning can be dismissed with complete contempt, but I know little of his work and reserve judgement. But in general I know what I am writing about, I believe like Ruskin that it is of enormous importance, or otherwise I should not write at all. Then you break in with your denunciations and accuse me of wasting my time, prostituting my talents, and so on. Is there any wonder that occasionally I get a little rattled, especially as I am always working under tremendous pressure, a fact you never seem to realize, and largely devoting myself to other people, with no thought of my own genius or my own fame. It would have been very agreeable to have conducted my life otherwise, writing poetry when the inspiration came to me, and spending the rest of my time criticising other poets. But somehow that always seemed a dilettante and self-indulgent mode of living. I don't claim any merit for the sacrifices I have made — they have been done by instinct, and in the belief that I had a duty to my family and even to the artists I write about, for I found myself in a situation (in this country) where I was the only person with the necessary energy and will to take on the defence of modern art. I would willingly have stood down and left the field to some other critic, but I belong to a generation that was decimated by war, and people who might have done this necessary task — men like T. E. Hulme — were killed in that war, and I found myself a solitary survivor in this field. I am not in any way ashamed of what I have written about art — I have not had the wealth and leisure of a Ruskin, and have always worked against time, and many things are hastily written, without the necessary grace. But the truth, as I see it, has prevailed, and that is all that matters. You must forgive my irritation, and I am sorry to have to speak roughly to a man who is ill. But I wanted to stop the flow of your misunderstanding. I am sorry you do not think I have done enough for you : I have done what I can. It was I who suggested this way of publishing The Sorrows to Laughlin, and without my persistence and pleading he would not have done it. Only he can do it because he is not strictly speaking a commercial publisher and has a background of wealth. You cannot expect such actions from commercial publishers like Routledge or Faber, who have to balance their 117

accounts and satisfy their auditors and shareholders. You demand patronage in an age when patronage is dead. As for not writing about your books, one cannot praise a book in a preface and then praise it again in an article or essay. And where does one publish an essay on Edward Dahlberg? There are no literary reviews that you respect: they are all edited by men you have made your enemies. I shall be proud to have The Sorrows dedicated to me, but if I then promise to review it in a magazine, the editor suspects a conspiracy. I cannot go on with this acrimonious debate — it wearies me and I am overworked and tired. Cannot you forget your misfortunes for a while, and return to your disinterested love of letters? There would be solace in some quite objective activity. I will send the James letter as soon as I have had time to re-type it — at the moment I am driven by endless tasks and duties. I would go mad but for the fact that I can walk every day on the hills and fill my mind with their peace. Your loving friend. December 12, 1956 Seville, Spain Dear Herbert, I am very glad to have your letter forwarded to me from Malaga. What makes you think, Herbert, your judgments on James are objective, a foolish word bandied about by dust and flesh, and that mine are personal? Have you forgotten that in one of your Epistles you set aside his novels, but insisted that we owed him homage because he was heroic and wrote some few lines, very few, in his own letters? Do you imagine that Dr. Johnson's estimate of Swift was not personal? Do you think that Hazlitt was free from a plethora of prejudices, or that Addison or Steele wrote memorials on authors that were scientific? Look, I have read all the noble, dreary aesthetes, from Kant, Schopenhauer, Schiller to I. A. Richards, and am mostly bored, and seldom renewed or invigorated by their dingy, objective judgments. Dickens is an author for boys, but Homer can be read or misread at 20, and judged at 60. Do you imagine that as we grow older our feelings for masterpieces are doddering, fatuous and peevish, whereas we were cool and tranquil when we garbled their wondrous thoughts and lines when we were green and callow? 118

I don't care very much for Wordsworth, and though Coleridge admired him, some of his criticism of Wordsworth was very damaging. I read your own essay on Wordsworth with great delight despite my own prejudice against him. I think he was a mediocre poet. Is that personal, then no man can be otherwise, for when is one's idea sufficiently aloof and who can prove it? Your own remarkable essay on Swift would be thrown away by an adherent of the author of Gulliver. Who then would be right, you or he? Is my epistle on Joyce reckless or subjective, whilst yours is reposeful and olympian? I have no faith in Aldington's criticism because I think a man who admires the best in Swinburne and yet defends Wilde and Pater and Hemingway has a meager intellectual faculty. Please bear in mind that this is a didactic book [Truth Is More Sacred] written to furnish readers and the apprentices to literature a path toward understanding. I have not the least heart to hurt the ashes of Lawrence, but I am more concerned with his bad effect upon young authors. I am not a venal writer, and would publish our Letters without reward, even taking the abuse, because I think it is a deeply useful volume to people steeped in nihilism and the most hedonistic waywardness. I am not moral in the philistine sense. When I read Byron I do not care one way or another whether he lay with his half-sister, Augusta or not. There are some sexual sins that trouble me, but very few, and a good line by Rimbaud is still good whether he was a bugger or not. There are no good books that wither or stale in time; bad books were poorly written when they were made, and do not deteriorate because we have grown older. Nor have I lost my own energetic exuberance; I still kneel in my heart before Callimachus or Propertius or some reverence in Pausanias. Nor has Don Quixote dropped in my estimation because I am now 56 and not 26. I can still read the best of Flaubert and Stendhal with abundant delight, and understand them better than I did when I gave them my heart and devotion at 28. Now, Herbert, I am not insensible of your labor for bread. You must have the loaves and the pair of gudgeons. But, please, recall that for my own work I receive sometimes by you tombstone encomium or nothing at all. I am very glad that you can earn money for your tribulations; but though no man will heed another until he has fallen down to the ground, and then he may curse you, I must remind you that you have to write at times solely because the Universe exacts truth and energy from you. As a stylist you are a lis119

some deer, and so I regard you, but you cannot write well, or think clearly in a hurry. You are trying to match your own rush, and objective judgments on books you have not read for many years with my very cautious, and personal remarks that come after the closest reading and scrutiny and meditation. Now, my dear friend, will you kindly also remember that I have put a great deal of time into these Epistles, and that seems to be of no value to the world, and of the same worth to you. I cannot afford, and this is not a precautionary economic word, to pour my soul onto the ground after 14 months of reading, tedium, and anguish. You have always been a hasty man, or much more so now than you were 15 years ago, and in those days I begged you to give more time to your own interior gifts. I have pleaded in vain, and this, too was a personal admonition? although I had in mind your life and bourne on this earth and not mine. I am reading constantly, and it is my deepest hope that I shall begin writing in another two months or so. I cannot endure to be idle or not to write. In your friendship with me, and in your relation to me concerning the book we are doing together, I beg you to be less personal and more considerate of my own pains and labors which I thought were ours together. The paper from Stuttgart arrived too late for Christmas publication of the book [The Sorrows of Priapus] and I was very despondent for weeks because everything has been postponed. The Nation has neither printed our Epistles nor paid me a penny. Where is Justice, O my dear Objective Friend? We both send you our devoted love, and I thank heaven that that is not impersonal, scientific or etiolated. I have been rereading a good deal of Shakespeare, or had done so some months back. His miraculous lines I bow to, particularly to the Sonnets. But let me ask you, when I find horseplay in the Comedies, or some pun, which I cannot accept, is that petulant, and subjective, and when I read some of his best and august poems and weep over them is that mature, considered, and cool? Is Timon personal or not, and what of Lear? And are these criticisms or not? Your friend, and again, as always with the warmest affections.

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Christmas Day, 1956 Stonegrave, York Dear Edward, I had a card from Hull yesterday which tells me that you were to leave Seville on the 21st, so presumably by now you are in Ascona, where I hope you have found good accommodation. Hull promises to do what he can to help you — I think you will find a good friend in him. I enclose a prospectus of an American school in nearby Minusio where it is conceivable that R'lene might find employment. Perhaps one enquiry might lead to another possibility. If [Erich] Remarque is in Ascona (Hull will tell you where he lives) he might have secretarial work for R'lene, and she could say that I recommended her to get in touch with him. But I think he spends a few months in the States at this time of year. You react too violently to [Richard] Aldington. I do not mean that he has not provoked you beyond silent endurance, but you spend too much of your spirit on such personal affronts. I know how difficult it is to control one's resentment, and I am myself often touched to the quick by the malice of my critics. But resentment is a poison in one's veins, and destroys the peace of mind which is the only state of mind that is creative. I had a letter this morning from [Naum] Gabo, who is reduced to impotence because his brother (Pevsner) has given an interview to a Paris magazine in which he makes certain statements that Gabo considers untrue and unjust. False statements should be corrected, but that done, the mind should be indifferent to the motives that inspired them. A counsel of perfection, I know, and one which I do not necessarily follow myself. Indeed, if the Epistles languish, it may be partly due to Aldington's poor opinion of them. One should never show half-finished work to anyone on whose sympathy one cannot rely. I am not blaming you for showing our work to Aldington — I should have done the same in your circumstances. And I don't agree with his criticism of them. But nevertheless it is a rebuff from which it takes time to recover. The real reason is the one I always give — the complexity of my life, my inability to escape from the myriad cares that press me down. I have a box behind my table into which I throw the string from the many parcels that come in, string full of knots which then gets entangled with the heap, until to draw a length of free string 121

from the tangled mass becomes impossible. That is the true image of my life. I will make a new effort in the New Year. It seems that I must write another letter on James — the last one is admittedly not a good one. But then you must give a new turn to the correspondence. But a more positive turn. I do not believe that we should waste [time] on a fellow like [Robert] Graves. The big issues lie elsewhere — indeed outside the world of belles lettres. I see no future for poetry or the novel, or for drama, except in so far as these forms are embodied in the philosophy of a new humanism. We are at a stage of evolution at which we need philosophers and prophets, and these must be of a pattern adapted to our civilization. It is difficult to conceive a Socrates of the screen and there is no question of compromising with the prevailing vulgarism. But there is no audience for our belles lettres, so we must be content with whatever faith we have in the immortality of good writing, or we must make the necessary gestures to attract an audience. And to do this without losing our integrity ! This begins to sound like a sermon, and the house is stirring for the^ festivities. There are thirteen of us — the complete family, three guests, and two Italian maids. I shall wait anxiously to hear how you get settled in Ascona, and shall hope for good news. My love to you both. October 30, 1959 New York City Dear Herbert, It is a great relief to hear that you are at home again after your journey to China. How good, too, to know that you are in such fine health. I cannot refrain from asking what you are going to do with your strength. Will you return to literature? I recall many years ago when you thought I was so overwhelmed by Tolstoy's hatred of art and letters that I should give over writing altogether. But, alas, it is you, my gifted Friend, who carry this Atlantean burden upon your heart. Or do you find it an easy load to bear? I have not altered my own thoughts about communism. People everywhere pay the greatest price for their bread and miserable lodgings. An Eskimo gives less of his life for his lamp of moss, his knife wrought of the tusk of a walrus, and his food consisting of 122

whale-blubber and seal, than we do for our mess, taken in a hurry, and our wretched wizened apartments for which we bleed most of the days of the sun. It does not matter much whether you give your flesh and your spirit for the State-cartel we title capitalism, or that corporation, known as a communistic society. And I don't think you can learn very much in a conducted tour in a land so alien to all that you know. I like oriental women, too, and have little doubt that it has been a tragedy to keep these people away from our country where the blood is anaemic if not dead. I care little for greed or materials canonized by the soviets, or by western monopolists. I cannot see but that the Russians want what other people have, a refrigerated box, a subway, large, flagitious cities, automobiles. The Russians transport many coveys of ballet dancers to our shores, a few journalists and a composer or two, better than our own, but hardly men to compare with Bach or Handel or Monteverdi, and the American press swoons. It may be that they are in some respects not as demented as the occidental race of fools, but in other ways they are noddies too. I hear that the Russian teddy boys are utterly mad for rock and roll, and the vile debauched sounds we misname music here. I am as weary as the worm of politics, and know no evil more devilish than a statesman, a man of the state. When you wrote your very fine Foreword to The Flea of Sodom, you said with great panic, and rightly so, that the Chinese were at the frontier of Tibet. Are you forgetting the tragedy of Hungary, Poland, Finland, the Latvian nations, and sundry other enslaved peoples? Now, my dear Herbert, I spoke to Laughlin who just returned to America, and he is very interested in our Epistles, and I think we should make arrangements for their publication. You can get your work published far easier than I can, and I don't want to go on writing until I have assurance that some one will do the book. You know I am at the moment tormented by the autobiography, [Because I was Flesh] and am giving a lecture on Melville which is to be published, along with other lectures by authors. It took me a whole month to reread Moby Dick and it will take at least that time to gather notes, and take another look at Mardi, and his Poems, as well as compare his work with many volumes on voyages to the New World. Moby Dick belongs to that kind of writing rather than to the great store of human learning. Of course, I do not pretend that you are going to find some of his lines in Parry, 123

Pigafetta, Drake, Herrera, and so on, but the bulk of Moby Dick is for a man about to apprentice himself as a whaler. I beg you, then, Herbert, to go ahead with arrangements with Laughlin who says he will write you, or if you prefer, with Mr. [Ben] Raeburn [of Horizon Press] whom I do not know. We could then complete the book [Truth Is More Sacred] without too much trouble, another five thousand words or so. You said we should write about Eliot, Pound, perhaps Yeats, I shall want to say something about [William Carlos] Williams, who, alas, never had a great development, but wrote one book, In the American Grain, and that grounded upon meager reading, but perhaps very good. I must reread it. I should like to add some words also on Wyndham Lewis, vastly overestimated, and essentially a newspaper mind. What he assailed was often right, but without much sense or culture of his own. Your own very discerning Letter on Lawrence I read a couple of times, and give you my deepest thanks, dear Herbert, for your tribute. The heart is corrupt, Herbert, and I myself am often in an agony when I consider my own vanity. Who can utter his full vanity and not cower, or hide it, and not be speciously meek? You are the kindest Man in the World of Letters, and I owe you much, more than I can ever thank you for. You know that, and what is more important, I know it ! You once asked me about Zukofsky ; I cannot continue a connection with a man who is so mercilessly uncritical of his own work, and who has so little gratitude in his heart. I cannot bear the unthanking biped, No-Man. Let it be. I am sorry that I was of use to him, not only through you, but I got many of his poems printed here. I expect page-proofs of the second part of the autobiography, and will send you both magazines in which the memoirs appear. You won't care for the periodical [Big Table], but what can I do, save tell the truth in as strong a prose style as I know. Should I appear only in these places I regard clean, just and arcadian, I would be in no magazine. Allen [Tate] has sent a marvelous statement to be used on the dust-jacket of Can These Bones Live, and so there will be your Introduction, his Yea, the drawings by James Kearns which please Laughlin and MacGregor deeply. Of course, you know, dear Herbert, I shall, when I get to that 124

parcel of the memoir dealing with literature pay you a great tribute as a formal essayist in the tradition of Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Dryden, and give you, I pray, that debt of gratitude I owe you for so much Human Goodness. I have been ailing, and if this letter resembles lichen and scurvy grass rather than the savannas and meadowland please forgive me. I have been culling much again from natural history, trying to find those equivalents of the mind, the heart, and the hands in an isthmus, the vegetable mould in the Arctic Circle, even the dung of the musk-oxen which provides those desolate and dreary grounds with the flowers that spring up from the sorriest shrubs. R'lene has not been well either; since we returned from Spain we have not flourished. The summer here was noxious; any swamp might have been more salubrious than the month of October, terrifyingly humid, viscid, each night of sleep, with an electric fan blowing some false air on our faces, a going to and fro in the earth. You have, as always my great admiration, and we both send you our warmest love. Your devoted friend. You did not imagine I wanted you to write a book on Ruskin simply to dedicate it to me. What a craven reason that would be. Of course, I was greatly elated, when you said that if you wrote such a chapbook you would give me that tribute. But I don't care to be more vulgar, ambitious, mean and sly than the vilest flesh is. December 4, i960 (my 67th birthday) Stonegrave, York Dear Edward, The last epistle which I sent off some time ago has not been acknowledged either by you or Ben Raeburn: I hope it arrived safely and that it did not enrage you too much. If you feel you must have the last word, I have no objection, but I do not wish to prolong the correspondence and tried to give my last words an air of finality. I did not yet receive a copy of the new edition of Can These Bones Live, but it may be on its way by surface mail. But I did receive The Literary Review with your reappraisal of Moby Dick. This is a wonderful essay, but how it will infuriate the American literary chauvinists ! You are terribly convincing, and make clear to 125

me why my children, to whom I have often recommended the book, could never persevere with it — I did not re-read it myself, and could not. I think possibly those few canorous lines you quote could be multiplied, and that there are whole paragraphs of eloquence buried in it. But your main contention is true: it is a suffocating blubber-room and no Homeric epic. I rejoice to hear that a collection of your critical essays is to be published. It should stir those vapid analysts, the New Critics, to envy or a belated acknowledgement of your integrity. My days are full with futile busy-ness — I struggle like a drowning man for air. The world will not leave me alone, and if you say I should ignore its solicitations, I can only reply that the clamour would still distract me. I have created the fame that destroys me. You should sometimes be grateful for the neglect that gives you solitude. There is no even measure in this world of literature. Those are fine lines of Allen's [Allen Tate] you quote in your Melville essay — I hope he has seen the essay and made some generous comment. You mentioned Pascal in your last letter. I have recently gone back to him for a little spiritual refreshment and find his thoughts as wonderful as ever. If only we had his faith ! I hope you are feeling less lonely and have reasonable health. I enter my 68th year with a little arthritis but no other bodily ills, and for that I must be grateful. Please give R'lene my love when you see her. Your devoted friend.

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THOMAS KINSELLA

Drowsing Over the Arabian Nights I nodded. The books agree, one hopes for too much. It is ridiculous. We are elaborate beasts. If we concur, it is only in our hunger; the soiled gullet... And sleep's airy nothing. And the moist matter of lust ( — if the whole waste of women could be gathered like one pit under swarming Man . . . then all might act together). And 'the agonies' of death — as we enter our endless nights quickly, one by one, fire darting up to the roots of our hair.

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JOHN HOLLOWAY

Flower of the Mountain I consider in this still and stony place between sea and mountain Those who at one with the rupted, disrupted planet, its rent and torrent, quake, earthquake, core-tremor, tremendous chord of discord, Those few at the fuse of now, the brunt of its troubled or flaring frontier Still (as this green jet of a seaward country) run their springs through deep beds to Issue gently. The all they do, Humane and retiring. . . . fissured into a seep of sweetness.

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And I Hardly see this appraisal and raising nature as — As anti-nature: for heavy with Tightness, authentic, ancient in its seeming as the rocks of our west, our ledge where the wave bursts in greenness, in these last and modest pastures, is it not the Second and Heavenly nature? bedrock as this archaean erode and overthrust determining at once the angry outcrop and small Flower of the Mountain?

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G. Wilson Knight

HERBERT READ AND BYRON

I

, m N THE BRITISH COUNCIL booklet on Sir Herbert

Read, Francis Berry, discussing the Collected Essays in Literary Criticism, observes that, though its range is wide and "though there are frequent en passant references to Shakespeare and Chaucer, these are not substantial contributions in the way that his studies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats (and even Byron) are." That bracket poses a problem central to both Byron and Read. Roughly, both may be called "romantic." Byron's romanticism is however only part of his contribution, since his literary valuations, and much of his practice, first in heroic diction and later in dramatic form, are Augustan. He bestrides two periods, as did Milton and Shakespeare before him. This is what Read did also, in his own way, within the context of twentieth-century letters. He reverses the Byronic divisions. His literary and social philosophies support "organic" rather than established forms and "personality" in place of "character." But he was one of Eliot's circle, and a life-long friend. In literary practice his peculiarly reserved and unpretentious tone, or wavelength, corresponds; and may accordingly be called "classic." In his British Council booklet on Byron, Read follows certain conventional views with which we can now, perhaps, part company; in calling Byron an "atheist" he is, simply, wrong. And yet the brief essay abounds in original comments that strike home. He accords the right priority to, and quotes in full, Byron's Thirty-Sixth Year; he finds Byron's to be "the wildest poetic energy in the whole range of post-Shakespearian poetry"; and he believes that Byron 130

was "in some sense beyond good and evil, one of Nietzsche's 'free spirits'." When in the preface to my Poets of Action I referred to Read as "that fine Byronist," he wrote in reply, on December 10, 1967 that it was "a compliment I would like to deserve." I had known him for some years. We met first in 1947 at the Present Question Conference at Birmingham, where I gave a lecture bearing the Nietzschean title "The Avenging Mind" (included in Shakespeare and Religion, 1967). He was generous in approval; as again, when I subsequently sent him my book Christ and Nietzsche. Later in London, in 1950, I showed him some photographs of dramatic poses, and he sent me a book by M. Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behaviour (1949), which I used for the commentary on the pictures of the volume Symbol of Man, as yet unpublished. After that, in 1951,1 sent him, as a director of Routledge & Kegan Paul, my Lord Byron: Christian Virtues, which was proving difficult to publish. It quickly won his, and the firm's, support. Read invited me to his club in London. He greatly liked my Lord Byron's Marriage; and on the publication of Byron and Shakespeare he sent me a reprint of his Byron booklet inscribed with a rating of my Byronic studies which manners forbid me to publicize. That is the record of what Read did, selflessly, not only in support of a younger contemporary but, what is more important, for Byron. His actions were impelled by a creative, Byronic, generosity; and without him my three Byron volumes might not have appeared. His interest in Byron was reflected in two recent publications. In High Noon and Darkest Night (Monday Evening Papers, 3; Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1964), an answer to José Ortega y Gasset's strictures on modernistic art, he quoted for his purpose various passages from Byron: "Perhaps it is Byron who gives the best expression to this romantic ideal of essential Night." In 1953 there was a broadcast of Read's dialogue Lord Byron at the Opera (published by Philip Ward, 28 Parkfield Crescent, North Harrow, 1963). The main persons are Byron and Stendhal, and the setting a box of the opera at Milan, in 1816. The dialogue shows a delicate skill, with scholarship. In a preface defending Dialogue as a medium Read notes: "There is hardly a sentiment or even an expression in this dialogue for which chapter and verse could not be quoted." The formal, even stilted, manner may be a true capturing of aristocratic, period, conversation; but it is rather strange that Read, 131

so receptive to the tumultuous in Byron, could have so resisted all temptation to let the Byronic fire ignite. True, this is a dialogue, not a drama. But when during the fifties Read sent me a typescript of a drama, TRe Parliament of Women, to comment on, I was aware of a similar limitation. The play is nevertheless fascinating. It dramatizes a French occupation of Greece in the thirteenth century, and the historical reading and creation of "atmosphere" are compelling. Against a background of imperial warring and political duplicity flowers a simple love-interest asserting the rights of the heart against convention. In i960 the play was published, exquisitely produced and illustrated, in a limited edition of 100 copies by The Vine Press (Hemingford Grey, Huntingdon). I was honoured to receive a copy of it. The Parliament of Women bears an interesting title. In the dramatic heritage of the West women, from ancient Greece to Shaw and O'Casey, regularly present a challenge to male warring and politics; and in this play, where women are left for a while in political control, Read had a theme which touched some of his most cherished tenets. The sexual balance is established and the points firmly made; sentences are finely chiselled and thought keen; and there are opportunities for sensitive production, in grouping and stately movement, to delight the eye. But there is less excitement than one expects; the whole is statically conceived, with little Dionysian thrust from the female party; and no strong dramatic conflict emerges. Nor was that aimed at. Read contributes a preface on poetic drama, which includes a tribute to Byron's The Two Foscari. In his dramas Byron aimed at classic form and a lowering of dramatic tempo: "What I seek to show in The Foscaris is the suppressed passion, rather than the rant of the present day" (to John Murray, September 20, 1821 ) . Read was following Byron. The play has exquisite verse interludes, one a messenger-speech and others of choric tone; in these the drama quietly takes wing into a more rarefied, clarified, philosophic, mode; but passions are not unleashed. In rejecting what he regarded as the Shakespearian extravagance, Byron was only in part successful; there was so much dramatic power in him that his theories did no, or little, dramatic harm ; but with Read, one feels, that control came perhaps too easily. Drama was less instinctive to him than to Byron. Much of his life was given to the Apollonian arts of sculpture, painting and ceramics; though 132

here too, as in literature, he was responsive to the darker energies, and a strong supporter of modern innovations. All this he could see, and know, and as a critic experience; but it was not quite natural to his own, more gentle, Apollonian, personality. His was, the more one thinks of it, a baffling personality. A distinguished soldier, and decorated for his service, he became a pacifist; an anarchist by political tendency, he accepted, and did well to accept, in all humility, a knighthood. To understand either a work of art or a personality one must search for the point where its contained opposites are blended ; perhaps, if we are fortunate, found, if only for an instant, identical. The opposites in Read are (i) his respect to natural instinct; and (ii) his serene, perhaps "classic," manner. Similar oppositions are in Byron and Nietzsche too, but for them instincts were more unrestful, the struggle for serenity harder, and their life-works in consequence the more richly varied. Even so, in Byron the originating core, or impulse, was, as I showed, following Thomas Moore, in Byron and Shakespeare (VI, 194-5), a softness, a thwarted love; and probably it was so for Nietzsche too. Both these in their later works, in Sardanapalus, Cain, and Thus Spake Zarathustra, registered a victory in attunement to the softer powers; for we must remember that in Byron's Cain our first and archetypal murder is shown as motivated by horror of cruelty to animals. The ethical problem is not simple : original sin may be easier for us to place and handle than original virtue. Now Read, a man, if ever there was one, of "original virtue," was by temperament peculiarly able to focus and express this very problem. Here, in The Parliament of Women, the opposites come together, are identified : GEOFFREY: There are some things, that concern a man's heart, that he does not share with even his nearest friends. WILLIAM : There I do not follow you. Guilt is the only feeling we do not willingly share. GEOFFREY: No; there are innocent feelings that are shy of the light.

(m.*)

That goes very deep into our human state. Our most terrible evils arouse a warm and congenial response; we are at home with them, and never more so than when we indulge in field-days of moral criticism. But what if such evils are all, in the manner of Cain's murder, reactions from some unconfessed, and feared, good ; which, 133

if recognized, would strike greater terror than evil? As Nietzsche has it: So alien to your soul is the great that the Superman would seem to you terrible in his goodness. (Thus Spake Zarathustra; II. 21) Some new assessment of the good-and-evil within us may be needed. Advance may be arduous, bringing not only dread but also, and perhaps worse, embarrassment; for we might have to ratify many an "innocent" feeling that dreads "the light."

134

Kathleen Raine

HERBERT READ AS A LITERARY CRITIC

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~JL. T J L Y FIRST READING of Herbert Read's criticism and the beginning of an enduring friendship with him marked my own emergence into my generation, as an undergraduate in the late twenties. Indebted as I am in countless ways to their author, I cannot see those many articles and introductions, written to make known some new or still unvalued writer or painter, merely as "literary criticism." Much that Herbert Read wrote — and much of the best — must be seen as a mode of action on behalf of the living arts and living artists of his time. He was, above all, "engaged" ; not in the sense of seeing literature and the other arts as so many auxiliary political weapons ; rather he saw politics as the necessary field on which his battle for the unpolitical values must be won or lost. The Politics of the Unpolitical (1943) is not only one of his finest essays: it defines the ground of his own action in the field — the confused and stricken field — of the arts, from the midtwenties to the time of his death in 1968. "The only taste is a contemporary taste," he believed ; and "It is merely lack of intelligence to refuse the experience embodied in the poetry of the past; but it shows an even greater lack of intelligence to refuse the experience embodied in the present." "One has only to compare, for example, Saintsbury's essay on Pater with Eliot's essay on Pater and Arnold to see the difference between the literary gossip of a refugee from life and the criticism of a man for whom literature is an integral part of life; dealing with problems which cannot with any good conscience be isolated from life." Elsewhere, writing of Ruskin 135

(whom he admired as the greatest critic) he makes the observation, "I cannot think of any great critic . . . — great as an artist in his own right — who has not found some good in the art of his own age. The independent "man of letters" is ceasing to exist in modern society, greatly to our loss. From the interested motives of press and academe Herbert Read was free. What he once wrote of Walter Bagehot was true of himself: " . . . varied interests gave to his mind a universality which is rare in literature but of incomparable value. It may seem, on a superficial view, that Bagehot dissipated his energies over too wide a field ; that if he had concentrated on criticism, on politics, on economics, he might have attained the highest possible reputation in one of these narrower spheres. That would be to mistake the quality of the man and to misjudge the proper value of criticism: the opinion of such a man on one literary topic is worth the life-work of a solitary pedant." It is strange to follow the stages of his progression from his Yorkshire boyhood to the rather bleak internationalism of "the modern movement"; in which he lived, I always felt, in an austere, selfimposed exile. A farmer's son, he was born into a natural world little changed since the Wordsworths and the Brontes, and a human world still regional, rooted, dignified. His life-long love of Wordsworth arose naturally from the similarity of their "formation" ; and a nostalgia for regionalism haunts his writings. On Sterne he wrote: "It is almost possible to say that an epic needs for its creation the all-inclusive self-consciousness of a small community. The ideal conditions exist when you have a community large enough to employ all the capacities and exhibit all the passions of mankind, yet small enough to be within the knowledge of one man." And in The Writer and his Region : "It is this concentration of infinite time in a finite place that produces the intensities of great art. It is the finiteness of the region that makes the ethos that moulds the character that is copied by the dramatist or the novelist. As for the poet and the painter, the musician and the architect, they are in more direct contact with the same ethos — an epic, a folk-song, a lyric, even a house, these are emanations of the genius loci, which alone can give accent, colour and life to the universal prototypes of the mind." Wordsworth was the regional poet of a part of England no longer, in the human sense, a region, after the first world war, when Yeats could still, in Ireland, discover and create in some measure a 136

"unity of culture" no longer possible in England; and Herbert Read was forced by the circumstances of his life into a field of action uncongenial to his natural sensibility, the no-man's-land of nomadic modern society. From the dales of the West Riding and the ruins of Rievaulx (the life of Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx, was one of his favourite books) to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, what a distance ! His contemporary Edwin Muir had travelled as far without severing some living link with his boyhood and his ancestors in the Orkneys which Herbert (although he returned in his later life to Yorkshire) somehow lost; perhaps because Muir (though he was one of the finest critics of his generation and made fewer mistakes in his judgments of new works and new authors than either Eliot or Read) never concerned himself with groups and movements. Herbert himself wrote that " . . . the eternal works of art — those exempt from the morality of taste and fashion — are those which are based on individual sensibility to the exclusion of all conceptual or 'idealogical' motives. But this still leaves the individual at the mercy of those unconscious forces which we call taste or fashion, unies? genius is precisely the capacity to evade these forces." As a poet Herbert Read was certainly not at the mercy of the Zeitgeist; his own poems — which will, I believe, outlast most of his criticism — laconic, private utterances — are the creation of his own "true voice of feeling"; his concern with groups and movements a matter of principle, or the expression of another side of his character, to which, perhaps, he often sacrificed his poetic genius on behalf of talents of less value than his own. Herbert Read's earliest critical writings, and those anthologies he made in collaboration with Bonamy Dobrée, seem nearer to his natural vein than what came later: The Sense of Glory ( 1929) and English Prose Style, with its fine sense of the native idiom of the English language. Curiously enough his best studies were nearly all of prose writers — Malory and Froissart, Swift, Smollett and Sterne, Berkeley, Hawthorne, James. The verse he liked was that nearest to prose: "free verse." He quotes, in The True Voice of Feeling from D. H. Lawrence's preface to the American edition of New Poems (1920) : "In free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant m o m e n t . . . . It is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been." "Poetry of this instantaneous kind must necessarily be written in free verse" Read comments; but 137

he later seems to have reflected that it is prose which is most immediately responsive to "the instant moment," and in which "the pitch and interval of natural utterance" finds its freest expression. Herbert Read's after-thoughts were invariably perceptive; as on Lawrence: "I regard him as, all things considered, the most original English writer of the post-war period. He has enlarged or intensified our very consciousness of the world in which we are vitally involved. But 'direct utterance from the instant whole man' is prose; a prose that faithfully projects the man himself; and insofar as he projected himself, exposed his sensibilities and formulated his ideas, Lawrence made a unique contribution to our literature. But it was, in the technical sense, a prose contribution. Of the technique of free verse, as it was developing, under his eyes, he had, as Pound realized from the beginning, no grain of understanding." Imagism, with its accompanying form of "free verse," was the first of the several movements with which Herbert Read was to associate himself. From the regionalism which inspired his first and enduring poetic loyalty to Wordsworth he moved, in post-war London, into the American expatriate ethos which, from Henry James to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, introduced into English letters that internationalism which changed, perhaps permanendy, the course of its native current. Eliot was to become his closest literary associate and lifelong friend; perhaps against his own natural bent he was caught up into the stronger current of the Imagist movement. T. E. Hulme's often-quoted lines I saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge like a red-faced farmer may be poor poetry, but they are good prose. Herbert Read's natural preference for the laconic, together with his adherence to Wordsworth's view that poetry should be a selection from the language of common men may have attracted him to a poem and a theory of poetry which does not, in retrospect, seem more than an incident, even an irrelevance, in the history of English poetry. The word that Herbert Read most often uses of the kind of literature he believed in was "feeling." It was he who described The Prelude as "the epic of the man of feeling"; "poetry," he wrote (à propos Wordsworth) "is the culture of the feelings; not the cultivation of the feelings, but their education." He invokes Ruskin who had written that "the goodness of a man is a question of his sensi138

bility; it is the goodness of his heart, not of his brain" and "the ennobling difference between one man and another... is precisely in this, that one feels more than another. . . . We are only human insofar as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion to our passion." In his own declaration of The Faith of a Critic he writes: "at the basis is pathos. Sympathy and empathy, feeling with and feeling into" He saw Romanticism as "a sudden expansion of consciousness — an expansion into the realms of sensibility." What was revolutionary in its character was "the recognition of sensibility itself, as the raw material of literature and painting." In The True Voice of Feeling he takes as his examples Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins, Whitman and Lawrence, T. E. Hulme and the Imagists, Pound and Eliot. What he means by "feeling" cannot be simply defined; it covers (in various contexts) a range of qualities from pure physical sensation to "sentiment," in the sense of the "refined and tender emotion" of Sterne and the late eighteenth century. At times the word seems to mean, or to include, flashes of intuition. Above all it is the quality of "life," D. H. Lawrence's "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The fashion of scientific "objectivity" and the mistrust of all feeling as "sentimentality" which characterized the twenties notwithstanding, there was a logic in the transition from Wordsworth to Imagism. "It was with the school which Hulme started and Pound established that the revolution begun by Wordsworth was finally completed. Diction, rhythm and metre were finally emancipated from formal artifices and the poet was free to act creatively under laws of his own origination." Yet Herbert could always see the possible objections to those sweeping pronouncements which from time to time he felt obliged to make; for he adds, "It was not always understood that having cast off tyranny's obsolete laws, the poet was under the necessity of originating his own, and much of the free verse that had been practised since 1914 compromises the theory by its feebleness. Nevertheless the theory is right, and all true poetry of the past conforms to it; it is not the theory of a particular school; it is the theory of all essential English poetry." The objections to free verse came, nevertheless, not from the upholders of "tyranny's obsolete laws" but from the poets. Yeats in his Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse finds Eliot "without apparent imagination" and criticizes him for working by a "rejection of all rhythms and metaphors of the more popular ro139

mantics rather than by the discovery of his own." Pound's "deliberate nobility" of style Yeats found "constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion." Yeats's friend George Russell (AE) saw in free verse not the expression of liberated imagination but a failure of imagination: "the verse form is only natural when the soul speaks," he wrote; because "the heart in love, in imagination, in meditation, mounts at times to an ecstasy where its being becomes musical." Elsewhere he writes of free verse that "the angel who presides over hearing shakes its head and murmurs, c No, it does not remind me of the music of the spheres'." Edwin Muir, Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, precisely the most imaginative poets of the succeeding generation, give support to AE's traditional view of the "musical" character of the imagination. Herbert once confessed to me the difficulty he had in memorizing verse, even his own; a defectiveness of the inward ear which may in part have accounted for his bias. He saw T. S. Eliot above all as an imagist; as in his earliest poems he was: " . . .modern poetry — the poetry of Pound and Eliot — has recognized that the senses are the source of linguistic vitality." The image was to remain always his test of vital poetic experience. His Yale ( 1943) lecture on The Image in Modern English Poetry is one of Herbert Read's two or three best pieces of criticism. In it he defines in retrospect the Imagist position: "If the image could be identified as the only poetic force within the poem, why not proceed to identify form and image, as had been the common practise in China and Japan?" This involved a change of diction: " . . . the image is most effective when conveyed in a minimum of words. It proved very difficult to reconcile this minimum with any regular metrical structure, for metre is basically aural and quite independent of image." The incantatory character of verse is age-old and found in all languages, including the Chinese; but Herbert Read remained faithful to his early taste. In 1950 he wrote that "the Cantos constitute the longest and without hesitation I would say the greatest poetic achievement of our time. Technically the poem is the perfection of Pound's taut free verse, and there are passages of purest lyricism which in themselves, if extracted, would constitute a body of poetry for which there is no contemporary parallel." Perhap c too it was Pound's capacity for generous feeling, however violent, that held 140

Herbert Read's admiration; his honour in proportion to his passion. It is notable that Read scarcely mentioned Yeats at any time. His earliest references were dismissive, and related to Ezra Pound, whom he regarded as the greater poet; "There is no doubt that Yeats was influenced, and influenced for the good, by the technique of some of his juniors, notably by Ezra Pound"; and "though one or two poems, such as Byzantium, seem to promise the necessary developments, Yeats remained to the end faithful to the spirit of another age." His analysis of The Sorrow of Love is an object-lesson in the limitations of the Imagist premises for the reading of a symbolist poem. The apparent discoveries of the avant-garde sometimes prove on examination to be failures to see the purpose of what they reject : "If I were asked to give the most distinctive quality of good writing I should express it in this one word : visual. Reduce the art of writing to its fundamentals and you come to this simple aim : to convey images by means of words." This may be one kind of good writing, but no symbolist poet could accept it; for the symbolist the visual image is not the end, but a word in the vocabulary of poetic discourse. * # * In his exposition of Imagism, Read developed a theory of poetry remote from, indeed opposed to, Eliot's own literary classicism, political royalism and religious traditionalism. Eliot was defended, as a poet, by his friend who claimed to be an atheist, a materialist, an anarchist in politics. He had early taken up a counter-position to Eliot's classicism and in 1938 in his Introduction to The True Voice of Feeling wrote that he "might accept a rehabilitation of romanticism" as an adequate description of his aims. It was rather to Wordsworth than to Coleridge, whose transcendentalism he rejected, that he turned for vindication of his own essentially materialist aesthetic theory. In his Clark Lectures (1929-30) he spoke of Wordsworth's philosophic debt to Locke and Hartley. Locke denied the Platonic doctrine of innate ideas and held all experience to come through impressions received from the external world : that is, from images. " . . . a lyric is simply a perception and all thought is based on primary perceptions. From the accumulation of selected perception expressed as lyrics, it is obvious that a general view of life may be constituted." "Hartley was almost what we should call a Behaviourist, and Wordsworth accepted his theories as infallible." 141

"The general effect of the growth of science has been to discredit transcendental reasoning altogether. Traditional criticism, therefore, insofar as it can claim to be fundamental, is a structure whose very foundations have perished, and if we are to save it from becoming the province of emotional dictators, we must hasten to relate it to those systems of knowledge which have to a great extent replaced transcendental philosophy." In the course of his literary life Herbert Read hastened to relate his criticism to system after system, most of them now themselves perished and replaced. Under the compulsive necessity always to have a theory, he was almost naively uncritical of ideas so long as they were new; and throughout his works is scattered a sequence of obscure names (most of them Germanic) of Freudian psychologists, Behaviourists and Heaven knows what, cited as infallible authorities in one book, forgotten in the next. The root of this continual theorizing was his refusal to accept the only final sanction there is for any qualitative view of the world. "Religious thinking always implies an act of faith — a belief in supernatural revelation. That kind of belief I do not profess. I am essentially a materialist. But as a materialist I find myself involved with certain intangible and imponderable elements which we call emotion and i n s t i n c t . . . and finally all our other knowledge and judgment is referred back to such absolutes — absolutes of truth and beauty no less than of justice." "I think it will be found that the only universal quality in art is beauty," he wrote; and for beauty he sought to discover a materialist explanation, referring often to d'Arcy Thompson's Growth and Form and to Lancelot LawWhyte's laws of organic form: " . . . no aesthetic form exists save such as are in conformity with physical and mathematical law." The basis of beauty is formal: " . . . the world keeps returning to certain specific values. Those values are few, but they seem to be fundamental. I would mention as examples the geometrical proportions which are common for forms of organic Ufe as well as forms of art — the socalled Divine Proportion — and those invariable qualities of harmony and serenity to which mankind returns after every period of storm and stress." Wordsworth's atheism, which made William Blake turn pale, was acceptable to Read because in keeping with the atheist humanism of his own day. "Our attitude to Wordsworth's philosophy," he said in his Clark lectures, "must inevitably be our attitude towards humanism ; it is the highest expression of humanism, even of scientific 142

humanism, that the world has yet seen." Yet he saw the inherent flaw in Wordsworth's position, so understood: "the objection to humanism, and it seems to me to bè a final one, is that it necessarily assumes this very infinity of the human mind which inspired Wordsworth. There is nothing in the history of humanity, nothing in our present experience, to justify such a belief.... the choice can only lie between an extreme scepticism and an un-compromising supernaturalism. . . . There is no compromise between these alternatives. But Wordsworth pretended there was, and his whole philosophy is vitiated by this inherent inconsistency. Wordsworth knew this, and the last phase of his life shows him vainly endeavouring to hide the disastrous significance of his philosophy of nature under a screen of orthodox beliefs." Elsewhere he writes of the "convictions" with which Wordsworth sought to "oppose the nihilism that already, at the opening of the nineteenth century threatened European thought" ; the hidden conclusion the atheist humanist must dodge, and Herbert Read himself with the rest. Having rejected the transcendental, he was committed to that relative absolute, the vital principle; D. H. Lawrence's belief that "life is the great reality, that true living fills us with vivid life, 'the heavenly bread' " — a definition that begs many questions. In this vitalism lies the consistency which runs through all the apparent inconsistencies of Herbert Read's thought, his changes of theoretical ground in justification of an idea essentially simple. The Zeitgeist is involved in a process of perpetual transformation ; and if he adopted and abandoned a succession of points of view, from Behaviourism and Freudianism to the structuralism of Cassirer and Suzanne Langer, Jung's view of the ' Collective Unconscious, and Existentialism, he was (to use Blake's term) "exploring the States": every belief possible to man is an experience of protean life; and no knowledge can in its nature be more. No period ever underwent so many decampments or set up edifices of ideology so impermanent as the period to whose every significant experience Herbert Read in turn subjected himself. "Stability, which we foolishly yearn for, is but another name for stagnation, and stagnation is death. The ideal condition of society is the same as the ideal condition of any living body — a state of dynamic tension.. . . Only on condition that the artist is allowed to function freely can society embody those ideals of liberty and intellectual development which to most of us seem the only worthy sanctions of life." Liberty, for him, seems to have signi143

fied a condition of perpetual revolt. The Romantic movement, he wrote, "was more than a change of style: it was a sudden expansion into realms of sensibility not previously accessible to the human imagination. I believe the way then opened still presents itself as a challenge to the human mind. Our duty at the moment, as creative writers and as critics, is to maintain the impetus of that revolution." In this context of perpetually evolving consciousness he saw the arts: "This new world would never have been discovered but for the invention of new vessels of exploration—new forms of literature like the novel and the short story, new techniques like free verse and the interior monologue. Even now further progress awaits new inventions." At his best no-one could be more sensitive in his response to the living "now." In the circumstances of the present, so lacking in solidity and permanence, he wrote, "the poet has no alternative but to rely on 'a certain inward perspective', a coherence of the personality based on the widest evidence of the senses." The weakness of such a position is of course that, in making the relative itself the only measure, all other distinctions are abolished, and an expression of ignorance is of equal value with an expression of knowledge — if indeed the terms any longer mean anything: "The new images presented by the younger artists are not indistinct for lack of focus : they are authentic symbols of chaos itself, of mind at the end of its tether, gazing into the pit at the other side of consciousness." In moments of detachment he could see the inadequacy of avant-gardism; in a late essay, The Problem of the Zeitgeist, he wrote: "a given age always looks at its contemporary art with contemporary prejudices. When . . . these prejudices disappear, the art of that given age is revalued once again with contemporary prejudices — the prejudices of a new age." All knowledge, it is implied, is relative; perhaps the worst of the contemporary prejudices in which Herbert himself was involved. Yet he could forget, with fatal consequences, that the Zeitgeist spares no avant-garde, and write of some ephemeral ideology as if it were an absolute: "It is only now, with the aid of modern dialectics and modern psychology in the name of Marx and Freud that they [the poets] have found themselves in a position to put their beliefs and practises on a scientific basis, thereby initiating a continuous and deliberate creative activity whose only laws are the laws of its own dynamics." — Herbert at his worst. * * * 144

It was inevitable that, seeking to find for the Romantic view of the imagination a materialist basis he should have sought to discover in the atheist psychology of Freud a ground for the mysterious creative processes of poetic inspiration. "Since the eighteenth century, inspiration has lost its religious significance and become almost exclusively an aesthetic form. . . . But whilst hitherto romanticism has had to rely on subjective convictions [he is thinking perhaps of Wordsworth] and has earned a certain critical disrepute in philosophy and the science of art, it can now claim a scientific basis in the findings of psychoanalysis." "Physics, demanding as it does such impressive modifications of aspect and attitude, provides the most general background for all subsidiary efforts, but for the literary critic psychology gains an intimate importance because it is so directly concerned with the material origins of art." In 1938 he wrote, "my increasing tendency, step by step with my increasing knowledge of modern psychology, has been to give literary criticism a psychological direction"; and, à propos Shelley, he wrote that the "only type of criticism which is basic is ontogenetic criticism, by which I mean criticism which traces the origins of the work of art in the psychology of the individual and in the economic structure of society." In retrospect, Herbert Read's, together with many less distinguished applications of Freudian dogma to works of literature and the arts, seems crude. To be just, he formulated, but never applied, the worst Freudian absurdities: "The essential point to notice is that psycho-analysis seems to show that the artist is initially and by tendency a neurotic, but that in becoming an artist he as it were escapes the ultimate fate of his tendency and through art finds his way back to reality." He goes on to quote (without irony) Freud's even more excessive notion "that the aesthetic pleasure produced in us by the creative artist has a preliminary character, and that the real enjoyment of a work of art is due to the ease it gives to certain psychic tensions." Were this so the value of any work must obviously be in proportion to the force of the neurosis it liberates, and its shared experience a sharing of our collective urge to violence, repressed sexuality and every other form of anti-social perversion and mania; a view of art which, however false, has, with or without the help of Herbert Read, produced works in abundance, according to its kind, within the phantasmagoria of the Modern Movement. More extraordinary still was Herbert's willingness to accept the crudities of Behaviourist explanations of experience: "McDougall 145

has shown that physiology may yet identify and classify the various glandular excretions and their appropriate lyrical responses." Such extravagances were of course abandoned as both Herbert himself and the science of psychology improved their knowledge; and he was the first, so far as I know, to point to Jung as possibly more relevant than Freud to any consideration of the imagination. Towards the end of his life Herbert had adopted a great deal of Jung's thought on the nature of the psyche, and the collective unconscious, and even much earlier there was a point of credulity beyond which he refused to be led. Quoting the Freudian Ernest Jones who seeks to explain the mentality of the artist by "the reaction of the young child against its original excremental interests" Herbert comments that "the repression of such interests may indeed contribute to the details of aesthetic activity but this particular hypothesis seems too limited in conception." Such fantasies are no longer in need of refutation, having gone with the Zeitgeist which brought them; but are worth recalling as typical of their period. The Clark lectures on Wordsworth (1932) were a moderate enough experiment in psychological criticism, though at the time they outraged survivors of the cult of Wordsworth as a religion for the irreligious. Basically he was right in drawing attention to the importance of erotic love (Wordsworth's illicit love-affair in France) as the prime agent of imaginative inspiration ; perhaps Freud's most enduring contribution to the understanding of the life and art. Yet it was a pity that so sensitive a reader of the text of prose or verse should have sacrificed his best gift to any theory outside the real terms of literature. Of his In Defence of Shelley I find it hard to say any good. It was this essay which gave currency to the theory of Shelley's "homosexuality" ; a mare's nest typical of the mentality of the thirties. The argument is a fine example of the Freudian logic : Shelley was, from adolescence, always involved in some love-affair with young and pretty women; in the first draft of Laon and Cythna the lovers, brother and sister, were an incestuous pair; The Cenci also treats the incest theme, of father and daughter: therefore Shelley was clearly a repressed homosexual. A generation who could accept such an argument was certainly liberated from the tyranny of the rational. There are of course — for Herbert Read was after all a critic of high distinction — excellent incidental perceptions in both essays; nor was his motive the journalist's vulgar interest in scandal. On the 146

contrary, Herbert was making an attempt to discover the roots of the poetry: "A poet's poems are facts far more essential in his life than his sexual adventures or his financial difficulties, and the biography of a poet should therefore be primarily an account of his creative activity, the life of the muse, and the other facts are only important in so far as they contribute to an understanding of this process." It all turns upon what is relevant or irrelevant knowledge; and the fashion of psychoanalyzing the poets has been one of the most disastrous. Many years later, reviewing Carl Grabo's The Magic Plant, he virtually admitted the inadequacy, or irrelevance, of the psychological approach to Shelley: "I myself, who have never been inclined to depreciate the quality of Shelley's philosophy, had no conception of its range, depth and coherence until I had read this Chicago professor's patient exposition of the ideas underlying Shelley's poems." *

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It was inevitable that Herbert Read should have become involved in the Surrealist movement, whose "pure psychic automatism" gave a greater scope (within the materialist hypothesis) to the imagination than does Locke's theory of the mind as a blank page on which perceptions are impressed, or the Behaviourist theory which is but a modern amplification of that view. In retrospect it is easy to see that Surrealism was less an exploration of the psyche than a doctrinaire application of Freudian theory; no structure of the mind is presumed, but pure expression of "the irrational." Of Coleridge's poetry Herbert Read wrote at this time, that "its poetic worth is in inverse ratio to its logical sense, reaching its greatest intensity in the incoherent imagery of Kubla-Khan" — already a notable departure from the view that the function of poetry is visual. But In Myth, Dream and Poem (written before 1938) we feel that he is already feeling beyond the Freudian and Surrealist conception of the irrational to some kind of ordering principle which would explain the universality of certain themes; a Jungian rather than a Freudian concept. "The works of art which survive," he wrote, "are those which most nearly approach to the illogical order of the dream.... These works of art are irrational and dreamlike — legendary myths and folk-tales and the poems which embody them — these survive all economic and political change They are retold in every age and every climate, and though modified in detail, are always essen147

tially the same, irrational and superreal." There are other possible views of myths, which within those traditions to which they respectively belong are vehicles of religious and metaphysical meaning of an exact, though certainly not of a logical and rational kind. From this point of view Surrealism is a misreading of symbol, even of dream symbols other than those belonging simply to the Freudian "personal unconscious," the confused re-presentation of physical impressions, reshaped according to our night-thoughts. The particular brand of irrational images in which the Surrealists trafficked were produced, besides, au service de la revolution; for the Surrealist movement was a thinly disguised political movement of the extreme Left (even though the Russian Marxists would have none of it) subversive and "engaged." The anti-social and nihilistic images were acceptable to Herbert Read, who like the Surrealists believed that our present society is rotten. His own understanding of anarchy was Utopian rather than subversive; but there was enough in common to blind him to the fact, obvious enough in retrospect, that Dada and Surrealism had more in common with Nazism (another manifestation of "the irrational") than with Marxism. The blind faith of the avant-garde of the thirties in whatever emerged from the Unconscious through "pure psychic automatism" seems in retrospect altogether too simple. There are many spirits, and those who come are those we invoke, whether from heaven, hell, or "the unconscious"; where also both devils and angels inhabit. Odin and his host would never have been allowed to pass the Surrealist censor; but neither would Yeats's woman of numinous beauty shooting an arrow at a star; or Edwin Muir's cosmic vision of creation; still less the angels of Mons or Our Lady of Fátima. At the time neither Herbert Read nor anyone else infected by the excitement of the Surrealist movement stopped to ask whether those who opposed it might have motives other than ignorant prejudice, reactionary obstruetivism, and so on. The intoxication of Surrealism could not, obviously, infect believers in a spiritual order, whether Christian or theosophist, for whom the "irrational" hierarchies of heaven and hell were in any case real, and more clearly conceived then by these newcomers from Behaviourism, Freud, French anticlerical rationalism and what-not. It seemed easy to make light of the criticisms of so popular a writer as J. B. Priestley, who had strongly attacked the movement on the self-evident grounds that "the Surrealists stand for violence and neurotic unreason," and that 148

"you catch a glimpse behind them of the deepening twilight of barbarism that may soon blot out our sky, until humanity finds itself in another long night." C. S. Lewis, scholar and Christian theologian, was another opponent. Yeats, who had been studying "the irrational" ever since the eighteen-eighties, and who could have told not only Herbert Read and the Surrealists but Freud and Jung themselves a great deal about the memoria and the hodos chameleontos which is only now beginning to be understood, reached Priestley's conclusion; "After us the savage god," he wrote, after seeing in Paris the first performance of Jarry's Ubu Roi. In retrospect Herbert himself related the movement to "a state of religious unbelief, of psychological imbalance, and social unrest . . . mental insecurity, social insecurity, metaphysical insecurity" — a fair description, one might think, of the blind leading the blind. This however was not how Herbert saw it: the function of the artist is to express the Zeitgeist; and his ignorance is neither here nor there. "Just as superrealism makes use of, or rather proceeds on the assumption of the knowledge embodied in psychoanalysis, so abstract art makes use of, or proceeds on the basis of, the abstract concepts of physics and dynamics, geometry and mathematics. It is not necessary for the abstract artist to have knowledge of these sciences (nor is it necessary for the super-realists to have knowledge of psychoanalysis) ; such concepts are part of our mental ambience, and the artist is precisely the individual who can make this ambience actual." I am reminded of a remark made to me long ago by T. S. Eliot: that there are two kinds of borrowing, conscious and unconscious ; and of the two unconscious borrowing is far the worse. "The mischief began at the end of the seventeenth century when man became passive before a mechanized nature," Yeats wrote in his Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse ; and it would be a fair criticism of Herbert Read that, grounded as he was in Locke and Behaviourism, his view of art was a passive one: art must "make this ambience actual." The intoxicating sense of powerful originality which possessed the "Modern Movement" was in fact a passive possession of this kind. The creative genius who strives to change that ambience has none of this sense of "possession," of going with the stream. Herbert Read was himself — as all who knew him will testify — a man of supreme natural goodness; and for that very reason could not easily discern evil. But to deny the reality of evil may be to give power to principalities and powers of the collec149

tive mind, and to "rulers of the darkness of this world." Herbert Read lacked what in Christian theological terms is called "the discernment of spirits"; or was he at times carried away by some theory into supporting movements uncongenial to his natural sensibility? During the war he admitted the destructive character of Surrealism while not on this account condemning it: "As for surrealism, when it has finally accomplished its destructive work (and the war is rapidly doing that for it) and begins to concentrate on the problems which have been raised by the discovery of the unconscious, then it may evolve something in the nature of a collective idiom." Under the growing and salutary influence of Jung he went further; "In The Integration of the Personality, Jung has suggested that the modern world is suffering from the consequences of iconoclasm, from the lack of any archetypal symbols to act as safety-valves for the suppressed forces of what he calls the collective unconscious. The artist from the prehistoric times down to the Middle Ages was the agent who created these symbols for society, and he has now to recover that public function." He was always careful to say that not all surrealism was, as he would understand the word, art; all the same, there was already in the concept of surrealism the beginning of the confusion that has since threatened to submerge any such distinction. There has never been any precedent, in the art of the past, for the notion that the function of art can ever be "destructive"; but once art and literature are conceived of as expressions of the Zeitgeist, and that Zeitgeist itself at the service of a nihilism (as Herbert himself knew very well) the only possible term can be the destruction of art itself. This the surrealists themselves were the first to proclaim, at a time when few could have foreseen the triumph of the principle of destruction they deliberately introduced into the arts. He also came to question the alleged therapeutic value of giving expression, in literature, to the suppressed destructive impulses. Writing on Realism and Superrealism he admits that "since our age is one of increasing savagery, it is only natural that our artists should revert to a savage type of art. But that is not quite the line of my argument. I would rather say that there is a savage in every human being, and always has been; and that our savage instincts find sublimation in art. But that too is not an altogether satisfactory argument — it suggests that art is a sort of medicine to make us mentally 150

healthy." In On the Failure of War Books he reflects on his own poem, The Happy Warrior: "the suspicion now grows upon me that such writing was fuel to the inner flames of the war spirit. If we human beings have an irresistible urge to self-destruction, then the imagination will feed ravenously on any vivid description of the process of destruction." The revolution in the teaching of art and poetry in English schools worked through Herbert Read's lifelong work in the cause of "education through art" is a matter of history. Again and again he affirmed his belief that the creative expression of the imagination is life itself. But the point at which he always stopped short was the admission of any metaphysical ground in which the imagination is rooted; nor could he admit that the "isolation and insecurity" of the modern attitude which he so clearly saw is basically an alienation from that ground; and in consequence a sickness of the imagination itself. By what possible stretch of credulity could the products of "pure psychic automatism" or the later productions of "action painters" and the like be attributed to the Spirit that "knoweth all things," Coleridge's "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM"? The absence of that informing principle is all such work communicates. #

*

#

The great confrontation for Herbert Read was with tradition. "Without contraries there is no progress" ; Herbert had seen a truth, and his affirmation of a vital imaginative principle throughout a protean sequence of changes of theoretical ground, was his great contribution to his time and the future. In reading his early criticism we often feel that Herbert is talking to T. S. Eliot; and especially so on the issue of tradition. On Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent he wrote, in The Poetic Experience, "there is not one literary tradition but many traditions; there is certainly a romantic tradition as well as a classical tradition, and, if anything, the romantic tradition has the longer history" and he quotes a famous passage from the Ion on poetic inspiration. His temperamental affinity with Wordsworth notwithstanding he was continually drawn back to Coleridge ; and in this too his afterthoughts were best. In his lecture on Coleridge as Critic (John Hopkins University, 1949) he reverses his earlier adherence to Locke and Hartley and (by implication) 151

Behaviourism: "There are in our world currents of thought that are central and others that are merely contributaries and wander off into the bogs and deserts of philosophy : that stream which first became defined in Kant's philosophy and continued to flow however irregularly through the minds of Schelling, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, divided by a watershed from the contrary stream to which we can attach the names of Locke, Condillac, Hartley, Bentham, Marx and Lenin — that first stream to which we give the fashionable name of Existentialism but which is really the main tradition of philosophy itself — in that stream Wordsworth is confidently carried." The ground of his difference with Eliot was of course the religious one. It is perhaps a pity that it is in Eliot's historical terms that the question is discussed. In a review of Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948) he states his objections to Eliot's view in the reasoned terms which a controversy with his friend imposed. "I agree with Mr. Eliot on so many essential points that it is only with a feeling of hopeless bafflement that I find myself being skeptical on the issue which he obviously regards as most important of all" ; and he states his case: " . . . the fact that societies have in historical times evolved from primitive to more elaborate or 'civilized5 patterns, taken together with the assertion that culture is the incarnation of a religion, implies that religion itself has also evolved. But once we admit a principle of evolution in religion we are committed (as sociologists) to the prospect of further steps in the evolution of religion. But that is not the underlying assumption of Mr. Eliot's thesis. If I do not misunderstand him he assumes that our European destiny is to work out a pattern of culture ordained nearly two thousand years ago. I have always assumed that Christian culture reached its perfection in the Middle Ages " Teilhard de Chardin (whose writings Herbert admired) was indeed to introduce the evolutionary principle into Christianity itself. But the great aesthetician of tradition, Ananda Coomaraswamy, starts from a different ground altogether; not history but metaphysical reality, St. Augustine's "wisdom that was not made, but is now what it always was and ever shall be." Such a definition raises quite other questions, for it rejects Herbert Read's relativism outright: the Zeitgeist is no longer the test of truth. "From the Stone Age until now, what a decline!" Coomaraswamy somewhere says; he meant of course "a decline in intellectuality, not in comfort. It should be one of the functions of 152

a well organized Museum to deflate the idea of progress." This calls in question Herbert Read's avant-gardism precisely at its most vulnerable point; for he could see as well as Coomaraswamy that the "evolution" of European art from, say, the eleventh century (the perfection of Christian art) to Jackson Pollock could be read in Coomaraswamy's sense. The evolutionary optimism of atheist humanism is (given the atheist's denial of a metaphysical principle or a divine purpose) mere wanton self-deception. According to Coomaraswamy "progress" is a meaningless word, for art is to be measured only by its nearness to or distance from enduring standards of perfection, determined by "unageing intellect" — Yeats's phrase, who was himself a lifelong student of the perennial philosophy, basis of traditional aesthetics. But according to Herbert Read, "To accept the view that the purpose of art is 'primarily to communicate a gnosis' is to acquiesce in a petrifaction of life — the supersession of human relations by abstract doctrines . . . the power of art is to communicate . . . let us leave it at that. That art is the power to communicate, and this power depends without any doubt on a vitality of the senses which are used by the artist in the process of giving form to anything — be it a religious symbol or a chair to sit on or a poem or an aeroplane." So he wrote in a review of Coomaraswamy's Why Exhibit Works of Art (1941). So he evades the argument that the means of art must serve its end; a little disingenuously, we may say; for he had supported in very different terms surréalisme au service de la révolution. We must conclude that it is those ends themselves which Coomaraswamy is indicating as the traditional ground of art that he cannot accept. "The vitality of the senses" is, besides, begging the vital question — one which Blake answered when he said that he saw "not with but through the eye," and "a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees." Blake might have included the Surrealists and many since among those who see nature as "all ridicule and deformity." Nor is "a chair to sit on" merely a sense impression; it is, according to another of Herbert's friends, David Jones, a focus of many memories and associations. "If the painter makes visual forms, the content of which is chairs, or chair-ishness, what are the chances that these who regard his painting will run to meet him with the notions of 'seat,' 'throne,5 'session,' 'cathedra,9 'Scone,' 'on-the-right-hand-of-the-Father' in mind. If this haphazard list is, in some of its accidents, yours and mine, it nevertheless serves, mutatis mutandis, for Peloponnesians 153

and for Polynesians too." Proust, whose criticism Herbert admired, had argued in similar terms against Zola and the French Realists years before. There can no more be "pure sensations" than there can be "pure psychic automatism." Our perceptions are determined by what we are, and that includes a great deal besides the sum of our sense impressions; "As a man is, So he Sees". Blake too had his answer to Locke. Herbert was essentially a humanist ; and in this, though not in his atheism, he has the Christians with him, in at least one of his objections to Coomaraswamy (in the same review) : "The art we call humanistic, restricted to the expression of individualistic feelings and concepts, must seem almost meaningless to the Indian artist." This is perhaps true ; and to dismiss the humanistic is to dismiss virtually the whole of Western Christian culture in what David Jones calls its "incarnationalism." I remember Herbert describing to me his impression of India, and saying how infinitely he preferred Christian to Indian mediaeval art because of this very difference; the "incarnational" aspect being eliminated from Buddhist, and dissolved in Hindu art. There is at stake a basic difference of point of view, and one which Coomaraswamy himself discusses in the book Herbert Read is here reviewing; he shows, for example, a naturalistic drawing of a Maori chieftain by a European; and an abstract mask of the same chieftain in which personal features are eliminated in order to communicate a hieratic concept of "kingship." Truth to say Herbert himself would have preferred the abstract mask also, but on different grounds; the fashion for "primitive" art characteristic of "the Modern Movement" was on purely aesthetic grounds. The choice of "tribal" rather than Christian, Buddhist or Islamic art was rather to evade metaphysical implications than to illustrate them, and Coomaraswamy's reminder that the motives involved in the creation of such works were of another kind was no more welcome than was his insistence on other aspects of the implications of the traditional gnosis. Once I spoke with Herbert of Coomaraswamy, to whom I owned myself indebted. I was surprised at the bitterness of his retort: "He is dead, dead." I had not found it so; on the contrary it was the Modern Movement I found "dead"; for in retrospect that movement can be seen as essentially an expression of the progress of atheist humanism towards that implicit nihil from which, according to Herbert, Wordsworth himself had recoiled in vain. Not all poetry 154

of this century has been an expression of this mentality. Eliot, David Jones, Edith Sitwell, Edwin Muir; in Wales, Dylan Thomas implicitly, Vernon Watkins and R. S. Thomas explicidy, are all Christians. The Irish renaissance was grounded in theosophy, Platonism, and the Western Esoteric tradition; Joyce, though a rebel, on Catholicism. Ezra Pound is a follower of Confucius. Even on tradition Herbert had wise afterthoughts; he never closed his mind, and in The Modern Epoch in Art (1949) he reflects upon the only possible alternatives in face of the present crisis; "To renew one's sensibility towards one's environment — that is the method both of the traditionalist and the revolutionary." Either "the artist retraces the historical development of his art and resumes contact with the authentic tradition" or "resolves the crisis by a leap forward into a new and original state of sensibility — he revolts against existing conventions in order to create a new convention more in accordance with a contemporary consciousness." But revolt and rejection and destruction are not themselves a creation of anything except chaos; and what happens when revolution and rejection have become the only convention? In his criticism of the present he is at one with Coomaraswamy : "There is no spiritual integrity in our life, and no artist of any worth will put his skill and sensibility at the service of any less worthy cause. An artist will serve either the light within him, or the light of humanity embodied in a superhuman concept of reality which is valid in the modern world, and therefore an artist like Hélion must remain true to the only reality of which he has knowledge — the subjective reality of his own vision. . . . For we are, in our baffled way, all compelled to construct a personal vision." Yeats, and David Jones too, would have seen the force of Herbert Read's desperation in face of the absence of any "unity of culture" in our society to which the modern poet can relate his life or his work. What Herbert Read never could admit was that tradition and the imagination affirm the same truth ; that, in Coomaraswamy's words, "we are considering a catholic or universal doctrine, with which the humanistic philosophies of art can neither be compared nor reconciled, but only contrasted." Another afterthought on Coomaraswamy may well be reflected in an article on Modern Chinese Painting, in which he admits that " . . . a tradition that has survived the vicissitudes of thirteen centuries is likely to possess some principle of vitality unknown to the 155

short-term policies of European a r t . . . that tradition is partly technical, partly philosophical. But the philosophical aspect is the primary one, the technical one being fixed because it is best adapted to express the philosophical aim." (This is almost a paraphrase of some of Coomaraswamy's arguments in Why Exhibit Works of Art), And he adds, "the traditions that die are the impersonal abstractions that have no roots in the self, and in the eternal need of the self to be objectivized. Chinese painting is a technique for selfexpression; by keeping to this standard of self-expression, it bases itself on the eternal verities of the human mind and sensibility which, through all the stress of religions and philosophies, remain in direct communication with the physical phenomena of the world. But to the Chinese these phenomena are not disconnected and discordant events; they are part of a universal harmony." — and so back to Wordsworth, his first master. This may still be an atheism, of a sort; but of a very different sort from the perpetual revolution of the Modern Movement. Perhaps Herbert had in mind a sentence of Coomaraswamy's with which he would probably have agreed: "An integrated society of this sort can function harmoniously for millennia, in the absence of external interference. On the other hand, the contentment of innumerable peoples can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of our civilization." He comes nearer, in some respects, than Eliot, to the metaphysical view of tradition in a passage in Realism and Superrealism, written about 1944; "Surely these people, who inherit their culture and preserve it unchanged, are not the true traditionalists. Tradition is not a heritage ; it is rather an active principle, a principle we apply to solve particular problems, and as the problems change from age to age, so must the solutions." True; but what of the principle itself? There is a sleight-of-hand involved in an argument that can conclude (à propos surrealism) that modern art "only seems to be revolutionary because it insists on developing the central tradition of art." The point in question is begged: has not that centre and that principle somewhere been lost? On many occasions, especially towards the end of his life, Herbert gave expression to something very like despair about the present situation: "It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved. But both may wear the cloak of humanism, the one for shelter, the other for disguise. The serísimo

tive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing." "Reading, like walking, is one of the lost arts; one of the sacrifices we have made to speed, noise, and news." " . . . we may be leaving an epoch without taste to enter an epoch without art" ; admissions, bitter enough, of the bankruptcy of the Zeitgeist. At the Éranos conference in 1958 Herbert Read gave a paper entitled The Flower of Peace \ and in that late statement, made before a small group of Jungians, the reader feels that he was reverting to what he himself loved, to that "true voice of feeling" he had often been compelled to stifle under the sense of obligation to fight the battles of the Modern Movement. He had written, many years before, "I have a characteristic preference for the miniature, for the epitome, the episode, the epigram. Rhetoric, everything mouth-filling and pretentious, the imposing and the pompous, everything orotund and ornate, intimidates me, and what is intimidating cannot be lived with. Art must be intimate if it is to be a personal possession. It belongs to a private world." He disliked the Renaissance, Bernini and Michelangelo; loved the laconic haiku, the private voice of George Herbert, the "innocent eye" of Traherne. He quoted, in his Éranos paper, Henry Vaughan's "My Soul, there is a country, Far beyond the stars"; and George Herbert's "Sweet Peace, where dost thou dwell?" — and suddenly we know that he is no longer on the battlefield, but at home, speaking of what he himself loves. In his Introduction to The Tenth Muse he beautifully states his own faith: " . . . my general outlook—of an attitude I would never venture to call a philosophy... . Never yield to habit, especially to habits of thought which polish away the rough edges of truth; remain open, innocent, original. Put away childish things, but retain, all the same, a core of childhood, a slender vein of vital sap, which the rings of growth may hide, but never destroy. Keep a reserve of simplicity, even of primitiveness, so that you do not meet elementary situations with sophistication. Your aim should be, not simply to be, but rather to be ever capable of becoming — not at rest, but moving with the moving world — always in touch with what is changing, changing one's self, open, like a child, to the whole world without, but with an inward reserve which the child does not possess, where one gathers a little strength, a certain order."

157

DONALD DAVIE

Emigrant^To the Receding Shore for the shade of Herbert Read

The weather of living in an island That is not an island in the ocean Crackles in the hallway. What is salt And ancient in us dries To an inland heat. The Atlantic Is a pond sunk in a garden, A concrete mole has sealed the Aleutian vents Browned already; only beside New Zealand Sobs refresh a walled-up bind of waters. Alfred in Athelney, Hereward in the Isle Of Ely, learn to go mounted. Tooling through second-growth Sherwood In an Armstrong-Siddeley tourer, Percheron of the twenties, My grandfather unmeaning Anything but well Discharged his quiverful: Aridity, and levels.

158

The anti-cyclone regions Of population pressure, Respondent to the pulse of Asia, Arabia, Kansas, Send out their motorized Hordes, the freely breeding. And the Age of Chivalry prinks Pygmy-size to my daughter's Gymkhana, though the Godolphin Arabian has invaded The forested, painfully cleared Lands of the Clydesdale, the Suffolk And the Shire horse, the old black English. The great trees sail the oceans, Spill acorns on Pitcairn Island. And all of this is over.

159

ANTHONY KERRIGAN

The Green Child

A green child greenly stayed : on a Cuban balcony, green : beside a County Wicklow Georgian manor, green : across a Yorkshire moor, green : in a Venice full of performance, another shade of green : but green. Fought battles always green with the gentle give of a tree turned and turned round and twisted and turned again. Unless it be the "infinite brown" of Rembrandt or the black background of the Christ of Velazquez or the blue of certain Cézanne watercolour geometries, accomplished silence is always green. "Green silence" is the most yielding background, as moist and deep as English grass remembered; in the biggest bole of a Constable still a sapling, a passage of counter-composition to a nature morte.

160

Robin Skelton

THE POETRY OF HERBERT READ

LJ JL. J L E R B E R T READ'S writings about poetry have overshadowed his actual compositions. The authority with which he wrote about the poetry of others and about the creative process makes it difficult for us to approach his poems with an open mind. We expect the poems to support the critical theories, and to evince the same wayward brilliance as the essays. We search for examples of Imagism, of Vers Libre, and Organic Form. We suppose that the philosophical and radical temper of the essays will appear with even more intensity in the poetry, and we are frequently disappointed. It would be a sad disservice to the memory of so great a man to adopt a merely pietistic attitude to his work, and to praise that which deserves to be put aside. Herbert Read himself, though the kindliest of critics, was not the least rigorous, and in writing of his poetry I feel compelled to attempt standards of honesty which he himself set, and obliged to look at the poems themselves without attempting to justify their failures or magnify their achievements by relating them to their author's critical theories. What matters is the quality of the poetry as poetry, and not its relationship to other writings. Reading and re-reading the canon of Herbert Read's poetry as he defined it himself in the two books, Collected Poems ( 1952) and Moon's Farm (1955), I find myself disturbed by the conviction that the poet has been ill served by the philosopher. The success of the poems is usually in inverse proportion to their length and to their degree of explicit intellectualism. Thus the section of "Longer 161

Poems" in the Collected Poems is the least satisfactory part of the book. Many times the struggle towards the intellectual formulation of a problem results in the disorganization of the imagery and the straining of language. "John Donne Declines a Benefice" opens with the lines: Shut out the sound. — These June birds shrill Their easy ecstacies too well To make a music for the thoughts That deep within discordantly delve This fallow mind. . . . The shift from images of music's ecstasy to images of delving the land is not sufficiently controlled by the creation of a credible persona for me to be able to accept it. The passionate voice of Donne, its rhythmic vigour and its humour, presented a fictive speaker whose mind could range easily and swiftly from abstract to concrete and mix metaphors and allusions with such speed and apparent spontaneity that our acceptance of oddity is at one with our admiration and understanding of his passionate intelligence. Read's speaker may imitate the Donnian mode in his brusque transitions, but does not share Donne's all-embracing gusto and zest for the grotesquerie of human energies. Moreover, the ringing originality of Donne's sudden violent perceptions is missing. Thus, later in the poem we find a concatenation of imagery whose violence cannot justify its absurdity, however much we tell ourselves that we are exploring a Jacobean intelligence. The trouble lies in the use of abstraction. An abstraction, such as "faithless lechery" unless given a novel conceptual twist by some device of wit, suggests the presence of a moral or philosophical assurance that is in direct opposition to any attempt to question the stability of the spiritual universe. Once I was Jack Donne, burned by the vast Energies of an eager lust, And leapt with zeal Into the mirage of a limpid pool Which my impinging body crackt Into a crater, a sulphurous hole Of faithless lechery. I reattained the fresh atmospheres By the perfection of a fair fantasy, This heart's concern, a sun to shine In the night of lust. 162

The final cliché emphasizes the essentially fustian quality of the lines. Read cannot make us believe in his Donne, but only in a man wishing to emulate Donne. This is a harsh judgment, perhaps, but it appears to be almost equally true of the other dramatic monologues. It is as if the speaker of them were attempting to remind himself of the philosophical significance of his own existence by interpreting and qualifying each phenomenon with the aid of cleverly chosen but poetically debilitating abstract epithets. Thus, in the first section of "The End of A War" what might well have been a chilling presentation of the silence surrounding the dying German officer becomes a presentation of a jargon-ridden intelligence weakly attempting profundity. . . . Now the silence is unholy. Death has no deeper horror than diminishing sound — ears that strain for the melody of action, hear only the empty silence of retreating life. If we cut out the words and syllables "for the melody of action" and "-ing life," we find ourselves approaching the sensation more nearly without in any way reducing the metaphysical implications. The hunger after acceptable intellectual formulae mars many of these poems. In "The Analysis of Love" the sixth section opens with the lines : There are moments when I see your mind Laps'd in your sex; When one particular deployment Is the reflex of incomplete attainment. This is, one may admit, clever stuff. It is also a useful component of the poem's total argument. It is also, however, versified talk of a peculiarly polysyllabic and dispassionate kind. The opening lines of the seventh section of the poem make the point : Since you are finite you will never find The hidden source of the heart's emotion; It is a pool, secret in dusk and dawn, Deep in the chartless forest life has grown. Here we are told that there can be no intellectual formula for the numinous. The abstract language of philosophy cannot place us in 163

communication with the sensation of living, only with the sensation of thinking — to make a useful but false distinction. Nevertheless, the human creature must somehow attempt that ' 'intolerable wrestle with words and meaning." In "Beata L'Aima" we find the lines: . . . words lie. The structure of events alone is comprehensible and to single perceptions communication is not essential. Art ends; the individual world alone is valid and that gives ease. The water is still, the rocks are hard and vein5d metalliferous, yielding an ore of high worth. In the sky the unsullied sun lake. It is in the presentation of t£the structure of events" that Read the poet excels, and not in the communication of opinions about them. Nevertheless, it seems there must be some justification for refusing to comment upon the significance of events. In "Mutations of the Phoenix" the question is asked. Why should I dwell in individual ecstasy? It is a hollow quarry of the mind rilPd with rock drippings, smooth'd with silt; and only the whorlminded Hamlet walks there musing in the gutters. The answer given suggests that man is obliged, by his very nature, to attempt to bring unconscious perceptions and impulses into conscious awareness, for man's consciousness is his supreme and unique attribute. Mind wins deciduously, hibernating through many years. Impulse alone is immutable sap and flowing continuance extending life to leafy men. Effort of consciousness carries from origin the metamorphic clue. The cap is here 164

in conscience humanly unique; and conscience is control, ordaining the strain to some perfection not briefly known. Unfortunately, however important the notion, it is here destructive of poetry. It is, indeed, only when the poem accepts the "phoenix" and accepts the warning that "you can't escape" that the poem, as poetry, surges forward into intensity of vision. This "vision is fire" ; the phoenix "burns spiritually" in a world which is "finite" and in which "the eye is all" for time itself is "vision." One should involve oneself in the dionysiac energies of the impulse towards vision, not the Appolonian search after categories and order. This is certainly the theme of "The Lament of Saint Denis" who, rapt by his vision, called himself "master of all nature and knowledge," and who, containing in himself "the storm you met on the way," announces that at last he shall stand "in ordain'd radiance" and his eyes shall become "the light of reason." The visionary element in some of these long poems thus contrives to overcome the intellectualization, but does not, still, provide the authority of most of the shorter poems in which the battle of Apollo and Dionysus is not joined. It is in these poems that the clarity and elegance of Read's sensibility is mo^. effectively displayed. It is in these poems too that he balances his language so that the silences are ineluctably part of the poem's structure and meaning. Consider

"April":

To the fresh wet fields and the white froth of flowers Came the wild errant swallows with a scream. We do not need to be told that this is more than a leaf from a poet's sketchbook. It is a classical feeling we have here; the flowers of April, in their innocence and fertility are inevitably to be visited by those swallows which, in myth, were born of predatory sexuality. The myth of Itylus is not mentioned. It does not need to be. It is all in that "scream" and that "errant." Again, in "Movement of Troops," a similarly glyptic poem describing a scene of the first world war the imagery calls up the living experience of myth. 165

We entrain in open trucks And soon glide away from the plains of Artois. With a wake of white smoke We plunge down dark avenues of silent trees. A watcher sees Our red light gleam Occasionally. The accuracy of the picture, as a record of a scene, is breathtaking, but what is even more astonishing is the shift in viewpoint from that of the speaker to that of a watcher observing what is surely a descent into the inferno. The word "occasionally" is filled with poignancy. The watcher cannot see all the agony. He can only glimpse it from time to time. The soldiers can only from time to time hope that their pain may be observable and be recorded. Herbert Read's translations of contemporary scenes into living myth are among his finest achievements. That they occur most frequently in short poems should not blind us to the magnitude of his success. Not surprisingly, it is in his War Poems that Read discovers mythic universality most frequently, and again, these are most impressive when least explanatory. "My Company," for example, hits home when we read : My men go wearily with their monstrous burdens. They bear wooden planks And iron sheeting Through the area of death. When a flare curves through the sky They rest immobile. Then on again, Sweating and blaspheming — "Oh, bloody Christ!" But this image of suffering humanity which, by means of the imprecation, is compared to the suffering of Christ on his way to Calvary is then marred by an explicit piece of sermonizing, for this second section of the poem ends : 166

My men, my modern Christs, Your bloody agony confronts the world. The clean narrative development of "The Execution of Cornelius Vane" does not permit of intrusive explanations and is, as a consequence a moving record of human confusion. "The End of a War," however, with its adoption of essentially Metaphysical methods suffers from elaboration and even the "Ode Written During the Battle of Dunkirk" and "A World Within a War" are marred by sententiousness. When we turn to the shorter poems, however, we discover that the imagery carries the viewpoint and the mythic awareness beautifully. "Bombing Casualties in Spain" concludes with an image filled with implications. We find ourselves wrily registering allusions to frivolous folly, to childhood, and to the irrationality of collective human passion. They are laid out in ranks like paper lanterns that have fallen after a night of riot extinct in the dry morning air. In "The Heart Conscripted" the viewpoint is expressed succinctly and in concrete imagery. I hear only the sobbing fall of various water-clocks and the swift inveterate wail of the destructive axe. It is therefore in the short, passionate poems, in which the image is presented, in Pound's words, as "an intellectual and emotional complex" that Read's power emerges most effectively. He can present the nuances of a scene or personality as deftly as Pound in the best of Lustra. "Penumbra" ends with an image quite as astonishingly effective as that of the woman "like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall" in Pound's "The Garden." She is gone a vestal her robes fluttering like a printed sheet in the gusty Tube The more the poems depend upon the image and the symbol the more disturbing they become. Consider the echoing of the images in "Aubade": 167

Early light beats down my body is a beaten silver leaf If I rise it will wrinkle a tinsel pod a wither'd caul from the womb of night. Images of the autumn, of birth, of death, and of male sexuality are here fused into a simple classically economic whole. The word "classical" has often been applied to Read's poetry, and if we allow the word to refer to that extraordinary capacity for evocative particularity possessed by many of the authors of the Greek Anthology, as by Sappho, and, at a later date and in a different tongue, Virgil in his Georgics, the term is valid. The poems are uncluttered with epithets and tense with the dynamics of movement. Thus in "The White Isle of Leuce" The oars beat off; Achilles cannot see the prows that dip against the dim shore's line. But the rowers as they rest on the lifting wave hear the revelry of Helen and a voice singing of battle and love. Here all is active, nothing is passive. The poem is presenting a movement, and not a state, of perception. Again, in the first stanza of "The Ivy and the Ash," a scene which might well have been fixed into immobility by the recording eye is vital with movement. The ivy and the ash cast a dark arm across the beck. In this rocky ghyll I sit and watch the eye-iris water move like muscles over stones smooth'd by this ageless action. The rigour which in the lengthier poems leads to a conscientious struggle towards intellectual formulae, here leads to a disciplined economy, a balance, and a tension which are totally convincing. 168

Moreover, Read can sum up in a phrase a whole world of implications, without losing touch with physical immediacy. "Song" opens So long my heart, This little polish'd ball of blood.. .. He can combine precision of description with richness of allusion as when in "Death of a Greek Mercenary" he tells us how The startled goats left footprints pointed like the olive leaves Here, even the speed of the scurrying goats is indicated by the shape of their spoor, and the locale is itself reimpressed upon us by the simile. Read has a penetrating eye for detail. In "The Death of Kropotkin" he shows us how he can make the vaguest and most abstract reference vividly particular and actual. The second stanza is, indeed, almost a critique upon Read's own method of translating the numen into the nomen. She said he had died in peace and the eternal intelligence on his brow had seemed like a light in the dark unlit hut. I imagined his steel-rimmed glasses on the side-table and a book abandoned. This has the poignant detail of the passage in "The Mayor of Casterbridge" where the death of Mrs. Henchard is reflected upon. Hardy and Read were both keenly aware of the pressure of the natural world upon the sensibility of the human creature. Moreover both were fascinated and disturbed by stories of return. The man, after his long life, returns to the village of his youth, and the village reflects for him a vision of his own place in time and space that he would otherwise never have discovered. In one "Sonnet," Read tells his reader, or himself, One day you will intuitively come Home again driving westward.... On that journey memory will be a dusty screen that blinds the vision The waiting world will be full of remembrance and agony and 169

It will be still and you will descend Into an arena of yellow corn That not a breath of wind stirs And a rock if it should swerve in the sky Will move the whole world momentously. This is at once the "individual vision" and the universal moment of understanding. It is a poem in which the environment becomes totally meaningful, and almost heroic. In another "Sonnet" Read tells us how the landscape is in turmoil, in continual epic war-array Berries in hedges are splashes spilt In this massed conflict. Along the roads Beech-boles evade the shuffling mists Bearing into vision like furled masts. The landscape of Read's poems is one of vitality and struggle, and though the poems may be about Greece or France or Italy they always remind one of the strong landscape of West Yorkshire, the moors, the stone walls, the dales, or of the Lake District. For Herbert Read The waters of the well of life Lie deep on a rock bed The protagonists of the majority of the lyrics are acquainted more with the rough mountain track than with the city street. In "Inscription (for a book of memories)" the reader is directed to Think kindly of a man not able To face the fiery light He had wandered over mountains And bruised his feet on stones Had dreamt of wine-fed fountains That dulled the ache of bones. Read's dreams of Classical Greece and of myth appear to be the result of an attempt to find a symbolism which will relate the struggle of man upon and against the resistant earth with the spiritual unity of the cosmos. Thus "Kalamis and Sosandra" ends with the ringing statement : A warm breeze blows across the lake It is the season of the grape

770

The god the lion and the man They have a single shape This search for a name for that life-force which "runs through all things" leads finally however past Heraclitus, past the Dionysiac energies of Ancient Greece, to Yorkshire and to the long "Dialogue for Three Voices," Moon's Farm. On a corrected proof in the University of Victoria Library Read labels the three as "Place", "Self" and "Time". Moon's Farm was written for radio and, as a consequence, it is more leisurely in progress than many poems and, of course, more discursive. It is perhaps a little marred by passages in which the protagonist returning to Moon's Farm, the scene of his youth, attempts to puzzle out his own relationship to the idea of God, but even here while the poetic tension slackens the intellectual argument produces equivalent tensions of its own, and, moreover, relates directly to the more mysterious and visionary passages. Moreover two forces, those of Dionysus and of Apollo, of poetry and abstraction are here clearly identified, for the second voice, the Self, tells us : Yes: we have two voices the instinctive voice that flows like water from a spring or blood from a wound and the intellectual voice that blares like a fanfare from some centre of the brain. The third voice, Time, replies: I have only one voice but it is new every day. Moon's Farm is obviously a record of its author's own spiritual pilgrimage. Its directness and honesty are deeply moving. It records without pretention the struggle towards self-discovery and the final sense of inadequacy. As the Third Voice says: "There is not unity in human character." And yet Moon's Farm does end with an expression of unity for it is at Moon's Farm, the place of beginnings, the place of intuition, the place of simplicity where "men hold on to tangible things" and "live with the sun by day and the stars by night," that unity becomes almost possible. It is to Moon's Farm that we must return for assurance and for refreshment. Read's poetry is at its greatest when it returns to those qualities of intuitive simplicity and direct experience which he finds at Moon's 171

Farm. It is this which can make dying bearable. The protagonist tells us that: I might die in pain in weariness or in despair. But if at the last moment I could see some perfect form it might be this fern at my feet or a sparrow flickering past my window or a painting on the wall or some poet's vision of eternity like a great Ring of pure and endless Light all calm as it was bright... Granted that I could at the last moment see some bright image I should die without fear and trembling. It is when we look into the abyss of nothingness infinite nothingness that we lose courage and die swearing or die praying. Read's poems at their best provide that "perfect form" spoken of here, and also that directness of vision which relates man to his environment with the unanswerable logics of myth. There is in Read's poetry a fusion of the poet and the peasant. As the Self, the second voice of Moon's Farm tells us : I did not discover that I was a peasant until I became a poet One might also reverse the statement, for it is when the poetry takes on the mythic directness of the peasant, whose world is one of symbols and of omens as well as of the realities of sweat and labour, that Read's vision achieves dignity and power. It is at such moments that we can be told, as we are told by the first voice : Man is more than his fate. Man is moulded in a womb and dissolved in earth His foundations are two tombs He is like earth uprisen. Finally the intellect must give way to a more comprehensive method of understanding, a method that may be alien to the philosophers or even to our type of civilization, but which can be discovered in 172

the poetry of Wordsworth and Traherne, in the mythology of the Greek peasant, and in childhood. In "Emblem" we read: Beauty has no other reason than the eye can indicate Only the miraculous conception is immaculate The battle of the two voices which marred some of the longer and earlier poems of Herbert Read ends with this appeal to the profound human understanding that is inevitably present in perfect artistic form. Our recognition of artistic perfection is also our recognition of a type of understanding which transcends both intellectual formulae and the raw directness of intuition. In the poetry of Herbert Read this understanding is most intense when most lyrical and when the form of the lyric and its content are fused together in a gesture appropriate to both poet and peasant. It is this song which is for Herbert Read as a poet the ultimate expression of living man. Thus in "The Heart Conscripted" he celebrates the death of Lorca, a poet whose work was of the people, Lorca was killed singing, and Fox who was my friend. The rhythm returns: the song which has no end. And thus what is perhaps the most crystalline and the most direct of all his songs is that made for the Anarchists in Spain. Freedom here is seen here not only in political terms, in terms of the ideal community of man with man, but also in terms of the intimate connection of man with the earth to which he is born and of which he is made. A SONG FOR THE SPANISH ANARCHISTS The golden lemon is not made but grows on a green tree: A strong man and his crystal eyes is a man born free. The oxen pass under the yoke and the blind are led at will : But a man born free has a path of his own and a house on the hill 173

And men are men who till the land and women are women who weave: Fifty men own the lemon grove and no man is a slave. The poetry of Herbert Read, as I said at the beginning of this essay has been overshadowed by the more immediately obvious importance of his other writings, and it is true that in the canon of his work there are many flawed poems and many poems divided against themselves. Nevertheless the successes are many and among those successes are some of the most formidably rigorous, sensitively organized, and subtly perceptive short poems of our century. Herbert Read may never be listed as one of the Great Poets of our history but his achievement demands that he be ranked high among the poets of major importance. Comparisons of stature are however ultimately ridiculous. He lived, as the voices of Moon's Farm bade him, "in the moment of attention" and "in the presence of things," and his work commands our reverence and praise.

174

ROBIN SKELTON

Song of Honour i The inventor of barbed wire was thinking of cattle. My brother lay there tripes skeined out like silk.

ii A question of weight of manpower, cannon-fodder : Falstaff and Talleyrand watch us filling the pit.

iii Passionate fear of pity is also pity eating away the vitals like a fox. iv We do not live. We die aloud to flags and oaths. The centuries steal our graves.

175

ROY FULLER

The Final War 'People have this thing about being burned to death.' U.S. airman in Vietnam. The Times, December u, ig6y Dreaming that the final war had started (as It has) I saw again balloons grey-skinned As breathed-on mercury, a colander For sky upturned on the disordered city. A nonentity, some minor office colleague, Was there encountered, in whose pointless aim Of catching a train at the scheduled time of leaving I was involved . . . Sufficiently alarming, Such feeble bodying out of present fear With images anachronistic. And so begins my tertiary period. But where is the devoted daughter-figure To care for my frailty; the honours, the homage? Those nightmares guard my sleep from sounds of harmless Aircraft, and getaways at traffic lights Beyond the opposite Augustan houses ; And when I wake breaks in not only man-made Disasters but also the major forms of nature — All, all inimical to organic life. How fragile that experiment conducted Under the heat of stars, in seconds of Virtual eternity, glued to the globe. What of the minor poets of Sumer? What indeed of the major? Better to Have been the author of This stone was laid By Edward Pygge Esquire on August 3rd. 176

How easily metabolism turns The era's very joys to morbid waste. No one would guess of my cachinnations at noon; Mockery of Juggins, affection for Ponsonby. Mysterious all the more my pains to guard Against, to conquer, natural ills And reach the days of general extinction — As though my affinity were not with that Basel historian who was prepared At every moment to exchange his life For a never-having-been, but more with him Who threw his arms around the ill-used nag And collapsed into madness, with the signatures 'The Crucified' and 'Dionysus'. To see In 1300 through the Little Ice-Age To the threshold of a rational century, Writing one's panegyrics of the Spring Overcoated ! Though I've always slept with it, Never have I been reconciled to death. And now to come so late in life to death By fire, death of the world, death of one's art ! I sense the pain of everything assaulted, Even boughs licked in rubbish heaps of Autumn : Their boiling sap's my own. If what we feel Were so — if from a dream we merely wake Into another ! Even heroic Nietzsche Would have preferred to be a Swiss professor Rather than God. Who's going to usher me Into my dreamless sleep?

177

Bonamy Dobree and Herbert Read

BEAUTY-OR THE BEAST? A Conversation in a Tavern There's no such thing as that we beauty call, It is meer Cozenage all. JOHN

DONNE

Beauty; "That assemblage of graces, or proportion of parts, which pleases the eye." SAMUEL JOHNSON BONAMY :

Is there anything wrong with your mixed grill? HERBERT: No; I was merely contemplating it: I thought it looked rather beautiful. BONAMY: I don't approve of this "still-life" attitude towards grub; it's too detached, and therefore bad for the digestion, which implies the closest possible intimacy. Mustard please ! HERBERT: Beauty, mustard, intimacy, detachment — what a flux of ideas ! Here, at any rate, is the mustard. BONAMY: You're very severe with me; but I see you funk the point. HERBERT : The point is in the mustard ; most people take their art with a condiment. BONAMY: I query "most." In art, as in other things, there are two races of men. Half the world wants mustard with its art, the thrill, that is, the something queer, like Bacon with his "strangeness in the proportion" ; the other half simply wants the familiar, Pope's "What oft was t h o u g h t . . . , " in fact tidiness as the great desideratum in art. Are you for Pope or Bacon? HERBERT: For Pope. But do not let us lose sight of a valuable analogy: I mean that between the digestion of food and the appreciation of art. BONAMY : Analogy? I oppose them. The appreciation of art is the most highly conscious thing we do; we have, alas! lost the pleasures of digestion. HERBERT: "The appreciation of art" is an odd phrase. Person178

ally, I "appreciate" this mixed grill, I leave art to my unconscious moments. BONAMY: The theory of the unhappy sponge, "simply absorb!" I'm convinced there must be some collaboration between creator and observer: the latter has to wrest something out of the work. HERBERT : The theory of the unhappy sponger ! BONAMY: NO, because one cannot wrest without payment. Beauty is the lover's gift — not the bribe he is offered. HERBERT: Oh, beauty ! I thought we were talking about art. BONAMY : I admit the distinction of course : I never supposed that when you gazed so raptly at your mixed grill you thought it was a work of art. Beauty can exist without art — but can art exist without beauty? HERBERT: That is the question. I have no hesitation in saying that it can. My only doubt is whether it ever exists with beauty. BONAMY : George ! Another double-brown please. HERBERT: Beauty, you see, is such a bastard concept. Beautiful women, beautiful wine, beautiful skies, beautiful food — it seems to me that anything can be beautiful so long as it ministers to our senses. Beauty passes, beauty fades . . . what is the line? — anyway, you know the sense : it has been the parrot-cry of every lyrical poet since Alemán. Everywhere and at every time beauty ' ^s been recognized as a transient phenomenon; something to be crooned over rather sadly, sentimentally. But art — surely a different thing! A work of art (how our very clichés express the difference — a work of art, a thing of beauty ! ) a work of art is by its very nature definite and enduring: it may be cruel, it may be difficult, it may be far from pleasing to the senses — but it endures — endures because it is the adequate expression of an enduring truth. Art satisfies the intelligence of men ; beauty their senses. BONAMY: I dislike the word beauty as a public counter as much as you do, though what sort of emotion it conveys is always clear from the context. You know quite well that when I talk of a beautiful beef-steak, or a beautiful Picasso, or a beautiful woman, or a beautiful mind, the same word-sign stands for quite different emotions; and you know in each case what sort of emotion it stands for. I object to the word simply because I don't know what sort of emotion it stands for in other people's mouths ; or rather because I know that with most people it means merely a vaguely diffused feeling of comfort or desire, and it is often used as a cloak for the 179

mushiest sentimentality. But here's my beer. Now I don't quite know what an enduring truth is — but accepting that there is such a thing, will you prove to me that its "adequate expression" can exist without that something you and I would agree to call beauty? HERBERT: I shall try; but let us avoid abstractions. Let us talk, not of beauty, not of art, but of definite things, a picture, a poem, a particular cathedral. Come; you shall select three examples of beauty, and I three examples of art. Then your task will be to reduce all six examples to the same category, mine to maintain an irreconcilable difference. BONAMY: I like that! You're simply forcing me to assume your premises. I could select three examples of beautiful things which were not intended to be works of art — certain factory chimneys, for instance (which, by the way, express "enduring truths" of mechanics, and very adequately indeed), or a Vauban fortress. But if you ask me to select a picture, a poem and a cathedral, that is, things which are supposed to be works of art, it seems to me rather to shift the onus of proving things on to you. You must now prove to me that Ingres' portrait of Madame Rivière, MarvelTs To His Coy Mistress, and well, to go on selecting rather haphazard, Salisbury Cathedral, though admittedly beautiful, are not works of art. HERBERT: I see you don't mean to fall into my trap. Your selection, indeed, however random, seems to indicate that you unconsciously recognize the difference I have in view. At least two of them, Ingres and Salisbury Cathedral, are — at first glance — examples in which we shall find the elements of art and beauty freely consorted; mixed but not mingled. For I am going to admit frankly that art and beauty can cohabit and cohere ; but I am also going to maintain, in opposition to the view you have expressed, that when art and beauty do cohabit, it is a casual union, not blessed by church or state, or by that personal harmony which sometimes usurps an official sanction in human relationships. You seem to regard art as a graceless masculine creature — a regular old ogre, in fact — who must somehow or other make love to a pretty girl before the world will tolerate his presence. BONAMY : I didn't know ogres grew more agreeable by devouring maidens; however, I resent your imputation that I regard art as a sort of Caliban who is only tolerable when clothed at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Anyway, if art is all skeleton and tendons, let me know him with the usual pleasant additions of flesh and skin. 180

But all this play of yours with analogies and so forth, is to try to make me admit something I don't want to admit : I don't think my view is at the opposite pole to yours, so I cannot flatly contradict. But why manoeuvre for position like this? Tell me your three works of art which are not beautiful, and let me tell you what I feel about them. HERBERT: Art is not all skeleton and tendons, but it differs from beauty in that it has these bones and sinews to give it not only life, but movement, action, momentum. But I must comply with my own challenge, and give you works of art to convert to beauty. Let us take a Greek tragedy for one — say Oedipus Rex; and for another let us take Picasso's stage-settings for Mercure; as for the third, you have already selected it, Salisbury Cathedral. BONAMY: Not beauty! "What is beauty? saith my sufferings then." But I see what you're after, at least I think I do: and as our difference is only a distinction, though I believe an important one, perhaps I had better try to state some formula or theory. My first difficulty is that there are so many roads of approach: but "at any rate I don't think the creation of beauty is the artist's end ; I think it is an accidental quality, an emotion in the recipient, which, however, it is essential he should feel if he is to grasp what the artist is at. Thus all decoctions made to please the senses, are not art at all — though that is no reason why we should despise them. Now in face of the works of art you mention, I do feel this emotion which I call thinking a thing beautiful. It is almost a guarantee of my understanding it: it is not an emotion to which I attach any importance in itself: it has, possibly, something to do with the senses, and the senses, as you have written somewhere, can never be satisfied. There are, I think, two possibilities, and they need not be mutually exclusive: each may apply to a slightly different realm. The first is this : that beauty is, as it were, the solvent of art : it permits the spectator to grasp the meaning of the work of art. It is, perhaps, the familiar element which throws a bridge over the chasm separating us from the newness of the work. It is, I will go so far towards you as to say, the cliché: that is why the public only hails as "beautiful" or "artistic," something which it recognizes as having seen before. But this element is necessary. You remember, no doubt, that Rémy de Gourmont said that a page of writing without clichés would be incomprehensible. Naturally, in a person more accustomed 181

to consider works of art, the sense of beauty will only be given by something a little more recondite than the common favourites; though the emotion of beauty is necessary to put him into that state of mind in which he can grasp the intuition, the new thing, or relation, expressed in the work of art. It is possible also that the emotion of beauty is that which we get on apprehending a work: art, you say, appeals to the intellect; well, perhaps it is this element I am trying to define, this recognition of an enduring truth (recognition, somehow, seems to come in again), which makes us see beauty in a theorem of Euclid, or any generalization so expressed as to seduce us utterly or immediately. These are but vague gropings. Perhaps you will help me to disentangle, or to destroy them. HERBERT: I think it will help us if we get the question into some sort of historical perspective. You have only to reflect a minute to realize that beauty is something purely relative. What is beautiful for one age is not beautiful for another. What one age ignores is taken up and exalted by its successor. And even in one age, beauty is conditioned by climate, religion, social status, culture and sensibility. All this, you will agree, is obvious enough. Now I don't want to ask you whether you are a nominalist or a realist, but I would like to know whether you consider this solvent, beauty, is at all times constant in its function. Beautiful things, you must admit, vary infinitely: there is nothing in common between a painting by Angelica Kaufmann and a Cambodian idol. But is the function of beauty in these examples one and the same? BONAMY : Well, for the sake of your argument, I will admit that it is so. The cliches are different (I rather fancy that Angelica Kaufmann is all cliché), but they are clichés none the less. HERBERT: I am inclined to agree. Beauty is nothing if it is not fashionable, something which Mr. Clive Bell must fetch from Paris twice a year, like the dressmaker his models. And please don't despise the dressmaker. BONAM Y : God forbid ! HERBERT: Then I don't see that logically you can stop anywhere between Poiret's latest creation and the portrait of Madame Rivière. Beauty is a question of degree, the degree of sensibility of the observer. For the "artist" it is the same thing essentially: it is an instinctive manipulation of material. The sculptor with his stone, the painter with his oils, the poet with his words, the potter with his 182

clay — it is all a question of instinctive play, so far as beauty is concerned. But now and then the artist is conscious of more than his constructive instinct : he is conscious of his intelligence, and then, if he is clever enough ("great" enough, the world would say), he makes his instinct serve his intelligence, and a work of art becomes possible. That is not the whole of the process; there are still more qualifications to be made — but enough for the moment. BONAMY: Certainly if you had not cried "enough," I should have had to do so: you have raised a dozen issues. But I see we are agreed on the main point, namely that beauty, the fashionable thing, is in reality the beast against which every artist must guard. If he pursues it, he is lost. Culture is the enemy against which every generation of artists has to fight. Nearly every advance in art is greeted as "ugly" by the public, for it is something unaccustomed, and art is nothing if it is not an exploration of life — or if that sounds too grandiloquent, of the artist's mind. But to go back to what you said about beauty, how it changes, and by what it is conditioned ; I suggest that your sentences will be equally just if you substitute the word art for beauty. Art certainly has some connection with truth, but truth changes. You, of course (I say "of course" when I mean I infer), are out for the adequate expression of a metaphysical truth. But you who know much more about such things than I do, will surely not maintain that metaphysical truth is constant? There is only one truth which seems to me to be unchanging (for all the other truths involve values, which are always being transvalued) ; and that is, that Solomon and Caesar and Shakespeare, and Mr. Jones next door, were once living and are now dead; that you and I are now living and will some time be dead. It seems to me that the only arts which constantly and thoroughly express this, are ancient Egyptian sculpture and Greek tragedy : all the rest, according to you, are elaborate frivolity. I submit that other artists have also expressed this truth — Shakespeare, El Greco perhaps: but is it for that that they are great artists? HERBERT: If this pot had not been to my lips when you uttered that blasphemy: "truth changes," I would have groaned out loud. As it was, I merely choked, iravra peí is not my motto. Truth, if there is such a thing, is immutable and eternal. Truth, as wise men have remarked, is a difficult thing to define. Above all, logical and physical truth is a poor, contingent affair. But what I will call quali183

tative truth — metaphysical truth, if you like — persists in spite of the logicians. It is superior to probability and the laws of nature. It can be deduced from one observation at one time and in the mind of one person, thus confounding the relativists. In fact, metaphysical truth is so relative as to be absolute. In a word, it is a revelation, and revelation is precisely what art, as distinct from beauty, does give us. Revelation, of course, is a theological term, and I use it in a theological sense. But that is only an indication of the nearness of art and religion. BONAMY: I confess I become lost and embrangled, to use a philosopher's phrase, when you lead me into these cloudy speculative regions, where I do not feel at all at home. Yet I believe you have delivered yourself into my hands. If truth is an intensely personal, unique, and momentary revelation, how on earth can a work of art express this to anyone else without some medium, without some symbol? And this medium is beauty, which does appeal to the senses, physical, emotional and intellectual, which, presumably, we all more or less share. If it is not beauty which is the means of communication, this solvent, what in heaven's name is? HERBERT: You still misconceive the nature of truth and revelation. Truth is not "intensely personal, unique and momentary"; these terms only relate to the perception of it, to revelation. In revelation we, who are temporal accidents, gain a glimpse of those things which are timeless and eternal, absolute and universal. When that beatific vision is given to man, and when man has sufficient grace to give expression to his vision, then the result is art. You seize on the process of expression, hoping that beauty may be identified with it. But I think your hope is vain. I used the word "vision," but in no vague, mystical sense. The vision of the artist is an intellectual vision, and the expression of this vision is an exact — and exacting — discipline. Art is a process of materialization, the translation of vision into actuality, of ideas into shapes, sounds, and signs. It is a practical activity, a making, a craft. Art, you see, actually is expression, and art ends with expression. Beauty may be involved, but always incidentally, unnecessarily, and as reaction, perception, absorption, physical passivity. Art works from the mind within to the thing without; beauty from the thing without to the mind within. But I don't therefore imply that these activities are reciprocal: It seems to me that the highest delights of art end with their creation ; the rest is whoring. 184

BONAMY: Well; what objection is there to that? if I'm not to despise the dressmaker. HERBERT: That is an argument ad hominem. BONAMY : Surely you admit that everyone may enjoy without being false to truth, or whatever this revelation may be? HERBERT : We only begin to perceive the truth when we have done with enjoyment. BONAMY: There I am with you: the beauty fades and the art remains, but the beauty is nevertheless essential. Before digesting my food, I must enjoy it; at least I do. And perhaps without the pleasure I would cease to eat. Art, if you wish, like a pretty problem in the calculus, appeals to the intellect, and beauty, like beefsteak, the perfume of a rose, or the fine lines of a cathedral, to the senses. So be it: then let me have beauty with my art, as for pure art (since, according to you, the only works of art I can really delight in are my own — an arid prospect) I don't care a fig. You may sneer at me for wanting my condiment, for I am a creature of the senses : I have taste, and sight, and hearing, and the imagination to grasp a printed page, that I know : and whatever else I may have has only these to build with. And just as without the senses there can be no thought, so without beauty there can be no art : it is skeleton without flesh, love without desire, a Dead Sea fruit which lacks even the bitterness. The senses, you say, are never satisfied: tell me, is the mind? But the virtue of art, it seems to me, lies especially in that it reaches the mind through the senses, even sometimes through sheer sensuality. It works, as you say, from without to within. It is the one thing which reconciles mind and body, for it despises neither. Art, to personify it for the moment, is like the soul of man : if it despises the flesh it is ruined, and a great prince in prison lies. One can, of course, wallow in beauty as one can in the sensual sty, and many accredited poets, painters and critics of today do so, to the applause of the multitude, and of sects that ought to know better. It is that beauty which I despise, or rather care nothing for, since it opens no windows for me, and gives me no new reality. A great and fresh work of art is nearly always, I think, unacceptable at first, at any rate to my lazy self, for it involves a readjustment: it is a volcanic thing which may blow one's attitudes sky-high. And that, of course, is the really valuable thing in it. But the beauty I ask for I would relinquish as soon as the taste in this excellent cheddar — Yes

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please, George, two ports — for without it, all art, which is, I repeat, an exploration of experience, would be dry, and tasteless, and chilly, a universe of which the suns are dead. HERBERT: You are so eloquent — and before the port! — that I begin to suspect you must be right. BONAM Y : Here is the port, so there's no need to be malicious. HERBERT: I only make this reservation: the art I have envisaged is not arid, not chilly, not necessarily without sensuous appeal. Why, think of the passionate fire of the Divine Comedy, and that is the very summit and supreme type of art ! It comes to this : you are for human standards; and I think a word you like, and it well describes your standards, is gustation . . . BONAM Y : Even if I use it in the theological sense? HERBERT : . . . while I want a word more remote from human appetite ; and yet I want the enchantment, the delight, the radiance. Will delectation do? I think it will. It implies Eden before the Fall, just as gustation is heavy with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. If we must be human, you have the advantage, for your beauty, however, transient, is real. But I think I am a transcendentalist, and in that airier region. . . . BONAM Y : . . . we do not have to pay our bills as we do here (they're both the same, we'll settle as we go along). And while I wait for the change, let me try and remember that phrase of Plotinus about approaching work of art, a phrase in which we can exist together, and pursue beauty-mongers to the death — HERBERT: I had almost forgotten them; yes, down with them! BONAM Y : Let me see — not solemnly, but with a happy reverence is the idea: here it is! "With wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and an awe blended with delight," though seeing the havoc recent writers have made of love in this connection, I would like to leave that word out. But otherwise, does it please you? HERBERT: Please is the word; it is pleasant. But let "love" be, for Plotinus also has a right to the theological sense. Then the phrase will cover all the dark points of our dispute, and lie like the sunlight on these hollow houses.

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Roland Penrose

HERBERT READ

P

ERHAPS T H E MOST DISTURBING and terrifying thing about a death is its stark and irreversible finality, and yet in writing about Herbert Read I find that he continues for me to be so alive and his presence so real that I feel urged to look for reasons for this persistence which breaks through the normal barriers between conscious life and the silent void of death. There are of course the memories of moments spent in Herbert's company which carry with them an intense sense of pleasure, such as the clear winter morning when he took me to see Rievaulx Abbey not far from his home in Yorkshire. The fact that he was my guide but said very little as we wandered round that magnificent Gothic ruin or walked on the thin crisp covering of snow among the trees and on the hill above, visiting the frivolous elegance of the eighteenth-century temples which ornament the natural beauty of the site — the fact that he seemed to transmit with no unnecessary explanation and without passing judgment the significance of this contrast between medieval faith and serenity and Georgian aristocratic caprice, gave me a sense of his ability to appreciate equally, sublime simplicity and grandiose extravagance. This understanding, this acceptance of opposites, made me wonder. I was never in doubt about Herbert's reverence for the great mysteries of life but his quiet laugh that assured me so often of his taste for the absurd, the trivial and the ridiculous as their inevitable counterpart came as a refreshing and endearing surprise. Beyond the casual incidents that remain as a continual delight there is a more profound and durable quality which keeps Herbert continuously alive, and this I think depends essentially on his penetration, as a poet and a sage, to the roots of life. This was somehow

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linked closely to his love of nature and of his friends. We find it expressed most convincingly in that story of his early life told so candidly in The Innocent Eye. We realize that in spite of his brilliant intellect and the great attraction that learning had for him he was deeply, in fact primarily, attached to the soil — what is more, the soil of Yorkshire where he was born and lived an idyllic childhood. The intense joy of being absorbed into the traditions of the countryside, his attachment to every tree, stone and brook and his understanding of their timeless function, thrived in his imagination and expressed itself in his poems and in that very personal fantasy, The Green Child. It is there that we can study a significant solution offered by Herbert for that problem which confronts us all, the problem of enjoying life to its full in all its diverse channels in spite of its outrageous risks and deceptions and yet being prepared to relinquish our all-absorbing passions with understanding and serenity. The reversal of the belief in the supremacy of the soul that he unfolds at the end of the book allows him to expand on his pleasure in the harmonies and timeless perfection of inanimate nature with which his dying hero becomes identified. This purified condition of the human body which he achieves can only take place when the body has become liberated from the lusts of the spirit and the insatiable desires of the soul. The allegory has its source quite obviously in a fact as simple and primitive as an intense love of the soil — a love which he shared with many English poets and which descended on him especially from Wordsworth. Herbert's ability to accept the dramatic contradictions of life and use them for his spiritual growth was one of his greatest qualities. We think of him as the happy son of Yorkshire farmers, tranquil and robust, and then abruptly in sharp contrast as the officer who could lead his men with calm and heroism through the hellish madness of war in Flanders. He is also the child of an unspoilt countryside who became a scholar of great repute and travelled widely, acclaimed in many countries as a philosopher who could give new meaning and importance to the arts. His love of order and peaceful understanding between men was balanced by his conception of anarchy which would unite mankind and resolve the menace of violence without the compulsion of the law. A fantastic portrait bust of him made by Eileen Agar in 1937 was reproduced beside a photo of Herbert in The London Bulletin and given the title "The Angel of Anarchy." 188

Herbert in his thought as well as his behaviour was marvellously fearless. I remember the authority with which he talked to us about fear in those days when war was again inevitably becoming a preoccupation, how he told us that he had learnt in Flanders to detect in others the difference between fear and cowardice. His own capacity for detached concentration not only gave him great physical courage but allowed him also to have the courage to doubt even himself. This quality, due largely to his humility often made it difficult for him to make a final decision. At times when we worked together and it was necessary to make up our minds on some point I felt I became a crude insensitive opportunist when finally I insisted on a decision. Yet once a reasonably correct solution was made he seemed relieved and was always loyal and full of encouragement for the line chosen. And here I should also mention Herbert's patience. His motives may have been various for doing so but it was extremely rare that he refused to see a poet or a painter who was asking for advice, and he was always eager to find some virtue in the work, however dim. This led often to hours of boredom but also to those many discoveries of talent due to Herbert's unending sense of inquiry. I do not mean to imply by what I have said that Herbert lacked convictions. On the contrary, like many others, I have always thought of him as a leader who inspired us by the clarity of his thought and his unshaken faith in humanity. It was this that made him in the thirties such a close ally of the surrealists, both poets such as Paul Eluard, and among painters, Miro. Among other things their insistence on the integrity of the artist and of his social responsibility appealed greatly to Herbert in those days before the war when the world seemed inevitably divided into two camps — democracy and fascism. I remember how closely he was involved, how he showed me one day a letter he had just received from George Orwell who was then fighting with the International Brigade in Spain, saying that we must prepare for a state of siege in which freedom of expression would be the most essential thing to defend and asking Herbert to examine the means of setting up a clandestine printing press in London. Among Herbert's friends were experienced and very sincere anarchists who included among them the indefatigable Emma Goldman. They could have provided the resourceful determination needed for the operation. But Herbert worked with great energy for 189

a number of anti-fascist organizations and spoke with eloquence in public meetings, just as years later he was again among those who led nuclear disarmament demonstrations in Trafalgar Square. "We must fight these primary battles first," I remember him saying, "otherwise there will be nothing to fight for." In spite of the time and energy that went into these things Herbert had an immense reserve that he dedicated to his poetry, his philosophy and that cause that he had deeply at heart, the understanding and the future of art. During his life he had witnessed the great revolution of the arts in this century and with the knowledge of an unbiased art historian he became, during the thirties, both the herald of abstract art and the champion of surrealism. He hailed with enthusiasm the freedoms won in earnest for the arts but he was not blind to the perils that now lie ahead. His last speech made in Cuba last January criticizing the fragmentation and frustration of the present "international" style shows this very clearly. My first intimacy with Herbert grew from a combined effort to introduce surrealism to London in 1936 — a task in which we were joined enthusiastically by Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Humphrey Jennings, David Gascoyne, Peter Watson, E. L. T. Mesens and many other poets and painters. The great exhibition which took place in the New Burlington Galleries was supported by André Breton, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Miró, Dali and others from abroad, but it was the presence of Herbert Read and his opening speech that made this, for London, an event of great importance. Using his gift for clarifying the confusion that can arise between groups that do not always agree but which have at heart the necessity for a revolution in the arts and in life, Herbert again took the leadership after the war of a cause which promised the fulfilment of his wish to encourage progressive experiment in the arts. He became a founder and the first president of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, an organization which he guided towards its present status as a centre for the growth and appreciation of the arts. In the late spring of 1968 he wrote to John Bodley after his first visit to the new premises the I.C.A. had just opened: "Wonderful — the fulfilment of a dream that has taken thirty years to realize." It was shortly after this visit that the cruel ravages of his illness caused his final return to the home he loved in Yorkshire and his end came as an inevitable and appropriate fulfilment of his life, a life dominated by the clarity of his intelligence, by the richness of his imagin190

ation, by his devotion to his friends and the ideals he shared with them. But perhaps above all this sense of fulfilment was due to his understanding of the eternal game of life and death. His death was beautiful in that it was the greatest accomplishment of life — a harmony such as he speaks of in The Green Child "that exists before life and after life: in worlds that are not yet formed and in worlds that are defunct" — a death which is a continuation of life and which engenders the eternal marriage of life and death — of heaven and hell.

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Howard Gerwing, with the assistance of Michael W. Pidgeon

A CHECKLIST OF T H E HERBERT READ ARCHIVE I N T H E M c P H E R S O N LIBRARY O F T H E UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA

archive collection at the University of Victoria began in 1966 with the arrival at the Library of three trunks of typescripts, proofs, notebooks and letters. This stroke of good fortune was immediately followed up by the preparation of a desiderata list from the Library of Congress Catalogue, the National Union Catalogue, the British Museum Catalogue, and several other published checklists. The works on this list are now on order or are included in the non-circulating collection housed in Special Collections. It was decided to print this list along with the checklist of the unique materials, in order to give a full picture of the Sir Herbert Read archive at the University of Victoria, and a reasonably complete account of his publications. Two of the trunks contained 47 bundles of papers, typescripts, notebooks and proofs. Since these bundles were put together either by Sir Herbert or his son Benedict it was decided to use these bundles as the basic units of the checklist. Though many of these bundles contained a variety of items such as letters, photographs, drawings, clippings and other printed materials, they were together because they had obvious connections with each other. The third trunk contained correspondence filed in labelled folders. This material was listed as "letters to" Sir Herbert and "letters from" Sir Herbert, the latter being almost completely unsigned carbons. It is hoped that eventually many of the originals of the "letters from" will find their way into the archive. Each section of the correspondence list ends with an item labelled "miscellaneous letters." These letters are from correspondents still to be identified. The folders titled "Freedom Press" and "Freedom Defence Committee" were listed separately because they seemed to warrant such treatment. H.G. T H E SIR H E R B E R T R E A D

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SECTION ONE Books by Sir Herbert Read Ambush. London, Faber & Faber, 1930. 43 p. (Criterion miscellany, no. 16) Contents: First blood; Man, melodion, snowflakes; Killed in action; Cloud-form; The raid; Cupid's everlasting honeymoon. Anarchy and order; essays in politics. London, Faber & Faber, 1945. 235 PThe anatomy of art; an introduction to the problems of art and aesthetics. New York, Dodd, Mead, 1932. 224 p. London edition (Faber & Faber Limited) has title: The meaning of art. Annals of innocence and experience. London, Faber & Faber, 1940. 211 p.

Includes the Innocent eye, and continues his reminiscences. "First published in November Mcmxl." —. London, Faber & Faber, 1946. 236 p. First published in November Mcmxl. .. New revised and enlarged edition. Includes the author's The innocent eye, and his In retreat] both works also published separately. American edition (New York, H. Holt and company) has title: The innocent eye. Aristotle's mother; an imaginary conversation. North Harrow, Middlesex, P. Ward, 1961. 14 p. (Herbert Read reprints, no. 1) Art and alienation: the role of the artist in society. London, Thames & Hudson, 1967. 176 p. Bibliography: p. [166] - 169. —. [1st American éd.], New York, Horizon Press, 1967. 176 p. "Text references": - [166] - 169. Art and education. Auckland, Paul's Book Arcade, 1964. 74 p. —. Melbourne, F. W. Cheshire, 1964. 74 p. Essays. Bibliographical footnotes. Art and industry, the principles of industrial design. London, Faber & Faber, 1934. 143 p. Title on 2 leaves. —. London, Faber & Faber, 1944. 188 p. "First published in October Mcmxxiv . . . Second edition Mcmxliv." —. [3rd éd., rev.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1953. 204 p. —. [1st American ed.]. New York, Horizon Press, 1954. 239 p. Based on the 3rd (revised) English edition. —. [4th éd., rev.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1956. 205 p.

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—. Bloomington [Ind.] Indiana University Press, 1961. 239 p. (Midland Books, MB, 32) —. [5th ed.]. London, Faber, 1966. 212 p. Art and society. London, Heinemann, 1937. 282 p. —. New York, Macmillan, 1937. 282 p. "Printed in Great Britain." —. London, Faber & Faber, 1945. 152 p. "The substance of the book was originally delivered as lectures... at the University of Liverpool, 1935-6." Pref. to the 2d ed. "First published in Mcmxxxvi... New and revised edition published in Mcmxlv." —. [2nd ed.]. New York, Pantheon Books, 1950. 152 p. Biographical footnotes. —. [3rd ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1956. 152 p. —. New York, Schocken Books, 1966. 152 p. Bibliographical footnotes. —. [4th ed.]. London, Faber, 1967. 152 p. Bibliographical footnotes. Art and the evolution of man; lecture delivered at Conway Hall, London, on April 10th, 195/. London, Freedom Press, 1951. 51 p. Art now; an introduction to the theory of modern painting and sculpture. London, Faber & Faber, 1933. 144 p. —. [new and rev. ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1936. 160 p. —. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1937. 160 p. "Printed in Great Britain." —. [rev. and enl. ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1948. 144 p. —. [new and enlarged edition]. New York, Pitman, 1948. 144 p. —. [rev. ed.]. London, Faber, i960. 120 p. Bibliographical footnotes. —. [rev. and enl. ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, i960. 131 p. Bibliographical footnotes. —. [rev. ed.]. New York, Pitman, i960. 131 p. Bibliographical footnotes. The art of sculpture. London, Faber & Faber, 1956. 152 p. (Bollingen series, 35. The A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 3) Includes bibliographical references. —. New York, Pantheon Books, 1956. 152 p. (Bollingen series, 35. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the fine arts, 3) Includes bibliographical references. —. [2nd ed.]. New York, Pantheon Books, 1961. 152 p. (Bollingen

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series, 3 5 : 3 . T h e A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 3) Includes bibliography. Arte y sociedad: Versión castellana de Agustín J. Alvarez; estudio preliminary de Alfredo E. Roland. Buenos Aires, G. Kraft, 1951. 307 p. (Biblioteca universal de sociologia, v. 2) Arte, poesía, anarquismo. Buenos Aires, Editorial Reconstruir, 1955. 72 p. (Colección radar. Serie: Temas doctrinario de exposión y de critica, 8) Bibliographical sketch of author signed: C D . Translation of Poetry and anarchism. Byron. London, New York, published for the British Council by Longmans, Green, 1951. 43 p . (Bibliographical series of supplements of British book news) "Byron, a select bibliography" : p. 35-43. —. London, New York, published for the British Council by Longmans, Green, 1961. 43 p. (Bibliographical series of supplements to British book news on writers and their work, no. 10) —. London, published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans, Green, 1966. 43 p. (Bibliographical series of supplements to British book news, no. 10) "Reprinted with additions to bibliography 1966". "Byron, a selected bibliography": p. 35-43. A coat of many colours; occasional essays. London, G. Routledge, 1945. 352p. A coat of many colours; essays. [2nd éd., rev.]. London, Routledge & Paul, 1956. 352 p. A coat of many colours, [ist American e d . ] . New York, Horizon Press, ! 956. 352 p. Coleridge as critic. London, Faber & Faber, 1949. 40 p . "Contribution to a Symposium on the Greater Critics, held at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, but the text here printed is . . . longer than the lecture actually delivered on April 14, 1948." Collected essays in literary criticism. London, Faber & Faber, 1938. 36^p. "First published in October Mcmxxxviii." Includes essays first published in the author's This sense of glory, 1929, Form in modern poetry, 1932, and In defense of Shelley. T h e remainder of the essays are either from his Reason and romanticism, 1926, or have not hitherto appeared in book form. Contents: General theories: T h e nature of poetry; T h e nature of criticism. Particular studies: Froissart; Malory; Descartes; Swift; Vauvenargues; Tobias Smollett; Sterne; Hawthorne; Charlotte and Emily Brontë; Bagehot; Coventry Patmore; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Henry James.

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—. [2nd e d . ] . London, Faber & Faber, 1951. 381 p . Published in New York under title : The nature of

literature,

—. [2nd e d . ] . London, Faber & Faber, 1962. 381 p. Collected Poems, 79/5-25. London, Faber & Gwyer, 1926. 115 p . One of an edition of 56 copies. Signed by the author. 50 copies are for sale. —. London, Faber & Gwyer, 1926. 115 p . Collected poems, London, Faber & Faber, 1946. 201 p. First edition. —. Norfolk, Conn., New Directions, 1951. 201 p . —. [New e d . ] . London, Faber & Faber, 1953. 203 p. —. London, Faber, 1966. 286 p. —. [1st American e d . ] . New York, Horizon Press, 1966. 286 p. A concise history of modern painting. London, Thames & Hudson, 1959- 376 P. —. New York, Praeger, 1959. 376 p. "Text references": p. 338-345. Bibliography: p. 346-348. —. London, Thames & Hudson, 1961. 376 p. (The World of Art library) "Text references": p. 338-345. Bibliography: p. 346-348. First published 1959. —. New York, Praeger, 1965. 378 p. (Praeger World of Art series) "Fourth printing 1965." "Text references": p. 339-346. Bibliography: p . 347-349. A concise history of modern sculpture. 1964. 310 p.

London, Thames & Hudson,

—. New York, Praeger, 1964. 310 p . (Praeger World of Art series) "Text references": p. 279-282. Bibliography: p. 283-285. —. New York, Praeger, 1965. 310 p. (Praeger World of Art series) Includes bibliographies. Contemporary British art, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, I95 1 - 47 P(Pelican Books, A 250) Bibliography: p. 47-48. —. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1954. 47 p. (Pelican books, A 250) Bibliography: p. 4 7 - [ 4 8 ] . —. [rev. e d . ] . Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1964. 61 p. (Pelican books, A 250) Bibliographical references included in footnotes. The contrary experience; 1963- 356 P.

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autobiographies,

London, Faber & Faber,

Includes the author's The innocent eye and pt. 2 of his Annals of innocence and experience, with new and previously unpublished material. Bibliographical footnotes. —. [1st American ed.]. New York, Horizon Press, 1963. 356 p. Includes the author's The innocent eye and part 2 of his Annals of innocence and experience, with new and previously unpublished material. Culture and education in world order. New York, published for the Committee on Art Education by the Museum of Modern Art, 1948. 14 p. Cover title. "Address . . . given for the Committee on Art Education at its Sixth Annual Conference, April 23-25, 1948." Design and tradition. With a preface by F. H. K. Henrion. Hemingford Grey, Vine Press, 1962. 17 p. (Society of Industrial Artists. Design oration, 1961) Eclogues. A book of poems. London, C. W. Beaumont, 1919. 35 p. Decorations designed by Ethelbert White. No. 23 of 30 copies printed on Japanese vellum. Eclogues; a book of poems. Westminster, Beaumont Press, 1919. 35 p. Cover and decorations designed by Ethelbert White. Limited to 200 copies. This is no. 123. Education for peace. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1949. 166 p. "Four . . . papers . . . originally delivered in 1947 or 1948 as lectures in various parts of the world . . . The final essay was originally published by the Freedom Press (London)." Bibliographical references included in "Notes" (p. 155-161). Contents: Education for peace; Education in things; Culture and education in a world order; The moral significance of aesthetic education ; The education of free men. —. London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1950. 131 p. Bibliographical references included in "Notes" (p. 121-125) The education of free men. London, Freedom Press, 1944. 32 p. Inscribed by the author to T. S. Eliot. Annotated by Eliot. "This treatise is a shorter statement of the theory of education put forward by the author in Education through art, London, (Faber & Faber), 1943" Education through art. London, Faber & Faber, 1943. 320 p. "First published in Mcmxliii." Bibliography: p. 303-312. —. [2nd ed.]. New York, Pantheon Books, 1945? 320 p. Bibliography: p. 303-312. —. [new rev. ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1958. 328 p. Bibliography: p. 309-321. —. London, Faber & Faber, 1961. 328 p. (Faber paper covered editions)

197

The end of a war. London, Faber & Faber, 1933. 31 p. A poem. English prose style. London, G. Bell, 1928. 227 p. —. New York, H . Holt, 1928. 229 p. —. London, G. Bell, 1942. 227 p. "First published May 1928 . . . Cheaper edition 1931. Reprinted . . . 1942." Minor revisions have been made in the various reprints of this book. —. [New (rev.) e d . ] . London, Bell, 1952. 216 p. —. [New e d . ] . New York, Pantheon Books, 1952. 216 p. —. [New e d . ] . Boston, Beacon Press, 1955. 216 p. O n cover: B P I O . English stained glass. London & New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926. 2 59PFrontispiece accompanied by guard sheet with descriptive letterpress. "Selected bibliography": p. 250-253. Essential communism. London, S. Nott, 1935. 3 2 P(Half-title: Pamphlets on the new economics, no. 12) Discusses from the point of view of an artist, the trend toward collectivism; concludes by advocating social credit as "a mode for attaining essential communism." Existentialism, marxism, and anarchism; Freedom Press, 1949. 56 p.

chains of freedom.

London,

Form in modern poetry. London, Sheed & Ward, 1932. 81 p . (Essays in order, no. 11 ) —. London, Vision, 1948. 85 p. —. London, Vision, 1957. 85 p. The forms of things unknown; essays towards an aesthetic London, Faber & Faber, i960. 248 p. Includes bibliography.

philosophy.

—. New York, Horizon Press, i960. 248 p. —. Cleveland, World Pub. Co., 1963. 248 p. (Meridian books, M168) The future of industrial design. London, 1946. 8 p. (Design and Industries Association. Booklet no. 1 ) Geschichte der modernen Malerei. [Aus dem Englischen iibertragen von Alfred P. Zeller]. Miinchen, Knaur, 1959. 368 p. Includes bibliography. The grass roots of art; four lectures on social aspects of art in an industrial age. New York, Wittenborn, 1947. 92 p. (Problems of contemporary art, no. 2) "Delivered as the Woodward

198

and Trowbridge memorial lectures at Yale University during the spring of 1946" — Pref. Bibliographical footnotes. Contents: Society and culture; The social basis of great architecture; The aesthetic method of education; Towards a duplex civilization. The grass roots of art. London, L. Drummond, 1947. 117 p. (Transformation library, 1) The grass roots of art; lectures on the social aspects of art in an industrial age. [Rev. and expanded]. London, Faber & Faber, 1955. 160 p.

Bibliographical footnotes. —. [Rev. and expanded]. New York, G. Wittenborn, 1955. 160 p. (Problems of contemporary art, no. 2) Bibliographical footnotes. —. Cleveland, World Pub. Co., 1961. 160 p. (Meridian books) The green child; a romance. London, Toronto, Heinemann, 1935. 256 p. —. [New ed.]. With illus. by Felix Kelly. London, Grey Walls Press, IO

4 5 - 137 P-

—. [Introd. Graham Greene] London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1947. 194 P—. With an introd. by Kenneth Rexroth. New York, New Directions, 1948. 194 p. Henry Moore, sculptor, an appreciation. London, A. Zwemmer, 1934. *5 PHenry Moore; a study of his life and work. London, Thames & Hudson, 1965. 284 p. (World of art library) —. New York, Praeger, 1966. 284 p. (A Praeger world of art profile) Bibliography 265-266. High noon and darkest night. Middletown, Conn., Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan Univ., 1964. 18 p. (Monday evening papers, 3) Icon and idea; the function of art in the development of human consciousness. London, Faber & Faber, 1955. 161 p. (Charles Eliot Norton lectures 1953-1954) Bibliography: p. 141-152. —. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1955. 161 p. (The Charles Eliot Norton lectures, 1953-1954) Bibliography: p. 141-152.

Imagen e idea; la función del arte en el desarrollo de la conciencia humana. Traducción de H. Flores Sánchez, México, 1957. 245 p. (Breviarios del Fondo de Cultura Económica, 127)

199

In defence of Shelley & others essays, London, Heinemann, 1936. 282 p. Contents: In defence of Shelley; Coventry Patmore; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Obscurity in poetry; Two notes on Swift; Diderot's love letters; Pablo Picasso; Parallels in English painting and poetry; English art. In retreat. London, L. & Virginia Woolf, 1925. 42 p. (The Hogarth essays, no. 6) Caption title: In retreat; a journal of the retreat of the Fifth army from St. Quentin, March 1918. —. London, Faber & Faber, 1930. 46 p. (Half-title: Criterion miscellany, no. 8) Caption title: In retreat: a journal of the retreat of the Fifth army from St. Quentin, March, 1918. Published in 1925 as the Hogarth essays, VI. Reprinted in 1930 by Faber & Faber Limited: second impression September, 1930. The innocent eye. London, Faber & Faber, 1933. 81 p. —. New York, Holt, 1947. 268 p. Includes the author's The innocent eye, and his In retreat; both works also published separately. British edition (London, Faber & Faber) has title: Annals of innocence and experience. Julien Benda and the new humanism, Seattle, University of Washington book store, 1930. 33 p. (Half-title: University of Washington chapbooks, ed. by G. Hughes, no. 37) A letter to a young painter [and essays], London, Thames and Hudson, 1962. 277 p. —. [1st American e d . ] . New York, Horizon Press, 1962. 277 p. Essays. Lord Byron at the opera; a play for broadcasting, Middlesex, Eng., Ward, 1963. 20 p. Lynn Chadwick, Amriswill, Bodensee-Verlag, 1958. 23 p. (Artists of our time, 4) English and German. The meaning of art. London, Faber & Faber, 1931. 150 p. American edition (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co.) has title: The anatomy of art. —. [2nd e d . ] . London, Faber & Faber, 1936. 224 p. American edition has title : The anatomy of art. —. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng., Penguin Books, 1947. 191 p. American edition (New York, Dodd, Mead & Co.) has title: The anatomy of art, "First published 1931." —. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books in association with Faber & Faber, 1949. 191 p. (Pelican Books, no. 213)

200

—. [3rd éd., rev. and enl.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1951. 262 p. —. New York, Pitman, 1951. 262 p. —. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1959. 196 p. (A Pelican books, A213) Fifth reprint. —. Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1959. 196 p. (Pelican books, A213) The modern art book, [n.p., 1966?]. 14 p. (Columbiad Club. Keepsake, no. 78) A lecture before the Columbiad Club, May 11, 1965. 50 copies. Moon's Farm, and poems mostly elegiac. London, Faber & Faber, 1955. 77 P—. [ist American ed.]. New York, Horizon Press, 1956. 77 p. Mutations of the Phoenix. [Poems]. Richmond, L. & V. Woolf, 1923. 51 PNaked warriors. [Poems]. London, Art & Letters, 1919. 59 p. The nature of literature, [ist American ed.]. New York, Horizon Press, ! 95 6 - 3 S l PFirst published in London in 1938 under title: Collected essays in literary criticism. —.New York, Grove Press, 1958. 381 p. (Evergreen books, E-92) First published in London in 1938 under title: Collected essays in literary criticism. The origins of form in art. London, Thames and Hudson, 1965. 207-. Bibliography: p. 189-197. The parliament of women; a drama in three acts. Text by Herbert Read; designed by Reg Boulton. Huntingdon, Eng., i960. 113 p. "One hundred copies printed and published in Great Britain by Peter Foster and John Peters at the Vine Press... Number 34." Paul Nash. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng., Penguin Books, 1944. 16 p. (On cover: The Penguin modern painters) At head of title: Herbert Read. Phases of English poetry. London, L. & V. Woolf, 1928. 158 p. (Half-title: Hogarth lectures on literature, (no. 7). —. New York, Harcourt, Brace, [c. 1929]. 158 p. (Hogarth lectures on literature, 7) —. [Rev. ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1950. 148 p. —. [Rev. ed.]. Norfolk, Conn., c. 1951. 192 p. (Direction, 19)

201

The philosophy of anarchism. London, Freedom press distributors, 1940- 35 P"Special edition limited to 500 copies." Bibliographical footnotes. —. London, Freedom Press, 1941. 35 p. "First published September, 1940 . . . Second impression June 1941." —. London, Freedom Press, 1947. 32 p. The philosophy of modern art; collected essays. London, Faber & Faber, 1952. 278 p. —. [Essays. 1st American e d . ] . New York, Horizon Press, 1953. 278 p . —. New York, Meridian Books, 1955. 309 p . (Meridian books, M 7 ) —. London, Faber & Faber, 1964. 278 p . (Faber paper covered editions) The place of art in a University. An Inaugural Lecture given at the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, London, Oliver & Boyd, 1931. 28 p. Poems, igi 4-^34. London, Faber & Faber, 1935. 168 p. First edition. Contents: Eclogues (1914-1918); War poems (19161932); Satirical verses (1919-1934); Lyrical poems (1919-1934); Longer poems (1920-1934). Poems, igi 4-^34. New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935. 168 p. At the head of title: Herbert Read. Printed in Great Britain. Contents : Eclogues ( 1914-1918 ) ; War poems ( 1916-1932 ) ; Satirical verses (1919-1934); Lyrical poems (1919-1934); Longer poems (1920-1934). Poetry and anarchism. London, Faber & Faber, 1938. 126 p . First published in June Mcmxxxviii. —. [2nd e d . ] . London, Freedom Press, 1947. 79 p. Poetry and experience. London, Vision P., 1967. 160 p . Bibliographical footnotes. —. [1st American e d . ] . New York, Horizon Press, 1967. 160 p . Bibliographical footnotes. Contents: T h e faith of a critic; T h e attributes of criticism; T h e style of criticism; T h e definition of comedy; T h e disciples of Diderot; T h e dialogue; Poetry and experience; T h e resurrection of the word; American bards and British reviewers. The politics of the unpolitical. London, Routledge, 1943. 160 p. Contents: The politics of the unpolitical; T h e cult of leadership; Culture and liberty; T o hell with culture; Art in an electric atmosphere; T h e vulgarity and impotence of contemporary art; Modern art and French decadence; a question of life or death; T h e collective patron; T h e freedom of the artist; T h e nature of revolutionary art; A civilization from under; Civilization and the sense of quality; A solemn conclusion.

202

Reason and romanticism. London, Faber & Gwyer, 1926. 229 p. Contents: T h e attributes of criticism; T h e nature of metaphysical poetry; Pure poetry; T h e future of poetry; Psycho-analysis and criticism; T h e disciples of Diderot; T h e definition of comedy; T h e dialogue; Charlotte and Emily Brontë; Tobias Smollett; T h e modern novel (cursory notes). Reason and romanticism, essays in literary criticism. New York, Russell & Russell, 1963. 229 p. The redemption of the robot; my encounter with education art. New York, Trident Press, 1966. 254 p . (Credo series) Bibliographical footnotes.

through

Selected writings; poetry and criticism. With a foreword by Allen Tate. London, Faber & Faber, 1963. 406 p. "Select bibliography of the author's works compiled with the assistance of Philip Ward and Salma M . G h a n e m : p. 402-406." The sense of glory; essays in criticism. Cambridge, University Press, 1929. 227 p . Contents : Froissart ; Malory ; Descartes ; Swift ; Vauvenargues ; Sterne ; Hawthorne; Bagehot; Henry James. Bibliographical footnotes. —. Freeport, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press, 1967. 227 p . (Essay index reprint series) Bibliographical footnotes. Contents: Froissart; Malory; Descartes; Swift; Vauvenargues; Sterne; H a w t h o r n e ; Bagehot; Henry James. The significance of children's art. Art as symbolic language. [1st e d . ] . Vancouver, University of British Columbia, 1957. 53 p . Includes bibliography. Songs of Chaos. London, Elkin Mathews, 1915. 37 p . Staffordshire pottery figures. London, Duckworth, 1929. 24 p. "Books" : p. 24. T.S.E., a memoir. Middletown, Conn., Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1966. 31 p. (Monday evening papers, no. 5) Cover title. "Reprinted from T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) edited by Alan Tate." The tenth muse; essays in criticism. London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1957- 330 P. —. [1st American e d . ] . New York, Horizon Press, 1958. 330 p . Thirty-five poems. London, Faber & Faber, 1940. 80 p. Second impression 1941. Most of the poems were included in his Poems, igi^-ig^. bibliography.

Includes

203

To hell with culture; democratic values are new values. London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1941. 63 p. (The democratic order, no. 4) To hell with culture, and other essays on art and society. London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1963. 193 p. —. New York, Schocken Books, 1963. 193 p. The true voice of feeling; studies in English romantic poetry. London, Faber & Faber, 1953. 382 p. —. New York, Pantheon Books, 1953. 382 p. Appendix (p. 321-364) : Concerning the relation of the plastic arts to nature, 1807 by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling; trans, by Michael Bullock, Bibliography: p. 365-366. Vocal avowals. Worte sagen aus. St. Gallen, Tschudy-Verlag, 1962. unpaged. Poems. German and English facing pages. Translated by Eva Van Hoboken. Wordsworth. London, J. Cape, 1930. 271 p. (The Clark lectures, 1929-1930) Signed by the author. —.New York, J. Cape and H. Smith, 1931. 271 p. (The Clark lectures, 1929-30) —. [New ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1949. 194 p. Bibliography: p. 189-190. —. [New ed.]. London, Faber & Faber, 1958. 194 p. Includes bibliography. "New ed 149; reprinted." A world within a war, poems. London, Faber & Faber, 1944. 50 p. Signed by the author. —. New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1945. 44 p. "First American edition." Zum 85. Geburtstag von Professor Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, 26. Juli i960. Zurich, Rascher, i960. 29 p.

SECTION TWO Books edited by Sir Herbert Read The anthology of English prose, selected and ordered by Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée. New York, Viking, 1931. 665 p. Printed in Great Britain. The collected works of C. G. Jung. Editors: H. Read, M. Fordham, Gerhard Adler. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953-.

204

SIR HERBERT READ AT STONEGRAVE, JULY I 9 6 6 Photo : Felicitas Vogler

LOT I 6

SEE LOT 47

—. —. [2nd éd.]. New York, Pantheon Books, 1966. (Bollingen series, 20) Encyclopaedia of the arts. Consulting editor: Herbert Read. New York, Meredith, 1966. 966 p. London edition has title: The Thames and Hudson encyclopaedia of the arts, English master painters. Edited by Herbert Read. London, Kegan Paul, 1940. The English vision; an anthology. Edited by Herbert Read. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1933. 364 p. "My aim has been to present the English ideal in its various aspects as expressed by representative Englishmen . . . I have chosen little poetry." —. London, G. Routledge, 1939. 364 p. First published in 1933. Form in Gothic. Authorized translation by Bernard Rackham of "Formprobleme der Gotik" by Wilhelm Worringer. Edited with an introduction by Herbert Read. London, G. P. Putnam's, 1927. 181 p. —.—.—.London, A. Tiranti, 1957. 181 p. —. Authorized translation edited with an introduction by Sir Herbert Read. Containing the original illustrations. New York, Schocken, 1964. 181 p. —.—.—. [Rev. ed.]. New York, Schocken, 1964. 180 p. Gaugin (1848-1Q03). With an introduction and notes by Herbert Read. London, Faber & Faber, 1949. 24 p. —. —. New York, Pitman, 1951. 24 p. —.—. London, Faber & Faber, 1949-58. 2 vols. Vol. 2 : Introduction and notes by Pierre Courthion. Klee (i8yg-iQ4o). With an introduction and notes by Herbert Read. London, Faber & Faber, 1948. 2 vols. Vol. 2 — Introduction and notes by Andrew Forge. —. —. New York, Pitman, 1949. 24 p. The Pitman gallery. The knapsack; a pocket-book of prose and verse. Selected by Herbert Read. London, G. Routledge, 1939. 622 p. The London book of English prose, selected and ordered by Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1931. 665 p. —. [2nd ed.]. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949. 572 p. —.—.New York, Macmillan, 1949. 572 p. —. —. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951. 572 p.

209

—. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963. 522 p. The London book of English verse, selected by Herbert Read Bonamy Dobrée. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949. 874 p. "Notes" (bibliographical) : p. 838-855.

and

—. [2nd rev. e d . ] . New York, Macmillan, 1952. 891 p. —. —. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956. 874 p. —. —. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965. 874 p . Bibliographical references included in "Notes" p. 840-857. Orage, Alfred Richard. Selected essays and critical writings. Edited by Herbert Read & Denis Saurat. London, Stanley Nott, 1935. 216 p . The practice of design, by Alastair Morton and others. With an introduction and edited by Herbert Read. London, L. Humphries, 1946. 227 p. A sentimental journey by Laurence Sterne. Edited, with an introduction by H . Read. London, Scholartiss Press, 1929. 230 p. Speculations. Essays on humanism and the philosophy of art by T. E. Hulme. Edited by Herbert Read. London, International Library of psychology, philosophy, and scientific method, 1924 [1923]. 271 p . — . — . — . [2nd e d . ] . London, Kegan Paul, 1936. 271 p . —. —. Edited by Herbert Read, with a frontispiece and foreword by Jacob Epstein. London, Routledge and Paul; New York, Humanities Press, 1965. 271 p . The styles of European art, introduced and edited by Herbert London, Thames and Hudson, 1965. 468 p.

Read.

Surrealism; edited with an introduction by Herbert Read; contributions by André Breton, Hugh Sykes Davies, Paul Eluard, Georges Hugnet. London, Faber & Faber, 1936. 251 p . The Thames and Hudson encyclopaedia of the arts, consulting Herbert Read. London, Thames and Hudson, 1966. 976 p. American ed. (New York, Meredith) has title: Encyclopaedia arts.

editor of the

This way, delight; a book of poetry for the young. Selected by Herbert Read. Illustrated by Juliet Kepes. New York, Pantheon, 1956. 155 p . — . — . Illustrated by G. Stewart. London, Faber, 1957. 192 p. — . — . Illustrated by Juliet Kepes. New York, Pantheon, 1961. 155 p. Unit 1, the modern movement sculpture, edited by Herbert 1934. 124 p.

210

in English architecture, painting, and Read. London, Toronto, etc., Cassell,

SECTION THREE Books contributed to by Sir Herbert Read Art in Britain, 1Q30-40, centered around Axis, Circle and Unit One. London, New York, Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., 1965. 92 p. "Catalogue of an exhibition, March-April 1965, dedicated to Herbert Read as a belated tribute to his 70th birthday." Atelier iy. Contributions by Herbert Read [and others]. New York, Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949. 31 p . Fourteenth exhibition of prints by members of the Atelier 17 group, March 14 to April 1, 1949, Laurel Gallery, New York. Australia: aboriginal paintings, Arnhem Land. Introduction by Sir Herbert Read. Greenwich, Conn., New York Graphic Society, 1954. 14 p . ( U N E S C O world art series, 3) Ben Nicholson — Paintings, reliefs, drawings. With an introduction by Herbert Read. London, Lund, Humphries, 1948. 32 p . Ben Nicholson. With an introduction by Herbert Read. London, Lund, Humphries, 1955. 2 vo ^ s Vol. 1, 2nd éd.; vol. 2, 1st ed. Includes bibliographies. Contents: vol. 1. Paintings, reliefs, drawings, vol. 2. Work since 1947. 1947Child art; the beginnings of self-affirmation by Sir Herbert Read [and others]. Edited by Hilda Present Lewis. Berkeley, California, Diablo Press, 1966. 127 p. "Grew out of a conference held on the Berkeley campus of the University of California on May 7, 8, 9, 1965." Includes bibliographical references. The creative arts in American education: the interrelation of the arts in secondary education by Thomas Munro; the third realm of education by Herbert Read. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, i960. 65 PT h e Inglis lecture and the Burton lecture, i960. Dutch tiles. T h e V a n den Bergh gift. A guide by B. Rackham with the help of Mr. Herbert Read. London, South Kensington Museum, 1923. 32 p. English pottery: its development from early times to the end of the eighteenth century by Bernard Rackham and Herbert Edward Read. With an appendix on the Wrotham potters by Dr. J. W. L. Glaisher. London, Ernest Benn, 1924. 142 p. O n e of an edition of 75 copies. Essays and studies by members of the English Association. Vol. 21. Collected by Herbert Read. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1936. 168 p.

211

5 on revolutionary art. Essays by Herbert Read, F. D. Klingender, Eric Gill, A. L. Loyd, Alick West. Edited by Betty Rea. London, Wishart, 1935. 87 p. Flicker. Three essays on the cinema by Herbert Read, Toni del Renzio and R. S. O. Poole. Croydon, Eng., R. S. O. Poole, 1944. Four lectures on design. The future of industrial design. London, Hutchinson, 1943. 32 p. (Design and Industries Association) History of modern painting... text by Maurice Raynal [and others}. Translated by Stuart Gilbert (Douglas Cooper). 2nd ed. With an introduction by Herbert Read. Geneva, Albert Skira, 1949. 3 vols. Hepworth. Exhibition, October-November 1959. Introduction by Sir Herbert Read. New York, Galerie Chalette, 1959. 24 p. Henri Matisse. Texts by Jean Leymarie, Herbert Read, William S. Liebermann. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966. 207 p. Henry Moore. With an introduction by Herbert Read. London, P. Lund, Humphries, 1957. 2 vols. —.—. [2nd ed. rev.]. London, P. Lund, Humphries, 19—. Contents: v. 2. Sculpture and drawings 1949-1954. Henry Moore: Mother and child. Introduction by Herbert Read. New York, New American Library, by arrangement with UNESCO, 1966. 24 p. —.—. London, Collins in association with UNESCO, 1967. 30 p. Henry Moore: Sculpture and drawings. With an introduction by Herbert Read. London, Lund, Humphries, Zwemmer, 1944. —. —. [3rd rev. and much enl. ed.]. London, Lund, Humphries, 1949. 44 P. —. Edited by Alan Bowness. With an introduction by Herbert Read. [1st ed.]. New York, G. Wittenborn, 1965-. Contents: v. 3 Sculpture, 1955-64, edited by Alan Bowness. Kandinsky (1866-1944). With an introduction and notes by Herbert Read. London, Faber & Faber, 1959. 24 p. —. —. New York, G. Wittenborn, 1959. 24 p. Moments of vision, a cura di Herbert Read, luglio-novembre, 1959. Roma, Rome-New York Art Foundation, 1959. Unpaged. English, Italian, or French. New trends in British art; Nuove tendenze delVarte inglese. Preséntate do Sir Herbert Read e Lawrence Alloway. Roma, Rome-New York Art Foundation, 1958? Unpaged. English and Italian.

212

Outline, an autobiography, and other writings by Paul Nash. With a preface by Herbert Read. London, Faber & Faber, 1949. 271 p. Paintings by Felix Kelly. Introduction by Herbert Read. London, Falcon Press, 1946. 10 p. Paul Nash. Ten coloured plates and a critical appreciation by Herbert Read. London, Soho Gallery, 1937. (Contemporary British painters, no. 1) Paul Nash. With an introduction by H. E. Read. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1944. 16 p. (Penguin modern painters) Paul Nash. Paintings, drawings and illustrations. Edited by Margot Eates. With essays by Herbert Read [and others]. London, Lund, Humphries, 1948. The Peggy Guggenheim collection at the Tate Gallery 3 / December IQ64 to 7 March 1965. [2nd ed.]. Preface by Herbert Read. London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1965. 99 p. Pioneering in art collecting. By Sir Herbert Read, James Johnson Sweeney [and others]. Edited by David Darryl Galloway. Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1962. 34 p. Five lectures delivered at a symposium in art collecting convene'd by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in January 1962, under the auspices of the Buffalo-Fine Arts Academy. The quest and the quarry, a cura di Herbert Read. Exhibition magg. sett., 1961. Roma, Rome-New York Art Foundation, 1961. unpaged. English, Italian or French. Radio. By Rudolf Arnheim. Translated by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read. London, Faber & Faber, 1936. 296 p. Recent paintings by Reybeyrolle. Introduction by Herbert Read. London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., 1961. 16 p. Truth is more sacred; a critical exchange on modern literature: James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, Robert Graves, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. By Edward Dahlberg and Herbert Read. New York, Horizon Press, 1961. 222 p. —. —. London, Routledge and K. Paul, 1961. 222 p.

213

SECTION FOUR

Unique Materials in the Sir Herbert Read Collection in the McPherson Library of the University of Victoria i

Nihilism and renewal in the art of our time. Éranos Lecture — August 1959. Holograph manuscript with corrections. Section I titled " T h e scream of Juno's Peacock"; Section I I titled " T h e Principle of Speculative Volition". 51 1. Typescript with corrections. 34 1.

2

T h e third realm of education. Holograph manuscript with corrections. 39 1. Typescript copy, "uncorrected". 27 1. 2nd typescript copy, "uncorrected". 27 1. Typescript with holograph correction. 32 1.

3

T h e origins of form in art. Éranos Lecture — August i960. Holograph manuscript with corrections. 31 1. Typescript with corrections. 41 1.

4

British art since 1945. Holograph manuscript. 48 1. Typescript with corrections. 33 1.

5

T h e poet and his muse. Éranos L e c t u r e — 1962. Holograph with corrections; looseleaf sheets in binder. 47 1. Typescript with corrections. 56 1.

6

Beauty and the beast. Éranos Lecture — August 1961. Holograph manuscript with corrections. 51 1. T w o programmes of the Éranos conference, 1961, enclosing seven pages of holograph notes and six reprints of articles by various authors dealing with psycho-analysis.

7

Power politics and human values. ("A Conference at Jordans, May 20-21, 1944") Typescript with corrections. 25 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 24 1. Art and leisure. Typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. 2nd typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. Existentialism, Marxism and anarchism. Typescript copy with corrections. 18 1. T h e ethics of power. Typescript with corrections. 9 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. Phases of English poetry. "Revised text for page 8 1 " . Typescript copy. 2 1.

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Ode on melancholy by John Keats. Typescript, i 1. Emblem by Frances Quarles. Typescript. 2 1. Song by Thomas Garew. Typescript with holograph notes. 1 1. Wordsworth's philosophy. Typescript copy. 20 1. Neither liberalism nor communism — a third way. Typescript with corrections. 15 1. Presuppositions. Typescript copy. 1 1. A one-man manifesto. Typescript with corrections. 6 1. A primer of dialectics. Typescript copy. 6 1. At the moment of writing. Typescript copy. 6 1. First aid for authors. Typescript with corrections. 6 1. Politics and the writer. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. T h e way of the world. Typescript copy. 12 1. Conversations in Germany. Typescript copy. 10 1. William Godwin. Typescript copy. 5 1. Education for peace. Kropotkin. Typescript copy with corrections. 15 1. Typescript copy. 15 1. T o the Editor of the New Statesman. "Before Dawn," dated 17.5.41. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of The Peckham experiment: a study in the living structure of Society, by Innes H . Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Freedom Press defence: speech for M a y 13, 1945. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. O n justice. Typescript copy. 7 1. 2nd typescript copy. 7 1. U n t o the new C a e s a r . . . a plea for a policy of meekness. Typescript copy. 8 1.

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Broadcast Review [of] Science, Liberty and Peace by Aldous Huxley and War, Sadism and Pacifism by Edward Glover. Typescript copy. 8 1. Anarchism. Typescript copy. 4 1. Ebeneezer Howard. Typescript copy. 2 1. The modern scene. On the threshhold of a new world. Renaissance or decadence. Typescript copy. 10 1. War and crisis. Typescript copy. 7 1. The method of revolution. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of The open fields by C. S. & G. S. Orwin. Typescript copy. 5 1. 8 Moon's farm and poems mostly elegiac. Page proof with pencilled corrections. 40 1. 9 The true voice of feeling. Typescript with corrections. 205 1. Wordsworth's philosophical faith. "Essay II" pencilled above title. Printed pages numbered 564 to 585 with holograph corrections. 12 1. Five letters from Faber and Faber, publishers of The true voice of feeling. . September 8, 1952 - October 1, 1952. 10 Spiral Notebook 1. Holograph (46 1.) containing: Rome-New York Art Foundation, 4 p. Review of Sources of Modern Art. 6 p. The secret of success in art. 24 p. Does pornography matter. 35 p. Review of Paul Klee: the thinking eye. 5 p. Spiral Notebook 2. Holograph (39 1.) containing: Vedova. 3 p. The critic's dilemma. 4 p. An appeal to fellow members of the Committee of 100. 7 p. A note on policy submitted to the meeting of the Committee of 100 to be held on December 17, 1961. 5 p. Review of Nature of film. 5 p. Symposium on collecting. "Buffalo: January 20, 1962". 13 p. Review of The biology of art. 6 p. Review of A sea ringed with visions. 4 p. Review of Letters to T. E. Lawrence. 4 p. Review of British art since igoo. 8 p. Review of The ordeal of consciousness in Henry James. 5 p.

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Spiral Notebook 3. Holograph (49 1.) containing: "President Kennedy, in his State of the Union address, uttered what was obviously a genuine note of alarm." 5 p. John Hoskin. 3 p. Review of Essays and Introductions by W. B. Yeats. 5 p. Rebeyrolle. 4 p. We believe. 1 p. Girlot. 3 p. Review of Three essays on the painting of our time by Adrian Stokes. 4 p. Review of The poetry of Corbusier. 4 p. Review of Muntu. An outline of neo-African culture. 3 p. Coleridge. 6 p. Walter Daniel. Talking of books. 6 p. Unbounded and immortal things. Talking of books. 6 p. "Claude Fatherly, 'the Major who gave the "go ahead" to destroy Hiroshima' . . . " 2 p. Review of Benedetto Croce by Gian N. G. Orsini. 5 p. Henry Moore. Berlin— 1961. 10 p. International Council of Societies of Industrial Designers. Venice: September 14, 1961. 16 p. Spiral Notebook 4. Holograph (50 1.) containing: Art in an Australian University. 11 p. Review of Henry James: Selected literary criticism, edited by Morris Shapiro. 6 p. Richard Aldington. 16 p. From Futurism to Surrealism — Chap. IV of the Concise History of Modern Sculpture. 29 p. Spiral Notebook 5. Holograph (50 1.) containing: Vincent Van Gogh. 23 p. Lynn Chadwick— 1961. 7 p. Spiral Notebook 6. Holograph (50 1.) containing: Contemporary British art. 14 p. A note on the plates. 2 p. Edvard Munch. 14 p. The Editors, Encounter. 4 p. Foreword (Mrs. Ashton Warner). 5 p. My first acquaintance with the philosophy of Bertrand Russell. ISPReview of Of divers arts by Naum Gabo. 5 p. Two masters of modern art, a review of Georges Roualt by Pierre Courthion and Joan Miró by Jacques Dupin. 14 p. Spiral Notebook 7. Holograph (51 1.) containing: To quote or not to quote. 9 p. Louis Le Brocquy. 5 p. The voices of silence. 14 p. Letter to Peace News. 3 p.

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Ben Nicholson. 12 p. (2nd) Review of Of divers arts by N a u m Gabo. 4 p. Review of Born under Saturn by Rudolf & Margot Wittkower. 5PEileen Agar. 4 p. Ars Una. 12 p. Spiral Notebook 8. Holograph (50 1.) containing: Tolstoy's theory of art. 29 p. I V International Congress of Aesthetics. 12 p. Aldous Huxley. 8 p . T o Huntington, Sage of the Potomac, Prosperity. 3 p. Civil disobedience. 4 p . A call to civil disobedience. 6 p. Books and the child. 9 p . Spiral Notebook 9. Holograph (50 1. + 3 1. typescript) containing: Preface — T h e resurrection of the word. 21 p. M a x Raphael. 19 p . + 4 p. corrected typescript. Michelangelo. 11 p. English poetry. 6 p . Spiral Notebook 10. Holograph (50 1.) containing: T h e limits of painting. 52 p . A short note on Zen. 1 p. Clarification supplied. 3 p . Anarchism in the affluent society. 25 p. Spiral Notebook 11. Holograph (97 1. + attachment) containing: A toy for God. 10 p. T h e moral significance of aesthetic education. 26 p. A broadcast review of Science, Liberty and Peace by Aldous Huxley and War, Sadism and Pacifism by Edward Glover. 7 P. Wordsworth's philosophy. 15 p. Plato. 3 p. Coleridge. 59 p. Erni. 2 p. T h e crisis in bookcraft. 12 p. II

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Icon and Idea. Holograph. 7 1. Typescript with holograph corrections. 14 1. Holograph. 2 1. Typescript with holograph corrections. 3 1. Holograph. 35 1. Typescript. 2 1. Holograph. 32 1. Typescript with holograph corrections. 1 1. Holograph. 11 o 1. Typescript. 1 1.

12 The true voice of feeling. A cloth-bound notebook containing: The cult of sincerity. Studies in English romantic poetry. Holograph. 194 p. Inserted : Introduction. Typescript with holograph correction. 3lColeridge's dejection. Typescript copy with holograph correction. 5 1. "Blew mimic hóotings to the silent o w l s , . . . " Mimeograph. 2l. " . . . own time the best p o e t r y , . . . " Typescript copy with correction. 3 1. Dylan Thomas poem. Typescript. 2 1. Introductory remarks. Typescript. 2 1. Page from a book with coloured plates by Margaret Duncan and Richard Walker. Wordsworth. Dismantled copy with holograph corrections in green cloth case. 264 p. Jonathan Cape publisher's list. 47 p. Proof copy with holograph correction in dust wrapper illustrated with Wordsworth's death mask. Faber & Faber. 190 p. Index with corrected page numbers from dismantled copy. 5PHolograph letter from E. M. Hatt, proof reader for Faber & Faber. 1 1. Preface to a new edition. Typescript with corrections. 9 1. 13 Notebook 1 with black hard cover (217 1.) containing: The place of art in a university. An inaugural lecture given at the University of Edinburgh on October 15, 1931. Unbound printed pamphlet enclosed. 15 1. In pencil "Appendix D" The place of art in the educational system. In pencil: The Aesthetic principles of education and Education through art. Holograph. 341 p. Ebenezer Cooke. Holograph. 4 p. Enclosed a holograph letter (2 1.) from Gwendolyn M. Fry dated October 11, 1941, and three copies of a drawing showing a personality graph. Notebook 2 with blue hard cover (81 1.) containing: "Discipline (cont.)" (Education through art). Holograph 71 p. Sociology and Architecture. Holograph 24 p. with typed page pasted in titled "Hitler Speech, Nuremberg, 6 Sept. 38." Henry Moore. Holograph 14 p. Typed l/2 p. Holograph. 1 p. Typed 5 p. Holograph 14 p. Enclosed sheet with some typing titled "Eden on Italy" and holograph notes of page references.

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To the editor of the Times. Holograph. 2 p. Dear Mr. Keyes. Holograph. 1 p. Notebook 3 with red hard cover (80 1.) containing: The problem of perception. Holograph. 120 p. Enclosed a typescript (5 1.) titled "The perceptive problem in the aesthetic appreciation of single colours" by Edward Bullough. Possible titles. Holograph. 3 p. Preface. Holograph. 2 p. N.E.W. Holograph. 3 p. Reply to Canon Smyth's letter of September 19. Holograph. 2 p. Shaw on the use of land. Holograph. 6 p. Five newspaper clippings enclosed. 14 Education through art. Proof copy with corrections. Unbound in multicoloured cloth case. 320 p. 82 letters concerned with Education through art. 15 Education through art. Typescript with corrections. 484 1. Galley proof page. List of plates. Contents. 16 In retreat. Typescript with corrections. 50 1. A journal of the retreat from St. Quentin to Amiens in March, 1918.

Holograph. 30 1. plus 9 'Messages and Signals' forms enclosed. Army Book 136. 34 1. Holograph. 12 p. plus group photograph enclosed. Messages and Signals. 22 1. Holograph. Stanley Redoubt. Detail of Battalion defences. 1 1. Holograph. 2 p. Three War Office Maps. 17 A world within a war. 51 1. loose in black folder. Typescript with corrections. 29 1. Printed cut-outs pasted on notebook pages with corrections. 12 1.

18 Henry Moore. A study of his life and work. Typescript with corrections. 120 1. Two letters (April 5, 1965; May 21, 1965) signed "Pat" and eight photograph snaps of Henry Moore sculpture. Holograph in black looseleaf notebook. 149 1. Enclosed a typed 'Preface' (2 1.), and a quote from Henry Moore, typed (1 1.). 19 Intimations of a new humanism. Éranos Lecture — August 1957. Holograph. 68 1.

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20 Adventures of the mind. Art and life. Holograph. 26 1. Typescript with corrections. 22 1. 2nd typescript with corrections. 23 1. 21 Old lovers' ghosts. "Unfinished play". Holograph. 36 1. 22 The parliament of women. A drama in three acts. Holograph in brown notebook. 122 1. Includes pasted in design on front cover and five separate sheets of notes and The death of Kropotkin, holograph. 3 p. The parliament of women. A drama in four acts. Typescript with corrections in red binder. 86 1. The parliament of women. A drama in three acts. "first draft-revised". Typescript with corrections in orange binder. 110 1. Includes a G. Wilson Knight letter (2 1.) ; Knight's criticism of The parliament of women (4 1.) ; Read's reply (11.). The parliament of women. A drama in three acts. "final version". Typescript copy in blue folder. 86 1. The parliament of women. "Copy No. 4 -f discarded scenes". Typescript copy. 17 Scenes. 23 The flower of peace. Typescript copy with corrections. 54 1. Beige clothbound notebook. Holograph (123 1.) containing: Penny wise and pound foolish. 33 p. Lord Byron at the opera. 37 p. The flower of peace II. 38 p. The flower of peace I. 24 p. Kandinsky. 28 p. The ambiguity of modern sculpture. 28 p. Notes. 2 p. 24 Spiral notebook 1. Holograph (49 1.) containing: American bards and British reviewers. 61 p. Kokoschka in London. 7 p. The war in the psyche. 13 p. Spiral notebook 2. Holograph (39 1.) containing: Art and communication. 53 p. Typescript copy with corrections enclosed. 19 1. Spiral notebook 3. Holograph (37 1.) containing: Gauguin. 15 p. Rysdale — Past and present. 13 p. Review of The fire and the fountain by John Press. 6 p. Bowra. 5 p. Spiral notebook 4. Holograph (50 1.) containing: Concise history of modern sculpture. 76 p.

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Spiral notebook 5. Holograph (46 1.) containing: Modern sculpture illustrated. 69 p. Spiral notebook 6. Holograph (51 1.) containing: Sc. V & VI. 72 p. Spiral notebook 7. Holograph (52 1.) containing: Sculpture: an art transformed. 55 p. The paintings of Van Le Witt. 8 p. Review of The beginnings of art by S. Giedion. 8 p. Notebook 8 with blue paper wrappers. Holograph (29 1.) containing: Gauguin. 2 p. Sotto voce: a plea for intimacy. 14 p. Wordsworth. 15 p. Byron. 4 p. Notebook 9 with green cloth cover. Holograph (46 1.) containing: Introduction to Dahlberg. 12 p. Review of The collected poems of Wilfred Owen, 5 p. Introduction to the Czech/Jugoslavian edition. 12 p. Review of The necessity of art: a Marxist approach by Ernst Fisher. 16 p. Review of Australian aboriginal art edited by Ronald M. Berndt. 11 p.

Preface Cash's Sterne. 6 p. 25 A history of modern painting. Holograph. 209 1. A concise history of modern painting. Typescript copy with correction. 259 1. Galley proof. 49 1. 26 The art of sculpture. Holograph, n o 1. Typescript with corrections. 207 1. Page proof. 131 1. 27

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The sense of glory: essays in criticism. Page proof corrected and loose in purple cloth case. 134 1. Phases of English poetry. Hogarth lectures, No. 7. Page proof corrected and loose in orange cloth case. 76 1. Page proof (Faber & Faber) corrected, m l . Notebook 1. Holograph (32 1.) containing: Jung. 42 p. Notebook 2. Holograph (136 1. plus 1 1. typescript) containing: The constructive art of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner. 22 p. Paul Nash. 18 p. Realism and abstraction in modern art. 33 p.

Psycho-analysis and the problem of aesthetic value. 32 p. + 1 p. typescript. Art and the evolution of man. 49 p. Introduction : a defence of political idealism. 45 p. 28

The contrary experience. A diary of the First World War. Holograph. 20 1. Autobiographies. Typescript with corrections. 109 1. Introduction. Typescript with corrections. 8 1. The innocent eye. Book Three. A dearth of wild flowers. Holograph. 95 1. The innocent eye. (pages 13-61 from Annals of Innocence and experience) Typescript with corrections. 144 1. Riveaulx Abbey. Two reproductions of the paintings of the Abbey by J. M. W. Turner. A letter to Sir Herbert Read dated January 27, 1961 from the librarian and curator of the County Borough of Bury. Typescript. 1 1. A letter to P. M. R. Pouncey dated March 10, 1961 from Herbert Read. Typescript copy. 1 1. Annals of innocence and experience. Dismantled copy (Faber & Faber, 1946) with corrections, 115 1.

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The tenth muse : essays in criticism. Typescript with corrections. 329 1. (Includes typescript copy, pasted-in clippings, and printed pages from other publications). Page proof with corrections. 18 1. Correspondence. 22 1. Frank Lloyd Wright. Typescript copy. 5 1. Against the betrayal of architecture. Review of The future of architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright. Typescript copy. 6 1. Two clippings from New Republic. Review of Notes toward the definition of culture by T. S. Eliot. European Service mimeograph. 4 1. Review of The letters of W. B. Yeats edited by Allen Wade and The identity of Yeats by Richard Ellmann. Typescript copy. 3 1.

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Graham Sutherland. Typescript copy. 2 1. Jung. Typescript copy. 3 1. An eightieth birthday. Typescript copy. 4 1. The art of art criticism. Typescript copy. 11 1. Tradition and revolt in modern English poetry. Typescript copy. 42 1. The cult of sincerity. Typescript. 39 1. Michelangelo and Bernini. Typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. The romantic revolution. Typescript copy with corrections. 11 1. Barbara Hepworth. Typescript 2 1. of Ezra Pound by Hugh Kenner. Review of Thecopy. poetry Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Ezra Pound as critic. A review of Make it new by Ezra Pound. Typescript copy. 7 1. Ezra Pound. Typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. Review of Guide to Kulchur by Ezra Pound. Typescript copy. 3 1. Reviews of Seventy Cantos by Ezra Pound. Clippings. 4 1. G. G. Jung. Page proof from Hudson Review. 7 1. Recent trends in English art. Typescript with corrections. 37 1. The present situation of art in Europe. Typescript with corrections. 37 1. Henry Moore and the renaissance of sculpture in England. Typescript with corrections. 22 1. Typescript with corrections. 14 1. The limits of painting. Typescript with corrections. Xerox copy. 31 1. Poetry and philosophy — reading from Shelley. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Poetry and philosophy: Shelley. BBC Third Programme Lecture. Typescript with corrections. 9 1.

Talk for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Typescript copy with corrections. 9 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Lord Byron at the opera. BBC Third Programme: Imaginary Conversation series. Typescript copy with corrections. 29 1. Aristotle's mother: an argument in Athens. BBC Third Programme: Imaginary Conversation series. Typescript copy. 16 1. Personal anthology — chosen and introduced by Herbert Read. BBC Third Programme. Typescript copy. 20 1. T. S. Eliot und die moderne Bewegung in der englischen Dichtung. Typescript with corrections. 5 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Modern art and public taste. Speakers: Herbert Read, Eric Newton. Chairman: Anne Symonds. Typescript copy with deletion. 8 1. Changing conceptions of art. Music, poetry, and the visual arts of the 20th century, lecture No. 1. Typescript with corrections. 5 1. It's good English. A lecture for weekly programme 'It's good English'. Typescript with corrections. 5 1. Typescript copy. 5 1. Review of Notes towards the definition of culture by T. S. Eliot. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. Writers in exile. A lecture for Tor your leisure'. Typescript copy. 3 1. The ethics of power. A lecture for the BBC series Tower — an aspect of social organisation'. Typescript copy with corrections. 10 1. Book Talk: Science, Liberty and Peace by Aldous Huxley and War, Sadism and Pacifism by Edward Glover. For the BBC's series 'Book Talk'. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. For the spirit. A discussion for the BBC series 'What is art for?' between Herbert Read and Eric Newton. Typescript with corrections. 7 1. The dialogues of Plato. BBC Third Programme. The sixth of the series 'The dialogues of Plato'. Translated by A. E. Taylor. Arranged, with a prefatory note by Herbert Read. Typescript copy with corrections. 35 1.

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New Judgment on Wordsworth. Telediphoned copy from BBC discussion between Herbert Read, Fuller and Bronowski. Typescript copy with corrections. 15 1. Poetry and philosophy — readings in Shelley. BBC Third Programme lecture. Chosen and introduced by Herbert Read. Typescript copy with corrections. 14 1. Moon's farm. BBC Third Programme, series 'The Inward Eye'. Typescript copy. 26 1. with small printed review attached. Wordsworth: an introductory talk. Typescript copy with corrections. 14 1.

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Wordsworth's philosophical faith. A lecture for 'The Wednesday Book Programme'. Typescript copy with corrections. 19 1. Wordsworth's philosophy. Typescript copy with corrections. 12 1. A new judgment of Wordsworth. A discussion between Read, Fuller and Bronowski. Transcribed from a telediphone recording. Typescript copy with corrections. 17 1. Longer poems. BBC Third Programme, 'Herbert Read Poetry Programme'. Typescript copy with corrections. 32 1. Typescript copy with deletion. 32 1. T h e ambiguity of modern sculpture. Typescript with corrections. 23 1. Typescript with corrections and holograph. 22 1. (typescript with corrections 13 L, holograph 9 1.) Typescript copy with corrections. 11 1. Typescript copy with correction, typescript with corrections and holograph. 23 1. (typescript copy with corrections 20 1., typescript with corrections 1 1., holograph 2 1.) Typescript copy 9 1. (2 copies). Zur Théorie des Künstlerischen. Typescript copy with corrections. 14 1. Sculpture — an art transformed. Typescript copy with corrections. 32 1. List of slides to accompany above. Typescript. 1 1. Die Plastik, eine Kunst in der Umwandlung. German translation of Sculpture — an art transformed. Typescript copy. 20 1. Lists of slides. Typescript copy with corrections. 1 1. Typescript. 1 1. Holograph with corrections. 1 1. Holograph. 1 1.

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Sergei. From book A survey of Swedish art. Xerox copy of chapter five. Positive. 3 1. Xerox copy of chapter five. Negative. 3 1. Johan Tobias Sergei. From a dictionary of Swedish artists, in French. Xerox copy of Sergei entry. Positive. 2 1. Xerox copy of Sergei entry. Negative. 2 1. To hell with culture and other essays of art and society. As assembled for printing. Typescript with corrections, typescript copy with corrections, printed, from an earlier version, with corrections. 206 1. A letter to a young artist. Typescript copy with corrections. 50 1. Typescript with corrections inter-paged with typescript copy. 44 1. each. Also 4 1. holograph and a list of paintings, typescript copy. 2 1. Existentialism, Marxism and anarchism. Typescript with corrections. 18 1. Chains of freedom. Typescript with corrections, print with corrections, typescript copy with corrections. 45 1. Poetry and love. Typescript with corrections. 23 1. The inspired tinker. BBC Third Programme. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. De Stijl. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Art and the evolution of man. Typescript copy with corrections. 38 1. Review of The problem of Knowledge by A. J. Ayer. Typescript copy with corrections. 9 1. Gauguin: the return to symbolism. Typescript copy with corrections. 1 1. Typescript with corrections. 9 1. Shelley's philosophy. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. Wordsworth's philosophy. Typescript copy with corrections. 19 1. The fundamental conflict in contemporary art. Typescript copy with corrections. 22 1. Reviews of The life of John Middleton Murry by F. A. Lea, To keep faith by Mary Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield and other literary studies by J. Middleton Murry, for The London Magazine. Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1.

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Preface. (Karel Appel) Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Karel Appel. Typescript copy. 2 1. 2nd Typescript copy. 2 1. T h e architect as universal man. Typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. 2nd typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. Review of The poem itself edited by Stanley Burnshaw. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. British art since 1945. Typescript copy. 32 1. A call to civil disobedience. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. 2nd Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. T h e informal image in modern art. T h e I V International Congress of Aesthetics. Typescript with corrections. 11 1. Review of Yulengor: nomads of Arnhem land by William S. Chaseling. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. 2nd Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Art and design. N U T conference, (notes) Typescript with corrections and one small paper clipping. 3 1. Tourism unlimited. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. Review of Art by Aldous Huxley. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Seeing and believing by Frank Avray Wilson. Typescript copy. 1 1. Middelheim. Speech to the people of Antwerp, 5th Biennial at Middelheim. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Typescript copy with corrections, holograph. 6 1. Introduction [to the work of John Warren Davis]. Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Review of Safe conduct by Boris Pasternak, translated by Alec Brown. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. T h e future for poets. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of The use of imagination: educational thought and the literary mind by William Walsh. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1.

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Review of Walter Bagehot by Norman St. John-Stevas. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Havelock Ellis by Arthur Calder-Marshall and An artist on life: the life and work of Havelock Ellis by John Stewart Collis. Typescript copy. 4 1. As printed in The Listener, January 29, 1959. 1 1. Introduction [to Baker's Stained Glass] Typescript copy with corrections. 9 1. Review of Picasso: his life and work by Roland Penrose. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. [Untitled essay on INSEA] Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of The letters of John Keats, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Poet of felicity. Review of Centuries, Poems and Thanksgiving by Thomas Traherne, edited by H. M. Margoliouth. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of The Court and the Castle by Rebecca West. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Holograph. 2 1. Fautrier. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Art and reality by Joyce Gary. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. What's wrong with industrial design? Typescript copy with corrections. 9 1. Reviews of Children's art by Miriam Lindstrom, Art of the young child by Jane Cooper Bland, Creative and mental growth by Viktor Lowenfeld and Art and visual perception: a psychology of the creative eye by Rudolf Arnheim. Typescript copy. 3 1. Foreword [To the Gothic Flame by Dr. Varma] Typescript copy 2 1. On breaking through. Typescript copy. 1 1. Review of A Henry Adams Reader edited by Elizabeth Stevenson. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of The works of Henry Vaughan edited by L. C. Martin. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of The diaries of John Ruskin, Volume II, 1848-1873, se^" ected and edited by Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. 229

The British Pavilion, 1958. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. Review of Politics and the poet by F. M. Todd and Wordsworth's Cambridge Education by Ben Ross Schneider, Jr. Typescript copy. 2 1. My favourite picture. Typescript copy. 2 1. Review of Art in crisis: the lost centre by Hans Sedlmayr. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Castello Sforzesco. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. Review of Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem land: art, myth and symbolism by Charles P. Mountford. Typescript with corrections. 5 1. Review of The poetry of living Japan by Takamichi Ninomiya and D. J. Enright. Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Vie quotidienne et valeur des Formes-Résumé. Typescript copy. 3 1. Anti-Malraux. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Review of A portrait of the artist as a martyr: letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Lone Wolf. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Art, industry and national decay. Typescript copy with corrections. 9 1. 2nd Typescript copy with corrections. 10 1. Walter de la Mare. Proof copy. 1 1. Typescript copy. 2 1. Victor Pasmore Mural — Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Typescript with corrections. 5 1. Review of The author and the public: problems of communication. Report of Twenty-eight International P.E.N. Congress. Typescript copy. 2 1. Introduction, Sao Paolo 1957. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Talk for BBC General Overseas Service. Typescript with corrections. 3 1. Review of Towards science in aesthetics and Art Education: its

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philosophy and psychology, both by Thomas Munro. Typescript copy, i 1. Review of Love, freedom and society, by J. Middleton Murry. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of William Wordsworth: the early years, ijjo-1803 by Mary Moorman. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Práraffaelitische Brüderschaft. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Stained Glass by E. Liddall Armitage. Typescript copy. 1 1. Review of The diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, edited by Willard Bissell Pope. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Art education. Review of Art and the child by Marion Richardson. Holograph. 9 1. Review of Guy Burgess: a portrait with a background, by Tom Driberg. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Nature and art. Typescript with corrections. 6 1. Wilfred Rowland Childe. Printed version. 2 1. The mystery of landscape. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. King's College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Address by Sir Herbert Read on the occasion of the viewing of Mr. Victor Pasmore's mural constructions in the Stephenson Building, April 3, 1957. Typescript copy. 3 1. (6 copies) Introduction. Rome-New York Art Foundation. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of Three essays on the painting of our time by Adrian Stokes. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Introduction. Girlot. Typescript copy. 2 1. Review of Essays and introductions by W. B. Yeats. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Neue Figurationen by Hans Platschek. Typescript copy, initialled. 1 1.

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Cecil Stephenson. Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Preface (to The teaching of mathematics by Z. P. Dienes). Typescript copy. 3 1. Answers to "Volonta." Typescript copy. 2 1. Práraffaelitische Brüderschaft. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Gregory Memorial Exhibition. Typescript with corrections. 6 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Review of The banquet years by Roger Shattuck. Galley proof with corrections for The London Magazine. 2 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Typescript with corrections. 6 1. Preface (to catalogue of works by Henrion) Typescript copy. 2 1. Review of Kunst und Konstruktion by Herbert W. Franke. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of Der Raumsatz by Wolfgang Th. Otto. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Epoch and artist by David Jones. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Ruskin. Review of The lamp of beauty, writings on art by John Ruskin, selected and edited by Joan Evans. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Foreword or Introduction (about St. Ives, Cornwall). Typescript copy. 2 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. 2nd Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Indian Miniatures by W. G. Archer. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Reviews of The life of John Middleton Murry by F. A. Lea, To keep faith by Mary Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield and other literary studies by J. Middleton Murry. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. As printed. 3 1. Introduction (for an exhibition for the Committee of Art of the Congress for the Liberty of Culture). Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Report. A review of The life and opinions of Thomas Ernest Hulme by A. R. Jones. Typescript copy. 2 1. Holograph. 3 1.

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A letter to Sir Herbert Read dated July 13, 1959 from Victor Gollancz Ltd. Typescript, initialled. 1 1. Ruth Francken. Typescript copy. 2 1. Drian Gallery, Ruth Francken Exhibition. Preface. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Introduction (to the work of Jovan Obican). Typescript copy. 3 1. As printed. 2 1. Printed brochure of a ceramic sculpture exhibition by Jovan Obican, Venice, October 1-25, 1957. 1 1. Printed brochure of an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Jovan Obican, Woodstock Gallery, London, June 1-13, 1959. 1 1. Isaac Rosenberg. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of The business of criticism by Helen Gardner. For The Listener, May 28, 1959. Proof copy with corrections. 1 1. As printed. 2 1. Review of The nature of experience by Sir Russell Brain. Typescript with corrections. 4 1. The Apollinaire of action painting. Review of The tradition of the new. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. As printed. 2 1. Introduction (to The Parliament of Women). Typescript copy. 4 1. Prints as a medium of cultural exchange. Typescript copy. 4 1. Review of Modulor 2: 1955 by Le Corbusier and The work of G. Rietveld architect by Theodore M. Brown. Typescript with corrections. 4 1. Austin Cooper. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Harrogate. Typescript with corrections. 8 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. James Lloyd. Typescript copy. 3 1. Preface (about the Museum of Modern Art). Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. 2nd Typescript copy with corrections. 1 1. 3rd Typescript copy with corrections. 16 1. 4th Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1.

233

A letter to Mr. Drexler dated June 5, 1957. (Typescript copy unsigned. 1 1.) Report on the translations of Paul Valery's poems made by Louise Bogan and May Sarton. Typescript copy. 4 1. Fifty years of British art, Olso and Copenhagen, 1956. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. T h e British Pavilion — X X V I Biennale, 1954. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. T h e English contribution to Twentieth Century art. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. T h e estate of man. Radio script. Typescript copy with corrections. 11 1. Coming to London, extracts from a diary. Typescript with corrections. 9 1. Council for the preservation of rural England, Ryedale Branch, Annual Report 1955-56 and Ryedale — Past and present by Sir Herbert Read. Printed pamphlet. Typescript with corrections. 8 1. Typescript with corrections, holograph. 11 1. Mr. Wyndham Lewis and the I.C.A. Typescript copy with corrections and additions. 2 1. Typescript with corrections. 5 1. (Title: A reply to Wyndham Lewis) Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. (Title: A reply to Wyndham Lewis) (Untitled, about amateur and professional painting) Typescript with corrections with small newspaper clipping attached. 4 1. Gropius. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Adolescent expression in art and craft. Society for education through art, Easter Conference, April 3-7, 1956. Holograph. 2 1. In printed wrapper. T h e unity of the arts. Typescript with corrections. 4 1. Life without a shoehorn. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Review of Busman's holiday by Dorothy L. Sayers, Hamlet, revenge! by Michael Dunes, The theft of the crown jewels by Edgar Jepson and Murder in hospital by Josephine Bell. Typescript copy. 4 1. T h e informal image in art. Unbound proof sheets with corrections. 3 1.

234

Review of Muntu: an outline of neo-African culture by Janheinz Jahn. Typescript with corrections. 3 1. Cecil Franklin : publisher of high standards. A letter to the editor, The Times, February 2 ( ? ) . Newspaper clipping. 1 1. A culture out of chaos. Review of Aldous Huxley on art and artists, edited and introduced by Morris Philipson. As printed in The Saturday Review. 1 1. Esthetics: an enemy of violence? In the series c The creative arts and peace'. As printed in The Saturday Review, December 24, i960. 2 1. Adult education and the arts. In Scottish Adult No. 18, December 1956. Printed. 9 p p .

Education.

Archetypal images. Review of Jackson Pollock by Bryan Robertson. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Preface (about artists of Ceylon). Typescript copy. 3 1. Letter to the editor about modern literary criticism. As printed. 1 1. T h e informal image in modern art. I V International Congress of Aesthetics communication. Typescript copy with corrections. 11 1. Rock paintings in South Africa. Review of The Tsisah Ravine by Abbé Henri Breuil. As printed in The Listener, February 11, i960. 1 1. Art, industry, and national decay. As printed in The Listener, January 3 1 , 1957. 2 1. What's wrong with industrial design. Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1. An art of internal necessity: recent trends in non-figurative painting. Typescript. 22 1. Review of The Modern Dilemma by Christopher Dawson. As printed in The Cambridge Review, February 3, 1933. 2 1. Letter to the editor of The Cambridge Review, February 17, 1933 from Christopher Dawson about Sir Herbert Read's review of his book The Modern Dilemma. As printed. 1 1. Letter to the editor of The Cambridge Review about Christopher Dawson's reply to his review. Typescript copy initialled. 2l. As printed. 1 1.

235

Letter to the editor of The Cambridge Review from G. G. Coulton concerning Christopher Dawson's The Modern Dilemma. As printed, i 1. A rather beautiful animal. Review of NRF — the most significant writings from the Nouvelle Revue Française, igig-ig^o, edited by Justin O'Brien. As printed in the New Statesman, November 29, 1958. 1 1. Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1. Introduction (about stained glass). Typescript with corrections. 9 1. Henry Moore (an entry for an artists' dictionary in German). Proof copy. 1 1. The problem of aesthetic consciousness. Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Aesthetics. As printed. 4 pp. An interview with Herbert Read by K. S. Toulson. Writing Today, No. 4, July 1958. As printed. 1 1. The prehistoric artist. Unbound proof copy with corrections. 19 1. British art since 1945. Typescript with corrections. 43 1. Unbound proof copy with corrections. 18 1. Fables from Flanders. Typescript with corrections. 7 1. A painter known as Griinewald. Review of Griinewald by Nikolaus Pevsner and Michael Meier. As printed in The Listener, July 17, 1958. 1 1. Untitled notes about censorship. Holograph. 5 1. Review of The problem of Knowledge by A. J. Ayer. Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1. Préface à la section britannique/Preface to the British Section. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization exhibition of contemporary painting, Paris 1946. In English and French, translated by Simone Boisecq. Printed pamphlet. 13 pp. The language of the eye. Typescript copy. 4 1. As printed in the pamphlet 'An exhibition of British painting since 1900, Bridgend, May 30-June 22, 1940'. (Called 'Art for the people'.) 3 pp. Fifty years of British art, Oslo and Copenhagen, 1956. Typescript copy. 3 1.

236

Review of Art in crisis: the lost centre by Hans Sedlmayr. As printed in the New Statesman. December, 14, 1957. 2 1. Untitled piece about Sam Francis. Brochure for an exhibition of oil paintings and watercolours by Sam Francis, Gimpel Fils, May-June 1957. As printed. 1 p. (2 copies) Constantin Brancusi: 1876-1957. As printed in The Listener, April 4, 1957. 1 1. A portrait of the artist as a martyr. Review of Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert. As printed in The New Statesman and Nation, May 25, 1957. 2•¿ 11 *

The Duveen era. Review of Duveen by S. N. Behrman. As printed in The Listener, July 17, 1952. 1 1. A cobalt bomb. Review of The crowning privilege by Robert Graves. As printed in The Listener, October 6, 1955. 1 1. Presentation of the Royal Gold Medal to Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), R.I.B.A., March 31, 1953. (includes a tribute by Sir Herbert Read.) As printed in the R.I.B.A. Journal, April 1953. 2 1. A call to discipline. In the series 'Books and leisure'. As printed in Public Opinion, March 16, 1951. 1 1. The unity of the arts. As printed in the Penwith Society Broadsheet No. 4. Summer, 1953- 1 PArt (article for an encyclopaedia). Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. Art and healing. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Painting (article for an encyclopaedia). Typescript with corrections. 11 1. Art education (article for an encyclopaedia). Typescript with corrections. 9 1. Education, theory of (from Chamber's Encyclopaedia). Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1. (7 copies) Letter to Sir Herbert Read from the assistant editor of Chamber's Encyclopaedia. Typescript. 1 1. Aesthetics (article for Chamber's Encyclopaedia). Proof sheets. 3 1. 2nd proof sheets glued into pages. 2 1. Proof sheets with corrections. 3 1. (3 copies) Proof sheets glued onto sheets with corrections. 3 1. (2 copies) Other proof sheets glued onto sheets with corrections. 3 1. Other proof sheets glued onto a sheet with corrections. 1 1.

237

Critic's choice 1955, selection by Eric Newton. Pamphlet with notes. 36

Innocence and experience. Typescript with corrections and ten leaves of printed text. 195 1.

37

Introduction (about Heinrich Wõlfflin). Typescript with corrections. 7 1. Introduction to the Critic's Choice Exhibition. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Fifty years of modern poetry. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. A call to discipline. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. T h e challenge of Boimondau. Typescript copy (with one leaf of typescript) with corrections. 7 1T h e church and the world. A review of Christ and culture by H . Richard Niebuhr. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Wilfred Rowland Childe. Typescript copy. 5 1. Tombstones. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Technics and civilization by Lewis Mumford. Typescript copy. 7 1. Review of D. H. Lawrence: selected literary criticism, edited by Anthony Beal. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of The life and work of D. H. Lawrence by Harry T. Moore. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. 1900-1950: Poetry. European Service General News Talk. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Sacred discontent. Review of From the other shore by Alexander Herzen. Typescript copy. 4 1. Review of The Englishness of English art by Nikolaus Pevsner. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Stained glass at Canterbury and Oxford. Review of The ancient glass of Canterbury Cathedral by Bernard Rackham and Medieval glass at All Souls College by F. E. Hutchinson. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Review of The Lascaux cave paintings by Fernand Windels. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1.

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Review of The milennium of Hieronynus Bosch by Wilhelm Franger, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Preface. Typescript copy. 2 1. Word and image. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of An apology for the art of our time by F. A. Wilson. Typescript copy. 2 1. The significance of "De Stijl". Typescript copy with corrections. 1 1. Report. Review of Design for colour by Hilaire Hiler. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of Notes on the technique of design and colour by Hilaire Hiler. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of Artist potters in England by Muriel Rose. Typescript copy. 1 1. Review of Staffordshire chimney ornaments by Reginald G. Haggar. Typescript copy. 2 1. The portrait of an artist. Review of Paul Nash by Anthony Bertram. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Deutsche Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. by Ludwig Grote. Typescript copy. 1 1. Review of Meaning and symbol in three modern artists — Edvard Munch, Henry Moore, Paul Nash by George Wingfield Digby and Poet and painter: being the correspondence between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash, 70/0-/946. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. British lithographs. Typescript copy. 2 1. The present state of design and its relation to the industrial system. Typescript with corrections. 16 1. The making and the unmaking of books. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from M. G. Barber, dated March 12, 1951. Typescript. 1 1. Letter to J. D. Newth from A. D. Peters, dated March 3, 1951. Typescript copy. 1 1. Letter to A. D. Peters from J. D. Newth, dated March 1, 1951. Typescript copy. 2 1. Review of De profundis: the complete text by Oscar Wilde. Typescript copy. 4 1.

239

Foreword. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. A modern gnostic. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of The flies (Les mouches) and In camera (Huis clos) by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Stuart Gilbert and Existentialism by Guido de Ruggiero, edited and introduced by Raynor Heppenstall. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. John Donne. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Review of Elected silence by Thomas Merton. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Plato — dialogues on education. Typescript copy. 4 1. Dublin unrevisited. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. Report. Review of Dissertation on Vico3s theory of poetry by H. S. Davies. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. An open letter to the new director of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Byron: a selj-portrait. Letters and diaries, edited by Peter Quennell. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Down the long slide by Tom Hopkinson. Typescript copy. 2 1. Foreword (to The flea of Sodom by Edward Dahlberg). Typescript with corrections. 3 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Gerard Manley Hopkins by the Kenyon Critics. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. 1984. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Americanism. Review of The American democracy by Harold J. Laski, An inquiry into the principles and policy of the government of the United States by John Taylor and Pioneers of American freedom by Rudolf Rocker. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Review of What is literature? by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Bernard Frechtman. Typescript with corrections. 4 1. Review of The forgotten language by Erich Fromm. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1.

240

Review of A preface to Eighteenth Century poetry by James Sutherland. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Communication. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Herbert Read writes. Typescript copy. 2 1. Letter from Eric W. White of the Poetry Book Society, dated September 21, 1955. Typescript copy. 1 1. The poet's eye. Review of The fire and the fountain by John Press. Typescript copy. 2 1. The creative imagination. Review of The fire and the fountain by John Press and The making of a poem by Stephen Spender. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Proposals for a Scottish philanthropist. Typescript with corrections. 7 1. Newspaper clipping from The Manchester Guardian, December 9> !932. 1 1. Review of Freedom and culture, compiled by UNESCO. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Literature and psychology by F. L. Lucas. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Mill on Bentham and Coleridge. Typescript copy. 3 1. One man show. Review of Rude Assignment by Wyndhaui Lewis. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Report on a visit to France and Switzerland, November 1945. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Wordsworth. Typescript copy with corrections. 9 1. I speak of the ungodly. Review of Bosch's garden of delights by Nicolas Calas. Typescript copy. 3 1. Kicks and ha'pence. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Review of Uhomme révolté (The rebel) by Albert Camus. Holograph and typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. Review of Coleridge by Humphrey House. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of My host the world by George Santayana. Typescript copy. 2 1. Review of The responsibilities of the critic by F. O. Mathiessen and Books in general by V. S. Pritchett. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1.

241

Review of Language as gesture by R. P. Blackmur. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Review of A reading of George Herbert by Rosemond Tuve. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of The art of Wordsworth by Lascelles Abercrombie. Typescript copy with corrections. 1 1. Review of Selected writings of John Ruskin, edited with an introduction by Peter Quennell. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of The note-books of Mathew Arnold, edited by Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young and Waldo Hilary Dunn. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of The wisdom of the stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, translated by Stuart Gilbert. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of The letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, selected with an introduction by Kathleen Raine. Holograph. 1 1. Review of The Victorian temper by Jerome Hamilton Buckley. Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Review of Epistles to several persons (Moral essays) by Alexander Pope, edited by F. W. Bateson and Pope and his critics by W. L. Macdonald. Typescript copy. 1 1. Review of The common pursuit by F. R. Leavis. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Who was the ancient mariner? Review of The wake of the bounty by C. S. Wilkinson. Typescript copy. 3 1. Review of The invisible writings by Arthur Koestler. Typescript and typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Wordsworth: a re-interpretation, by F. W. Bateson. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Foreword (of Rudolf Rocker's Auto-biography). Typescript copy. 3 1. Bonamy Dobrée. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from I. S. Scott-Kilvert of the British Council dated June 30, 1955. Typed. 1 1. Biography of Bonamy Dobrée. Typescript. 1 1. A cobalt bomb. Review of The crowning privilege by Robert Groves. Typescript copy. 4 1. With holograph notes. 1 1.

242

The hovering fly. Review of Critical approaches to literature by David Daiches and The man of letters in the modern world. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of Red, black, blond and olive by Edmund Wilson. Typescript copy. 1 1. Review of The English sense of humor and other essays by Harold Nicolson. Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Review of Heaven and hell by Aldous Huxley. Typescript copy. 1 1. Review of English literature of the Nineteenth Century by R. C. Churchill. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. The return of a native. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. The future of painting: a reply to my critics. Typescript copy. 6 1. (Contains letter to Sir Herbert Read from Ian Finlay, undated. Typescript copy with corrections by Sir Herbert Read. 2l -) Notes from Professor Karl Hofer. Typescript with corrections. 30 1L Notes from Professor Paul Strecker. Typescript with corrections. r» 1

2 1.

Notes from Professor Alexander Gouda. Typescript. 1 1. Notes from Wolfgang Grõzinger. Typescript. 1 1. Notes from Siegmund Lympasik. Typescript. 2 1. Notes from Professor Hermann Beenken. Typescript. 1 1. Everyman as artist. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Untitled (about ideological directives). Typescript with corrections. 4 1. Foreword (to a book by Professor Michelis). Typescript with corrections. 3 1. Tragic art. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Ben Nicholson. Typescript copy. 2 1. Preface (to Stained Glass by Sowers). Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Foreword (about Gyorgy Kepes). Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Report. The question of taste: a study in visual art. Typescript copy. 3 1.

243

Foreword (about Guiseppe Santomaso). Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Willi Baumeister. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of A history of modern criticism: 1750-1 g$o by René Wellek. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Untitled (introduction to an exhibition of the works of sufferers from schizophrenia). Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Review of The art of Indian Asia: its mythology and transformations, by Heinrich Zimmer, completed and edited by Joseph Campbell. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Le Corbusier. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Typescript with corrections. 3 1. L'architetto come uomo universale. As printed in a magazine. 4 1. The critic and the art market. Typescript copy. 3 1. Eroffnungsrede. Typescript with corrections, holograph. 6 1. Two notes in German, both typescript with corrections. 2 1. Untitled (about younger sculptors). Typescript copy. 6 1. Contemporary British sculptors. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. New aspects of British sculpture. Typescript copy. 4 1. Introduction (about prehistoric Australian art). Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Postcard to Sir Herbert Read from the Burlington Magazine, postmarked June 18, 1954. Holograph. 1 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Peter Bellow of the Arts and Letters Division of UNESCO, dated June 14, 1954. Typed with holograph notes. 1 1. The museums scandal. Typescript copy with corrections. 11 1. An aboriginal academician. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. First aid for the arts. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1.

244

Review of Juan Gris: his lije work by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, translated by Douglas Cooper. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Primitive and modern art. Typescript copy. 2 1. Felix Kelly. Typescript copy. 2 1. 2 letters to Sir Herbert Read from Felix Kelly, undated. Holograph. 6 1. Review of The poetical works of William Wordsworth, edited by E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. Typescript copy. 2 1. Review of The gate of horn by G. R. Levy. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. The crisis in bookcraft. Typescript with corrections. 12 1. Novelism at the Royal Academy. Typescript copy with corrections. 13 1. A general impression. Typescript copy. 6 1. Mexican art. As printed in a magazine. 2 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Foreword (Chinese calligraphy by Chiang Yee). Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. The British Pavilion. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Psychologie de l'art anglais jusqu'à la jeune peinture. Typescript copy with corrections. 8 1. A postscript to posterity. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Art and aggression. Typescript copy with corrections. 9 1. Typescript copy. 5 1. Typescript with corrections. 6 1. Review of Aesthetics and history by Bernard Berenson. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Letter to the editor of The Listener about his review of Aesthetics and history by Bernard Berenson. Typescript copy. 2 1. The spirit of 20th Century painting. Holograph. 6 1. The Duveen era (Review of a book of S. N. Behrman). Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1.

245

Review of Art and social life by G. V. Plekhanov. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Keep Whitehall out (pencilled title). Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Review of Criticism and the Nineteenth Century by Geoffrey Tillotson. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of Paul Klee by Carola Giedion-Welcker, translated by Alexander Gode. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Second typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Preface (about Graham Sutherland). In French. Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1. Review of Matisse: his art and his public by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Review of The conduct of life by Lewis Mumford. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. The burden of renewal. Review of Art and technics by Lewis Mumford. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1. Holograph notes. 2 1. Review of The liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. The York Mystery Plays. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. The making and unmaking of books. Typescript with corrections. 5 1. Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1. Preface (to Aspects of form, edited by L. L. Whyte). Typescript copy with notes and corrections. 2 1. Review of The dilemma of the arts by Wladimir Weidle. European Service General News Talks Weekly Book Summary, No. 185. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Review of De Stijl: igi j-1931 by Hans Ludwig JafTe. Typescript with corrections. 2 1. 38

Truth is more sacred : The Dahlberg-Read epistles. Typescript, typescript copy and typescript copy with corrections. 177 1.

39

Art and industry. Unbound copy. London, Faber and Faber, 1944. Second edition. With notes, both holograph and typescript attached, loose corrected proof sheets and a new preface, typescript with corrections for the third edition (revised).

246

Unbound copy. London, Faber and Faber, 1943. Second edition. Holograph notes and corrections. 4 letters to Sir Herbert Read from Richard de la Mare of Faber and Faber, all typed, October and November 1942 (one letter dictated by de la Mare but signed by someone else of Faber and Faber). 4 1. 2 letters from Sir Herbert Read to Richard de la Mare dated November 7, 1942 and February 24, 1943. Typescript copies unsigned. 2 1. Key to redistribution of blocks for the new edition. Typescript copy. 4 1. Holograph. 6 1. Preface to the fifth edition. Typescript with corrections. 17 1. Inside the loose cover of the new edition. Conflicts in contemporary art. County Council of the West Riding of Yorkshire Education Committee, Breton Hall. Printed pamphlet with holograph additions and corrections and attached typescript additions and corrections. The grass roots of art. Unbound copy. Lindsay Drummond, 1947. With holograph corrections and additions throughout. Unbound proof copy. Faber and Faber, 1955. New edition. With holograph corrections and additions throughout. Typescript with corrections and a printed piece attached. 9 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Phyllis A. Reinhardt, Slide and Photograph Librarian, Yale University Division of the Arts, dated January 6, 1955. Typed. 1 1. 5 letters to Sir Herbert Read from C. Dahl, Librarian to Aerofilms Limited, 1954-1955. Typed. 5 1. 2 despatch notes from Aerofilms Ltd. 2 1. 2 letters from Sir Herbert Read to Mr. Shaw, 1954 and 1955. Typescript copy unsigned. 2 1. List of slides. Typescript copy with corrections. 2 1. Holograph. 1 1. 2 letters to Sir Herbert Read from the Art Department of Country Life, December 1954. Typed. 2 1. Letter from Sir Herbert Read to the Librarian of Aerofilms Ltd., dated January 10, 1955. Typescript copy unsigned. 1 1. The grass roots of art. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Joseph Hill, Vice-Principal of The Training College, dated March 19, 1954. Typed. 2 1. Receipt and invoice from Country Life. 2 1. 2 letters to Sir Herbert Read from M. Shaw of Faber and Faber, December 1954. Typed. 2 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Victoria and Albert Museum, dated December 10, 1954. Holograph. 1 1.

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Letter trom Sir Herbert Read to T h e Librarian at Yale University School of Fine Arts, dated December 8, 1954. Typescript copy, unsigned. 1 1. Postcard to Sir Herbert Read from Reg., dated March 10, 1955, with a photograph of sculpture attached. 1 1. 2 letters to Sir Herbert Read from Faber and Faber, March !955- Typed. 2 1. Photograph. 1 1. Unbound proof copy with corrections. Loosely inside printed cover of book. This way delight. Delight, a first book of poems for children. Chosen by Herbert Read. Holograph in notebook. 69 pp. With loose newspaper clippings. Holograph notes and a postcard. 15 1. Unbound proof copy on newsprint paper. Earlier unbound proof copy on heavier paper. Proof sheets of poems included with corrections. 45 1. Typescript copy of the poems with notes. 58 1. Typescript. 63 1. Letters connected with the publication of This way delight: 2 letters from Alida Monro, the widow of Harold Monro, 1 typed, the other holograph. 2 1. 50 letters to Sir Herbert Read from various publishers. Typed. 58 1. 45 letters from Sir Herbert Read to various publishers. Typescript copy unsigned. 49 1. (3 of these are from Sir Herbert Read's secretary.) Various lists of the poems to be used. Typescript copy with corrections and typescript with corrections. 9 1. Index of first lines. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Acknowledgements. Typescript copy with corrections. 4 1. Material about copyright fees. Typescript copy with corrections, typescript with corrections, holograph. 32 1. W h a t is poetry? Typescript with corrections and holograph. 11 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 7 1. Permission forms from various publishers. 3 1. Blurb. Typescript copy. 3 1. Sample page. Printed. 1 1. Some poems. Typescript. 6 1. Typescript copy. 6 1. Lecture. Typescript with corrections. 31 1. Lecture materials. Holograph, typescript, typescript copy and printed material. 54 1-

Journal de psychologie. 15 Janvier- 15 Février, 1931. With holograph notes. British Museum. Lantern slides catalogue. Announcement in Danish of a lecture by Sir Herbert Read, April 26, 1935. 2 1. Art and crisis. Typescript copy with corrections, holograph, and typescript with corrections. 71 1. Notes. Typescript copy with corrections and holograph. 5 1. Letter to the editor from G. P. Snow about a review by Sir Herbert Read of Snow's Rede Lecture. Proof copy with corrections. 1 1.

Letter to the editor from Sir Herbert Read in answer to the above. Typescript copy with corrections. 3 1. Threshold of a new age. Proof sheets with corrections. 3 1. Philosophy of change. Proof sheets with corrections. 2 1. The informal image in modern art. Typescript with corrections. 20 1. List of slides. Holograph. 1 1. Typescript with corrections. 1 1. 60 American painters: i960. Walker Art Centre, April 3 - May 8, i960. Brochure. Excerpts from article by Jean Dubuffet, Daedalus, Winter i960. Typescript with notes. 2 1. Contemporary British art. Typescript with corrections and notes. 65 1. Typescript copy with corrections. 42 1. Proof sheets with corrections. 14 1. List of artists. Typescript, typescript copy and printed on small pieces of paper with corrections and notes pinned to the back of proof sheets of The Flea of Sodom. 5 1. Proof sheets of the plates. 10 1. Some plates cut from sheets, some loose. 14 letters to Sir Herbert Read about the publication Contemporary British art, from artists, their representatives and publishers. Holograph and typed. 17 1. Blurb. Typescript copy. 1 1. Miscellaneous notes on artists and coloured plates. Typescript, typescript copy and printed. 28 1. 42 Kenyon lectures. English prose style. (June 23-August 6, 1949). Typescript with corrections. 75 1. (Inserted clippings, pamphlets, proof-sheets, and printed pages.) Typescript copy. 80 1.

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Typed letters from A. W. Ready regarding English prose style. o«4 11 . Reply, unsigned, typescript copy, i 1. The modern epoch in art. Typescript with corrections. 41 1. Paul Nash. Typescript. 16 1. Paul Nash. Typescript copy. 4 1. List of illustrations. Typescript copy. 2 1. 4 letters signed "Margaret". Holograph. 4 1. Instructions for the trustees of the Paul Nash estate. Typescript copy. 3 1. Remarks on the Memorial Volume selected by Paul Nash. Typescript. 19 1. Supplementary list of pictures. Typescript with corrections. 9 1. Unseen landscapes by Paul Nash. (Published in Country Life, May 21, I93 8 )Typescript copy. 4 1. For, but not with. Typescript copy. 6 1. Art and war by Paul Nash. Typescript copy. 15 1. 15 letters about Paul Nash's autobiography. Typescript, typescript copy, and holograph. 15 1. Typescript, p. 14-20. "duplicate copy". A metaphysical artist. Geoffrey Grigson or Paul Nash. Clipping from The Listener, April 1, 1948. 2 1. Chronology. "Final copy". Typescript copy. 4 1. Editor's preface. Typescript copy. 5 1. List of illustrations to accompany "Outline". Typescript and typescript copy. 4 1. Anarchy and order. Unbound proof copy with corrections. Reason and romanticism. Proof copy bound in plain paper wrapper. Incomplete with some loose leaves. Proof copy with corrections bound in plain paper wrapper. Unbound proof copy. Incomplete.

Annals of innocence and experience. Proof copy unbound of title page and introductory pages. Contains, loosely inserted, corrections to the page proofs of The innocent eye. Typescript copy and holograph. 3 1. Collected poems. Unbound proof copy with corrections. The politics of the unpolitical. Unbound proof copy with corrections, in loose printed wrapper. 44 Coleridge as critic. Unbound proof copy with corrections. Art now. Unbound proof copy with corrections. Unbound proof copy with new preface to this new edition attached and corrections throughout. Proof copy of the index with corrections. Notes on some painters. Typescript copy with corrections and holographs. 11 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Curt Valentin, dated December 10, 1946. Typed. 1 1.

Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Frank McE., dated February 9, 1948. 2 1. Icon and idea. Unbound proof copy with corrections and the plates. Selected writings: poetry and prose. Unbound proof copy with corrections. In printed paper wrapper. Proof copy of title page and foreword of the English (Faber) edition with American (Horizon) notice attached to title page and American printing information on verso. 45 Collected essays in literary criticism. Unbound proof copy with corrections. Preface to the Italian edition. Typescript copy with corrections. 41. Contents. Typescript copy. 1 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Faber proof-reader J. C. Jennett. Typed with notes and corrections. 2 1. Corrections. Holograph. 1 1. Unbound proof gatherings of various books, many pencil marks throughout. Loose in an exercise-book cover: 2 letters to Sir Herbert Read from Irene Maguiness, dated January and February 1945. Holograph. 8 1. Art through education. Holograph. 23 1. Information from the Leeds Girls' High School. Typescript copy with notes. 4 1. C.L.C. Art Syllabus. Typescript copy with corrections. 5 1.

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Herbert Read und die englische Kunsterziehung von Herbert Klingst. In German. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Kathleen Bartlett, dated June 18, 1946. Holograph. 1 1. Biology in art and education. Review of Sir Herbert Read's Education through art by Hans Syz. Typescript copy with pencil underlinings. 13 1. Letter to Ian Gaha from Sir Herbert Read, dated January 19, 1948. Typescript copy with corrections. 1 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Ian Caha, dated December 30, x 947Typescript. 2 1. Letters and lists of corrections from Faber and Faber. Typescript, typescript copy and holograph. 10 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Gpl. Smith. Holograph. 2 1. Review of Sir Herbert Read's Education through art by Hans Syz. Reprinted from Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations, Volume ten, number one, February 1947. 7 pp., 5 copies. Newspaper clipping in German dated May 15, 1949 mentioning Sir Herbert Read's Education through art. 1 1. Brochure from The Museum of Modern Art's Art Glasses, FallSpring, 1944-1945. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Emay Twining, dated November 8, 1944. Typed. 1 1. Two newspaper clippings from The Times. 2 1. Pamphlet No. 8 from Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools. Drawing and painting by A. M. Carr. Pamphlet from the Eighth Grade Fine Arts, 1946. Thomas Jefferson Jr. High, Cleveland, Ohio. 46 The contrary experience. Corrected proof sheets with 3 leaves of typescript and holograph. 136 1. Letter to Sir Herbert Read from Eileen Brooksbank of Faber and Faber, dated January 16, 1963. Typed. 1 1. Letter from Sir Herbert Read to Eileen Brooksbank, dated February 2, 1963. Typescript copy with carboned signature. 1 1. Henry Moore Exhibition for American universities, 1965. Introduction. Typescript copy with corrections. 6 1. (2 copies)

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Contents. Typescript, i 1. 5 letters from Sir Herbert Read about the Henry Moore Exhibition (one to Henry M o o r e ) . Typescript copy. 5 1. 7 letters about the exhibition to Sir Herbert Read or copies for his attention. Typed and typescript copies. 7 1. Memorandum. Typescript with corrections. 2 1. A telegram to Sir Herbert Read from Robert Richman. Typescript and typescript copy. 2 1. (2 copies) 47

Jacob Kramer. Holograph. 5 1. Catalogue of the Exhibition of the work of Jacob Kramer, 8 September - g October ig6o, Leeds City Art Gallery. Presentation copy to Herbert Read. Letter to Jacob Kramer, dated 6.4.18. Pencilled holograph. 3 1. Drawing to Read, dated 23.8.19. 1 1.

Correspondence 48

Letters to Sir Herbert Read from : Ackerley, Joe. 20. Holograph. Aldington, Richard. 72. Holograph and typed. Bill, Clive. 3. Holograph. Benda, Julien. 1. Holograph. Berber, John. 10. Holograph and typed. (A poem titled "War Pastoral" dedicated to Read included. Holograph. 1 1.) Blunden, Edmund. 1. Holograph. Boulton, Marjorie. 5. Holograph. Bowes Lyon, Lilian. 11. Holograph. Breton, André. 5. Holograph. Bunting, Basil. 1. Typed. Burri, Minka. 1. Holograph. Butler, Reg. 1. Holograph. Calder, Sandy. 1. Holograph. Cairns, Huntington. 4. Typed. Cary, Joyce. 1. Holograph. Childe, Wilfred Rowland. 22. Holograph. Church, Richard. 14. Holograph and typed. Clark, Kenneth. 4. Holograph and typed. Coghill, Nevill. 1. Holograph. Comfort, Alex. 7. Holograph and typed. Connolly, Cyril. 2. Typed. Cooper, D . 13. Holograph and typed. Dahlberg, Edward. 229. Typed ( 1 holograph). Davie, Alan. 1. Holograph. Day-Lewis, Cecil. 1. Holograph. de la Mare, Walter. 2. Typed.

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Dickinson, Lowes. 8. Typed. Dobrée, Bonamy. 50. Typed. Dobrée, Valentine. 13. Holograph and typed. Dubuffet, Jean. 1. Typed. Duthuit, Georges. 7. Holograph. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 158. Holograph and typed. Elouard, Paul. 10. Holograph. Erni, Hans. 4. Holograph and typed. Evans, Merlyn. 1. Holograph. Faber, Enid. 1. Holograph. Faber, Geoffrey. 3. Holograph and typed. Finlay, Ian Hamilton. 1. Typed. Flint, F. S. 6. Holograph and typed. Ford, Ford Madox. 10. Holograph and typed. Forster, Edward Morgan. 2. Holograph. Frost, Terry. 2. Holograph. Fry, Roger. 1. Holograph. Gabo, Naum. 47. Holograph and typed. Garnett, Edward. 1. Holograph. Gill, Eric. 6. Holograph and typed. Giono, Jean. 4. Holograph. Gollancz, Victor. 2. Typed. Graves, Robert. 1. Holograph. Greene, Graham. 2. Typed. Grierson, H . J. G. 1. Holograph. Grigson, Geoffrey. 3. Holograph. Grohmann, Will. 8. Typed. Gropius, Walter. 4. Holograph and typed. Hanley, James. 5. Holograph and typed. Hanley, Timothy. 1. Holograph. Hayward, John. 1. Holograph. Hayter, S. W. 1. Typed. Hélion, Jean. 9. Holograph and typed. Heppenstall, Rayner. 21. Holograph and typed. Hepworth, Barbara. 76. Holograph and typed. Heron, Patrick. 8. Holograph. Hitchens, Ivon. 7. Holograph. Housman, A. E. 1. Holograph. Hughes, Ted. 1. Holograph. Hugnet, Georges. 4. Holograph. Hull, Richard. 16. Typed. Hutchings, Patrick. 1. Holograph. Huxley, Julian. 1. Typed. John, Augustus. 1. Holograph. Jones, David. 11. Holograph. Jung, G. G. 5. Holograph and typed. Kandinsky, Wassily. 5. Typed. Knight, G. Wilson. 5. Holograph.

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Kokoschka, O. io. Holograph and typed. Kramer, Jacob. 12. Holograph. Lanyon, Peter. 4. Holograph. Lawrence, T. E. 2. Holograph. Le Bas, Edward. 1. Holograph. Le Corbusier. 1. Holograph. Leavis, F. P. 1. Holograph. Lewis, Wyndham. 14. Holograph and typed. Lowry, L. S. 1. Holograph. M c William, F. E. 3. Holograph. Mason, Bateson. 1. Holograph. Mathieu, Georges. 1. Holograph. Meadows, Bernard. 2. Holograph. Miller, Henry. 12. Holograph and typed. Miró, Joan. 3. Holograph. Mitchison, Naomi. 1. Typed. Moholy-Nagy. 2. Holograph. Moore, Henry. 17. Holograph and typed. Morley, F. V. 48. Holograph and typed. Muir, Edwin. 11. Holograph and typed. Muir, Willa. 3. Holograph. Murry, J. Middleton. 9. Holograph and typed. (In addition: 2 holograph letters by John Bailey to Murry.) Myers, Leo. 4. Holograph. Nash, John. 3. Holograph. Nash, Paul. 5. Holograph. (Paper by Read on Paul Nash included. Typescript copy with corrections. 17 1.) Newson, John. 2. Holograph and typed. Nicholson, Ben. 134. Holograph. Orage, A. R. 32. Holograph. Orwell, George. 3. Typed photocopies. (6 letters concerning photo-copies included.) Pasmore, Victor. 2. Holograph. Payne, Robert. 27. Typed. Piper, John. 1. Holograph. Plomer, William. 2. Holograph. Pound, Dorothy. 1. Holograph. Pound, Ezra. 3. Holograph and typed. Rackham, B. 2. Holograph. Raine, Kathleen. 28/Holograph and typed. Remarque, Erich Maria. 6. Holograph and typed. Richards, I. A. 2. Holograph. Richter, Hans. 5. Holograph and typed. Roberts, William. 1. Holograph. Romains, Jules. 2. Holograph. Rothenstein, Michael. 2. Holograph. Rothenstein, William. 2. Holograph. Russell, Bertrand. 2. Typed.

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Russell, Peter. 5. Typed. Sackville-West, Edward. 1. Holograph. Sadler, M . E. 13. Holograph. Sassoon, Siegfried. 5. Holograph. Scott, Tom. 1. Typed. Sell, Joseph. 1. Holograph. Shahn, Ben. 1. Typed. Sickert, Walter. 1. Holograph. Simenon, Denise. 1. Typed. Simenon, Georges. 1. Typed. Sitwell, Osbert. 1. Holograph. Sitwell, Sacheverell. 2. Holograph. Spark, Muriel. 4. Holograph. Spender, Stephen. 32. Holograph and typed. Stein, Leo. 1. Holograph. Steinberg, Saul. 1. Holograph. Stokes, Adrian. 21. Holograph. Stravinsky, Igor. 1. Typed. Sutherland, Graham. 2. Holograph. Tapié, Michel. 1. Holograph. Tapies, Antonio. 1. Typed. Tate, Allen. 18. Holograph and typed. Tate, Isabella. 1. Holograph. Thomas, Dylan. 3. Holograph. Thompson, D'Arcy W. 1. Typed. Tippett, Michael. 1. Typed. Townsend, William. 1. Holograph and typed. Treece, Henry. 45. Holograph and typed. Waley, Arthur. 1. Holograph. Webb, Beatrice. 4. Typed. Wedgwood, Josiah. 2. Holograph. Wells, H. G. 7. Holograph and typed. (Including one signed by Marjorie Wells (Mrs. G. P. Wells), his secretary.) Wells, John. 1. Holograph. Wharton, Edith. 2. Holograph. Wheen, Arthur Wesley. 14. Holograph. Wilson, Colin. 8. Typed. Wingfield, Sheila. 5. Holograph and typed. Woodcock, George. 3. Typed. Woolf, Leonard. 2. Typed. Woolf, Virginia. 1. Holograph. Worringer, Marta. 1. Holograph. Worringer, Wilhelm. 18. Holograph and typed. Yeats, William Butler. 1. Typed. Miscellaneous. 141 letters. Holograph, typed, typed copy.

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Letters, unsigned carbons, from Sir Herbert Read t o : Alford, John. 1. (Letter from Alford to John S. Keel included.)

Berger, John. 4 (Proof copy of a review by Berger of The Grass roots of art included.) Dahlberg, Edward. 16. Dickinson, Lowes. 1. Dubuffet, Jean. 1. Eliot, T. S. 10. (includes 1 pencilled holograph) Erni, Hans. 2. (2 photographs and a paper on Erni by Read, typescript copy, 3 1., included.) Faber, Geoffrey. 1. Gabo, Naum. 3. Grohmann, Professor Will. 7. Hepworth, Barbara. 1. Higham, David. 1. Hitchens, Ivon. 2. Hull, Richard. 3. (Change of address included) Jung, Dr. G. G. 3. (Includes letters from Jung's secretary and typescript copy of The legend of the green children,) Koestler, Arthur. 1. (Includes telegram from Arthur Koestler, Georges Mikes, Stephen Spender and three-page statement on Russian invasion of Hungary.) Moore, Henry. 1. (Includes letter to Read from J. R. M . Brumwell.) Muir, Edwin. 2. Newsom, John. 1. Nicholson, Ben. 3. (Includes typescript copy with corrections, 8 1.; paper by Read on Nicholson.) Raine, Kathleen. 2. Richards, L A . 1. (holograph "copy") Russell, Peter. 1. Spender, Stephen. 2. (2nd letter has holograph additions in red pencil.) Wells, H . G. 3. Wilson, Colin. 3. Miscellaneous. 23. 50

Freedom Defence Committee. Constitution. Typescript copy and mimeograph. 5 1. Draft letters to sponsors and friends. 6 1. 21 letters replying to appeal for funds. Typescript and holograph. Replies from : E. M . Forster. 2. (initialled postcard and signed holograph) George Orwell. 1. (signed holograph) Bertrand Russell. 2. (signed holograph and typescript reply from Read) Stephen Spender. 1. (signed holograph) Graham Sutherland. 1. (signed post card)

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Julian Symons. i. (signed typescript) Leonard Woolf. 2. (signed typescript) Freedom Press. Copy of circular letter dated October 25, 1944. Typescript. 1 1. Freedom press defence. Typescript copy. 9 1. Letter from The Times, John Webb, to Read. Typescript. 1 1. Letter from Read "To the editor". Typescript copy. 2 1. Letter from Read to "Commander Stephen King-Hall, M.P." Typescript copy. 1 1. Newspaper clippings.

Notes on Contributors

SIR HERBERT READ (1893-1968) HERBERT EDWARD READ was born on his father's farm, Muscoates Grange, at Kirbymoorside in Yorkshire on December 4, 1893. He spent the first ten years on the farm and then went to a Halifax boarding school. On leaving school he worked in a bank for three years before entering Leeds University, where his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. He served in the Yorkshire Regiment (the Green Howards) from 1915 to 1918, earning the D.S.O. and the M.C. From 1919 to 1922 he worked at the Treasury and from 1922 to 1931 was Assistant Keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum. From 1931 to 1933 he was Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh, and from 1935 to 1939 he was Editor of the Burlington Magazine. In 1935-1936 he was Sydney Jones Lecturer in Art at the University of Liverpool, in 1940-1942 Leon Fellow of the University of London, in 1953-1954 Charles Elliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, and in 1954 the A. W. Mellon Lecturer in Fine Arts at Washington, D.C. In 1962 he was made Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art and an honorary Professor of the University of Cordoba, Argentine, and awarded an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts by the University of Buffalo. He received the degree of Litt.D. from the Universities of Boston and York and that of D. Litt. from the University of Leeds. He was President of the Society for Education through Art, of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and of the British Society of Aesthetics. He became a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1965, and in 1966 with Rene Huyghe, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize. He was knighted in 1953.

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GEORGE BARKER (1913) was born in Essex. He has taught in Japan as a Professor of English Literature, and is the author of two novels and many books of poems. His Collected Poems (1930-55) were published by Faber & Faber in 1957. Later volumes include Two Plays (1958), The View from the Blind I (1962), and Dreams of a Summer Night (1966). SAM BLACK (1913) was born in Scotland, and educated there and in France and Belgium. He was a schoolteacher in the years before the Second World War, and after his war service became one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, and, later, Principal Lecturer in Art at Jordanhill Teachers College, Glasgow. He is a Founder Member of The International Society for Education Through Art, and a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours, the Canadian Society of Graphic Art, the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour. He was a Commonwealth Visiting Fellow to Australia in 1963 and is currently Professor and Acting Head of the Art Education and Fine Art Department of the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. His paintings are represented in many public collections in Europe and North America. He is married and has four daughters. EDWARD DAHLBERG ( 1900) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Columbia University. He is the author of many works of fiction and criticism, including Bottom Dogs (1929), Those Who Perish (1934), Do These Bones Live (1940), The Flea of Sodom (1950), The Sorrows of Priapus (1957), and, in collaboration with Herbert Read, Truth is More Sacred (1961). His autobiography, Because I was Flesh, was published in 1964. DONALD DAVIE (1922) was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, and educated at Cambridge. He has published two books of criticism, Articulate Energy ( x 957) a n d Ezra Pound, Poet as Sculptor (1964), and three collections of poetry, Brides of Reason (1955), A Winter Talent (1957) and Events and Wisdoms (1963). From 1964 to 1968 he was Chairman of the Department of Literature at the University of Essex. He is at present Professor of English at Stanford University. BON AM Y DOBREE (1891) was educated at Haileybury, Woolwich, and Cambridge, and published his first book, the classic study Restoration Comedy, in 1924. Since that time he has published many biographies, books of criticism, anthologies, and scholarly editions as well as a number of imaginary dialogues and some fiction. Generally regarded as a leading scholar of the eighteenth century (his Early Eighteenth Century is the most brilliant volume in the Oxford History of English Literature of which he was a General Editor) he is also an authority on several modern writers. Of his more than thirty books perhaps the most outstanding are Essays in Biography (1925), John Wesley (1933), As Their Friends Saw Them (1933), Alexander Pope (1951), The Broken Cistern (1954). He was Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds from 1936 to 1955, and Gresham Professor in Rhetoric from 1955 t o x 96i. His wife Valentine (nee Brooke-Pechell) is a painter and author. He was awarded the O.B.E. in 1929. ROY FULLER (1912) was born in Failsworth, Lancashire, and educated at private schools. He is a solicitor and since 1958 has been Legal Advisor to the Building Societies Association. He is the author of eight novels and nine collections of poems, including Poems (1939), The Middle of a War (1942),

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Counterparts (1954), Collected Poems 1936-61 (1962) and Buff (1965). He is married with one son, the poet John Fuller, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1968 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. HOWARD B. GERWING (1932) was born in Kelowna, British Columbia, and educated at the University of British Columbia. He is the Special Collections Librarian of the University of Victoria, and editor of British Columbia Library Quarterly. WALTER GROPIUS (1883-1969) .was born in Berlin, and studied at the Technische Hochschule there and in Munich. Before the First World War he designed factories, residences, furniture, and locomotives. He served with the Ninth Hussars during the War and was awarded many decorations. In 1918 he created the Staatliches Bauhaus at Weimar, later moving it to Dessau where the school he himself had designed was dedicated in 1926. Between 1926 and 1934 when he voluntarily left Hitler's Germany, he created many designs for residences, theatres, factories, prefabricated houses and car bodies. In England from 1934 to 1937 he designed buildings in collaboration with Maxwell Fry. In 1937 he became a permanent resident of the United States and senior Professor of Architecture at Harvard. Together with Moholy-Nagy he established the New Bauhaus (later called the Chicago Institute of Design). In 1938 he became chairman of the Department of Architecture in Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He designed the Harvard Graduate Centre (completed in 1950) and many other buildings for government and industry. He received many honorary degrees and other marks of distinction from universities and organizations in Europe and America. MICHAEL HAMBURGER (1924) was born in Berlin, Germany but moved to England at an early age. His first book, a translation of Holderlin, was published in 1943 when he was serving in the British Army. He has published five collections of poems, of which the most recent are Weather and Season (1963) and In Flashlight (1965). His translations include Holderlin: Poems and Fragments (1966), and, in collaboration with Christopher Middleton, Modern German Poetry 1910-1960. He has published three books of criticism, and has lectured in German at University College, London, and at the University of Reading. In 1966-67 he was Purington Lecturer at Mount Holyoke College, Mass. At present he lives in London. BARBARA HEPWORTH (1903) was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and studied at Leeds Royal College of Aft. She was awarded a C.B.E. in 1958 and a D.B.E. in 1965 and has received the honorary degree of D.Litt. from the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, and Exeter. Her sculpture has been awarded many international prizes including the Grand Prix of the 5 th Sao Paolo Biennial in 1959, and her work is represented in public collections throughout the world. A one-man exhibition of her work was presented at the 25th Venice Bienniale in 1950, and retrospective exhibitions of her work were held in 1954 and 1962. She has been a Trustee of the Tate Gallery since 1965. Sir Herbert Read contributed a foreword to her 1952 volume, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, published by Lund Humphries. Her most recent publication is Drawings from a Sculptor's Landscape (Corey Adams & Mackay, 1966). She lives in St. Ives, Cornwall. JOHN HOLLO WAY (1920) was educated at New College, Oxford. He was a Fellow of All Souls from 1946 to i960, and currently teaches at Queens

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College, Cambridge. He is the author of many works of criticism, including Language and Intelligence (1951), The Victorian Sage (1953), The Chartered Mirror ( i 9 6 0 ) , and The Story of the Night (1961). He has published three collections of poetry, The Minute (1956), The Fugue ( i 9 6 0 ) and The Landfallers (1962). He is married, with one daughter, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. ANTHONY KERRIGAN (1918) was born in Massachusetts and studied Sino-Japanese at the University of California in Berkeley. He is the editor of Borges' Personal Anthology (Grove, 1967) and is the editor with Herbert Read and Martin Nozick of the currently appearing Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno. He divides his time between Dublin and Spain. THOMAS KINSELLA (1928) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and educated at University College, Dublin. He worked as a Civil Servant until 1965, when he became Poet in Residence at the University of Southern Illinois. He has published a number of translations from the Irish; and his books of poetry include Poems (1956), Another September (1958), Moralities ( i 9 6 0 ) , Downstream (1962), Wormwood (1966) and Nightwalker and Other Poems (1968). A group of his worksheets were featured in Malahat 3. G. WILSON KNIGHT (1897) was educated at Dulwich College and St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. A Shakespearean producer and actor as well as scholar, he has directed, in England and Canada, productions of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, in all of which he has played the leading role. His first books on Shakespeare revolutionized Shakespearian criticism; in The Wheel of Fire (1930), The Imperial Theme ( 1931 ) , The Shakespearean Tempest ( 1932), he established a totally new way of examining and interpreting poetic drama. His later Shakespearean books, Principles of Shakespearean Production (1936, reissued and enlarged as Shakespearean Production in 1964), and The Mutual Flame (1955) were equally perceptive and imaginative. In addition to his work on Shakespeare, he has written several books on Byron and commented vividly upon the work of John Cowper Powys, Alexander Pope, John Milton and the Romantics. His autobiographical Atlantic Crossing was published in 1936 and his one play, The Last of the Incas, in 1954. He was Professor of English at Trinity College, Toronto from 1931 to 1940, and later occupied a chair in English Literature at the University of Leeds of which he is now Emeritus Professor. His latest book, a collection of essays spanning forty years of his explorations, entitled Shakespeare and Religion, has just been published by Routledge & Kegan Paul. He was awarded a C.B.E. in 1968. JACOB KRAMER (1892-1962) was born inKlincy in the Ukraine. The family left Russia in 1900 and settled in Leeds. He taught at Bradford and Leeds Schools of Art for many years, and in i960 was honoured with a retrospective exhibition by Leeds City Art Gallery. The catalogue of this exhibition included a long introduction by Herbert Read who had been a friend since before the First World War. DENISE LEVERTOV (1923) was born in Ilford, Essex, and settled in the United States shortly after the close of the Second World War. Her collections of poetry include The Double Image (1946), Overland to the Islands ( ! 9 5 8 ) , With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads ( i 9 6 0 ) , The Jacobs Ladder (1961). She is married to Mitchell Goodman and lives in New York.

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HENRY MOORE ( 1898) is now generally regarded as the world's greatest living sculptor. He was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, and, after serving in the First World War, studied at the Leeds School of Art, and then the Royal College of Art in London. His work is represented in over fifty public collections in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia. His most recent public commission was the creation of a Reclining Figure for the Unesco building in Paris (1957-58). He has received the honorary degree of D.Litt. from the Universities of Leeds, London, Reading, Hull and Oxford. He has a doctorate in Arts from Harvard, a Doctorate in Law from Cambridge and a Doctorate in Engineering from Berlin. He has been a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission since 1947, and a member of the National Theatre Committee since 1962. He was a member of the Arts Council from 1963 to 1967, and a Trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1941 to 1956. He was a Trustee of the National Gallery from 1955 to 1963 and from 1964 to the present. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1955 and received an O.M. in 1963. BEN NICHOLSON (1894) w * s born in Denham, Bucks, England, and studied at the Slade. His paintings and reliefs have brought him many international prizes, and his work is represented in most of the major public collections throughout the world. Sir Herbert Read introduced the two volumes surveying his work from 1911 to 1948 and from 1948 to 1955, which were published in 1948 and 1956 respectively. In 1954 he received the "Ulissi" Prize at the Venice Biennale, in 1956 the Governor of Tokyo prize at the 3rd International, in 1956 the Grand Prix at the 4th Lugano International, and in 1957 the 1st International Prize at the 4th Sao Paolo Biennial. In 1 §57 he also received the first Guggenheim Foundation Award. He lives in Switzerland. He received an O.M. in 1968. NORMAN NICHOLSON (1914) was born in Millom, Cumberland, where he still lives. He is the author of the standard work on Cumberland and Westmoreland in The County Books series, and of The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists (1955). He has celebrated the life of the small provincial town in his touching and witty Provincial Pleasures (1959) and has written two critical works about William Cowper. His verse plays (The Old Man of the Mountains (1946), Prophesy to the Wind (1950), A Match for the Devil (1955), Birth by Drowning ( i 9 6 0 ) ) have been widely performed in Britain, but he is chiefly known for his three books of poems, Five Rivers (1944), Rock Face (1948), The Pot Geranium (1954). His Selected Poems appeared in 1966. VICTOR PASMORE (1908) studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He was Master of Painting in the Department of Fine Art of Durham University from 1954 to 1961, and has been consulting architectural designer for Peterlee New Town since 1955. His paintings and reliefs are represented in many public collections in Europe, Australia, and North America. He was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1963 to 1966. In 1959 he was awarded a C.B.E. SIR ROLAND PENROSE (1900) was educated at Queen's College, Cambridge, and in France. He organized the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 and painted and exhibited with the Surrealist group in London before the outhreak of the Second World War. He was a founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and has been its chairman since 1947. He was a Trustee of the Tate Gallery from 1959 to 1966, and

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organized that Gallery's Picasso Exhibition of i960. His publications include The Road is Wider than Long (1939), In the Service of the People (1945) and Picasso, His Life and Work (1958). He was awarded a C.B.E. in 1961 and a knighthood in 1966. He lives in Sussex. MICHAEL W. PIDGEON (1945) was born in Rochford, Essex, and educated at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, where he is at present pursuing graduate studies in linguistics. KATHLEEN RAINE (1908) was born in London and educated at Girton College, Cambridge. She has published six collections of poetry, Stone and Flower (1943), Living in Time (1946), The Pythoness (1949), The Year One (1952), Collected Poems (1956), and The Hollow Hill (1965). Her collection of critical essays, Defending Ancient Springs, was published in 1967, and her Andrew Mellon lectures on Blake have just been published in two lavishly illustrated volumes by the Bollingen Foundation under the title Blake and Tradition. STEPHEN SPENDER (1909) was born in London and educated at University College, Oxford. One of the leading poets of the thirties in England, he became, in the forties and fifties, also a prominent critic and editor. He was co-editor of Horizon from 1939 to 1941 and of Encounter from 1953 to 1967. He has held senior academic appointments at Northwestern University and the Universities of Cincinatti and California. In 1966 he delivered the Clark Lectures at the University of Cambridge, and in 1968 the Mellon Lectures in Washington, D.C. In 1967 he was a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the author of over thirty books including an autobiography, World within World (1951), the critical works, The Creative Element (1953) and The Making of a Poem (1955), and numerous volumes of poetry. His Collected Poems appeared in 1954. In 1962 he was awarded the C.B.E. REGINALD C. TERRY (1932) was born in England and educated at the Universities of Leicester, Bristol and Michigan. After working for some years as a journalist and in the field of Adult Education he emigrated to Canada and in 1965 joined the English Department of the University of Victoria. He is at present on leave in London where he is completing a Doctoral dissertation on Anthony Trollope. FELICITAS VOGLER (1922) lives with her husband, Ben Nicholson, in Switzerland. Her photographs have been represented in many international exhibitions and she has presented several one-man shows. GEORGE WOODCOCK (1912) was born in Winnipeg and educated in England where, from 1940 to 1947, he edited the magazine Now. He returned to Canada in 1949. He has published biographical studies of William Godwin ( 1946 ), Peter Kropotkin ( 1950 ) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon ( !953)> a n d critical studies of the work of Aphra Behn (1948), Oscar Wilde (1950) and George Orwell (1966). The Writer in Politics appeared in 1948, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements in 1962, and Civil Disobedience in 1966. He is the author of four collections of verse, The White Island (1940), The Centre Cannot Hold (1942), Image the South (1949) a n d Selected Poems (1967). Since 1956 he has taught English and Asian studies at the University of British Columbia where he edits the quarterly, Canadian Literature.

264

Routledge Revivals

The Tenth Muse

This book, first published in 1957, is a collection of Herbert Read’s essays on various topics. The essays explore many different subjects and themes, including art, literature, religion and philosophy. This title will be of interest to a variety of readers.

The Tenth Muse Essays in Criticism

Herbert Read

First published in 1957 by Routledge & Kegan Paul This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1957 Benedict Read All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 58000464 ISBN 13: 978-1-138-91397-4 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-315-69109-1 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978-1-138-91407-0 (Set) ISBN 13: 978-1-315-69097-1 (Set) (ebk)

PAUL g a u g u in : M aternity

18 8 9

THE TEN TH M USE

Essays in Criticism by H ERBERT READ

R O U T L E D G E & K EG A N PAUL

London

First published 1957 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited Broadway House Carter Lane E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by Wyman & Sons Ltd. London Fakenham & Reading © by Herbert Read

To W . G. A R C H E R , O .B.E. who suggested this book

CONTENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 g 10 11 12 13 14 13 16 17 18 ig 20 21 22 23

On Something in Particular The Art of Art Criticism Gauguin: the Return to Symbolism The Inspired Tinker Goethe and Art Naum Gabo Walter Pater The Writer and His Region Max Stirner Frank Lloyd Wright Religion and Culture Michelangelo and Bernini The Limits of Logic Baudelaire as Art Critic The Image in Modern English Poetry De Tocqueville on Art in America Sotto Voce George Lukács The Romantic Revolution The Sustaining Myth On First Reading Nietzsche The Drama and the Theatre Two Notes on a Trilogy vii

l 3 30 37 43 32 38 66 74 82 go gy 106 113 117 138 146 136 162 171 1 73 181 i8g

CONTENTS

24 C. G.Jung 25 6The Prelude’ 26 Barbara Hepworth 27 Susanne Langer 28 Henry Miller 29 cDe StijT 30 Ezra Pound 31 The Architect as Universal Man 32 Gandhi 33 The Enjoyment of Art 34 D ’Arcy Thompson 33 A Seismographic Art 36 Tribal Art and Modern Man 37 Graham Sutherland 38 Kokoschka 39 The Problem of the Zeitgeist 40 The Faith of a Critic Notes

viii

197 215 228 239 250 236 260 275 284 288 293 297 304 310 3 13 316 322 329

ILLUSTRATIONS Plate 1

Page

P aul G auguin : Maternity, 1889

Frontispiece

Oil on canvas, 37 x 23-J ins. Private Collection, U .S.A . Photo : Soichi Sunami

2

A lexander C alder with Myxomatose, 1953-4 Metal construction, 8 ft. 6 ins. X 13 ft.

40

Collection : Galerie Maeght Photo : Varda

3

N aum G a b o : Construction in Space with red, 1953

52

Metal, plastic, nylon thread Photo : Rudolph Burckhardt

4

N aum G a b o : Construction, 1957

56

Erected in front o f the Bijenkorf Stores, Rotterdam

5

B arbara H epworth : Torso, 1928

228

Hopton wood stone. H. 14 ins. Collection : A. J. McNeill Reid, Esq. Photo : E. J. Mason

6

B arbara H epworth : Pelagosy 1946

232

W ood, with colour and strings. H. 16 ins. Collection : Mrs. Elizabeth Macdonald

7 J ackson P ollock : Convergence, 1952

296

Oil Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, N .Y . Photo : Art Institute o f Chicago

8

F autrier : Otage, 1945

302

Oil Collection : René Drouin, Paris a!

IX

“ Yes,” said Goethe to Eckermann, “ I may have missed writing many a good thing, hut when I reflect, I am not sorry. I have always regarded all I have done solely as symbolical; and, in fact, it has been tolerably indifferent to me whether I have made pots or dishes ” May 2, 1824

THE T E N T H MUSE

I

On Something in Particular “ at present the essay, as a serious, yet personal, intimate, and friendly way o f public utterance, is at a low ebb. Those who write ‘ easy’ essays write idly about trifles, often with some elegance, in the tone o f polite society; but these things are essentially empty. The tendency is to write articles, not about things in general, about life as it is lived and thought about, or lived and not thought about by the essayist, but about some­ thing in particular—literature let us say—from a rather expert or professional point o f view .” Thus writes one o f the most graceful o f living essayists on the modern English essay,1 and I, as another and less graceful essayist, must confess that the criticism is just. I tend to write “ about something in particular” , and from a rather expert or professional point o f v ie w ; and generally my essays are called articles, perhaps because they are not personal enough, cer­ tainly not intimate enough, to deserve the grander name. An “ essay” —that undoubtedly is a form not merely o f literature, but o f belles lettres; an article—that is something paid for at so many guineas a thousand; an article, indeed, o f commerce. 1 Bonamy Dobree, in English Essayists. London, 1946.

I

ON SOMETHING IN PARTICULAR

I doubt i f I could write an easy essay, just to express my thoughts about life in general. The only essays in this volume that were not written about something in particular, on a par­ ticular occasion and for a particular purpose, were written as pegs to hang my coat o n ; and even then I was creating my own particular purpose. The rest were written to command— the command o f editors and talks producers—as reviews and broadcasts. Each had a particular subject and in each I tried to express a critical opinion. And that is the way o f writing forced on one by the circumstances o f our time. It may be a bad way o f writing, but at least it belongs to the pattern o f our way o f life. The circumstances which dictate the form o f the modern essay to the writer are economic. The writer cannot dictate to the public: most certainly he cannot dictate to the editors who interpret the demands o f the public. Even i f the writer is a man o f financial independence and ample leisure, and can sit quietly in some country retreat rounding off his five or ten thousand words in the manner o f Hazlitt or Macaulay, what is he then to do with the product ? N o journals like the old Quarterly or Edinburgh now exist to accommodate such essays; and i f some idealist were to cause one to come into existence, such is the pace o f modern life that no one would have time to read it. The Criterion made an attempt to restore the serious essay, and I took part in that forlorn effort. W e failed because we were travelling in a coach-and-four along a first-class motor road, where speed and the number o f passengers were the prime essentials. W e were often complimented on our elegant turn-out, but there were few who wanted to adopt our pace. I believe that in the coming years the essay will change even more decisively through the influence o f broadcasting. The good talk is a spoken essay, and it usually reads well when 2

ON SOMETHING IN PARTICULAR

printed. That depends, o f course, on one’s definition o f a good talk; personally I am glad to see the last o f the mannered talks —the groans and hesitations, the pompous deliberation and fatuous intonations, which passed for a good broadcasting style in the early days. Directness and sincerity have been recognized as the essential qualities o f good broadcasting, and these are the essential qualities o f good essay writing. But broadcasting imposes standard lengths and usually short lengths, and it imposes a particular subject. The radio does not exist to put across trifles (though it might well be a little less serious): it does not exist to propagate a personal view o f life. It encourages intimacy o f approach (which is all to the good), and it magnifies and makes intolerable any form o f affectation. When one can afford to be serious, or even idle with elegance, as on the Third Programme, then broadcasting is an ideal medium for the essayist. Must the modern essayist be an expert, as Professor Dobree suggests ? It depends on what is meant by an expert. An expert is usually a man who knows everything about one thing, and nothing much about anything else—he has a fanatical singletrack mind: he burrows in a tunnel where no side-passages admit light and air. His counterpart is a man who knows a little about everything and nothing much about anything in particular. I myself am sometimes accused o f eclecticism. I do not object to the charge. The essayists I most admire—Bacon, Hazlitt, Bagehot—they too were eclectic. I f one has a beam o f intelligence, let it play where it lists, so long as it has power and penetration, and a fixed centre. The intensity and restlessness o f modern life forces the essayist to dubious shifts: he is commanded by pressures and exigencies which distort the true picture o f his interests. I have been persuaded to write on some subjects beyond my com­ petence, and by chance I have never been asked to write on

3

ON SOMETHING IN PARTICULAR

subjects near my heart. But the longer one lives and the more one writes, the more complete the pattern becomes. I do not pretend that there is any pattern discernible in the miscellany that follows this opening essay—indeed, i f the title had not already been used by Paul Valery, I might have called it Variety. I do not even claim the virtue o f consistency, and I am sure a logician could have fine intellectual sport in expos­ ing m y contradictions—my paralogisms, as he might call them. I am not in desperate search o f what Mr. CrawshayWilliams has called “ the comforts o f unreason” : rather, I am a pluralist, content to let loose a number o f truths with no desire to bring them within a house o f correction, no itch to reduce them to some “ unifying formula” . The quotation from C. F. Ram uz’sJournal which I put in front o f a previous collection o f this kind, A Coat of Many Colours, was meant as a warning, an excuse, a confession o f this possible deficiency. That quotation, which I left in French because I found it too difficult to translate into adequate English, is a fairly exact and very compact summary o f my general outlook—o f an attitude I would never venture to call a philosophy. I might paraphrase it thus: Never yield to habit, especially to habits o f thought which polish away the rough edges o f truth; remain open, innocent, original. Put away childish things, but retain, all the same, a core o f childhood, a slender vein o f vital sap which the rings o f growth may hide, but must never destroy. Keep a reserve o f simplicity, even o f primitiveness, so that you do not meet elementary situations with sophistication. Your aim should be, not simply to be, but rather to be ever capable o f becoming—not at rest, but moving with the mov­ ing world—always in touch with what is changing, changing oneself—open, like the child, to the whole world without, but with an inward reserve which the child does not yet possess, where one gathers a little strength, a certain order.

4

2

The Art o f Art Criticism I in the accepted sense, we mean the current criticism o f painting, sculpture, architecture and other visual arts. But what is “ criticism” ? There is ambiguity in this very word, for it is obvious that the nature o f criticism must be determined by the nature o f the audience to which it is addressed. A teacher, moving from easel to easel in the life class, w ill be critical in one manner—pointing to faulty composition in one case, to an insensitive line in another, to inadequacies o f all kinds; at the same time praising the successes where they exist, and always urging on his pupils by communicating to them his sympathy and enthusiasm. That I would call professional criticism, and with its technicali­ ties and jargon it should be confined to its proper sphere, the studio or the school o f art. There is another kind o f criticism which should also be confined to a school. Though it can be applied to contempor­ ary art, it is, properly speaking, historical criticism, by which I mean the delineation o f movements and groups, the descrip­ tion o f styles, the analysis o f techniques and materials—in general, the post-mortem attitude to art. Finally, there is what I would call the aesthetical or philo­ sophical criticism o f art. In so far as aesthetics is a science, and philosophy a discipline, this also is a form o f criticism that calls for a specialized terminology and a concentrated manner o f thought. The best art critics have, o f course, a philosophical background: their criticism is an applied philosophy, but is not in itself a philosophical activity. b y art c r i t i c i s m

5

THE ART OF ART CRITI CI SM

What, then, are we left with that might be called simply art criticism ? It must be an activity addressed, not to a pro­ fessional minority o f any kind, but to the general body o f educated opinion, and it must give its public something it wants—something it is not capable o f finding for itself—in one word, enlightenment. Such a criticism will be either informative or interpretative. It will not assume that everyone has seen the w ork o f art the critic is talking about; on the contrary, it will try to give everyone a vivid image o f the object in question. Having done this, the critic will proceed to interpret the artist’s intention, and in the end he may express his own view o f the artist’s achievement, and this view need not necessarily be favour­ able. But most critics, I am afraid, never stop to ask what the artist was trying to do; they assume that there is only one w ay o f doing a particular job (painting a landscape, building a cathedral) and they proceed to criticize the artist for not doing the jo b as they would have done it. But some critics make a practice o f imputing to the artist motives which he never had in m ind; and they criticize him for not doing what he never intended to do. There can be no true interpretation without complete sympathy and under­ standing. The lack o f sympathy, and therefore o f under­ standing, may be due to the confusing variety o f modern styles. Ruskin was faced by an extreme deviation from one style, which we call realism; a modern critic has to cope with a wide variation o f execution in at least four distinct styles— realism, super-realism, expressionism and abstract art. He may have sufficient sympathy for realism to make a good critic o f realistic painting, but be so completely out o f sympathy with abstract art as to be quite incapable o f writing anything sen­ sible about it. Few critics would refrain on that account from criticizing abstract art. 6

THE ART OF ART CRI TI CI SM

I think the modern art critic fails most conspicuously on the descriptive or visualizing side o f his activity. Perhaps the verbal description o f a painting, a piece o f sculpture or a building, is regarded as somewhat old-fashioned. “ It seems all right,” as Georges Duthuit says, “ to speak because o f a picture, but speaking of it must be avoided as much as possible.” Photographs and various methods o f reproduction have made it easy—in periodicals and in television, but not in broad­ casting—to dispense with a lot o f verbal description; it is assumed that the reader can grasp from the illustration what the picture or piece o f sculpture is about; as well as various details o f its composition. Here, maybe, we are near the heart o f the present malady, for I believe that the critic ought to be capable o f giving an exact verbal description o f the object which has caused him aesthetic pleasure or displeasure— only in that w ay can he be sure that his experience is a complete one, and that the necessary transformation has taken place in his mind which will enable him to criticize the processes o f one art (say painting) in the terms o f another art (the art o f writing). That, at any rate, was the method o f the old art critics— o f Hazlitt and Ruskin, o f Diderot and Baudelaire. They were all masters o f the art o f writing, and to them a work o f art—a painting or a building—was first and foremost something to be described, something to be realized in words, just as a paint­ ing in its turn had been something to be realized in paint. One might take, as a perfect example o f this type o f art criticism, Hazlitt’s essay “ On a Landscape o f Nicolas Poussin” —an essay o f some three to four thousand words, first published in The New Monthly Magazine for August, 18 21. I emphasize that fact to show that it was written as journalism. It deals with Poussin’s “ Orion” , painted in 1658, which Hazlitt had seenin an exhibition at the British Institution. The whole process o f

7

THE ART OF ART CRI TI CI SM

criticism is, for Hazlitt, infinitely leisurely. There was no paper shortage in 1821, no restriction o f space, and the public had leisured vacancies to fill. So he begins with some account o f the legend o f “ Orion” , so that we can appreciate the justness o f the painter’s selection o f a particular incident and scene, and the pertinency with which it has been treated. Then there is a disquisition on the relation o f art to nature—to make the point that Poussin’s art is “ a second nature, not a different one” . B y this he means that a painter like Poussin—he calls him an “ historic” painter, meaning what we should now call a “ literary” painter—that such a painter “ does not neglect nature, but follows her more closely into her fantastic heights, or hidden recesses. He demonstrates what she would be in conceivable circumstances, and under implied conditions” . Hazlitt then interpolates an attack on the lifeless imitators, the dull traducers o f nature, and by this time he is half-way through his essay, and must come to his main point, which is : that Poussin was, o f all painters, the most poetical. To prove this point will demand a lot o f significant detail, not only from the picture under observation, but from Poussin’s w ork in general. Subsidiary points will be made—for example, that Poussin succeeded better in classic than in sacred subjects. A comparison with Rubens is called for, and then we come to a definition which shows the bias o f Hazlitt’s own mind. “ Pictures,” he says, “ are a set o f chosen images, a stream o f pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. . . . A life passed among pictures, in the study and the love o f art, is a happy noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same tim e; for it has all ‘ the sober certainty o f waking bliss’ with the romantic voluptuousness o f a visionary and abstracted being. Pictures are the bright consummate essences o f things___ ” And then Hazlitt checks his eloquence to return to “ Orion” , and to the gallery in which he had seen the picture,

8

THE ART OF ART CRI TI CI SM

and with a final tribute to the private patrons o f art and to the enterprise o f those who had organized the exhibition o f loans from their collection, he ends his essay. A leisurely performance, indeed; not apt for the fraction o f a newspaper column which is now all that is at the disposal o f the modern art critic, nor even for the twenty minutes or so that is put at the disposal o f a broadcaster. The critic in the daily newspaper or the weekly review does not describe the works he criticizes, simply because it is not possible to do so in the space at his disposal; so he resorts, either to the supposition that his readers have seen what he is criticizing, or to shorthand symbols which only the initiated understand. In broadcasting the position should be easier : the time given to an art talk is equivalent to quite a lengthy critical review, but the critic often seems to carry over into the medium o f broadcasting the clipped and emaciated language o f the Press. Let me now quote two examples o f the kind o f criticism that can be read at any time in a weekly periodical. I shall not mention the names o f the critics, because they are irrele­ vant ; and I freely admit that I myself might have spoken in a similar vein. The first is from The Listener and was not broad­ cast: At the Lefèvre Gallery Hans Tisdall has enlarged his scope b y a remarkable act o f self-abnegation. For him, a full range o f colour was always a temptation to turn a picture into a decoration, and, having a daring sense o f colour, he succumbed to the temptation. Perhaps, realizing his weakness, he has gone deliberately into a kind o f aesthetic retreat, or perhaps he has tired o f the seductions o f a rainbow palette. Whatever the reason, his recent paintings— still-lifes mainly—are worked out in a monochrome tempered with accents o f pale colour. The result is a new range o f expressiveness. The familiar rococo pat­ tern is impregnated with space and light and density. The eye no

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THE ART OF ART CRI TI CI SM

longer slides off into patterned surface but explores the shapes and is drawn in between them. That is very different from Hazlitt’s style o f criticism, but it is quite typical o f present-day art criticism. I personally do not experience any difficulty in understanding what the critic is saying, for I have studied the private language in which it is written. Not knowing that language, you might protest that i f a picture is not a decoration, then what is it; and w hy shouldn’t it be decorative ? But I, as one o f the initiated, know that a theoretical distinction has been made by modem art critics between painting and decoration, and it is one o f the accepted clichés o f modem art criticism. W e do not stop to discuss the distinction: we assume that the reader is in the secret, and will not stop to question what we mean. Again, when the critic tells us that “ the familiar rococo pat­ tern is impregnated with space and light and density” and that “ the eye no longer slides o ff into patterned surface but explores the shapes and is drawn in between them” , I know what these rather mixed metaphors mean. M y knowledge o f the history o f art has given me a general idea o f “ rococo pattern” , but I wonder how many readers know the differ­ ence, for example, between a rococo and a baroque pattern ? As for the difficult feat o f impregnating such a pattern, not only with space and light, but at the same time with density; and the still more mysterious business o f an eye that slides o ff surfaces, explores shapes and ends by getting drawn in between them—all that will require, on the part o f the poor blind reader—I call him blind because he has never seen the painting in question—a prodigious power o f visualiz­ ation. N o w let me take another example—from a broadcast talk which I personally found very illuminating, but which at the time baffled some listeners : io

THE ART OF ART CRI TI CI SM

In looking at some o f Bacons paintings we are conscious at first only o f the paint, seeing it as some amorphous, ectoplasmic substance floating aimlessly on the canvas. It takes a little time before this stuff that is paint crystallizes into an image. But as soon as it does crystallize, the once vague and shifting shapes become volumes modelled with a wonderful sensitivity and situated with extreme precision in space. The certainty with which Bacon creates volumes, volumes that are tangible, is largely due to his uncanny sense o f the exact degree o f tension along each form.

Admittedly there is some jargon here: “ volumes” are not “ modelled” in any precisely visual sense: they may be sug­ gested by certain pictorial means: and only in some meta­ phorical sense could such volumes become “ tangible” . W e don’t “ touch” volumes; we fill them, either really or ima­ ginatively. But apart from such impressions, the language is such as might be used by a lecturer in a physics laboratory. I f you protest that art is not physics, I think the critic would be justified in retorting that that is just what it is—the manipula­ tion o f physical substances to create the illusion o f physical elements like space and colour. And it is perfectly legitimate to use a physical concept like “ tension” , for it is the physical experience that the painter wants to convey—Francis Bacon, for example, wants to recreate in the spectator the actual feeling o f the stretched-out armpits and biceps conveyed in his painting o f the Crucifixion. In describing the painter’s intention in terminology taken from the science o f physics, this particular critic was, I would say, using precise analytical language. It would seem, therefore, that what we really dis­ trust—and by “ w e” I mean the general public—is the ana­ lytical method itself: we remember Wordsworth’s phrase, “ we murder to dissect” , and w e would rather be left with a living unity, however baffling it might be. Should not criti­ cism confine itself to giving us the sense o f wholeness, the ii

THE ART OF ART CRI TI CI SM

sense o f richness, the sense o f interest—which was the impres­ sion Hazlitt gave us o f Poussin’s “ Orion” ? The critic might reply: “ Give me a Poussin, and 1 will rival Hazlitt: but I can’t do a Hazlitt over the amorphous ecto­ plasm o f modern art.” The material the modem art critic has to criticize is not the same— we could hardly describe Francis Bacon’s paintings, for example, as “ a stream o f pleasant thoughts passing through the m in d !” And an abstraction by Ben Nicholson does not offer quite the same opportunities for poetic disquisition as “ blind Orion hungry for the m om ” . In deserting Nature, in the sense in which Hazlitt understood that term, the modern artist has left the critic speechless, or at any rate in need o f a new language. This, o f course, is not true o f all types o f modern art; the surrealist painters gave their critics plenty o f poetic grist; and the more recent return to the old English habit o f anecdotage in paint might eventually inspire a corres­ ponding loquacity in criticism—given the space for it. But so far there is no sign o f it. It has been said that there is nothing more boring to listen to than the relation o f other people’s dreams. The modern anecdotal painting has that dream-hke quality, and I can imagine the listener becoming very restive i f submitted to a descriptive essay in the manner o f Hazlitt on, say, a landscape by Salvador Dali. This is not necessarily an adverse comment on the work o f those two painters; it merely implies that different kinds o f subject demand different critical approaches. Still, let us face this problem; the problem o f critical pro­ cedure in relation to works o f art which do not lend them­ selves to direct description. I believe that a solution o f this problem does exist, though it has yet to be proved that people will accept it. It consists in shifting the critical attention from the work o f art as object,

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to the work o f art as sym bol: from the meaning o f the work o f art to its m otive: in other words, for description the critic substitutes interpretation. This is not only more difficult than description or analysis: as a method it is woefully subject to error; and by descending so deeply into the psychological realm, the critic may fail in his first duty, which is to keep a sensuous eye on the work o f art. This kind o f criticism began, I suppose, with Walter Pater, and his famous prose-poem on the “ Mona Lisa” , or the equally beautiful description o f Botticelli’s “ Venus” , would illustrate what 1 mean. Pater gives us not only a perfectly conveyed description o f the painting, so that we can visualize it although we may never have seen the original or a repro­ duction, but at the same time an interpretation o f its meaning or significance; and all done without any o f the machinery o f analysis. And it is beautiful to read and to listen to ; it is criticism raised in itself to an art, the art o f prose, the least appreciated but the most essential o f all human arts, for it is the daily bread o f communication. But Pater, you will say, was a genius, and therefore an exception. But I do not think his method o f criticism is ex­ ceptional, even today. It is merely not fashionable. I might quote a contemporary critic like Adrian Stokes, but that would not be a fair test, for he writes about the same kind o f art as Pater— on Giorgione, Desiderio, Piero della Francesca; and with a not incomparable eloquence. I shall take instead a French critic whose name I have already mentioned— Georges Duthuit. His book on The Fauvist Painters is a bril­ liant illustration o f what I mean by interpretative criticism: interpretative even when negative. Y ou must not expect a Pateresque passage: it is eighty years since Pater wrote his criticism and since then one o f the greatest revolutions in the history o f art has taken place. Duthuit’s best pages are devoted B

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to the praise o f Matisse, but I find it difficult to detach one o f these. Here, instead, is a passage in dispraise o f Vlaminck, who is compared with Van Gogh: And now I am afraid, not of being unjust, but of not having in­ sisted enough on the paintings, and diere are a certain number of them, in which Vlaminck shows disgust with his usual concoctions, hastily spiced, daubed and peppered, and served up cold ; in which, miraculously, he lets his colour carry him along. But what obsesses me is this Van Gogh, to whom his adoptive son, self-adopted, with­ out asking anybody’s permission, never ceases to bum incense, with the utmost cordiality, the better to burn incense to himself, im­ moderately. How can one help being irritated ? And as ill-luck would have it, just as I was writing this chapter, I came across some of his feeblest paintings, inexpressibly pretentious and facile. In nothing do they recall, except in such a way as to arouse our indignation, the con­ sternation of the sacrificial victim of the sun of Saint-Rémy, the desperate decisions of the man who preferred not to sign his work, and who, with a shattering humility, compared his most successful paint­ ings to “ rough and bungled sketches” . Specifically I have in mind two dead fish on a dish-clout, and dead is the word, two varnished corpses. Plush tablecloth of a rather crude dye, laboured with knife and brush, heroically, as though this flaccid material could not be mastered in any other way. With cold-blooded fury Vlaminck has triturated certain passages, in order to ape the passion of Vincent the predestined, who died of his passion, and who with a single lash of the whip could destroy and transfigure the whole of a heterogenous world. Vlaminck, the prudent pugilist, stamps in a pre-arranged space, taking care not to go beyond it, respecting its conventional limits and reinforcing them if need be. He rumples his clout, but his two whitings have been set neatly upon it by an eternal housekeeper, who always manages to slip away before the painter has set up his easel. What, then, is the meaning of these incendiary lights that illu­ mine the eyes, border the gills and fins of these edibles, ready to be rolled in flour ? The skin does not even remotely suggest the rainbow. One suspects that the scandal is due only to the smell of fried fish

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that has invaded the salon; for it is on a fine piece o f plush, prize­ winner at the Universal Exhibition o f 1900, that the chef has set his livid animalcula, beside an overflowing Sunday fruit bowl. A blow from which the glittering drawing-room and the fish will not recover. Soon the painter will give up and bring back his whole bag o f tricks to the kitchen gloom. Meanwhile the pair o f bi-coloured whitings, horror-stricken, show themselves o ff on this wisp o f silk that makes van Gogh’s sunflowers look like old junk.1

That, I think, will give the reader a vivid idea o f Vlaminck’s painting, and, by implication, a better understanding o f the essential quality o f van Gogh’s work. The words convey the very processes o f the painter’s mind, the physical transmuta­ tion o f these processes into paint. The metaphors are some­ times far-fetched, but there is no technical jargon—one is made to experience, through another medium, the literary medium, the emotional impact o f an object seen by the critic, and i f the critic can do that for us, he has served well, not only the reading public, but also, and this is surely important, the artist. I warned the reader that an interpretative criticism o f a modern artist would not be so easy to take in as Hazlitt’s descriptive criticism o f Poussin. More imaginative effort is required because the mind is being asked to reconstruct, not a familiar myth or a second nature, but a reality. “ A new reality” —how easy it is to utter a phrase like that: how diffi­ cult it is for the public to know what it means, or if it means anything. W e follow Alice into a Wonderland willingly enough, in spite o f the Dodo and the U gly Duchess and the terrors o f a contracting and expanding universe; we are glad to meet Renoir and Matisse, but we are less anxious to meet the grimmer creations o f Picasso or Francis Bacon. 1 The Fauvist Painters by Georges Duthuit. Translated by Ralph Manheim. N ew York, 1950.

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The task o f the modem critic o f art is difficult, but that must not be used as an excuse for an obscurity which is a retreat into jargon, nor for a snobbism which is an attempt to reserve certain pleasures for a minority. The difficulty’ ’ o f modern art must be accepted by the critic as a challenge—a challenge to his powers o f interpretation, a challenge to his capacity for communication. W e live in an epoch in which people must understand: deep no longer calleth unto deep— symbols must be translated into concepts. That is the critic’s j o b : to take the symbols o f the painter or sculptor and trans­ late them, i f not into intellectual concepts, then into poetic metaphors. Art criticism can be conducted on the level o f explanation; but also on the level o f translation. The best art criticism reaches both levels, and to the clarity o f a rational discourse, adds the colour o f a sensuous style. Inspired by the love o f truth, it can rise to the greatest heights o f thought and eloquence, and in the hands o f a Ruskin or a Pater, proffer tributes to a tenth muse.

n It is sometimes said that there is no art criticism to compare with the greatest literary or philosophical criticism. That is a prejudice due, I believe, to our academic neglect o f art. Our schools and universities recognize literature and literary criti­ cism as worthy subjects o f study, but painting, sculpture and architecture are either completely ignored, or treated as elegant optional additions to the normal curriculum. The result is a general depreciation o f the literature o f art; its very existence, on a scale comparable to the literature o f poetry or drama, might be denied. If, however, we look at the general body o f criticism, not only in England, but in western and central Europe, we find that a considerable proportion o f the best o f it has in fact been directed to the visual arts.

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I have already suggested that in the hands o f a master—and I mentioned the names o f Ruskin and Pater—criticism can become in itself another art. In citing these two names I did not mean to imply that the w ork o f art would serve as well as any other subject to inspire good prose, or that a good style would justify any kind o f criticism. A good style, I would say, is the product o f a well-ordered mind moved by a worthy passion. Ruskin had enthusiasm, passionate enthusiasm, for Turner’s paintings, but he also thought clearly about art in general, and was therefore able to relate his immediate experience to basic principles. The experience was deeply sincere, and because Turner was suffering from the misun­ derstanding that is the usual fate o f original artists, Ruskin was moved to a passionate defence o f him. But the analysing mind kept pace with the sympathetic heart, and the result was not only great English prose, but also great art criticism. In this field 1 would place Ruskin’s achievement above all other criticism o f whatever kind written in the English lan­ guage. Where is the work o f literary criticism that can com­ pare with Modern Painters or Stones of Venice—compare in scope and eloquence and in what, in the original sense o f the word, one might call righteousness? Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is perhaps philosophically more profound, but that philosophy is in part borrowed from Schelling, so Coleridge cannot have all the credit for it. As for the rest o f Coleridge’s great argument, one might say that it secured for Words­ worth almost exactly the same kind o f understanding that Ruskin secured for Turner. These two achievements might be considered as o f almost equal value in the history o f English culture. But nowhere in Biographia Literaria—and I say this in spite o f the fact that it is a book to which I am intensely devoted—nowhere w ill you find those mounting themes o f imaginative splendour into which Ruskin’s criticism

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lifts itself, not once, but a hundred, times. W e may read Ruskin’s art criticism as great literature, but if we do not at the same time recognize it as great criticism, it is because o f some deep-seated indifference to art. For as criticism it is supreme. I

w ill quote, as an example o f Ruskin’s criticism, a passage

which he himself looked back upon with satisfaction—his description o f the painting he regarded as Turner’ s greatest— “ The Slave Ship” : But, I think, the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted and, i f so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that o f the “ Slave Ship ” , the chief Academy picture o f the Exhibition o f 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic, after prolonged storm ; but the storm is partially lulled, and the tom and streaming rainclouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow o f the night. The whole surface o f sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges o f enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low broad heaving o f the whole ocean, like the lifting o f its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture o f the storm. Between these two ridges the fire o f the sunset falls along the trough o f the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold, and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell o f the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark in­ definite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength o f the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces o f level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold o f the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above, with the undistinguishable images o f the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes o f crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion o f their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows o f the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist o f night which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow o f death upon the

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guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral eaves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this. Its daring conception, ideal in the highest sense of the word, is based on the purest truth and wrought out with the concentrated knowledge of a life; its colour is absolutely perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part or line, and so modu­ lated that every square inch of canvas is a perfect composition; its drawing as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, bending, and full of motion; its tones as true as they are wonderful; and the whole picture dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions (complet­ ing thus the perfect system of all truth, which we have shown to be formed by Turner’s works)—the power, majesty, and deathliness of the open, deep, illimitable sea. In that last sentence, you may have noticed, there is a parenthesis in which Ruskin claims to have shown that Turner’s works form “ the perfect system o f truth” — an achievement which, in Ruskin’s opinion, he shared with only a few choice spirits such as Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Pope. W e cannot stop to examine the validity o f this claim : I merely draw attention to it to show that art criticism, no less than literary criticism, can have a philosophical scope. For another example o f art criticism that rises to the heights o f literary art I would like to suggest Ruskin’s contemporary, Charles Baudelaire. A good deal o f the poetry that went into Ruskin’s prose Baudelaire reserved for his verse; but his art criticism has the same largeness o f view, the same philosophical scope. Baudelaire once said that art criticism ought to be partial, passionate and political—made from an exclusive point o f view, but from the point o f view that opens up the widest horizons. His own criticism has that enlightening

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q u a lity ; and in his case again there w as a particular cause fo r enthusiasm, a subject fo r passionate ad vocacy— the art o f D e la cro ix . H ere is a passage fro m one o f his essays on that p a in te r: In order to complete the analysis, it remains for me to draw atten­ tion to a final quality in Delacroix—the most remarkable o f all his qualities and the one that makes him the true nineteenth-century painter. It is the strange persistent melancholy which broods over all his w ork and which is expressed by his choice o f subject, by the expression on his people’s faces, by gesture and by the w ay he uses colour. Delacroix is an admirer o f Dante and Shakespeare, two other great painters o f human suffering. He understands them perfectly and is able to draw on diem freely. When we look at a collection o f his paintings—“ Dante and V irgil” , “ The Massacre o f Scio” , “ Christ in the Garden o f Olives” , “ St. Sebastian” , “ Medea” , “ The Ship­ wrecked” and “ Hamlet” , so derided and so little understood—we have the impression that we are attending the celebration o f some sad rite. W e notice in several o f them, as though it were the result o f some perpetual chance, one figure which is more stricken, more weighted down by grief than all the rest and which seems to contain in it all the surrounding suffering. W e see it in the woman kneeling with her hair hanging down in the foreground o f “ The Crusaders at Con­ stantinople” ; in the mournful wrinkled features o f the old woman in “ The Massacre o f Scio” . His melancholy envelops even “ The Women o f Algiers” the most stylish and decorative o f all his pic­ tures. This little poem o f an interior, so restful, so bathed in silence, so stuffed with rich furnishings and odds and ends o f finery, exudes the strong indefinable odour o f an evil place which quickly leads us to unplumbed depths o f sadness. In general, he does not paint pretty women, at any rate not pretty by the standards o f fashionable society. Nearly all o f them are sick and glow with a certain inner beauty. He does not express strength by swelling muscles, but by nervous tension. It is not only suffering that he expresses better than anyone else, but above all—supreme secret o f his art—moral suffering! This grave, lofty melancholy shines with a sombre splendour in his very

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colouring which like that o f all the great colourists is broad, simple and rich in harmonic masses, but plaintive and deep-toned as a melody o f Weber’s. Each o f the old masters had his kingdom and his prerogative w hich he was often compelled to share with illustrious rivals. Raphael’s was form ; that o f Rubens and Veronese, colour; that o f Rubens and Michelangelo, imaginative design. A portion o f the empire remained where Rembrandt alone had made a few incursions—drama, natural living drama, terrible and sombre drama which was often expressed by means o f colour, but always by means o f gesture . . . This quality, which is essentially modem and new, makes Dela­ croix the final expression o f progress in art. The heir o f a great tradition—the tradition o f breadth, nobility and grandeur o f com­ position and the worthy successor o f the old masters, he excels them in his mastery o f suffering, passion and gesture. That is the real sig­ nificance o f his greatness. Suppose, for example, the work o f one o f the celebrated old masters were to be lost. There would nearly always be someone like him whose w ork would explain his and enable the historian to grasp what had been lost. Take away Delacroix, and the great chain o f history snaps and falls to the ground.I

I believe that Ruskin and Baudelaire are the two greatest art critics o f modern times, and they are both distinguished by the quality o f enthusiasm. It is a quality from which academic minds shrink, and it can indeed involve a writer in mistakes and even in absurdities. These do not matter in the long run. There are dozens o f names in Baudelaire’s Salons—the notices o f exhibitions which he wrote between 1845 and 1859— which are now completely forgotten. Most o f them he dis­ missed with a withering phrase ; others he praised for qualities that were merely topical. Ruskin’s mistakes were more dis­ astrous, especially in his later days—I need mention only the name o f Whistler. The contemporary scene is always a tur­ moil, and he who ventures into it, brandishing a sword in the cause o f truth, is sure to hit a few o f the wrong people on the

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head. But the critic must enter that turmoil—however much one’s principles have been formed by the study o f the history o f art, or by the study o f the science o f art, those principles do not deserve the name o f criticism until they are applied to the living reality o f art. Criticism is discrimination, is guidance, and it is useless i f it never ventures outside a museum. Every age has its own sense o f beauty, and it is the critic’s business to isolate and define that particular nuance—if only for the purpose o f condemning it. I cannot think o f any great critic—great in the sense I have defined, great as an artist in his own rights—who has not found some good in the art o f his own age. It is true that there have been critics who have not found anything particularly interesting to say about the art o f their own time, but I do not think one can put them on the same level as Ruskin or Baudelaire. A good example is Eugene Fromentin, himself a disappointed painter, out o f sympathy with contemporaries like Delacroix and Courbet, a man without passions, nervous and feminine, as Baudelaire said o f him. He had a sensitive talent for description, and wrote a novel o f great charm, as well as two or three books o f travel. But he also wrote a book on Dutch and Flemish painting from Van Eyck to R em ­ brandt—Les Maitres d’autrefois, which is undoubtedly one o f the masterpieces o f art criticism. But it is again a triumph o f the art o f writing, and i f Fromentin is not a critic o f the art o f his own time, he does manage, by his method o f writing, to bring the old masters into the contemporary context. For example, before writing about Rembrandt he describes Am ­ sterdam—not the Amsterdam o f Rembrandt’s time, but the Amsterdam he himself saw in 1875, and very beautiful and evocative it all is! And he is, as a writer (and even as a painter) a romantic o f his time. The best example o f his style is his description o f Rembrandt’s “ Night W atch” : 22

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There remains an episodic figure which up to the present has baffled all conjectures, because it seems to personify in its traits, its dress, its strange brilliance, and its little bearing on the subject, the magic, the romantic meaning, or, if you like, the counter-sense o f the picture. I mean the little person with the look o f a witch, childish yet very old, with comet-like head-dress and ornamented tresses, who glides, we scarcely understand why, among the legs o f the guards, and who—a thing no less inexplicable—wears suspended from her waist a white cock, which we might take at first for a purse. Whatever reason it may have had for mixing with this assembly, this small figure seems to have nothing human about it at all. It is colourless, almost shapeless. Its age is doubtful because its traits are indefinable. Its appearance is that o f a doll and its behaviour auto­ matic. It has the ways o f a beggar, and something like diamonds all over the body—the air o f a little queen, with garments like rags. One might say that she came from the Jewish quarter, from the old clothes shop, from the theatre or some Bohemian place, and that, awakening from a dream, she dressed herself in the most singular fashion. She has the glimmerings, the uncertainty and the flickerings o f pale fire. The more one examines the less can one seize the subtle lineaments which serve as a covering for her incorporeal existence! W e come to see in her nothing but a sort o f extraordinarily strange phosphorescence which is not the natural light o f tilings, nor yet the ordinary brilliancy o f a well-regulated palette, and which adds a witchery the more to the strangeness o f the physiognomy. Note that in the place she occupies in one o f the dark comers o f the canvas, rather low, in the middle distance, between a man in dark red and the captain dressed in black, this eccentric light has the more activity, that the contrast with the surroundings is more sudden, and that, without extreme precautions, this explosion o f accidental light would have been enough to dis­ organize the whole picture. W hat is the meaning o f the little being, imaginary or real, which, though but a supernumerary, seems to have taken possession o f the principal role ? I cannot undertake to tell you. Men more skilful than m yself have not failed to ask themselves what this might be, what it

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is doing there, and have not been able to discover a satisfactory solution. One thing astonishes me, and that is that people argue with Rem­ brandt as if he himself were a reasoner. They are enraptured with the novelty, the originality, the absence of all rule, the free flight of an entirely individual imagination, which make up, as has been well said, the great attraction of this venturesome work; and it is precisely the fine flower of his somewhat disordered imagination, which people subject to an examination by logic and pure reason. But if, to all these rather vain questions about the why and wherefore of so many things which probably have none at all, Rembrandt were to reply thus: “ This child is a caprice, no less odd than, and for that matter quite as plausible as, many others in my engraved and painted work. I have set it there, as a narrow light between great masses of shade, because its slightness gave it more vibration, and it suited me to enliven one of the dark comers of my picture with a streak of light. Its get-up is, moreover, the ordinary dress of my figures of women, great or small, young or old, and you will find in it the type which, more or less like, is continually found in my works. I like whatever shines brightly, and that is why I have dressed it in brilliant apparel. As to the phosphorescent glimmer which seems to cause you so much astonishment here, while in other places it passes unnoticed, it is in its colourless sparkle, and in its supernatural quality, the light that I usually give my personages when I want them to shine rather vividly.” Don’t you think that such an answer would have in it sufficient to satisfy the most exacting, and that finally, the rights of the producer being reserved, he would have nothing to answer to us for save on one point; the manner in which he has treated the picture ? The point I want to make about this extract is that the sensibility which Fromentin brings to the appreciation o f Rembrandt was the romantic sensibility o f 1875, and not some passionless and disinterested analysis o f the academic kind. How easy it would have been, before 1875, to have ignored the very existence o f that mysterious little witch in Rembrandt’s otherwise very solemn picture—or i f not easy 24

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to have ignored her presence, to have missed her significance! In his way, therefore, Fromentin is as contemporary as Baude­ laire or Ruskin. What is odd is that the eye that could appre­ ciate Rembrandt’s little witch could not appreciate Manet’s Bon Bock. I would say that a blindness to contemporary modes o f expression, in any o f the arts, is generally due to some psy­ chological inhibition in the spectator, but that is a generaliza­ tion that would have to be supported by more evidence than I can command at present. The whole problem o f inhibition in relation to both the creation and appreciation o f art is one which calls for scientific research. I think one might as well face the fact that no amount o f interpretative criticism is going to make certain types o f people like certain types o f modern art. The momentum o f the realistic tradition is too great for them—they are not prepared, either by education or environ­ ment, for an art that rejects realism. N ow the kind o f art criticism written by Ruskin, Pater and Baudelaire was always concerned with what might be broadly called pictorial motives. (Every picture tells a story, and criticism has often been the retelling in the critic’s words o f the theme o f the painting.) There is no story in an abstract painting by Ben Nicholson, and the story in many other types o f modern art is not o f the kind that lends itself to expatiation. A still-life by Braque, an odalisque by Matisse, one o f Henry Moore’s reclining figures—the modern critic cannot approach them as the critics o f former days approached Rembrandt, Turner or Delacroix. Even Fromentin when he came to deal with R em ­ brandt’s colour, felt that he had to “ leave the easy paths, enter the thicket, and ‘ talk shop’ ” . But “ shop” in 1875 was a fairly simple language o f tones and tints, o f high-lights and chiaroscuro. A succession o f critics—Burckhardt, WolfHin, Berenson, R oger Fry—enormously extended this scientific

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terminology, made it into a very exact instrument o f formal analysis. Certain o f the earlier phases o f modern art—the paintings o f Cezanne, those o f the Cubists—lent themselves all too easily to the formalistic method. But this method becomes meaningless when applied to a picture like Picasso’s “ Guernica” ; to apainting by Klee or MaxErnst, to Kokoschka’s “ Windbraut” or Chagall’s “ Russian Village” ; or generally to the art o f the last thirty years. Such artists are using other means, other conventions, to secure the desired effect, and a new type o f art must call into existence a new type o f art criticism. W e have, in fact, returned to a phase o f art—the Byzantine period is an example in the past—in which the work o f art is essentially a symbol and no longer a sign: that is to say, it attempts to express a meaning that cannot be expressed by realistic images. Once realism is abandoned most o f the tech­ nical jargon o f the old art criticism is beside the point, and a new critical vocabulary has to be invented. W e live in a tran­ sitional period in which such a new language o f criticism is gradually being evolved, and some o f the difficulty o f con­ temporary art criticism is due to that fact—there is no adequate terminology that is universally accepted. I can perhaps illus­ trate this difficulty by quoting a typical example o f the formalistic criticism which has prevailed for the past halfcentury and then asking you to admit how impossible it would be to apply the same kind o f criticism to a Byzantine mosaic or a painting by Picasso—I will take a short passage from Wolfflin’s Classic Art, a book which along with the same author’s Principles of Art History did so much to estab­ lish the terminology o f modern art criticism: The head emerges from the darkness of the background, not sharply relieved against a black foil as is sometimes the case with Perugino, but, as it were, encompassed in the greenish half-light and 26

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the highest light does not fall on the face but on a scrap o f shirt acci­ dentally displayed at the neck. The hood and collar are dull grey and brown in colour. The large eyes look calmly out o f their orbits. W ith all its vibrantly painterly handling the effect o f the whole is stabilized by the vertical position o f the head, the simple, full-face view and the gentle fall o f light which brings out exactly half the head and illumines exactly the necessary points. The head seems to turn with a quick movement and to be holding, just for a moment, the pose which gives absolutely pure vertical and horizontal axis, the vertical being continued right up to the peak o f the cap. The simplicity o f line and reposeful masses o f light and shadow unite with die clear defini­ tion o f form o f Andrea’s developed style, with the bony structure clearly understood. The w ay in which the angle at the junction o f nose and eye is brought out, the modelling o f the chin, the indica­ tion o f the cheek-bone are all strongly reminiscent o f the style o f die “ Disputa” , which was clearly painted at about the same time.

WolfHinis describing, and criticizing, a typical Renaissance portrait. His main concern is with the way the artist has illuminated his subject, with the clear definition o f natural form, and with a certain ideal o f humanism which is repre­ sented by these means. A Byzantine artist would not be pre­ occupied with a merely human ideal, but with a divine one; and to represent such an ideal he would create a symbol, rigid and hieratic, dominating the spectator by its suggestion o f supernatural power and mystery. Subtleties o f modelling and o f light and shade would be irrelevant; the whole vocabulary perfected by the critics o f Renaissance art is irrelevant. Here, however, is a passage from a contemporary art critic, and one whose eloquence is not incomparable to Baudelaire’s or Ruskin’s, which in the process o f describing the essential quahties o f Byzantine art, renounces all jargon and returns once more to poetry—it comes from the second volume o f André Malraux’s Psychology of A rt: 27

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In the process o f becoming Byzantinized, art sets out to destroy the independence o f the depicted figure. The Rom an painters had made it stand out against a neutral background like that o f the classical stage-play. The semblance o f a wall, a patch o f landscape, sometimes even (as in the Timomachus copies) a hint o f perspective, form set scenes in front o f which the figures show up like statues in public squares. Christian art makes this background even more abstract; but sometimes makes it solid, and joins it up with the figures, which seem to sink back into it like foundering ships. It rediscovers dark­ ness ; the desert stars reappear in the night sky above “ The Flight into E g yp t” The dark, leaden blues o f the backgrounds o f frescoes and mosaics tend not only to suggest the tragic aspect o f the universe, but also to immure the figures within a closed world, to wrest them from their independence, in much the same w ay as Christianity wrests man’s life both from its individuality and from the empire, so as to link it up with the Christian destiny, with the serpent and with Gol­ gotha. For Christianity claims to be the Tru di; not Reality. To Christian eyes the life the Romans saw as real was no true life. Thus i f the true life is to be portrayed, it must break free from the real. The task o f the Christian artist is to depict, not this world, but the world to come, and a scene is only worthy o f portrayal in so far as it par­ takes in that other world. Hence the golden backgrounds which create neither real surface nor real distance, but another universe; hence that style, incomprehensible so long as we insist on reading into it a quest o f any sort o f realism; for always it is an effort towards transfiguration. This does not apply solely to the figures; Byzantium aims at expressing the world viewed as a mystery. Its palace, politics, diplomacy reverted (as did its religion) to that time-old craving for secrecy (and subterfuge) so characteristic o f the East. Superficial in­ deed would be an art portraying emperors and queens, were it con­ fined to the mere display o f pom p ; but this was only, so to speak, the small change o f the art o f the great mystery, the secular extension o f an art which did not hesitate to annex the profane to the sacred, as is evident when we compare the bust o f a Rom an empress with Theodora’s portrait o f the Sainte-Pudentienne “ V irgin” with the

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“ Saint Agnes” in Rome, and with the Torcello “ Virgin” . The whole significance of Byzantine art is incarnate in this last-named figure, standing aloof in the recess of the dark cupola so that none may intrude on its colloquy with fate. Under the Virgin are aligned the saints and prophets; still lower, we see the crowd of mundane worshippers in prayer. On high, looms the immemorial Eastern night, which turns the firmament into a phantasmagoria of wandering stars, and the earth into as vain a sight as the shadow of armies battling with the void; unless this passing show be mirrored on the meditative visage of a god. Once again a different kind o f art has evoked a different method o f appreciation. Modern art—the art o f artists like Picasso, Braque, Klee, Henry Moore—is far more akin to Byzantine art than to the art o f any intervening period. It is true, o f course, that it in no w ay shares the religious basis o f Byzantine art; but its philosophical basis—and for a modern man his philosophy is often his religion—is equally a denial o f the validity o f the real, and art is consequently an attempt to express a mystery, which we have not confidence enough to call the Truth. One o f the most significant modern move­ ments in art adopted the name Surrealism, but all that is essentially modern in contemporary art is in some sense super-realistic. I am not now concerned with the reasons w hy it is super-realistic—there is surely cause enough in the conditions o f modern life to instil in man a longing for the serenity o f the absolute—that is to say, o f the abstract, the ideal; and i f modern man, in his isolation and scepticism, cannot share an ideal or accept a tradition, then that visionary life w ill rise unaided from the depths o f his unconscious, the original source o f all myth and symbol. The modern critic can never for a moment ignore the purely plastic values by means o f which aesthetic pleasure is com­ municated ; but these plastic values are now used once more

c

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in the service o f what might be called metaphysical values, and the critic’s function is again to render in adequate words the significance o f the symbols created by the artist. The first qualification for the criticism o f modern art is perhaps a realization o f the tragic situation o f modern man. From that basis the critic can proceed to speak with authority, with feeling, and with simplicity.

3

Gauguin : The Return to Symbolism I n a n y exhibition o f nineteenth-century painting the work o f Gauguin seems to emerge with a distinction for which we vainly seek the appropriate word. “ Monumentality” is one label conveniently waiting to be applied, but in a sequence that stretches from David to Toulouse-Lautrec there are several artists whose work it would fit—to seek no farther there are the neighbouring canvases o f Cézanne and Van Gogh. I f we stand back, and as far as possible take in the whole range o f the gallery, the Gauguins are immediately noticeable by the weight and brilliance o f their colours, and by a sig­ nificance that is easy to read at a distance. In this sense they have the characteristics o f a good poster—o f one o f ToulouseLautrec’s posters, to be precise. This at once suggests a de­ preciation, but in the same moment the glowing colours have reminded us o f another kind o f poster, the medieval stainedglass window, and our respect is restored. O f all the influences that went to the shaping o f Gauguin’s style, it is certain that the medieval one was the strongest. He 30

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had no yearning for the Christian sentiment o f the Middle Ages—he was a pagan, and his specifically religious subjects, like the “ Yellow Christ*’ or “ Jacob wrestling with the A nger*, are parodies rather than re-interpretations. A Tahitian myth would serve his purpose just as well—indeed, rather better, for there was no traditional composition to travesty. Deeply as he believed in the creation or representation o f symbolism, he had no coherent system o f transcendental values to embrace them. The coherence belonged to the paintings—was aesthetic and not religious: a formal coherence. At the same time, his art is humanistic; the inherent values are those o f vitality and beauty, and these are human values. A painting he called “ A4 aternity” (Frontispiece) may be taken as typical o f his greatest achievement. What I have already called “ monumentality** is always a question o f composition —in this case the interweaving, by gesture and attitude, o f three human figures into a rhythmical unity, a plastic volume that rises gigantically against the summary background. N ot that the background plays an insignificant part in the com­ position—its w avy rhythms echo horizontally the vertical structure o f the human group, and the yellow, pink and greens contrast harmoniously with the dominant notes o f blue, red and brown. But ingenious and plangent as it all is, as a com­ position in colour, the attention is held, and Gauguin meant it to be held, by the symbolic significance o f the group. Maternity could not be more directly, more naively, indi­ cated than by the seated woman giving her breast to the child: it is the archetypal symbol o f the subject, and one can only emphasize the perfect simplicity and tenderness with which Gauguin has rendered it. The standing figures, the woman with the basket o f fruit, the man with the spray o f flowers, reinforce the general significance o f the painting with their subsidiary symbolism. The tropical setting, the

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semi-naked bodies, the rich saturation o f the colours— every ele­ ment contributes to the essentialidea o f fertility and fruitfulness. Such is the painting that is offered to the world in an epoch o f naturalism, realism and expressionism—in an epoch, that is to say, that was in one way or another devoted to a factual analysis of feeling and observation, that had renounced sym­ bolic artifice and that insisted on the values, whatever they may be, that emerge from the immediate consciousness o f life as such. W e can, o f course, find symbolism o f a far more blatant kind in the academic painting o f the period, and Puvis de Chavannes is an artist who on this level o f symbolism may be fairly compared with Gauguin. W e are almost driven to the conclusion that Gauguin, far from being a modernist o f his time, was a traditionalist and even an archaicist. He did not object, as did the Impressionists, to the aitns o f the academic painter, but only to the means. Symbolism had been corrupted by realism, illusionism, vulgarity o f vision: it was necessary to restore to it its primitive force, to make the embodied idea as clear and as moving as it had been in medieval painting. The corruption o f the image had begun in Renais­ sance times, with irrelevant notions o f perspective, o f social realism, o f ecclesiastical pomp. Mannerism and academicism had destroyed the virtue o f the symbol by making it too com­ plex, too consciously artificial, too worldly. Romanticism had not really improved matters: Ingres and Delacroix had merely substituted their own kind o f artifice, an illusion o f historic realism. Courbet had rejected symbolism, and Manet and Degas had sacrificed everything for the triviality o f the immediate vision, the direct sensation, “ fiddling with details” . Gauguin had learned much from the Impressionists, from Degas and particularly from Pissarro, but already by 1886 he had shown his independence, to become what Pissarro called “ an austere sectarian” . 32

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Gauguin was not right in his diagnosis, and had no desire to be fair. He did not realize that an object held in pure con­ sciousness, i f it be only an apple, may be more symbolic o f reality than an idea, however clearly “ realized” that idea may be (that is to say, however completely and convincingly represented in visual images). A part o f reality—a segment, a fragment—stands for the whole, but only on condition that it is present to consciousness as a thing-in-itself, desentimentalized, dehumanized. That was to be Cezanne’s discov­ ery. When Gauguin paints a still-life it is merely decorative : this aspect o f his art belongs to the iconography o f Vart nouveau. W e must recognize Gauguin’s limitations, therefore, and then return to an emphasis on his great strength, which lies in his symbolism. But then we must ask whether these isolated icons, o f maternity or o f fate, add up to any significant vision o f life. W e misrepresent the nature o f symbolism, as Gauguin conceived it, i f we think o f it exclusively in terms o f general concepts like maternity or fate. The great composition at Boston (D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous ? Où allons-nous?) might be taken as an allegory o f life, and as in some sense representative o f a philosophy o f life ; but the greater part o f Gauguin’s paintings do not translate so easily into conceptual notions. Some o f them represent symbolic scenes to which Gauguin himself no doubt attached a particular significance (“ L ’Apparition” o f 1902, for example); others are illustra­ tions o f Tahitian myths or legends; but for the most part Gauguin is content to ask a silent question, to pose an enigma. It is a questioning face that looks out o f such canvases as “ Never M ore” (1897), “ The Idol” (1897), “ Et l’or de leur corps” (1901) and “ Contes Barbares” (1902). B y reading Gauguin’s own books and letters, we can sometimes discover the symbolic meaning o f such paintings, but we are none the

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wiser, because the legends are too remote from our modes o f thought or feeling. This group o f paintings attracts us by its overtones o f mystery and magic. But far more characteristic o f Gauguin’s work as a whole are the early “ N ude” (1880) at Copenhagen, the Breton and Martinique landscapes, and paintings such as “ Conversation a Tahiti” (1897) and “ Les seins aux fleurs rouges” (1899), in which the symbolism is simply sensuous or vital. Such paintings are not really distinct from a painting like “ Maternity” or “ Et For de leur corps” , but instead o f a symbol o f easily recognized significance, we have the representation and affirmation o f a life o f sensa­ tion. It might be asked in what w ay does such an affirmation differ from that o f Renoir’s ? Only, I think, in a quality o f generalization. The gold is certainly present in the flesh o f Renoir’s nudes, but it is a particular woman that is character­ ized, not a general quality. The sensuousness in Gauguin’s painting is a derivative o f the symbolic statement: the breasts are fruitlike and are associated with fruits. The sensuousness in Renoir’s painting is a luminous and carnal warmth in the paint itself; we do not “ associate” , even unconsciously, the body with any symbolic objects: it is immediately present as a particular being, human and vital. All symbolism is at a remove from the immediate present — that is its function: to enable us to discourse without the associations and distractions o f sensation. This does not mean that a symbolic painter is trying to evade “ life” or “ reality” . He is like a mathematician or a logician who can deal more effectively with life or reality by means o f signs. But the visual signs o f painting and sculpture are more like the characters o f a fable. The story o f the Good Samaritan, or o f the man who went forth to sow seed—such fables are strictly com­ parable to Gauguin’s pictures, and when we read them we do

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not think o f real men with distinctive features, but o f typical men with conventional features. To load it with detail would detract from the universality o f the fable. In the same way, Gauguin does not need to create an illusion o f particular presence, or even o f a particular time and place: his discourse is universal and must be expressed in symbolic signs, which are never aspects o f reality. It is for this reason that Gauguin, for all his exoticism, is a popular artist—an artist easily accessible to the man in the street. There have been other exotic artists in our time, most o f them influenced in some degree by Gauguin—Emil Nolde, Paula Modersohn, M ax Pechstein—but though there are good and even great artists among them, they have not the same appeal as Gauguin because they lacked the same bold grasp o f universal themes. Nevertheless, Gauguin too has his limitations. W e have only to compare him with a universal artist like Rembrandt to see how limited was the range o f his intelligence. Gauguin was capable o f creating universal symbols, but selectively, dis­ creetly. Rembrandt was himself a universal spirit, and this spirit informs everything that he painted, so that a biblical legend, a carcass o f an ox, a naked woman, his own selfportrait—all stand as symbols o f an all-embracing sympathy. Perhaps only Shakespeare, in another art, has that kind o f universal intelligence. But Gauguin, on his more limited frontage, reaches the same heights; as does his friend Van Gogh. But these comparisons reveal another distinction. A selfportrait by Van Gogh, like a self-portrait by Rembrandt, is a self-analysis, a revelation o f the innermost self. A self-portrait by Gauguin is a persona, a mask—that is to say, again a sym­ bol. The symbol may represent what is universal in the man — o f evil and o f good; but it does not reveal the particularities

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that are neither good nor evil, that are uncharacterized, but that nevertheless are a segment o f the living reality. In the end symbolism and realism are incompatible. The symbol is an intuitive grasp o f realities that remain beyond the range o f analytical intelligence. One cannot say that a sym­ bolic art is therefore greater or more intensive than an art that reveals a particular segment o f the visible world. These are merely alternative ways o f presenting reality, like myth and history. The myth is not historical: it is the archetypal form into which historical events are moulded, for con­ venience o f popular understanding, for ease o f memory, for endurance in tradition. History has no archetypal form in this sense: it is diffuse and incoherent, and the historian is an impressionist. But an artist can present a segment o f the panorama, and it will be like a still snatched from the restless reel. These stills can be arranged like a book o f illus­ trations, and we call the result history. But history is not reality, nor is m yth: as efforts o f human comprehension they are complementary. Gauguin’s work is symbolic, and he himself is a myth. He rejected the values o f bourgeois society and o f a machine civilization. His gesture had its sordid side, but retrospectively it seems to have been appropriate, coming at a time when the world was preparing for annihilating wars. It was not a useful example: we cannot all go and live on South Sea islands, and, as I have said before in this connection, modern man carries his civilization like a pack on his back, and cannot cast it off. But he can protest against the burden, and state the real values o f life. That is what Gauguin did, in paintings that are symbols o f eternal truths, images o f great beauty and serenity. He is not a painter’s painter, and his influence is not to be found in schools and academies, but in hearts weary o f the burden o f modernity and enticed for a moment o f con36

THE INSPIRED TINKER

templation into an Earthly Paradise. A cowardly escape ? The realist and the politician might think so, but Gauguin’s paintings already have the authority o f monuments that will outlast our time and its mournful anxieties.

4

The Inspired Tinker A l e x a n d e r c a l d e r was bom in Philadelphia more than fifty years ago, and his parents, who were artists, misread his childish proclivities and tried to make an engineer o f him. But left to himself Sandy—as he is always called by his friends — began to draw, and when he was free to follow his own bent, he joined an art school. B y 1924 he was supporting himself by free-lance work—work which included the regu­ lar provision for the National Police Gazette o f what journal­ ists called a half-page spread. In the course o f his job he was asked to cover the circus, and this proved to be the decisive event in his career. He couldn’t keep away from the circus, and from drawing the animal and clowns he turned to modelling them in wire and any available bits and pieces. The first time I met Sandy—it was about twenty years ago— he asked those present to sit round him in a circle on the studio floor. He then unrolled and spread in front o f him a piece o f green baize. Out o f a bag he brought the segments o f a ring, two or three feet in diameter, which he joined to­ gether on the baize, and then he treated us to all the ritual and riotous fun o f a circus. The performers—clowns, acro­ bats, horses, elephants—were all made o f wire, and they all

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went through their turns with a degree o f realism that would have to be seen to be fully appreciated. I cant remember all the turns, but his friend James Johnson Sweeney, who has written a book about him and has often seen the performance, tells us that “ there were acrobats; tumblers; trained dogs; slack-wire acts à la japonaise; a lion-tamer; a sword-swal­ lower ; Rigoulot, the strong-man ; the Sultan o f Senegambia who hurled knives and axes ; Don Rodriguez Kolynos who risked a death-defying slide down a tight w ire; ‘ living statues ’ ; a trapeze act ; a chariot race ; every classic feature o f the tan-bark programme” . And Sweeney adds this perceptive comment: “ These toys . . . were not mechanical. They had a living quality in their uncertainty. The dog might not succeed in jumping through the paper hoop. The bareback rider might not recover her balance. The aerialists might land in the net beneath, or might succeed in catching the swinging bars with their toes. The number o f failures was uncertain ; but an eventual suc­ cess brought relief and restored equilibrium.” This circus was only a rather elaborate toy, but I see in it the beginning o f the later “ mobiles” , those wavering struc­ tures o f wire and metal that have delighted us at the Lefèvre Gallery in 19 51. In introducing these mobiles in the cata­ logue o f the exhibition, this same quotable James Johnson Sweeney surprised me with a reference to the machine age. “ Calder,” he said, “ has accepted as the material o f his art some o f the most crude and obvious features o f our mechan­ ical heritage and forged them into a graceful, individualized sculptural expression. . . . He has taken the principle o f the unwieldy machine and employed it as the basis o f his delicate ‘ toys’ ; he has taken the toy and built it on the scale o f the machine.” Perhaps before I explain w hy I disagree at this point with 38

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m y friend Sweeney, with whom 1 usually fmd myself in an embarrassing fulness o f agreement, I ought to assume that some o f my readers have never seen a Calder mobile, and therefore attempt a verbal description o f this new type o f art. It may hang from the ceiling or project from a wall, but generally speaking a mobile stands on three legs—an irregular tripod rising to a sharp point on which balances and rotates an assemblage o f wires and pieces o f sheet-metal. These pieces may be discs or crescents or rhomboidal shapes, and one rather heavy piece o f metal at the end o f a short wire w ill often be balanced against a widespread constella­ tion o f small discs, the constellation itself being made up o f a series o f balances and counter-balances. The tripod is gener­ ally, but not necessarily, black; the discs and other counter­ weights may be white or yellow or red or blue, and the wires are also painted. One has only to tap a disc or a crescent to set the whole system in a swaying, swinging motion, which may last for a considerable time. In suitable weather the soft breezes that come in at the window keep the mobile in continuous movement, and occasionally there will be a tinkle as two discs touch each other or come into contact with a neighbouring object. This gives a lively quality to mobiles such as no other works o f art possess: they seem to have a life o f their own, and are no trouble at all—they do not need watering, as plants do; they do not even need oilin g! I f you keep one on your writing-table, as I do, it is always amusing to see what the mobile has been up to since you last looked at it. Y ou can even use it as a kind o f diviningrod, to point in the direction in which you should seek in­ spiration. Finally, it is a fascinating object for a kitten to play w ith; and even my sophisticated cat will sometimes sit on the table and give it a playful push. But must we take such art seriously? you might ask.

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Modern art, you have been told, is anything but a joke—it is a reflection o f the tragic age we live in, something that can only be explained by an existentialist philosophy and a psy­ chology o f the unconscious. O f course, there are critics o f modern art who say that the whole movement is a gigantic hoax, and that clever fellow Picasso, for example, is simply pulling our insensitive legs. Calder, by making no pretence to profundity, seems, to such people, to be giving the game away. He is one o f the playboys o f the western world, and i f we had not been assured o f his direct Scottish descent, we might suspect him o f being another Irishman—another Christy Mahon. But Sandy Calder is a simple man—rather like the B ig Bear in the story o f the Three Bears, but kindlier to little girls. He lives near Roxbury, Connecticut, in an old farm­ house, and by the side o f the farmhouse is a building that was once a barn, but the clapboards have been replaced by glass and the place is in fact a studio, but a studio with a forge at one end and an indescribable clutter o f tools and sheets o f tin, coils o f wire and cans o f paint. Suspended from the beams hang scores o f tinkling mobiles—the whole room is full o f a pretty music as they gently sway in the draughts. I didn’t think o f the machine age when I visited Calder some years ago: I thought rather o f the village blacksmith and the spreading chestnut-tree; o f fairy grottoes and crystal chan­ deliers; o f weathercocks and windmills; and o f the Three Bears. But I also recognized in what I saw the w ork o f one o f the most original artists o f our time, and I want to try and explain why I think such a playboy can be so important. There is in modern art an element o f protest. It is perhaps its most characteristic element. As we are so often told, we live in an age o f transition: some o f us would say that transi­ tion is an optimistic word, for it implies that w e are going 40

Al e x a n d e r c a l d e r w ith

Myxomatose 1 9 5 3 - 4

THE INSPIRED TINKER

to get somewhere—not that we are merely going from bad to worse. In a stable civilization we always find an intimate and sympathetic link between art and society—art embodies the ideals o f that civilization, gives confident expression to its aims. But for many years now artists have felt no sympathy for the society into which they have been bom, and they have tended to use their art either to criticize and mock that society, or to protest against the fate that has condemned them to such a malign destiny. The extreme form o f this protest-art was the Dada movement o f 1914, which was a declaration o f spiritual bankruptcy—a bankruptcy whose receivers were the corrupt and cynical powers that just at that time were letting loose the First W orld W ar. After that war the genuine artists o f the period continued to protest, though in less obvious terms. What is the art o f Picasso, from 19 14 to the present day, but an immense and deeply moving protest against the indignity o f modern life, and against the falsity o f those who attempt to give it a façade o f academic respectability ? Calder is also an artist o f protest. Verbally he is not very articulate, but I can imagine him saying to Picasso: “ Don’t get so hot under the collar. They will only laugh at you. Take it easy. Y ou might as well have some fun, and let the politi­ cians and philosophers get on with the job o f putting the world to rights.” Does this mean that Calder is an escapist ? At this point I must venture a statement which may sound rather mystical. It is impossible for any genuine w ork o f art to be escapist. There is in art a principle o f obliqueness, indirection, distance —call it what you will—but a law which says that art is most effective when least purposive. Keats expressed this truth when he said that “ we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us, and i f we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its

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breeches pocket” . Calder’s design is not palpable. It is like Mozart’s music, or Cervantes’ story-telling. In its subtle w ay such art mocks the false complacency o f the official and academic world just as effectively as Goya’s art or Picasso’s; but by keeping cool and detached it enters the public con­ sciousness by open doors: it amuses before it amazes. The catharsis comes as a secondary and completely unconscious effect. It is characteristic o f all such art that it does not strike an attitude. Picasso strikes an attitude in such a painting as “ Guernica” —a direct indictment o f tyranny and inhumanity. I am not criticizing Picasso for giving expression to his righteous emotions in this direct w a y : it is a question o f tem­ perament rather than a question o f art, and one artist may have a temperament that finds expression in satire while another may have a temperament that finds expression in hum our; one may be conscious o f his environment, another completely oblivious o f it. “ I never wrote one single Line o f Poetry with the least Shadow o f public thought,” said Keats. Calder would say the same o f his sculpture. “ When I am writing for myself for the mere sake o f the Moment’s enjoy­ ment,” continues Keats, “ perhaps nature has its course in me.” That is the whole point. A moment ago I imagined someone asking me i f we should take such art as Calder’s seriously. If “ seriously” means “ solemnly” the answer is N o ! But after all there may be something to be said for the English habit o f taking our pleasures seriously, because it is then, and perhaps only then (I mean when we are enjoying ourselves) that nature takes its course in us. Such, at any rate, is my justification for taking the art o f Alexander Calder seriously. I do not believe that it has any­ thing to do with the machine age, or any mechanism in­ vented later than the Bronze Age. I do not suggest that these 42

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playful mobiles are even a reaction to the American “ way o f life” , or to an existentialist Angst. Archimedes might have made them: they may have been inspired by the fluttering leaves o f the spreading chestnut-tree. And when I think o f Sandy Calder, it is not o f a modern sculptor exhibiting his novelties in the refined atmosphere o f Bond Street or the rue de la Boetie. Rather I think o f him as an inspired tinker whose caravan has come to rest in Roxbury, Connecticut, but whose gaiety has penetrated to the ends o f the earth and shattered for a blissful moment the gloom o f our scientific civiliza­ tion.

5

Goethe and Art is n o t Goethe' s Philosophy of Art nor Goethe s Theory of Art, for the most significant thing about Goethe is his integrity—the fact that we cannot detach any part o f his thought and consider it in isolation. Art and Morality, Science and Philosophy, Religion and Politics—all are knit into one consistent fabric. The part is only fully significant in relation to the w hole; there are no boundaries or fences. I f we want to know what Goethe thought about a subject like art, we must look with equal expectation on every page he ever wrote— not only in his diaries and letters, his books o f travel or o f maxims, but also in his novels, his books about the morpho­ logy o f plants and animals, in his Theory o f Colour and, o f course, in his poems. When we have done that—and it would be almost a life’s work to do it competently—then I think we my title

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should be in possession o f a complete understanding o f the nature and significance o f art. It may be that with such an understanding we could then formulate a science o f art, a theory o f aesthetics. But that is not what Goethe did— on the contrary, that is just what he deliberately refrained from doing. For he realized—and these are his own words— “ that our understanding o f a work o f art, as o f a work o f nature, always remains incommensurable. W e contemplate it; we feel it; it is effective; but it eludes exact cognition, and its essence, its quality, cannot be expressed in words” . And yet nothing intrigued Goethe so much as the problem o f art. He spent a considerable part o f his life in the study o f a subject for which he invented a new name—morphology. A science, you will say. Indeed, it has become a science in the limited, specialized sense we give to science nowadays, but to Goethe it meant the study o f form (which is what the word means) and Goethe realized that form in his sense was present, not only in the crystal and the bone, in the leaf and the cloud, but also in the painting and the poem. Further, and this is the most important point o f all, he realized that there is no essen­ tial difference between any o f these manifestations o f form— that the form discoverable in nature is the same as the form revealed by art. There is one creative process—formation and transformation, and at no point can we detect a caesura, a break. Nature and art are linked in one continuous chain o f being, and morality, freedom, God—all values are inherent in that reality. In considering specific works o f art, Goethe would always go to the Ancient Greeks for his touchstone, but never in a spirit o f imitation. “ W e always advocate the study o f the ancients,” he said to Eckermann, “ but what does this mean other than: Concentrate upon the real world and seek to express it ? For that is what the ancients did in their day.” Art

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is never bom o f art. “ Art is constitutive— the artist deter­ mines beauty. He does not take it over.” So reads one o f Goethe’s notes, and in another he points out that style, the characteristic quality o f a work o f art, “ rests on the deepest foundations o f cognition, on the inner essence of things, in so far as this is given us to comprehend in visible and tangible forms” . Nowhere in Goethe do we find any justification for the conception o f art as the slavish imitation o f the external appearances o f nature. Art is an intuitive act, a leap beyond the phenomenal world, into “ the realm o f what lies beyond words to utter” . But this realm, the realm o f what we would nowadays call archetypal forms, is still a part o f the natural world. But it needs a special faculty—or rather, the special training o f a normal faculty, the imagination—to realize or represent it. “ A man born to and trained in the so-called exact sciences, and fully matured in his powers o f reason,” Goethe noted, “ will not find it easy to understand that there is such a thing as an exact sensuous imagination—a faculty without which art would not be conceivable.” An exact sen­ suous imagination—there i f anywhere you have Goethe’s definition o f art, and both epithets, exact and sensuous, are equally important. Let us look a little more closely at this definition. What in the first place did Goethe mean by using the word “ exact” in connection with art? W e have seen that he did not mean exactness in the sense o f an exact reproduction. In the same context he was fond o f using two other words which give us a clue—clearness and serenity. Further, he believed that these qualities had been exemplified in classical art, and that they were characteristics o f a properly civilized epoch. “ W e are in need o f clearness and serenity,” he said to Eckermann, “ and we should turn to those epochs in literature and art in which men o f quality attained to fully rounded Bildung and D

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lived serene lives and in time radiated the harmony o f their culture to distant epochs.” The epochs to which we should turn for this conception o f clearness and serenity were the classical epochs, more par­ ticularly Ancient Greece, and it is essential, before we can establish the real significance o f Goethe’s theory o f art, to come to terms with his so-called classicism. Goethe lived through a revaluation o f classical culture— that revaluation we associate with the name o f Winckelmann. For an appreciation o f Winckelmann’s significance we cannot do better than return to the essay on him by Walter Pater— himself, to an extent not often realized, a disciple o f Goethe. Winckelmann was something more than a scholar and his­ torian—he was one o f the first o f those philosophers o f history that Germany has produced in such intoxicating quantity. It is not easy to reconstruct the pre-Winckelmann view o f antiquity, but it is perhaps represented by the picturesque etchings o f Piranesi. There was no precision in the outlines— rather the mossy be-whiskered ruins o f an age that had com­ pletely vanished. Winckelmann scraped off the ivy and the weeds, revealed the ground-plan and true proportions under­ lying the desolate splendour. The past became at once more precise and more human, for it was possible for the first time to see how the Greeks and Romans had lived—to reconstruct their daily life in all its fascinating actuality. What then emerged, for the admiration o f intelligent people like Goethe, was a way o f life, a conception o f culture, for which the Germans invented the untranslatable word Bildung, which has in it a suggestion o f precise form and structure not rendered by English equivalents like education. Bildung is— or was, before it became a snob term in the hands o f the German middle class—the “ manners” that maketh man, the style o f living; but style in the aesthetic sense, which

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we then call grace, and which the Greeks identified with nobility. In so far as he admired the Greek or classical way o f life, Goethe is rightly to be called a classicist. It was the ideal way o f life, the only healthy w ay o f life. And so we get that typically Goethean identification o f health and classicism, weakness and romanticism. “ What is sound [again he is talking to Eckermann] I call classical ; and what is morbid I call romantic. And from this angle the Nibelungen are as classical as Homer, for both are sound and doughty. Most recent productions are romantic, not because they are modern but because they are weak, sickly and diseased ; and the pro­ ductions o f older times are classical, not because they are old but because they are strong, fresh, tonic and sound. I f we differentiate between classic and romantic on this basis, we shall avoid confusion.” Perhaps so ; but Goethe himself did not always do so, either in theory or in practice. He claimed, for example, that in the earlier acts o f Faust, Part II, classical as well as romantic notes are sounded in order to lead, as on rising ground, to the Helena act, where both o f these political modes “ assert their specific character and achieve a sort o f synthesis” . A synthesis o f the diseased and the sound, o f the sickly and the strong— that does not make sense. The real distinction is indicated in another statement to Eckermann. “ The distinction o f classical and romantic poetry, which now provokes so much dis­ cussion and dissension all the world over, originated with myself and Schiller. I held to the maxim o f objective pro­ cedure in poetry and refused to admit o f any other ; Schiller, on the other hand, with his wholly subjective approach, re­ garded his way as the right one, and to defend himself against me he wrote On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. He proved to me that I am romantic despite myself, and that my Iphigenie

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is, by its preponderance o f sentiment, not nearly so classical and in keeping with the ancients as you might be inclined to think.” Here we are on firmer ground. W e have a psychological distinction—between the objective and subjective procedures in poetry—and an admission by Goethe himself that he was not always so objective in practice as he would like to be. On this psychological plane his talk o f a synthesis begins to make sense. Goethe refers to this psychological distinction between classical and romantic on several occasions. In his essay on Shakespeare he made a list o f the opposed qualities which these terms cover—thus: Modem Complex Christian Romantic Ideal Freedom W ill

Ancient Simple Pagan Heroic Real Necessity Obligation

and he went on in particular to elaborate the distinction between obligation and will. “ In the tragedy o f the ancients [he pointed out] there is a sense o f inescapable obligation bear­ ing down on the individual, and the fact that the will tends in the opposite direction makes the pressure only so much the more acute. . . . All obligation has a despotic quality.. . . The will, by contrast, is free, or seems free, and gives leeway to the individual. There is something flattering about the asser­ tion o f will, and men were bound to come under its sway once they had become aware o f this power. W ill is the god o f the modern age. Surrendering to it, we fear its opposite, and this opposition sharply divides our art and our outlook from those 48

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o f the ancients. Through the presence o f obligation tragedywaxes great and strong, whereas the assertion o f will makes it weak and small.” “ W ill is the god o f the modern age.” That pronouncement was made in 18 13, in Weimar, with a young philosopher called Schopenhauer sitting at Goethe’s feet. A few years later this young philosopher wrote The World as Will and Idea. Goethe had put his finger on the nerve o f the age. After Schopenhauer came Nietzsche, Ibsen, Dostoevsky—the main current in modern literature. But it was Goethe who had released it, and Faust is the prototype—the tragedy o f the man who dares to assert his will. There can be clearness or lucidity in such a work o f art, but hardly serenity. The union o f Faust and Helena gave birth to Euphorion, the new man, the synthesis o f ancient and modern, o f pagan and Christian, o f necessity and freedom, o f obliga­ tion and w ill; but the hero o f Goethe’s tragedy is Faust, not Euphorion, who remains a shadowy figure, never bodied forth in any realistic shape. Such a realization was perhaps only possible in another, more objective art—in sculpture; and only possible in one shape, the human form. Poetry is inspiration, conceived in the soul, inevitably subjective. One should call it neither art nor science, but genius. And genius, thought Goethe, is under the sway o f man’s daemons. Goethe was a great believer in the daemonic. “ In poetry,” he said to Eckermann, “ there is something decidedly daemonic—espe­ cially in unconscious poetry, which fails to satisfy the intelli­ gence and for that reason transcends everything conceptual in its appeal. It is the same with music, in the highest degree. Its loftiness is beyond the grasp o f the understanding. It casts an all-powerful spell that defies rational analysis.” Goethe was here approaching the hypothesis o f the unconscious, even o f a collective unconscious as it appears in the psychology

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o f our contemporary, C. G. Jung. This seems to be the sense o f the following passage from the Autobiography: He [adolescent Goethe] fancied that in nature, animate as well as inanimate, he could perceive something manifesting itself only in contradictions and incapable for that reason o f being reduced to a concept, much less to a word. It was not divine, for it seemed devoid o f reason; not human, for it lacked intelligence; not diabolic, for it was benevolent; not angelic, for it often manifested malicious plea­ sure. It was like chance in being inconsistent. It resembled Providence, in suggesting a pattern. Everydiing that finds us blocked seemed penetrable to it. It seemed to manipulate the necessary elements o f our life in arbitrary fashion. It controlled time and expanded space. It seemed to take pleasure only in the impossible and spurn the pos­ sible with disdain. This essence, that seemed to move in the midst o f all others, uniting and separating them, I termed daemonic after the example o f the ancients and those who had perceived something similar. . . .

Goethe recognized the presence o f that daemonic energy in himself and in all great poets. He could not reconcile the creative powers o f that energy with his classical ideals o f harmony and serenity. He therefore tended to separate the arts into two categories—those that express this daemonic energy, the subjective arts o f poetry and music; and those that transcend human feelings, projections into an ideal world o f order, harmony and significance, the objective arts o f sculpture and architecture. Sculpture in particular he thought o f as in some sense an extension o f natural evolu­ tion. Nature had produced, in man and woman at the moment o f puberty, her finest and final achievement. At this point art takes over and attempts to go one step farther, in its representation o f the ideal human form. I think we might venture to express a doubt about this distinction o f Goethe’s. The daemonic forces in architecture

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are, in an obvious sense, subordinated to reason and utility. But the w ork o f an artist like Rodin, or Henry Moore in our own time, shows that in sculpture too the daemonic uncon­ scious insists on being expressed. We can only conclude that all artists, whether poets, musicians, architects or sculptors, are compelled in some sense to be interpreters o f their time — ‘ ‘ Our virtues,” as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus said, “ lie in the interpretation o f the time” —and as artists we cannot consciously mould the forces that unconsciously dominate the epoch. The corollary o f this doctrine is the belief that the poet’s exclusive concern is the effective artistic presenta­ tion o f his subject. W e are back at the point where we began — cultivating exact sensuous imagination, and we begin to see the importance o f exactitude. The artist is a recording instrument, o f value only i f he is accurate. There is another statement o f Goethe’s with which I would like to conclude, for it expresses the man and his attitude to life and art more adequately than anything I know, apart from his poetry. It is from a letter to Jacobi, dated January 13, 18 13 : “ I for my part [wrote Goethe], drawn in many directions as I am, cannot content myself with one w ay o f thinking. As poet and artist I am a polytheist; in my nature studies I am a pantheist—both in a very determined w ay. When I require one god for m y personality, as an ethical being, this is provided for also. The things o f heaven and earth contain such a wealth o f value that only the organs o f all beings jointly can encompass it.”

5i

6

Naum Gabo the career o f most artists o f our time is punctuated by a series o f unrealized “ projects” . Our age has not had the courage, nor the economic means, to realize the splendid visions o f its architects, sculptors and painters. In this respect, Gabo’s career is no exception— “ Project for a Radio Station, 19 19 -2 0 ” , “ Monument for a Physics Laboratory, 19 22” , “ Project for a Monument for the Institute o f Physics and Mathematics, 19 25” , “ Project for a Fête Lumière, 1929” , “ Project for the Palace o f the Soviets, 19 3 1” , “ Monument for an Airport, 19 32” —so it continues until this year 1956, when the project initiated by Dr. Van der W al for a monument to form part o f the architectural design o f the new Bijenkorf building will be realized in the city o f Rotter­ dam. It is the culmination o f a great artist’s career. Naum Gabo, who is the leading exponent o f the movement in modern art known as Constructivism, was bom in Russia in 1890 and had a scientific education. In further pursuit o f that education he went in 1909 to Munich, a decisive step for at Munich were three teachers whose fundamental in­ fluence on the formation o f the modern movement in art has never been adequately appreciated—Heinrich Wòlfflin, Wilhelm Worringer and Wassily Kandinsky. Though Gabo did not have any direct contact with these animators o f the modern movement, new interpretations o f the history o f art, new conceptions o f its destiny, were being forged in that Bavarian city, and in this atmosphere Gabo became an artist, but an artist who did not renounce the scientific concepts

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o f a new era. But then in 19 14 came the war, and the dis­ ruption o f that nursery o f genius. Gabo wandered through war-stricken Europe, but on the outbreak o f the Russian Revolution he returned to Moscow where he joined a group o f artists determined to give Russia a new art worthy o f the ideals o f a new society. For three years this group worked passionately and ex­ perimentally, and by 1920 had formulated their famous manifesto: “ W e deny volume as an expression o f space. . . . W e reject physical mass as an element o f plasticity. . . . W e announce that the elements o f art have their basis in a dynamic rhythm.” It was too much for the emergent Thermidorians o f the Revolution, committed to the desperate task o f maintain­ ing power and defending doctrine. In this task too the artists were required to play a part, and that part, in terms o f “ so­ cialist realism” , could only be popular, illustrative, senti­ mental— a denial o f all the principles o f the Constructivist Manifesto. The breaking-point came in 1922. Gabo received permission to go abroad and made for Berlin; he never returned to Russia. He remained in Berlin for ten years, formed new friendships, and was then driven by the oncoming tragedy, first to Paris, then to England, where he remained until 1946, and finally to the United States, where he now lives and works. It is not m y purpose, in this brief Introduction, to trace Gabo’s career in detail. I would rather concentrate on one more attempt at elucidating the principles which underlie his creative achievement. Constructivism was an inevitable word for the movement founded by Gabo and his colleagues in Moscow between 19 17 and 1920. Like most terms in the history o f art, it was invented by the critics, not by the artists themselves (their

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first manifesto was actually called “ Realistic” !). There was a good i f superficial reason for such a name. W e have devel­ oped a civilization that is predominantly mechanical, and for art to ignore the characteristics o f such a civilization is a foolish form o f conservatism. All stylistic periods in the history o f art have made use o f the characteristic techniques o f the period—and just as we speak o f Stone Age Art or Bronze Age art, and just as the Classical, Gothic and Renais­ sance periods made use o f the prevailing materials and pro­ cesses, so the Machine Age should naturally take advantage o f the inspiring new materials and the fantastic extensions o f constructive power brought into existence by the machine. That seems simple and logical enough, and already by 1909 the Italian Futurists had called on all artists to “ take and glorify the life o f today, incessantly and tumultuously transformed by the triumphs o f science” . The Moscow group o f artists were undoubtedly influenced by the manifestoes o f Marinetti and by the violently original works produced by painters and sculptors like Boccioni, Severini and Balia. But as in naturalistic art, so in construc­ tivist art: there is a fundamental difference between imitation and interpretation, between an art that follows and an art that leads. An awareness o f this distinction gradually mani­ fested itself within the Constructivist group itself; and from the beginning there was no doubt o f Gabo’s point o f view. He has always affirmed the primacy o f the creative will in art, the spontaneous nature o f the artist’s experience. “ B y means o f constructive techniques,” he declared on one occasion, “ today we are able to light forces hidden in nature and to realize psychic events. . . . W e do not turn away from nature, but, on the contrary, we penetrate her more profoundly than naturalistic art ever was able to do.”

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N o word is more ambiguous than this word “ nature” . To one person it signifies the world o f flowers and clouds, o f beasts and birds, o f man’s sensuous experience. To another person it signifies the whole universe, with stars in their mathematical courses and atoms ordained in crystalline pat­ terns. The poet and the philosopher will try to reconcile these two conceptions o f nature, to see, as the poet Blake said, “ a world in a grain o f sand, And heaven in a wild flower” . Gabo is a poet o f this kind, a poet whose images are visual, and who seeks by means o f the image to reconcile past, present and future; the many and the one, man and the universe. As he once wrote in a letter to me: “ ‘ Abstract’ is not the core o f the constructive idea 1 profess. The idea means more to me. It involves the whole complex o f human relation to life. It is a mode o f thinking, acting, perceiving and living. The Constructive philosophy recognizes only one stream in our existence—life (you call it creation, it is the same). Any thing or action which enhances life, propels it and adds to it something in the direction o f growth, expansion and development, is Constructive.” In this philosophy Growth and Form are two inseparable concepts: there is no growth in nature that does not follow a principle o f formation; no form that is not the result o f a process o f growth. The opposition o f law and life, o f science and art, is a false one; in general, in the words o f a great natural philosopher,1 “ no organic forms exist save such as are in conformity with physical and mathematical law s” . W ith equal authority it may be said that no aesthetic forms exist save such as are in conformity with physical and mathe­ matical laws. And there are not two separate sets o f laws, but only the one, the one universal tendency to the same 1 Wentworth D ’Arcy Thompson, in Growth and Form (Cambridge, 1942).

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law o f being, “ the realization o f unity o f spatial form in the complex processes o f physics, biology, psychology and art.” 1 Gabo, and the group o f artists o f which he is the leader and prototype, are the first artists in our time (they had predecessors among the architects o f Greece and Gothic Europe) to be animated by a more or less conscious realiza­ tion o f this fundamental unity o f all visual form. I say “ more or less” conscious realization because the creative experience o f art is never the result o f calculation, but o f what, for want o f a better word, we call intuition or insight. The process o f nature, we may believe, is entropic— it aims at economy o f energy and therefore at perfection o f form. The artist is intuitively aware o f this natural process o f development, and his work is an imaginative representa­ tion o f it. He demonstrates these formative principles, for our enlightenment and pleasure, for our disinterested con­ templation. He does more than abstract a static order from the modalities o f natural phenomena: he constructs ideal representations (images) o f the perfection towards which natural growth is striving—“1 think [wrote Gabo in this same letter] that the image o f m y work is the image o f good—not o f evil; the image o f order—not o f chaos; the image o f life—not o f death.” Intimations o f these images are everywhere in the world around us, so long as we look for the form o f what we see. There is a formative principle in the act o f perception: we focus the chaos o f phenomena into a “ field” o f vision, a visually intelligible segment o f reality. But there is another method o f vision, which is better called contemplation, occlu­ sive and penetrative, which reveals the wonders o f the forma­ tive process—the supreme process, as Goethe called it, “ indeed the only one, alike in nature and art” . The Con1 L. L. Whyte, in Aspects of Form. London, 1951.

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structive artist is dedicated to that vision, to that process o f revelation. W hen Gabo began to consider the Bijenkorf project, he first thought o f the physical requirements, which were a sculptural image free-standing in space, o f a scale o f so many metres, strong in its material construction but light in its visual impact, and he came quite logically, quite inevitably, to the image o f a tree. “ The organic structure in the world o f plants provided for me the solution for the new conception which I needed. There in the world o f plants, in the structure o f a tree—there lies a structural principle which . . . could be with great advantage applied to many a structural task. In particular, I felt it was there that I had to look for a solution o f m y structural problem and once this principle became evident to me, the image o f the whole sculpture evolved out o f it naturally.” In this manner a constructive image was created; and now this tree o f steel rises from the Rotterdam pavement, like the poet Darley’s blest unfabled Incense Tree, That bums in glorious Araby, With red scent chalking the air, Till earth-life grow Elysian there!

But a better and more exact comparison is the constructive image first wrought into visible form by the Abbot Suger: the radiant, aspiring image o f the Gothic cathedral, a con­ structive image i f there ever was one, and which was wont to transport its creator into a higher world, anagogicus mos, by “ the upward-leading method” .1 In this materialistic age o f ours “ a diversity o f sacred virtues” has once again taken on 1 1 take the phrase from Erwin Panofsky’s essay on “ Abbot Suger o f St.-Denis” (Meaning in the Visual Arts. N ew York, 1955), pp.108-45.

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visible form, and is not to be ignored. People on their busi­ ness will stop for a moment in the milling street to con­ template this image o f universal beauty. Naum Gabo is an artist who, in an age o f confusion, o f distraction and o f despair, has remained faithful to a vision o f transcendental order. His constructions are not ohjets d'art for the connoisseur—they do not belong in any sense to the bourgeois tradition o f art. They are images o f a tradition that has still to be established—prototypes o f an art that is emerging to give expression to the unformulated ideals and blind aspirations o f a new age. N ew materials, new processes, a new technology o f unknown potentiality, are waiting to be fused by the imagination o f a new breed o f artists into the monuments o f a new civilization. O f this breed o f artists Naum Gabo is the forerunner.

7

Walter Pater no English writer o f the nineteenth century stands so much in need o f rehabilitation as Walter Pater. Born in 1839, he lost his father at the age o f five and his mother at the age o f fifteen. Sensitive and reserved, he nevertheless won a scholar­ ship to Queen’s College, Oxford, and while there attracted the attention o f that most formidable o f all Oxonian pun­ dits, Benjamin Jowett, Master o f Balliol. “ I think you have a mind which will come to great eminence,’ ’ declared that ponderous professor. But it was not to be an eminence which Dr. Jowett could look upon with any satisfaction.

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Indeed, there is evidence which suggests that once Pater began to show his independence and originality, Jowett moved into opposition. Appointed a Fellow o f Brasenose in 1865, Pater was never, in spite o f his brilliant gifts, to rise above this modest position. A. C. Benson, whose book on Pater is the best that has so far been written, says that “ Jowett took up a line o f defuiite opposition to Pater and used his influence to prevent his obtaining University work and appointments” . Jowett was merely expressing the Oxford point o f view, for to this point o f view, in every aspect, Pater’s philosophy was a scandalous obstruction. This opposition was eventually to drive Pater out o f Oxford—“ there are in O xford,” he wrote, “ some very objectionable people from whom I would gladly separate m yself” . But Pater had remained in Oxford long enough to become an influence, and even to found a movement, and this was to be the undoing o f his subsequent reputation in the hands o f a righteous and avenging puritanism. When Pater died in 1894 his reputation was firmly established, his influence was increasing, and continued to increase until the end o f the century. But then came the trial o f Oscar Wilde, and Oscar Wilde was his most brilliant pupil and follower, a living embodiment o f his philosophy. Great was the re­ joicing in the land o f the Philistines; their worst enemy was down in the mud, and with him he had dragged his prophet Pater. There is not, o f course, the slightest excuse for involving Pater in W ilde’s downfall. It is perhaps too optimistic to suppose that even an intelligent few would, in the face o f such a moral outcry, attempt to save the good in W ilde’s philosophy from the vindictive flames. His wit was not to be denied, and two o f his plays and sundry aphorisms have been kept in circulation. But there is more in Wilde than that,

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as is perhaps now recognized; but that “ more” , apart from W ilde’s socialism, is wholly contained in Pater. In any case, Pater is immensely wider in his scope and deeper in his philosophy, and the comparison is not worth making, except as a backward transition to the work o f the master. Mr. Richard Aldington, in a vigorous but petulant intro­ duction which he contributed to an anthology o f Patef’s writings’1 seemed to doubt whether Pater could be appre­ ciated by “ a generation so sorely harassed” as ours, “ warweary . . . scrambling on somehow from day to day” . Instead o f trying to show the relevance o f Pater’s philosophy to our present needs, he accuses the “ intellectuals o f this century” o f setting out “ to burlesque Pater’s ideas by applying them too literally” . Pater had said that we should “ regard all things and principles o f things as inconstant modes or fashions” , and that we should be “ for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy” . I believe that Pater meant what he said in such passages, and practised what he preached. But acting on these principles, says Mr. Aldington, we have “ turned the palace o f art into a giant Aesthetic Fun Fair, where newer and wilder exhibits vie with one another, and a jaded i f impecunious public calls incessantly for bigger thrills and cleverer titters” . Mr. Aldington then enjoys him­ self in giving us a long list o f such thrills and titters, and while it includes items o f a kind that would hardly have come within the range o f Pater’s observation, such as “ Jellyroll Morton’s R ed Hot Peppers” , there are others, not only “ Japanese novels and Chinese poems” , but even “ Henry Moore’s calamitous excrescences” and “ the tortured pigs o f Stravinsky’s ‘ Sacre’ ” , that would not, in my opinion, have been outside the range o f Pater’s sensibility. Pater had two 1 London, 1948.

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qualities that Mr. Aldington seems to lack: an instinctive sympathy for the struggles and aspirations o f the artists o f his own time, and a readiness to listen to “ the note o f revolt” , as he called it, whenever and wherever sounded. There is a passage in the essay on “ Coleridge” which well expresses his attitude, and since it is not included in Mr. Aldington’s selection I would like to quote i t : Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the “ relative” spirit in place of the “ absolute” . Ancient philosophy sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in a necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification by “ kinds” , or genera. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions. The philosophical conception of the relative has been developed in modern times through the influence of the sciences of observation. Those sciences reveal types of life evanescing into each other by inexpressible refine­ ments of change. Things pass into their opposites by accumulation of undefinable quantities. The growth of those sciences consists in a continual analysis of facts of rough and general observation into groups of facts more precise and minute. The faculty for truth is recognized as a power of distinguishing and fixing delicate and fugi­ tive detail. The moral world is ever in contact with the physical, and the relative spirit has invaded moral philosophy from the ground of the inductive sciences. There it has started a new analysis of the rela­ tions of body and mind, good and evil, freedom and necessity. Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. Always, as an organism increases in perfection, the conditions of its life become more complex. Man is the most complex of the products of nature. Character merges into temperament: the nervous system refines itself into intellect. Man’s physical organism is played upon not only by the physical conditions about it, but by remote laws of inheritance, the vibration of long-past acts reaching him in the midst of the new order of things in which he lives. When we have estimated these conditions he is still not yet simple and isolated; for the mind of the race, the character of the E

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age, sway him this w ay or that through the medium o f language and current ideas. It seems as if the most opposite statements about him were alike true : he is so receptive, all the influences o f nature and o f society ceaselessly playing upon him, so that every hour in his life is unique, changed altogether by a stray word, or glance, or touch. It is the truth o f these relations that experience gives us, not the truth o f eternal outlines ascertained once for all, but a world o f fine grada­ tions and subtly linked conditions, shifting intricately as we ourselves change—and bids us, by a constant clearing o f the organs o f observa­ tion and perfecting o f analysis, to make what we can o f these. To the intellect, the critical spirit, just these subtleties o f effect are more precious than anything else. W hat is lost in precision o f form is gained in intricacy o f expression.

Is it likely that a critic who could write in these terms in 1865 would have been blind, as Mr. Aldington assumes, to the characteristic art o f the period that followed—to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, to Expressionism and Abstraction, to Proust and Kafka, to Bartok and Stravinsky, to Picasso and Moore. Mr. Aldington is entitled to his own opinion, but I would submit that a critic who could write with such prophetic foresight more than ninety years ago (he then being only twenty-six years old), and who could at the same time give Goethe as a true illustration o f “ the speculative temper” —as one “ to whom every moment o f life brought its contribution o f experimental, individual knowledge; by whom no touch o f the world o f form, colour, and passion was disregarded” —such a spirit would not today be in the camp o f reaction. One might give many examples o f the amazing modernity, the enduring validity, o f Pater’s criticism. I was particularly struck by this on re-reading the essay on Winckelmann, which was first published in 1867. It is not merely that Pater brings out clearly the significance o f Winckelman’s influence on Goethe (and indeed on the whole o f the Romantic 62

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Movement in Germany); he proceeds to define the limita­ tions o f Winckelmann’s philosophy o f art, and to show how Goethe in particular surpassed it. This again has a bearing on the point already discussed—Pater’s “ modern­ ism ” . “ Breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are the marks o f Hellenic culture” —so much had been revealed by Winckelmann. “ Certainly,” observes Pater, “ for us o f the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many pre­ occupations, so bewildering an experience [let us note, incidentally, that they already said such things in 1867!], the problem o f unity with ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek, within the simple terms o f antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.” But the problem could not be solved in the Greek w ay— “ by perfection o f bodily form, or any joyful union with the external world; the shadows had grown too long, the light too solemn for that. It could hardly be solved, as in Pericles or Pheidias, by the direct exercise o f any single talent; amid the manifold claims o f our modern intellectual life, that could only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe’s Hellenism was o f another order, the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit, the com­ pleteness and serenity, o f a watchful, exigent intellectualism” . But what did this imply for Goethe? Not, at any rate, to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. “ A taste for metaphysics may be one o f the things which we must renounce, i f we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfec­ tion. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift o f absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strange­ ness, and dramatic contrasts o f life.” Few people now aspire to mould their lives to artistic

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perfection, and “ the relative spirit” has been somewhat crushed in these days o f dogmatic politics and totalitarian states. All the more reason for returning to Pater, his wisdom, his poetry, his subtlety, his gentle humour. Humour is per­ haps an unexpected word to apply to him, but he himself said that “ a kind o f humour is one o f the conditions o f the just mental attitude, in the criticism o f by-past stages o f thought” ; and he charged Coleridge with “ an excess o f seriousness, a seriousness arising not from any moral principle, but from a misconception o f the perfect manner. There is a certain shade o f unconcern, the perfect manner o f the eighteenth century, which may be thought to mark complete culture in the handling o f abstract questions.” Pater himself had this “ shade o f unconcern” , and that is perhaps why he was not popular in Oxford, and w hy a suggestion that he was “ super­ ficial” still persists. It is a gross error. It is a common assump­ tion that in order to be “ profound” a writer must be pessimistic about nature and humanity—that a Pascal, therefore, is necessarily more profound than a Montaigne, a Kierke­ gaard than a Goethe. This is to confuse wisdom with meta­ physics or mysticism. Pater quoted Montaigne with approval: “ I love a gay and civil philosophy. There is nothing more cheerful than wisdom: I had like to have said more wanton.” For Montaigne, said Pater, “ to be in health was itself the sign, perhaps the essence, o f wisdom—a wisdom rich in counsels regarding all one’s contacts with the earthy side o f existence” . But health is not to be confused with heartiness, with mere grossness o f appetite, with brutal affirmation. The governing method is ignorance—an ignorance “ strong and generous, and that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive knowledge itself” —a sapient, instructed, shrewdly ascertained ignorance, suspended judg­ 64

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ment, doubt, everywhere. Pater is speaking for Gaston (in Gaston de Latour) : Gaston who is the final exponent o f his philosophy and the pupil o f Montaigne: “ Balances, very delicate balances; he was partial to that image o f equilibrium, or preponderance, in things. But was there, after all, so much as preponderance anywhere? To Gaston there was a kind o f fascination, an actual aesthetic beauty, in the spectacle o f that keen-edged intelligence, dividing evidence so finely, like some exquisite steel instrument with impeccable suffi­ ciency, always leaving the last word loyally to the central intellectual faculty, in an entire disinterestedness.” Mr. Aldington is right in regarding Pater as a bulwark resisting those world tendencies and pseudo-philosophies which “ must result in a contemptuous repudiation o f all that has for so many centuries formed the material o f ‘ culture’ ” . But the image is too negative, too static, for there is in Pater a positive philosophy, a philosophy which inspires and vitalizes the creative mind. He appreciated, none better, “ the old, immemorial, well-recognized types in art and literature” , but he was not so stupid as “ to entertain no matter which will not go easily and flexibly into them” . He was on the side o f the progressive element in his own generation, one o f those “ born romanticists, who start with an original, untried matter, still in fusion; who conceive this vividly, and hold by it as the essence o f their w ork; who, by the very vividness and heat o f their conception, purge away, sooner or later, all that is not organically appropriate to it, till the whole effect adjusts itself in clear, orderly, propor­ tionate fo rm ; which form, after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn” . Finally it is to be observed that Pater’s work, critical and philosophical in intention, is nevertheless creative in its own kind. He believed that “ imaginative prose” was “ the special

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art o f the modem w orld” , and he showed in all his work how it should be written. W e may have reservations about his style—it is sometimes too coloured for its purpose, an engraved scalpel; but at its best it is magnificent, and in cer­ tain o f his Imaginary Portraits, in The Renaissance and in certain chapters o f Marius, one is aware that our language is, perhaps for the first time, being used in the full measure o f its music and meaning.

8

The Writer and His Region En g la n d , broadcasting has made “ region” a word o f daily usage, but has obscured its meaning. The region in which I live, the Northern Region, is not a region in any­ thing but an arbitrary geographical sense—its bounds deter­ mined partly by administrative convenience and partly by the vagaries o f electro-magnetic radiation. Lancashire is in the north, but it has little in common with the county on the east o f the Pennincs. Even in that county there are three ridings, each with very distinct geographical and ethno­ graphical peculiarities. I doubt i f we could isolate a distinctive “ northernness” , getting more intense the farther north we go. Indeed, beyond Northumberland we come to a region called the Border, which is not a geometrical boundary, as the name might indicate, but what might be called a bufferregion, dividing incompatible realms. But the Border is precisely one o f the authentic regions, and the Border ballads one o f the best examples o f great literature rooted in a

in

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defined geographical space. Sir Walter Scott, collecting these ballads, gave his volume “ the misleading and indeed men­ dacious title” , as Swinburne called it, o f Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border— Swinburne retaliated with a volume entitled Ballads of the English Border, and in a draft o f a Preface to this volume he remarked rather bitterly that “ it needs no more acquaintance with the Borderland than may be gathered from print by an English Cockney or a Scotch highlander, to verify, the palpable and indisputable fact that even if England can claim no greater share than Scotland in the splendid and incomparable ballad literature which is one o f the crowning glories, historic and poetic, o f either king­ dom, Scotland can claim no greater share in it than England: and the blatant Caledonian boobies whose ignorance is impudent enough to question the claims o f the English ballad—nay, even to deny its existence, and consequently the existence o f any ballads dealing with any such unheardo f heroes as Robin Hood, Guy o f Gisborne, Adam Bell, Clym o’ the Clough, and William o f Cloudesley— may be confuted and put to shame, i f shame be possible for such thick-skinned audacity to feel or understand, by the veriest smatterer who has an honest and intelligent eye in his head” . Swinburne was a Borderer himself, so his indignation is understandable. But the point he makes is also the first point I would like to make: that what we call regionalism in literature has nothing to do with nationalism in litera­ ture, which is usually a disguise for politics. Regionalism in literature (and in all the arts) is a product o f historical tradition and geographical restrictions. The geographical factors come first, but geographical is not quite the right word for them. There is the basic factor o f landscape—the actual conformation o f the region—its hills and streams, its woods and buildings—all the surface appearances that make 67

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a familiar scene, loved for its own sake. But the buildings, as well as the fields and gardens, are themselves an expres­ sion o f the people who generation after generation patiently and consistently created them. The people have a continuity o f race—o f intermarried families and accepted customs; and a continuity o f language—and language which they may share for the most part with other regions, but which they speak with a special intonation and pronunciation. The dialect o f a region, to those who live in the region, is an unconscious bond o f feeling, and all these things—climate, landscape, buildings, speech and customs, make up an invisible matrix in which the minds o f the people are moulded. The Greeks had a word for this regional feeling—they called it ethos. This word generally signifies the prevailing spirit o f a city, and we have derived our word ethics from this sense o f the Greek word. But originally there was the idea that the ethos o f a city was somehow dependent on its situation and physical characteristics, and the difference between the ethos o f Athens, and that o f Sparta, for example, was explained by the very different spirit bred in such dis­ tinct places. This, o f course, was bound up with their myth­ ology, which tended to localize the habitation o f the gods. The gods, too, were part o f the landscape. The important distinction to make, in considering this question in its widest implications, is between this Greek sense o f a prevailing spirit o f a region and what I would venture to call the debased modern sense to which we might give the name provincialism. There is, o f course, no clear distinction between a province and a region; but “ pro­ vincial” has acquired a somewhat derogatory sense which fits certain characteristics in literature as in life and these are the characteristics which we must seek to dissociate from regionalism in life and literature. 68

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I f I proceeded to describe the characteristics o f the pro­ vincial writer I shall inevitably offend some people, but it is a risk I must run. The main distinction is that regionalism, in spite o f its local origins, is always universal—that is to say, it appeals, not to the limited audience o f the region in which it is written, but to mankind everywhere and at all time. Provincialism, however, is, like village gossip, o f little interest a mile beyond the village pump. It relies on local knowledge o f local types, and is inevitably petty and particu­ larising. A good test to distinguish the two types is that o f translatability. Tristam Shandy is a book wholly rooted, as I shall argue presently, in the ethos o f a particular countryside, and yet it is universal. I cannot quote statistics about the translations that have appeared in other countries, but I know that it has had, and perhaps still has, a great vogue and influence in Germany and France, where translations have been current since the eighteenth century. In Russia it had a decisive influence on two o f her greatest writers, Pushkin and Gogal. A Chinaman or a Mexican could enjoy its humour and its style. N ow take a book which in certain moods I m yself can enjoy, and which is not altogether dissimilar— Handley Cross by Surtees. Jorrocks is, I suspect, a descendant o f Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, but he lacks their uni­ versality. Sterne’s characters are, like Bottom and that other Toby, or Sir John Falstaff himself, larger than their local life— they pluck at heart-strings wherever in this harsh world the human breast is still equipped with such things. Let us now turn to a different kind o f book, though we only pass from the North to the West Riding o f Yorkshire —Em ily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights. Here we have a work o f art comparable to the masterpiece o f Greek drama, and as those masterpieces had deep roots in the region o f Attica, so Wuthering Heights has its deep roots in the bleak 69

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moorlands o f Yorkshire: it could not have been written with its particular colour and intensity in any other region but the Yorkshire moors, and yet, like The Oresteia or Antigone, it is universal in its appeal. Perhaps we shall get a little nearer to the secret o f this intimate contract between the universal and the particular if we examine the example o f Wuthering Heights a little more closely. Emily Bronte was a very strange genius, for out o f nothing, it almost seems, she conjured a philosophy that has all the fortitude and grandeur o f the philosophy o f the Greek stoics—o f Zeno and Cleanthes. But that “ nothing” , if we analyse it closely, resolves into the positive ethos o f the Haworth moors. Charlotte, in her Preface to the 1850 edition o f Wuthering Heights, admitted the presence o f what she called a quality o f “ rusticity” in the book. “ It is rustic all through,” she said. “ It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root o f heath. N or was it natural that it should be other­ wise ; the author being herself a native and nursling o f the moors.” Charlotte then went on to speculate on whether the case would have been different had Emily been bom in a town. Different it would have been, assuming that she had written at all. The interpretation given to the tragedy by a lady o f the world would have differed widely from that given by “ the homebred country girl” . It might have been more comprehensive—more “ sophisticated” , as we might nowadays say. But, said Charlotte, “ as far as the scenery and locality are concerned, it could scarcely have been so sym­ pathetic : Ellis Bell did not describe as one whose eye and taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her native hills were far more to her than a spectacle; they were what she lived in, and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the heather, their produce” . I remember, many years ago, while still a student in Leeds, 70

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going for a walk over the Haworth moors and being awe­ struck by what, in a poem I wrote at the time, I described as “ the unheeding bleakness” ; and 1 too called for a Stoic sacrifice o f passion on the “ black altars o f rock” that lay strewn on those moors. There is only one other landscape that has given me a similar emotion— the bleak valley o f Mycenae in Greece, where the tragedy o f Agamemnon was enacted. I might have hesitated to put forward the notion that a region can directly inspire tragedy and tragic poetry, and even a characteristic philosophy, had I not had these personal experiences. But between the vague and numinous awareness o f a region’s ethos and the dramatic organization o f a tragedy like Wuthering Heights there is, o f course, all that the word “ art” connotes. It is not sufficient to feel the ethos o f a region: one must also realize it, and this is the artist’s immediate concern. How it is done, no one knows—least o f all, perhaps, the artist. There is the feeling, and there, after an exhausting wrestle with the angels o f creation—there is the w ork o f art. I am not maintaining that all inspiration is o f this immediate physical kind. Inspiration is a complicated relationship not only between the artist and his environment, but also between the artist and his material, and between the artist and tradi­ tion, by which I mean the technique o f the art as handed down by previous generations o f artists. But I believe that this quality in art which Charlotte Bronte called “ pow er” is largely an unconscious communication from a region’s ethos— from its physical physiognomy and racial collectivity. At the same time one must admit that not all works o f art betray a regional origin. Some o f the greatest, and Shakespeare immediately springs to mind, are not to be localized in any exact sense. O f course, Shakespeare had his roots deep in English soil. There is a profound and intensely felt Englishness

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in such works as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and even King Lear, the most universal o f Shakespeare’s tragedies, is peculiarly British, and even anonymously local, in its atmosphere. Macbeth, too. Turgenev wrote a story called A Lear of the Steppes; another Russian writer, Leskov, wrote a story called Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District; and what both writers suc­ ceeded in doing was to transpose a universal theme into a more familiar regional setting. But in doing so they were admitting that a tragedy gained something by such a trans­ position—and that something is the regional ethos. A tragedy that gains its force from a familiar ethos, gains an equivalent force from the ethos o f another region. So far I have perhaps confined myself too closely to tragedy, but the need for regional roots is not less evident in other forms o f imaginative literature—notably in poetry. What better illustration is there than Wordsworth, a poet who was so conscious o f this need that he deliberately planted himself in his native Lake District. His best poetry is intimately associated with the Lakeland ethos and takes its strength from that “ primal sympathy, which having been must ever be” . But I would like to return, for a less obvious and therefore more effective demonstration o f m y thesis, to Laurence Sterne. I happen to belong to Sterne’s region myself, and though there have been many changes since he died in 1768 the changes have not been so drastic as in other parts o f the country. Shandy Hall still stands, and the villages o f Sutton, Stillington and Coxwold, where he lived or had a living, have not altered very much since the eighteenth century. I should get into trouble with my present neigh­ bours if I said that their inhabitants too had not altered much since the eighteenth century, but though they may be eccentric characters, as indeed they were in Sterne’s time, I

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can meet any day the spit-and-image o f Mr. Shandy and Dr. Slop, o f the widow Wadman and Uncle Toby. Such characters have not changed, and never change, because they are essentially human, and they are essentially human because they are native. Here is Sterne’s description o f the village m idw ife: In the same village where my father and my mother dwelt, dwelt also a thin, upright, motherly, notable, good old body of a midwife, who with the help of a little plain good sense, and some years full em­ ployment in her business, in which she had all along trusted little to her own efforts, and a great deal to those of Dame Nature—had acquired, in her way, no small degree of reputation in the world—by which word world, need I in this place inform your worship, that I would be understood to mean no more of it, than a small circle described upon the circle of the great world, of four English miles diameter, or there­ abouts, of which the cottage where the good old woman lived, is supposed to be the centre ? There you have a very exact definition o f the region, and though only o f four English miles diameter, it is large enough to breed half a dozen immortal characters, and the man that had the genius to depict them in immortal words. W e know that Dr. Slop was drawn from an original prototype —a Dr. John Burton o f Y o rk ; and so with every character in great fiction. Nothing is invented by the imagination: the imagination discovers what has been created intensively by the ethos o f a small circle described upon the circle o f the great world. “ The great Error o f Life is,” said Sterne in one o f his letters, “ that we look too far. W e scale the Heavens—we dig down to the centre o f the Earth, for Systems—and we forget ourselves. Truth lies before us; it is in the highway path; and the Ploughman treads on it with his clouted Shoon” (Letter X V I, Coombe’s collection, 1788).

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It is this concentration o f infinite time in a finite place that produces the intensities o f great art. It is the finiteness o f the region that makes the ethos that moulds the char­ acter that is copied by the dramatist or the novelist. As for the poet and the painter, the musician and the architect, they are in more direct contact with the same ethos—an epic, a folk-song, a lyric, even a house, these are emanations o f the genius loci, which alone can give accent, colour and life itself to the universal prototypes o f the mind. I am not venturing as a paradox that the regional is uni­ versal, or that the particular is general. There is a sense in which the greatest artists transcend their origins. A Michel­ angelo, a Shakespeare, a Beethoven—they have been claimed by the world for qualities which are super-regional because they are in a sense super-human. I do not wish to end on a speculative note; I would rather confess that there is a supreme quality o f greatness that eludes our critical faculties. But within the range o f those faculties stand the shining lights that make our common glory, each in a local shrine.

9

M ax Stimer several reasons why the centenary o f M ax Stirner’s The Ego and His Own should not pass without commemora­ tion, the least important being the merely historical fact that it played a decisive part in the philosophical discussions out o f which emerged Marxism. M arx devoted three-quarters o f Die Deutsche Ideologie, an immense work, to a refutation o f Stirthere are

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ner’s philosophy, and M arx was not given to wasting his time on trivialities. Marx triumphed over Stimer as he triumphed over Feuerbach and Bakunin: he had the last word and it is still echoing in the political events o f the present day. But after a sleep o f a hundred years the giants whom Marx thought he had slain show signs o f coming to life again. “ The issues which Stimer raised and M arx met,” Sidney Hook observes in a brilliant book which he devoted to the intellectual strife o f this period,1 “ have a definite relevance to the conflict o f ideas and attitudes in the contemporary world in Europe and America today. Indeed, we might even say that this is due to the fact that Stirner and M arx are here discussing the funda­ mental problems o f any possible system o f ethics or public morality.” That was written in 1936, and now, after a second world war which has brought all these fundamental problems into sharper focus, the relevance o f Stirner’s philosophy is all the more apparent. The clash o f altruism and egoism is one o f the common­ places o f ethics, and the issue is never in doubt. Stirner is usually dismissed as the most extreme representative o f the philosophy o f egoism known to history, and students in our academies o f learning only hear o f him as a lost soul con­ demned to the lowest regions o f limbo. His famous book was originally published in Leipzig, ironically enough by the same publisher who a few months later (in 1844) published Engels’ Condition o f the Working Classes in England. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum as Stirner’s book was called, hardly survived M arx’s onslaught, but some mention o f it is made in two books which played a great part in the development o f thought during the second half o f the nineteenth century—Lange’s History of Materialism (1866) and Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). The references in Lange’s 1 From Hegel to Marx. London, 1936, p. 165.

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book aroused the curiosity o f John Henry Mackay, the Ger­ man poet with a Scottish name, who then read Der Einzige und sein Eigentum and was so moved by it that he devoted a considerable part o f his life to a rehabilitation o f Stimer’s name and work. His biography o f the philosopher was published in Berlin in 1898. Later Victor Basch, who held the chair o f aesthetics at the Sorbonne until quite recently, published an appreciative study o f Stirner’s philosophy. George Brandes also saw the importance o f Stirner, and when, at the turn o f the century, Nietzsche’s philosophy became the vogue, Stirner was presented as one o f his precursors. An English translation o f Stirner’s book was sponsored by the American anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, and excellently carried out by Steven T. Byington. This translation, with an Introduction by Dr. James L. Walker, another American anarchist, was published by A. C. Fifield in London in 1913. I bought m y copy in 1915, and it is a book which I have never lost sight o f—it is ,a book which once read is persistently recalled to memory. In America it has been re-issued as a popular classic in the Modern Library, but in England it remains unknown and unsolicited. I have not read Stirner’s original text, but its vitality sur­ vives translation, and it is easy to detect the influence it had on Nietzsche’s style (its influence on his thought is still more obvious). Read the following passage (appropriate enough today for its content) and you hear the very voice o f Zarathustra: Listen, even as I am writing this, the bells begin to sound, that they may jingle in for tomorrow the festival o f the thousand years’ exist­ ence o f our dear Germany. Sound, sound its knell! Y o u do sound solemn enough, as i f your tongue was moved by the presentiment that it is giving convoy to a corpse. The German people and German peoples have behind them a history o f a thousand years: what a long

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life! O, go to rest, never to rise again—that all may become free whom you so long have held in fetters. The people is dead. Up with me! O thou my much-tormented German people—what was thy tor­ ment ? It was the torment of a thought that cannot create itself a body» the torment of a walking spirit that dissolves into nothing at every cock-crow and yet pines for deliverance and fulfilment. In me too thou hast lived long, thou dear—thought, thou dear—spook. Already I almost fancied I had found the word of thy deliverance, discovered flesh and bones for the wandering spirit; then I hear them sound, the bells that usher thee into eternal rest; then the last hope fades out, then the notes of the last love die away, then I depart from the deso­ late house of those who now are dead and enter at the door of the— living one: For only he who is alive is in the right. Farewell, thou dream of so many millions; farewell, thou who hast tyrannized over thy children for a thousand years! Tomorrow they carry thee to the grave; soon thy sisters, the people will follow thee. But when they have all followed, then—mankind is buried, and I am my own, I am the laughing heir! The whole o f The Ego and His Own is not written in this exalted style—indeed, Stirner’s style, for a German style, is unusually direct and clear, and not loaded with the symbolism so characteristic o f Nietzsche. Some o f his terminology is difficult to translate into English, for we have no exact equiva­ lents for words like “ Einzige” , “ Eigner” , “ Einzigkeit” , “ Eigenheit” and “ Eigentum” , but with the help o f some footnotes Steven Byington successfully overcame these prob­ lems. Stirner wrote his book at a decisive moment in the history o f European thought—at a moment when the traditional dogmas o f religion, politics and philosophy were being dis­ carded, and people everywhere were adopting the new dogmas F

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o f socialism, communism, Hegelianism, materialism and many other “ isms” . It might be said that the whole purpose o f Stirner was to show that these revolutionaries were merely jumping out o f the frying-pan into the fire, throwing off one set o f shackles merely to slip into another set. A man is only free, Stirner maintained, i f he gets rid o f all dogmas, renounces all “ isms” , and confronts the world as an “ Eigner” , a unique person existing in his own rights, self-determined and selfdirected. “ I am my own only when I am master o f myself, instead o f being mastered either by sensuality or by anything else (God, man, authority, law, State, Church, etc.); what is o f use to me, this self-owned or self-appertaining one, my selfishness pursues.” In so far as this doctrine was applied to absolutism, to nationalism, to religious dogmatism, it was (and still is) acceptable enough to a large number o f small-minded people. But Stirner carried his relentless analysis into the revolu­ tionary camp, and showed that their ideals, called humanism, liberalism, communism or what not, were merely traps for the unwary. “ The human religion is only the last meta­ morphosis o f the Christian religion. For liberalism is a reli­ gion because it separates my essence from me and sets it above me, because it exalts ‘ M an’ to the same extent as any other religion does its God or idol, because it makes what is mine into something otherworldly, because in general it makes out o f what is mine, out o f m y qualities and m y property, something alien—to wit, an ‘ essence’ ; in short, because it sets me beneath Man, and thereby creates for me a ‘ voca­ tion’ . But liberalism declares itself a religion in form too when it demands for this supreme being, Man, a zeal o f faith, ‘ a faith that some day will at last prove its fiery zeal too, a zeal that will be invincible’ .” That last phrase is quoted from Bruno Bauer, whose 78

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uncritical idealism had been too much for Marx, When he comes to Stirner, M arx has to take a very different stand. Engels had already warned him (in a letter o f November 19, 1844, quoted by Hook, p. 173«.) that “ what is true in his principle, we, too, must accept. And what is true is that before we can be active in any cause we must make it our own, egoistic cause—and that in this sense, quite aside from any material expectations, we are communists in virtue o f our egoism, and that out o f egoism we want to be human beings and not merely individuals” . That acute observation has been enormously reinforced since Engels’ time by psychoanalysis, which has shown to what great extent our ideals, even when apparently most disinterested, are but rationalizations or sublimations o f egoistic impulses or ex­ pressions o f unconscious and yet selfish motives. M arx’s criticism o f Stirner’s subjectivism would need drastic revision to be convincing today. But where M arx is on stronger ground is in showing that Stirner’s “ ow n ” or “ unique one” is a philosophical abstraction which one can divorce only in theory from the environmental influences which determine the nature o f the individual personality. A t this point Stirner becomes relevant to the philosophy o f personalism, and indeed Berdyaev has admitted that “ in M ax Stirner, in spite o f the falsity o f his philosophy, true personalism is to be found, but in a distorted form. In him a dialectic o f the self-affirmation o f the ego comes to light. The ‘ unique one’ is not personality because personality dis­ appears in the infinity o f self-affirmation, in unwillingness to know another, and to achieve transcendence to the utmost. But in the ‘ unique one’ there is a modicum o f truth, for personality is a universe, a microcosm, and in a certain sense the whole world is its property and belongs to it ; personality is not partial nor a particular nor subordinate to the whole

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and. the com m on’.1 Stirner would have had his answer to Berdyaev—he would have found his surrender to “ suprapersonal values” nothing but the old slavery in a new form, and slavery not freedom in his mystical transcendentalism. The most pertinent criticism o f Stirner is that which is directed against his doctrine that freedom implies power, though it is not a criticism that a Marxist can make with any sincerity. Certainly some o f Stirner’s statements can be construed as a defence o f the competitive spirit, and therefore as a defence o f capitalism. But Stirner was really only con­ cerned, as Erich Fromm has been in our time, to insist that freedom is a very ambiguous term—that there is all the difference between freedom from and freedom for something. “ M y freedom,” wrote Stirner, “ becomes complete only when it is my— might; but by this I cease to be a merely free man, and become an own man. W hy is the freedom o f the peoples a ‘ hollow w ord’ ? Because the peoples have no m ight! With a breath o f the living ego I blow peoples over, be it the breath o f a Nero, a Chinese emperor, or a poor writer.” Marx, i f not his followers, would have subscribed to this. And I think that most modern psychologists—cer­ tainly Jung, Burrow, R ank and Fromm—would subscribe to what is the essence o f Stirner’s claim—that freedom, “ in the full amplitude o f the w ord ” is “ essentially self-liberation —i.e. that 1 can only have so much freedom as 1 procure for myself by my ownness” . Stirner’s doctrine is, in fact, a plea for the integration o f the personality, and on that basis the charge o f “ selfishness” becomes somewhat naive. As Fromm says, if an individual can only “ love” others, he cannot love at all. “ Selfishness is rooted in this very lack o f fondness for oneself. The person who is not fond o f himself, who does not approve o f himself, is in constant anxiety concerning his own 1 Slavery and Freedom. London, 1943, p. 34.

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self. He has not the inner security which can exist only on the basis o f genuine fondness and affirmation. ” But Stirner had said the same thing: “ 1 love men too—not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the con­ sciousness o f egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. 1 know no ‘ commandment o f love’ . I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them.” Like Mencius and Chuang-tze, Stirner realized that “ the feeling for right, virtue, etc., makes people hard-hearted and intolerant” . The whole o f Stimer’s treatment o f the subject o f love is o f great subtlety and pro­ fundity, and Marxian criticism does not touch it at all. So far as I know only Martin Buber, himself the most profound o f modern philosophers o f the self, has appreciated this aspect o f Stirner’s work and given some discussion o f it.1 Finally I would like to suggest that the fashionable doctrine o f existentialism must owe something to Stirner—the re­ semblances are too many and too close to be accidental. Sartre’s philosophy is said to derive from Heidegger, a philosopher o f whose work I have read very little, and Heidegger is said to derive from Kierkegaard, o f whose w ork I have read a good deal. But I see no resemblance at all between the end-links o f this chain, between Kierkegaard and Sartre. But the characters in Sartre’s plays and novels are constructed round a philosophy which seems to me to be identical with Stimer’s (plus a little American prag­ matism). They are all busy discovering the illusory nature o f freedom, the tyranny o f “ isms” ; they are all resorting to a non-metaphysical, anti-hypothetical view o f reality. Every Sartrean hero concludes much in the concluding words o f 3Between Man and Man. London, 1947. 8l

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The Ego and His O wn: “ In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, out o f which he is born. E very higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling o f m y uniqueness, and pales only before the sun o f this consciousness. I f I concern myself for myself, the unique one, then m y concern rests on its transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say: All things are nothing to me.”

10

Frank Lloyd Wright described Frank Lloyd Wright as a “ provin­ cial genius,,) as though genius could be qualified, and for­ getting that geniuses are most often provincial, at any rate in their origins. In small countries they are drawn to the metropolis for economic reasons, especially i f they are archi­ tects. But the United States has no metropolis in the Old W orld sense o f the word, and a genius may alight, with equal propriety, in Wisconsin or Arizona, N ew Y ork or Washington, D .C. Mr. Wright cannot be so easily dismissed. His eccentricity is a positive quality, and is due to an obstinate holding on to certain truths from which others have diverged. W right’s early work was not particularly eccentric; apart from American exemplars, like Louis Sullivan, it seems to me to stem quite naturally from the European movement o f the late nineteenth century, from Austrian and Dutch Jugendstil, from Macintosh and Voysey. There was still organic someone once

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growth in that movement, but from the time o f the building o f the Crystal Palace the engineers began to declare their independence o f the architects, and on their drawing-boards designed “ structures” which were “ erected” . All they asked for was a clear space and a firm foundation, and their paper­ work, their brain-work, could then be converted into terms o f steel and concrete, into machines with various functions (to live in, to work in, to die in). W right’s career has been a life-long protest against this betrayal o f architecture—this substitution o f construction for building. Building begins on the ground—and not in an office. It begins with something even more essential than a survey o f the site. It begins with contemplation, with meditation, with an intuitive apprehension o f the particular forms that will be “ in harmony w ith” the site, and yet fulfil the functional purpose o f the building. Mr. W right has used the word “ organic” to describe this kind o f archi­ tecture— an ambiguous word for which he is now prepared to substitute two or three others—integral, intrinsic, natural: Organic means intrinsic—in the philosophic sense, entity—when­ ever the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole and where the nature of the materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes clear as a necessity. Out of that nature comes what character in any particular situation you can give to the building as a creative artist. This might be called a romantic conception o f archi­ tecture—Wordsworth wrote an essay on the architecture appropriate to the landscape o f the Lake District, and Mr. W right is saying what Wordsworth said before him, and which all people o f romantic sensibility have always felt. T o live in unity with nature—it is not a sentimental idea: it is a philosophical idea, the philosophy o f the Taoists, o f

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the Stoics, and o f the Romantic poets. But some o f Mr. W right’s critics are sentimentalists, and think that to live in unity with nature means living in thatched cottages or log cabins. That may be the way a stick-insect lives with nature, but it is not the way o f man, who has developed a wonder­ ful faculty for harmonization, which means the reconcilia­ tion or integration o f disparate elements—the creation o f a synthesis out o f thesis and antithesis. That is the method o f Frank Lloyd Wright. He was once asked how he came to relate Bear R un House to its site. He answered: There in a beautiful forest was a solid high rock-ledge rising beside a waterfall and the natural thing seemed to be to cantilever the house from that rock-bank over the falling water. You see, in the Bear Run House, the first house where I came into possession of concrete and steel with which to build, of course the grammar of that house cleared up on that basis. On the basis o f reconciliation—the reconciliation o f rigid steel and waving foliage, o f smooth rectangular planes o f concrete and rugged protruding rocks. Such a reconcilia­ tion is not achieved on the surface—it is part o f the inner structure o f the building, the use o f principles o f tenuity and flexibility, made possible by modern materials, which are actually the principles o f organic growth. A Frank Lloyd W right house grows like a tree rooted in the ground and spreading its branches to enfold a living-space. The machinemade, engineered house has no such organic conception, but is dumped inertly on the landscape, like a cardboard box. “ 1 can see no evidence o f integral method in their making,” remarks Mr. Wright. W e should not be afraid to re-examine our principles, and it may be that we can convincingly demonstrate that for

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the time in which we live, and under the economic con­ ditions o f our living, these principles are logical. But a revolt may be directed against a prevailing dialectic: aesthetic principles need not necessarily be logical—they can be illogical, imaginatively irrational. It was not reason that determined the architectural motive o f the Gothic cathedral or o f the Baroque palace. It is not reason that has determined the character o f Frank Lloyd W right’s buildings. Another reviewer o f this book called W right “ the Father o f the Functionalists” , but the truth is rather that Wright has been a lonely giant battling against contemporary academicism: a functionalist does not put carved larva peacocks over his doorways, build dwellings over waterfalls, or erect above a chapel a concrete tower-trellis for flowering vines. Frank Lloyd Wright is, o f course, a romantic—perhaps the greatest romantic o f our age. The mistake is to assume that a romantic is a kind o f village idiot with no interest in science or “ modern developments” . On the contrary, typical romantics like Goethe and Shelley had keen scientific interests: a contempt for science is more characteristic o f the classicist. It is his romanticism which gives W right’s Autobiography its typical flavour—it is an epic o f self-absorp­ tion, o f expansiveness, o f quixotic idealism. It is a big book, and it is all about the man himself, his notions and achieve­ ments, but never for a moment does it flag. And it is never petty. Failures are accepted with courage, tragedy with dignity. Call the man a charlatan i f you feel that way about him, but then recognize that his background is a continent and that he fills it without strain, with ease and affluence. I f he is a charlatan, so was Whitman, so was Goethe, so was Beethoven. “ In Beethoven’s music I sense the master mind, fully conscious o f the qualities o f heartful soaring imagina­ tion that are god-like in a man. The striving for entity,

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oneness in diversity, depth in design, repose in the final expression o f the whole—all these are there in common pattern between architect and musician.” The man is con­ scious o f this kinship, and when we have measured his achieve­ ment, we are not disposed to deny his claim—though we might have doubts about the claims o f the grandiose in general: doubts about Beethoven and Whitman no less than doubts about Frank Lloyd Wright. In addition to the Man, there is in this book a philosophy and an architecture. The philosophy preaches “ organic integration” . It says that i f you want to create a healthy civilization and a beautiful culture, man’s artifacts must be in unison with the natural: there must be no hard and fast division between man and his environment. This is given a literal interpretation: In integral architecture the room-space itself must come through. The room must be seen as architecture, or we have no architecture. We have no longer an outside as outside. We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. Now the outside may come inside and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other. This conception has a general application: Thus in this rise of organic-integration you see the means to end the petty agglomerations, miscalled civilization. By way of this old yet new and deeper sense of reality we may have a civilization. In this sense we now recognize and may declare by way of plan and building —the natural. Faith in the natural is the faith we now need to grow up on in this coming age of our culturally confused, backward twentieth century. But instead of “ organic” we might well say “ natural” building. Or we might say “ integral” building. Integral building includes “ an awakened sense o f Materials —their nature understood and revealed” . Aw ay with plaster and paint—let brick remain brick, stone stone, and wood 86

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an organic texture. But might not a painter claim that paint is also a material? And certainly a plasterer can go into raptures over his “ textures” . Wright extols glass, “ a super­ material” , and textiles are admitted as “ a beautiful overhead for space, the textile an attribute o f genuine architecture instead o f decoration by way o f hangings and upholstery” . There seems to be an unreasonable prejudice here: let us rather demand freedom to exploit the aesthetic potentialities o f any and every material. This prejudice in favour o f an arbitrary range o f materials—brick, stone, glass and un­ treated woods—might explain W right’s deficient sense o f decoration. His interiors look bleak, his furniture is hard and angular, his ornament empty, and there is just no place at all for “ art” (paintings, drawings, sculpture). Wright wishes to abolish the “ cave” and restore “ something o f the freedom o f our arboreal ancestors living in their trees” . But in man’s evolution the cave was a slight improvement on the tree-top, and for inhabitants o f a temperate or arctic zone it was at any rate “ cosier” . Wright seems to be an enemy o f Gemiitlichkeit: his forefathers were Welsh Unitarians. I speak without experience o f living in a Frank Lloyd W right house, and cosiness may be a prejudice. Alexander Woollcott found one o f W right’s houses “ exhilarating” — “ just to be in that house uplifts the heart and refreshes the spirit. Most houses confine their occupants. N ow I under­ stand, where before I only dimly apprehended, that such a house as this can liberate the person who lives in it” . W e could do with a few more testimonies o f this sort. If we can take the human aspect for granted, there is no denying the poetry. The houses are married to the landscape: there is lyricism in an office building, integrity in everything. N o doubt inferior architects have built better houses—better in the sense that they will give satisfaction to dull-minded

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people for a century or two, and then pass into oblivion. But W right’s genius, always romantic, sometimes mad, hovers at the threshold o f a new epoch, and no modern architect has offered so much inspiration, inspired so much hope. He is like his great painter-contemporary Picasso in that the fertility o f his genius has given no excuse for the foundation o f a new academicism. I have not seen enough o f Mr. W right’s architecture to venture any criticism, but I observe in what I have seen, and in all that I have seen illustrated—and what I have seen is supported by all that Mr. W right says on the subject—a certain self-sufficiency and jealousy. Obviously, when the house is finished, he resents the intrusion o f the client for whom he has built the house— the client with his furniture and knick-knacks, his all-too-human desire for comfort and cosiness. A Chinese screen is permissible ; perhaps a few wellchosen pieces o f Japanese pottery. Nature, in the form o f drooping ferns or climbing ivies, may grace the natural background o f wood or stone ; and even a tree may, like a giraffe, thrust its head through the roof. W right’s archi­ tecture, no less than the severest functional architecture, pre­ dicts the end o f all “ cabinet” art— o f the whole Renaissance tradition o f bibelots and bric-à-brac, in which we must include the painted canvas and sculpture on its pedestal. The aesthetic impulse that proliferated such objects in the past five hundred years now seeks to inhabit other forms— the typical forms o f our industrial civilization. The more sophisticated amenities o f our civilization must, it would seem, be secreted in cupboards. Insofar as they have useful articles (and what, in this respect, is the difference between women’s dresses and pictures, books and golf-clubs) there may be a certain logic in such austerity. But carried to its logical conclusion a sense o f unity— “ where the whole is to the part as the part is to 88

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the w hole’ ’— implies that every house Mr. Wright builds is his own house, and the people who live in them are not his clients, but his guests. Every architect, inasmuch as he fulfils a social need (for housing) becomes a sociologist. You cannot build, on any considerable scale, without affecting the life o f the com­ m unity; and most communities exercise a strict control on building. In the course o f a long experience Mr. W right has acquired many definite ideas on social questions, and they are never far from the surface when he is writing about architecture. They constitute a devastating criticism o f modern civilization. But it is always positive criticism. It is easy to trace most o f our social ills to the big city, and to cry out for decentralization. But decentralization is a long word which means nothing unless you have a plan. M r. W right has a definite plan, an architect’s plan, a plan for what he calls Broadacre City, a plan which we can criticize and try to improve. But he knows that a plan is useless unless there is the imagination to realize it, the vital creative impulse which is precisely the impulse that has been destroyed by modem civilization. So the fundamental problem is to restore this creative impulse, and this can only be done by a new kind o f education—education through art. I believe the time has come when art must take the lead in educa­ tion because creative faculty is now, as ever, the birthright of man— the quality that has enabled him to distinguish himself from the brute.. . . This creative faculty in man is that quality or faculty in him of getting himself bom into whatever he does, and bom again and again with fresh patterns as new problems arise . . . A false premium has been placed by education upon will and intellect. Imagination is the instrument by which the force in him works its miracles.1 1 The Future of Architecture. N ew York, 1953.

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M r. W right admits that creative art cannot be taught, but he has a practical suggestion to make—experimental centres endowed by industry where sensitive, unspoiled students (“ and they may yet be found in this unqualified machine that America is becoming,,) may rediscover their creative talents— “ where the creative endeavour o f the whole youth is co-ordinated with the machinery, and where the tech­ nique o f his time is visible at work, so that youth may win back again the creative factor as the needed vitalizing force in modern life” .

II

Religion and Culture o f the Nobel Prize to Mr. T. S. Eliot in 1948 coincided with the publication o f a new book by him— not a book o f poems or o f literary criticism, but o f what would usually be called “ sociology” .1 It is not the first book o f this kind that Mr. Eliot has published— Thoughts After Lambeth and The Idea of a Christian Society also deal with social issues, and in general, even in his poetry, he is con­ stantly aware o f the problems that distress our age. His point o f view is that o f a Christian and a note o f fervent apologetics underlies all his argument. But the pitch is always perfectly controlled—he believes, with Lord Acton whom he quotes to this effect, that our studies “ want to be pursued with chastity, like mathematics” . The title o f his new book is precise—notes towards the the aw ard

1 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London, 1948.

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definition o f culture; not a systematic treatise in the manner o f a German or an American sociologist, not a claim to com­ pleteness or finality. Nevertheless, the argument is closely reasoned, and i f we would understand it not one o f its hundred pages can safely be omitted. In a book whose whole purpose is to establish distinctions, to advance qualifications, we must not expect dogmatic conclusions. At the end o f our reading we are more conscious o f what culture is not rather than o f what it is. It is, we are told, “ a w ay o f life o f a particular people living in a par­ ticular place” , a “ peculiar way o f thinking, feeling and behaving” . It is the “ pattern o f the society as a whole” and it is “ the creation o f society as a whole” . But not a conscious creation—it is in some sense unconscious and cannot be deliberately produced by education or political action. Culture in this sense must be distinguished from the culture, or cultivated taste, o f the individual, as well as from the culture o f a group or class within a society. It is misleading to identify culture with any o f its specific manifestations—it is a question o f fine manners and good cooking no less than o f great architecture and immortal poetry. But there is one general assertion which, in Mr. Eliot’s opinion, can be made about all cultures—“ no culture” , he says, “ has appeared or developed except together with a religion: according to the point o f view o f the observer, the culture will appear to be the product o f the religion, or the religion the product o f the culture” . M r. Eliot takes great pains to define this “ togetherness” o f religion and culture. He warns us several times not to make Matthew Arnold’s mistake o f assuming that culture is something more comprehensive than religion. Equally w e must avoid the error o f regarding religion and culture as two separate things between which there is a relation; and further, 91

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it is an error to identify religion and culture. All these attempts at definition admittedly lack spiritual subtlety, and though he is “ aware o f the temerity o f employing such an exalted term” , Mr. Eliot cannot think o f any other which would convey so well the intention to avoid relation on the one hand and identification on the other as the word incarnation: the culture o f a society is the incarnation o f its religion. But there are further qualifications to make. There are religions “ o f partial truth” and people with “ a truer light” , “ higher” religions and “ low er” religions, and i f we should be compelled by the objective evidence to admit that a religion o f partial truth, such as Buddhism, is incarnated in a culture superior to our own, that is only because our cul­ ture is not really Christian. But surely the Buddhist might retort that if in some respect the culture o f India or China is in our view inferior to our own, that is only because it is not “ really” Buddhist. I f we are to have what might be called a science o f comparative culture, then we must also have a science o f comparative religion; and all that the scientists will be able to conclude is that while culture is generally (not always) found in association with religion, there is no evidence to show that any one type o f religion is “ truer” than another. There is one way o f life (comprising religion and art and every other kind o f cultural manifesta­ tion) and there is another w ay o f life, and the only objective test o f their worth would seem to be the degree o f happiness generated by each way o f life—Bentham’s sensible test o f the greatest happiness o f the greatest number. I agree with Mr. Eliot on so many essential points that it is only with a feeling o f hopeless bafflement that I find myself being sceptical on the issue which he obviously regards as the most important o f all. I agree that culture is an indefinable way o f life— that it cannot be potted or 92

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analysed or scientifically communicated in any effective way. “ Culture can never be wholly conscious— there is always more to it than we are conscious o f ; and it cannot be planned because it is also the unconscious background o f all our planning” —my own philosophy is embodied in that general statement o f Mr. Eliot’s. But even assuming that culture is the incarnation o f religion, I cannot help observing that the flesh can be corrupted. How often in the history o f man­ kind has a corrupted church been responsible for the dis­ ruption o f a culture—for the destruction o f a pattern o f culture, for the distortion o f a w ay o f life ! If you want the evidence, look round you at all the monuments defaced by a righteous spirit o f asceticism. I f a sociologist allows himself to speak o f “ higher” and “ low er” religions, o f “ truer” and less true lights, he is tacitly admitting an evolutionary order in religions. Whether this is or is not a correct interpretation o f Mr. Eliot’s mean­ ing, the fact that societies have in historical times evolved from primitive to more elaborate or “ civilized” patterns, taken together with the assertion that culture is the incarna­ tion o f religion, implies that religion itself has also evolved. But once we admit a principle o f evolution in religion we are committed (as sociologists) to the prospect o f a further stage in the evolution o f religion. But that is not the under­ lying assumption o f Mr. Eliot’s thesis. I f I do not misunder­ stand him, he assumes that our European destiny is to w ork out a pattern o f culture ordained nearly two thousand years ago. I am genuinely anxious to understand the Christian sociologist on this point. I have always assumed that Christian culture reached its perfection in the Middle Ages—in the Christian society o f Saint Louis, for example. It does not seem to me to be very realistic to suggest that we can re­ establish the cultural pattern o f the thirteenth century; and G

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at the same time any incarnation o f the Christian faith would seem to imply a society far more like the feudal societies o f the Middle Ages than anything we have experienced in modem history. If that kind o f medievalism is not in Mr. Eliot’s mind, then he must envisage a very different kind o f society—a society different from that o f the thirteenth cen­ tury no less than from the society o f today. But a different society, on his own argument, would seem to imply the incarnation o f a different religion. A different religion is pre­ cisely what I contemplate as the substance o f any renewal o f culture in the future, but from Mr. Eliot’s point o f view that is a gross heresy. That Mr. Eliot seeks to restore a past order to correspond with a past stage o f religious evolution is shown by his treat­ ment o f the question o f élites. This fashionable word hides the social phenomenon more realistically known as a domi­ nant or privileged class. Admittedly an élite can be cultured —it can encourage and protect artists and scholars and even to some extent assimilate such agents o f culture into its own body. The fact that people are variously endowed at birth with genius or talent means that i f a society is to benefit to the full from its humanity, it must allow its best brains, its wisest minds, to rise to positions o f influence in the public service. It would seem, from a biological point o f view, that the best system would be one that allowed this talent to rise freely to the top, like cream on milk. That is the policy known as “ equality o f opportunity” . Mr. Eliot is opposed to it, with a somewhat surprising violence. He argues that it is “ an ideal which can only be fully realized when the institution o f the family is no longer respected, and when parental control and responsibility passes to the State. Any system which puts it into effect must see that no advantages o f family fortune, no advantages due to the foresight, the

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self-sacrifice or the ambition o f parents are allowed to obtain for any child or young person an education superior to that to which the system finds him to be entitled” . I should have thought that the family, in Mr. Eliot’s no less than in m y own view, was bound together by something more spiritual than self-interest. But let us look for a moment at the consequences o f an education depending on privilege. In the administrative branches o f the Civil Service, as well as in the Armed Forces, there is no doubt that a “ career open to talents” has proved the only safe rule from the point o f view o f the efficiency o f those services and the safety o f our society. In the First W orld W ar the officers reared in privilege, trained in privilege and promoted by privilege proved a menace to our very existence, and had to be shed in their thousands and replaced by new blood drawn from the unprivileged classes before the war could be won. Even i f this statement o f facts is disputed, it cannot be questioned that the two world wars were organized and prosecuted not by a professional élite, nor by a class élite, but by an élite drawn by a selective process from the nation at large. W ar, in m y opinion, is not a cultural activity, but the position is not different in the peace-time cadres o f our C iv il Service, our county and borough services, and in the vast organization o f our economic and industrial life. W hat is left ? Mr. Eliot cannot reply: “ All that we mean by the w ord culture” , for he has already defined culture as an indivisible w ay o f life. But religion, art, learning— these are left. A re we to assume that different rules apply to them—that in these spheres o f life culture by exception must be formed and transmitted by a privileged class ?—the privileges being exclusive property, exclusive schools, exclusive universities and exclusive clubs.

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Levels o f culture are inevitable; specialization o f culture is desirable; but I am not convinced that these depend on an aristocratic organization o f society. Mr. Eliot is contemptuous o f the doctrine o f egalitarianism; he thinks it leads to licen­ tiousness and irresponsibility. I do not think he has given due consideration to what might be called the mystique of the doctrine. Some Christians argue that this mystique is implied in the Fatherhood o f God, in the Brotherhood o f Man—I am not in a position to substantiate their argument. I take my evidence from biology and history, and this evidence suggests to me that the highest achievements o f man, moral and material, are due to the impulse o f mutual aid. There is, o f course, an individual one-way expression o f this impulse— we then call it sympathy or charity. But the higher form o f its expression is mutual, an “ I-Thou” dialogue, a sinking o f differences, an exercise o f humility. To the extent that this relationship prevails in a society we have that social unity, that “ peculiar w ay o f thinking, feeling and behaving” , which generates and transmits a culture. I must confess that I have not given the whole o f Mr. Eliot’s argument at this point, but that is because it is not quite clear to me. He states that the primary vehicle for the transmission o f culture is the family, and in that I agree. He then says that in a more highly civilized society there must be different levels o f culture, and there too I agree, subject to m y remarks about equality o f opportunity. But he then concludes, from these two premises, that only by main­ taining class privileges can culture be transmitted from genera­ tion to generation. Groups o f families must persist each in the same way o f life—the landed gentry, presumably, must remain landed gentry, the merchant adventurers must remain merchant adventurers (and not aspire to the House o f Lords), and the poor must know their place and keep it. 96

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M r. Eliot recognizes the danger o f ossification; he thinks that a modest flow o f blood from one social level to another will prevent it. But that is not the lesson o f history. Privilege does not necessarily lead to enlightenment, and only rarely to noblesse oblige. Rather it breeds a spirit o f entrenchment, o f pride, o f infallibility; finally a tyranny against which the spirit o f man again and again has risen in bloody revolt.

12

Michelangelo and Bernini w hen w e c r it ic iz e great artists we have to take into account not only their personal achievements, but also their universal influence; and this is often an evil that “ lives after them” . Michelangelo is a particularly good example o f this ambiguous fame— “ a great fellow ” , as Ruskin said, “ but the ruin o f art” . In Ruskin’s earlier days Michelangelo had seemed to him the most sublime o f all modern artists; but the more he considered the development o f art after Michelangelo’s death (which took place in 1564), the more convinced he became that Michelangelo had been responsible for its decline. Ruskin felt that four great changes had been wrought by Michelangelo and they were all changes for the worse. They could be expressed in four terse phrases: 111 work for go o d ; Tumult for Peace; The Flesh o f Man for his Spirit; and the Curse o f God for his Blessing. It w ill be useful to bear these criteria in mind in discussing two books which were pub­ lished in the same year, 1955— one on Michelangelo, and one on the sculptures o f Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, an artist

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whom Ruskin would have considered a perfect illustration o f Michelangelo’s bad influence. The book on Michelangelo is by Adrian Stokes,1 a critic whose work is not so well known as it should be. He has written several books dealing with different aspects o f Italian art, and in some o f them he has written with especially subtle feeling and profound knowledge on the art o f sculpture. He describes his book on Michelangelo as a “ study in the nature o f art” , but though there is a whole section devoted to Michelangelo’s poems, which are not often considered in relation to his visual works, sculpture is again uppermost in his mind. It is not a long book, but it is so tightly packed with meaning that it must be read more than once—1 myself have read it three times, and with each reading have found increased understanding and pleasure. R u d o lf W ittkower’s book on Bernini2 is a w ork o f great scholarship. Professor W ittkower has been studying Bernini for more than twenty years, and no one in the world writes upon this subject with so much authority. He also writes with feeling, and his introduction is, as he says, “ an exposition o f the principles o f Bernini’s art rather than . . . a biographical narrative” . Mr. Stokes’s aim is similar: he says that his book is devoted to an “ aesthetic appraisal” o f “ Michelangelo and humanist art, to an unique quality o f humanist art” . I think we might begin by asking what this unique quality is, and then we might ask i f Bernini also possessed it, and finally whether we can use this quality as a criterion o f greatness in art. Let me first reveal the fact, which I hope will not prejudice the reader, that Mr. Stokes is a Freudian. But let me hasten to add that his book is not one o f those crude psycho-analytical 1 Michelangelo: a Study in the Nature of Art London, 1955. 2 The Sculptures of Bernini. London, 1955.

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approaches that reduce the work o f art to a sexual symbol and the artist himself to a sexual pervert. His book is an attempt “ to substantiate, in the person o f Michelangelo, the distinctive character o f art as self-expression or catharsis, what is called the Form, the mode o f treating each subject-matter” . Michel­ angelo suffered from periods o f acute anxiety and depression; he was testy and, in spite o f his great fame, always felt per­ secuted. He never married, and an element o f bi-sexuality is clearly discernible in his work. It is the aim o f Mr. Stokes to show that the very greatness o f Michelangelo’s art is due to a superhuman effort to repair this tormented psyche: “ I live on m y death,” wrote Michelangelo . . . “ And he who does not know how to live on anxiety and death, let him come into the fire in which I am consumed.” This gives us some inkling o f his inner suffering, and Mr. Stokes’s thesis, that Michelangelo “ projected into art a heroic, constant move­ ment that overcomes, or rather absorbs, depression and the state o f being overpowered” , becomes entirely convincing. Let me take this opportunity to quote, because it is rele­ vant, a paragraph from Mr. Stokes’s book which is an illus­ tration o f the occasional magnificence o f his prose style. He is discussing the statues o f Night and Dawn in the Medici chapel: They are carvings that make o f depression itself, rather than o f the defences against it, a heroic cycle; a statuary less o f uneasy grandeur than o f grandeur in unease, yet figuring an anguish not unreconciled with the formula o f an antique river god’s vegetative settlement. The women are inactive; there is no expressionist thrust beyond the m a­ terial, nothing pointed; on the contrary, a great deal to distract us momentarily, sleep, fatigue, surfeit, a relaxed and slow awakening upon the perilous incline, fruitful images that soon broaden to an universal recognition, undisturbed by the intensity that provokes re­ joinder, o f profound unrest. This feeling is unescapable: it comes to

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us through the sense of touch and the consuming eyes, from a hun­ dred sources that interweave, monumental composition, modelling, movement, directional contrast and the rest. It finds the hidden depressive centre in ourselves, but even did we not possess it, we should be aware that here are great works of art, here an eloquence of substances that is read by the tactile element inseparable from vision, by the wordless Braille of undimmed eyes. On the other hand such clamant evocations of hidden depression could not reach us—our minds would be closed—were it not that they are conveyed in the reparative, reposeful terms of art. “ The reparative, reposeful terms o f art” —there you have the guiding idea o f this book— the idea that an artist like Michelangelo can live on anxiety and death because he can transmute such themes into the sublime forms o f his art. It is part o f Mr. Stokes’s thesis that such ideal relationships o f form can be expressed only by means o f images o f the human body, and he goes so far as to say that “ it is likely that images o f the body belong to the aesthetic relationship with every object; emotive conceptions o f physique are ancient in u s; awareness o f our own identity has always been based upon the flesh” . It almost seems as i f he would explain even the aesthetic appeal o f abstract art as in some sense related to the body image. And here we come to the possible source o f Michelangelo’s fatal influence. One o f the charges brought by Ruskin against Michel­ angelo was that he had substituted the Flesh o f Man for his Spirit. Although Ruskin is usually considered a Romantic, he had strong classical prejudices, and one o f these was that the human body should be idealized, made androgynous or sexless, and that the face should be the principal feature, and should express perfect serenity, free from either vice or passion. I will not go into the personal psychology o f Ruskin that pre-disposed him to such a view, and certainly it is not

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an eccentric view, but one that has been held by many people, and by whole civilizations. The consequence o f such a view is that the forms o f painting and sculpture should be severely restrained, clear and compact. As an artist profoundly in­ fluenced by classical models, and by Italian predecessors like Donatello who held this same view, Michelangelo at first kept his forms closely packed. But we are always conscious o f a tremendous power trying to break the bonds o f form. As Wolfflin says, “ every turn, every bend o f a limb, has a latent power—quite trivial displacements have an incompre­ hensibly powerful effect and the impression so produced can be so great that one forgets to seek the motives behind the movement” . And then Wolfflin—I am quoting from his book Classic A rt: an Introduction to the Italian Renaissance1—points to the fatal weakness in Michelangelo’s style: It is characteristic of Michelangelo that he forced his means relent­ lessly to gain the utmost possible effect so that he enriched art with new effects hitherto undreamed-of, but he also impoverished it by taking away all joy in simple, everyday things; it was he who brought disharmony into the Renaissance and prepared the ground for a new style—the Baroque—by his deliberate use of dissonance. The great interest o f Adrian Stokes’s book is that it shows with great subtlety how this formal dissonance is related to the inner conflicts o f the artist—how Michelangelo forged beauty out o f conflict itself, and thereby resolved the conflict. What he calls the “ rational” nude was necessary for this pro­ cess—“ a man’s predicament, conflict, are not only explored but embodied by means o f the ‘ rational’ nude in rivalry, as it were, with the precise actuality, separateness, solidity, o f another human being or o f ourselves” . The means to this end were complex—a spiritual contest 1 London, 1952. Trans. M. D. Hottinger. IOI

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with brute matter in which even the material itself, in its uncouthness, must collaborate— the block must bear witness to the emotional process o f searching for that ideal form— “ add to depth and vivification; allow the worked forms to suggest both emergence and shelter, a slow uncoiling that borrows from the block the ideal oneness, timelessness, single­ ness o f pristine states” . This is beautifully said, but it also makes it clear why Ruskin called Michelangelo one o f “ the leading athletes in the gymnasium o f the arts” (the other is Raphael). Great art might be described as strong passions firm ly contained. When the passions are weak or common­ place, and the bonds themselves are feeble, then we get the decadence o f art, and that is the charge we must bring against the whole o f the Mannerist style that Michelangelo inspired. Bernini began his career about fifty years after Michelangelo’s death. The Mannerist style had had time to run its course, and it is Professor W ittkower’s contention that Bernini repre­ sents a return to strength and discipline, to Michelangelo’s “ dynamic vigour” . To Ruskin, and I confess to me also, any comparison o f Bernini to Michelangelo is almost blasphemous. I would like to explain why. Professor Wittkower thinks that Bernini is still suffering from comparative neglect, but that “ his fortunes seem to be changing” . It is true that there is now in this country a wider appreciation o f Baroque art in general, and o f Bernini in par­ ticular, than existed twenty years ago. This I suspect is in a large measure due to the advocacy o f foreign scholars who were brought up in a Baroque atmosphere and came to England as refugees. It is significant that the six columns o f Professor W ittkower’s bibliography contain only one item by a British scholar, and this is a reference to a magazine article. There is some quality in Baroque art to which people like myself do not respond. The usual assumption is that our

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attitude is a religious or a moral one. W e do not like Baroque art because it is the art o f the Counter-Reformation; it offends our ingrained Protestantism. But this is not true. The revul­ sion I experience when I enter St. Peter’s in Rom e is not moral—it is physical, even visceral. It is literally an aesthetic reaction, and it is not confined to Protestants—I have met many Catholics who agree with me. Fundamentally we are agreeing with that great Catholic, St. Bernard, who reacted against similar tendencies in the art o f the twelfth century. The Cistercian order which he founded perfected an archi­ tecture that is at the opposite extreme to Baroque—instead o f richness, austerity; instead o f agitation, stillness; instead o f emotional expressionism, ideal harmony. These dissident Benedictines were instrumental in spreading the serene Cis­ tercian style throughout northern Europe, and there can be no doubt that it corresponded, and still corresponds, to some­ thing more universal than sectarian prejudice: the longing to contrast the futile indulgences o f the flesh with an order that is perfect in its proportions, at once objective and absolute, superhuman and serene. Bernini’s personality is somewhat elusive. He was a devout Catholic, and, as Professor W ittkower tells us, “ remained to the end o f his life an ardent follower o f Jesuit teaching” . He does not seem to have been tortured by any o f the doubts and despairs that made Michelangelo’s life such a misery; and he does not seem to have felt the need to cast his broken mind into the reparative mould o f a perfected form. On the con­ trary, his impulse was to break all bonds, to escape from a confining mould, and to use the utmost freedom o f gesture— to be rhetorical rather than restrained. His particular type o f Catholicism encouraged him in this. As Professor W ittkower says, the Spiritual Exercises o f St. Ignatius which he practised “ were designed to stimulate a vivid apprehension o f any 103

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given subject for meditation through an extremely vivid appeal to the senses” . The religious imagery which he was called upon to create had to fulfd precisely the same purpose as the Spiritual Exercises. Professor Wittkower then gives the statue o f St. Bibiana (in the church in Rom e dedicated to her) as an example o f this achievement; he says that the beholder finds himself face to face with the gnosis o f an individual rather than with a supra-personal cult image. His sympathy is roused, he feels with her and tries to identify himself with her experience. He receives even more than he is immediately aware of, for with her he shares emotions o f universal significance. Herein seems to lie the secret o f Bernini’s spectacular success: it is through emotional identifi­ cation with the mood symbolized in a figure that the faithful are led to submit to the ethos o f the triumphant Counter-Reformation.

W e turn to the illustration o f this statue and find all that is so artificial and repellent in this type o f art: “ the prevalent prototype o f female saints” , as Professor W ittkower in­ cautiously calls it—a calculated pose, a languid hand uplifted in benediction, a head inclined sentimentally, and sweet empty features whose stereotyped details—half-open mouth and upturned eyes—are a kind o f rubber-stamp o f piety. Bernini certainly has finer conceptions to his credit, but this statue is nevertheless representative o f all he stands for in the history o f art: for a pictorial conception o f the art o f sculpture (sculpture seen from a single viewpoint, and not as a rounded palpable mass), for emotional involvement rather than time­ less contemplation; for tumult rather than peace; for con­ scious conceit rather than naivety. The notion that sculpture should be a plastic three-dimen­ sional composition rather than a pictorial composition—that it should appeal to our tactile sensations as well as to our visual sensations, that it should be read, as Mr. Stokes says, “ by the wordless Braille o f undimmed eyes” —this is perhaps a modem 104

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prejudice, but i f one has become accustomed to this full range o f sculptural effect, then Bernini’s work must seem shallow and relatively ineffective. As for its dramatic effect, which might be thought to compensate for this lack o f tactile pal­ pability, again a confusion o f medium seems to be involved. I confess that I am subdued by the theatrical brilliance o f Bernini’s St. Teresa group in the church o f St. Maria della Vittoria, but only by forgetting (or not noticing) that I am looking at sculpture. I am penetrated by a dramatic vision, by a dream-like illusion; and i f art is a form o f illusionism, then Bernini is a great artist for whom sculpture is a means, not an end. That perhaps explains why, following Baudelaire, I attach so much importance to naivety in art. To use art is to abuse art. In true art there is no interval between intuition and execution, between vision and design: everything is imme­ diate and spontaneous, and even the sculptor, who labours against time, seeks always to retain the unity o f feeling and form. It may be that in expressing a preference for such qualities in art as unity, objectivity, serenity, and simplicity, we are merely revealing our own psychological type, and I have no wish to dismiss Bernini dogmatically. Obviously he was a genius—his architecture alone is sufficient evidence o f that. But the corruption that was inherent in Michelangelo’s later work is blatant in the whole o f Bernini’s sculpture, and it springs, in m y view, from a corruption o f consciousness itself, whereby what should be direct and unique in feeling and expression becomes stereotyped and calculated.

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13 The Limits o f Logic suggests that his book1 may be o f interest to the general reader, and it is as a general reader that I presume to comment on it. There is, indeed, much in his closely rea­ soned argument o f general application; to follow it is a profit­ able mental discipline; and I can imagine no intelligence that would not benefit from its clear presentation o f certain basic problems o f philosophy. It is as a general reader that I am immediately held up by the first sentence o f the first page: “ It is by its methods rather than its subject-matter that philosophy is to be distinguished from other arts or sciences.” The five chapters that follow are confined to a consideration o f method. The problem is not to make a valid statement (about being or existence, truth or beauty), but to discover how a statement o f any kind can be made. “ Knowing as having the right to be sure” , “ How do we kn ow ?” , “ The justification o f statements about physical objects” , “ The analysis and justification o f statements about other minds” — such sectional headings will indicate the kind o f question that is discussed. But is this philosophy in any traditional or complete sense? Most philosophers have attempted to solve such epistemological problems, but very few would have regarded them as the be-all and end-all o f philosophy. Hume and Locke, who may be regarded as the father and grand­ father o f the empirical tradition to which Professor Ayer belongs, treated these questions o f method as prolegomena to the more weighty problems o f morals and politics. Con­ temporary analytical philosophy never seems to advance professor ayer

1 The Problem of Knowledge. London, 1956.

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beyond its prolegomena and this is due to its exclusive reliance on linguistic logic or “ scientific method” . The general reader is not likely to be in a position to question any o f Professor Ayer’s propositions. Apart from the fact that they are usually in support o f a commonsense view, which he is likely to share, they are presented with a dialectical brilliance which only a logician o f equal skill could counter. But while agreeing that there is more to it than “ running hard in order to stay in the same place” , it is possible to question the general utility o f some o f these logical exercises. “ W hy cannot cause succeed effect?” The general reader might feel that the answer to such a question is precluded by the agreed usage and function o f the words “ cause” and “ effect” , and i f this is nevertheless Professor A yer’s own conclusion, one can still wonder whether the question need ever have been raised. But apparently con­ temporary philosophers love to conduct long arguments on such subjects, and to conclude that indeed cause cannot succeed effect. W e knew it, but our knowledge is confirmed. O f most propositions it could be said that it is logically con­ ceivable that they are false; but human discourse has to ignore logic, or there would be no art and no invention, no spring o f action whatever, but only universal scepticism. The con­ duct o f life is not logical, but pragmatic. Logic is a necessary science because language is an imprecise instrument o f communication, and the average mind uses it bluntly. But there is an opposite error based on the assump­ tion that language can be scientific, and that meaningful discourse is only possible in so far as this ideal o f scientific method is achieved. The truth is rather that human beings communicate with each other by various and devious methods, from grunts and gestures to mathematical symbols and works o f art. Several o f these methods dispense with 107

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language altogether, and yet communicate the structure o f feelings with great precision. Admittedly the knowledge thus communicated is not infallible; but Professor Ayer admits that empirical statements are in no better position—there are very few o f them which are in any important sense indubit­ able. Plato believed that it was possible to have imiate knowledge o f universal ideas—that is, o f truth. Knowledge o f truth, he would have said, is acquired by metaphysical intuition, and the function o f logic or scientific method is then deductive. This kind o f philosophy has been discredited in our time because all manner o f religious or mystical statements that have no basis in experience are then open to discussion, and they tend to clog the dialectical machine. All modern philo­ sophers, except perhaps certain Catholics like Gilson and Maritain, would claim to be empirical in some sense, but there is no agreement as to what constitutes experience; or, since we are here concerned with a theory o f knowledge, as to what constitutes cognition. Professor Ayer does not like the w o rd “ intuition” (“ Words like ‘ intuition’ and ‘ telepathy’ are brought in just to disguise the fact that no explanation has been found” ), and though I have noted the word “ unconscious” two or three times, it is not used to imply any theory o f access to hermetic levels o f knowledge, such as Freud’s “ archaic heritage” or Ju ng’s “ collective unconscious” . N or does Professor Ayer presum­ ably admit the existence o f two distinct types o f cognition— discursive (logical) and presentational (symbolic). I would not venture to take up a dogmatic position in such matters, but I do in my amateurish w ay feel as I read The Problem Oj Knowledge that the problem o f knowledge is either more complicated than Professor Ayer suggests, or that it is possibly much simpler. 108

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I can only very tentatively, and surely revealing my ignor­ ance o f places where these questions have been definitely settled by Professor Ayer and his followers, ask certain ques­ tions. For example, while duly qualifying his defence o f “ naive realism’ ’, Professor Ayer seems to treat all perception as mirror-like. How the perceptual apparatus functions is an extremely complicated problem, for which the neurologists have no simple explanation. “ When we perceive a twodimensional circle,” Sir Russell Brain has pointed out, “ we do so by means o f an activity in the brain which is halved, reduplicated, transposed, inverted, distorted, and three-di­ mensional.” But more significantly, there is in perception itself (if I have understood the Gestalt psychologists) a selec­ tive and formative element. It has even been called an aesthetic element. That is to say, i f perception were direct, it would be formless, confused and confusing. As the mind perceives, it automatically selects and organizes the field o f perception. To this modern psychological observation corresponds Kant’s fundamental notion that “ experience is without doubt the first product which our understanding brings forth” . This means, as Professor Charles Hendel has observed (in his Introduction to Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), that “ in knowledge truth is whatever is in accordance with the form o f understanding. . . . Whatever human consciousness appropriates for any purpose whatsoever, whether to gain knowledge or to handle imaginatively in art, is already pos­ sessed o f form at the very taking” . It is on such grounds that Cassirer rejected positivism. The Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that in the act o f perception a “ segregation o f wholes” takes place in the nervous system. W e see the external world through a shape-giving filter. It is no longer possible, as R u d o lf Arnheim H

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said in Art and Visual Perception,1 to think o f vision as pro­ ceeding from the particulars to the general—“ vision is not a mechanical recording o f events but the grasping o f significant structural patterns” , and these patterns are the primary data o f perception. We have to think o f perception as a creative activity that achieves at the sensory level a form o f knowledge (symbolic cognition or “ perceptual concepts’’) independent o f the processes o f logical reasoning. This fact, if fact it be, would have considerable significance for the problem o f memory, to which Professor Ayer devotes one o f his most interesting chapters. He argues very convincingly that memory is not necessarily based on image recollection. He even suggests that memory perhaps functions best when no images intervene. But granted that the senses work through significant patterns, one can imagine an almost mechanical process o f sorting that has no reference to concrete visual particulars. It will still seem true that “ where one remembers something that one has seen, there need not always be a present image” . But this is a limited, figurative or repre­ sentational, notion o f an image. There may be a shadow-play o f imageless “ Gestaken” . This is pursuing the argument into the psychological sphere, which Professor Ayer seems studiously to avoid. But again the general reader in his ignorance might ask whether the problems o f perception and memory can be realistically discussed apart from psychology, or even apart from physi­ ology. If one reads a neurobiologist such as J. R . Smythies2 one has the feeling, perhaps deceptive, that the problems discussed by Professor Ayer are being discussed more realis­ tically. The closest correspondence in my limited reading o f 1 London, 1956. a A n aly sis o f Perception. London, 1956. IIO

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philosophy to the kind o f reasoning pursued by Professor Ayer is not in neurobiology, and not even in Locke or Hume, but in St. Thomas Aquinas. Logic can function with a certain sublime disregard o f facts : it is happiest when dealing with abstract categories. St. Thomas, for example, discusses whether the intelligence can know the indivisible before the divisible (Summa Theologica I, Qu. 85, Art. 8), which corres­ ponds to Professor Ayer’s discussion o f whether the effect can come before the cause. St. Thomas and Professor Ayer even discuss an identical problem—e.g. can we have any knowledge o f the future (Summa, I, Qu. 86, Art. 4: Utrum intellectus noster cognoscat futura). The remoteness o f logic is due to a limited and frustrating notion o f cognition: not only the denial o f intuition as a mode o f knowledge, but also, and more seriously, the con­ temptful neglect o f symbolic modes o f communication. Sym­ bolism has, unfortunately, a traditional aura o f superstition, but what symbols communicate is not necessarily irrational or even numinous, but concrete and positive—a pattern o f feeling, for example. Symbolic modes o f communication are non-verbal, and a symbol that is non-verbal, say a painting by Cézanne, can be as positive a contribution to knowledge as any statement verified by scientific method. Symbolic statements can be elaborated or extended: it is possible to communicate by means o f “ the language o f art” , and by means o f this language convey a knowledge o f reality. Cassirer’s hypothesis o f “ mythical thinking” , for which he gives the empirical evidence, Susan Langer’s “ symbolic dis­ course” , extend the idea o f such a language and suggest several modes o f mental experience that function on a non­ verbal level. Even behaviouristic semanticists like Charles W . Morris admit that “ such arts as music and painting may signify in any o f the modes o f signifying” . The arts are hi

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languages and their logic is sui generis. The statements they make are meant to be true, and refer to the same probable truths as philosophy. It is possible that Professor Ayer presupposes a distinction between philosophy and metaphysics, and that he would dismiss all metaphysics as outmoded Platonism. But finally, as Kant held, the intellect is incapable o f anything but platonising. What we hanker after is some form o f integral experi­ ence : a mode o f knowledge that is not partial or exclusive, but in our human degree, absolute. Philosophy, said Whitehead, “ is akin to poetry, and both o f them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization” . There is neither religiosity nor sentimentality in such an ideal; even Hume would have accepted it. It is not for a general reader to pronounce on the validity o f any particular system o f philosophy—he lacks the technical equipment. He must modestly decline to enter into an argu­ ment with a professional philosopher. It is not that he is afraid o f finding himself in error. He is merely less ambitious. In the past philosophy has been more than a theory o f knowledge or a clear understanding o f the dimensions o f language. It has been an adventure o f ideas, and i f this phrase o f Whitehead’s now seems too corny, let Cassirer express the same thought with his subdued eloquence: E very authentic function o f the human spirit has this decisive characteristic in common with cognition: it does not merely copy but rather embodies an original, formative power. It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present but contains an independent energy o f the human spirit through which the simple presence o f the phenomenon assumes a definite “ meaning” , a par­ ticular ideational content. This is as true o f art as it is o f cognition; it is as true o f myth as o f religion. A ll live in particular image-worlds, which do not merely reflect the empirically given, but which rather 112

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produce it in accordance with an independent principle. Each of these functions creates its own symbolic forms which, if not similar to the intellectual symbols, enjoy equal rank as products of the human spirit.1

14

Baudelaire as Art Critic is often said that no form o f writing is so ephemeral as art criticism; and one has to be careful, in writing about contemporary art, not to be dominated by a sense o f ultimate futility. But such despair is not justified, and I know o f no better proof o f this than Baudelaire’s art criticism, written about a hundred years ago, but only recently adequately presented in an English edition.2 It will be said that Baudelaire is unique— that he was a poet who abolished the distinction between creation and criticism, and who knew (he alone) how to transform his volupté into connaissance. Baudelaire is certainly unique, but not in this respect—in France Gautier and Mérimée had the same faculty, in England Ruskin (and i f we no longer read Ruskin, it is a reflection on our own dullness o f sensibility, and not on his continuing vitality). Baudelaire’s uniqueness consists not in his method, but in certain idéesfixes to which he returned in almost every article he wrote. “ W e are living in an age in which it is necessary to go on respecting certain platitudes,” he wrote, “ in an

it

1 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. I : Language. Trans, by Ralph Manheim. Yale University Press, 1953, p. 78. 2 The Mirror of Art. Translated and edited with Notes and Illustra­ tions by Jonathan Mayne. London, 1955.

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arrogant age which believes itself to be above the misad­ ventures o f Greece and Rom e. W e may not now be so confident o f ourselves, but we still live in the same age— the age o f “ steam, electricity and gas—miracles unknown to the Romans—whose discovery bears full witness to our superiority over the ancients” . O f the informing ideas that still give Baudelaire’s criticism such vitality, three seem to stand out as still immediately relevant. The first is his rejection o f the concept o f progress— “ this gloomy beacon, invention o f present-day philosophizing licensed without guarantee o f Nature or o f God—this modern lantern throws a stream o f darkness upon all the objects o f knowledge; liberty melts away, discipline vanishes. Anyone who wants to see his w ay clear through history must first and foremost extinguish this treacherous beacon. This gro­ tesque idea, which has flowered upon the rotten soil o f modem fatuity, has discharged each man from his duty, has delivered each soul from its responsibility and has released the w ill from all the bonds imposed upon it by the love o f the Beautiful” . The idea o f progress was based on the achievements o f nine­ teenth-century science and industry—already associated by Baudelaire with America—and even for this material notion o f progress there is no guarantee—it is a form o f credulity. But transported into the sphere o f the imagination the idea o f progress “ takes the stage with a gigantic absurdity, a grotesqueness which reaches nightmare heights” . And then Baudelaire goes on to point out, what is always so evident to any student o f the history o f art, that genius is not governed by any laws o f progress. “ Every efflorescence is spontaneous, individual. . . The artist stems only from himself.” Baudelaire did not deny the existence o f development within the individual artist—on the contrary, he was much concerned to trace such a development in the case o f a painter

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like Delacroix. N or did Baudelaire deny the existence o f “ the laws which shift artistic vitality” . He was well aware o f “ that curious law which presides over the destinies o f great artists, and which wills it that, as life and understanding follow opposing principles o f development, so they should win on the swings what they lose on the roundabouts, and thus should tread a path o f progressive youth and go on renewing and reinvigorating themselves, growing in bold­ ness to the very brink o f the grave” . Baudelaire was, o f course, anything but a reactionary. He explained and defended the most experimental art o f his day, and was content to leave the final judgment to Time. The most experimental art o f his day was Romanticism — it still is. “ To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art—that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.” Baudelaire is nowhere more vital, and nowhere more rele­ vant to our present preoccupations, than in his attack on realist art. Mr. Mayne, in his introduction to the English translation, says that “ Realism (associated by him with Positivism) was for Baudelaire a flat negation o f the Imagina­ tion—it was little less than a blasphemy; hence his somewhat curious coupling o f the names o f Ingres and Courbet, both o f whom he regarded as having sacrificed the imaginative faculty on the altars o f other gods—‘ the great tradition’ and ‘ external nature’, respectively” . Painting for Baudelaire was above all evocation—“ a magical operation (if only w e could consult the hearts o f children on the subject!), and when the evoked character, when the re-animated idea has stood forth and looked us in the face, we have no right— at least it would be the acme o f imbecility—to discuss the magician’ s formulae o f evocation” . Baudelaire, as Mr. Mayne points out, comes very near to the doctrine o f the creative II5

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imagination as developed by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria, and Coleridge in England and Baudelaire in France (Schelling in Germany)—these are the prime sources o f a romantic philosophy. For Baudelaire imagination is a cardinal faculty, “ the queen o f truth” . “ It is both analysis and syn­ thesis . . . It is sensitivity___ It is Imagination that first taught men the moral meaning o f colour, o f contour, o f sound and o f scent. In the beginning o f the world it created analogy and metaphor. It decomposes all creation, and with the raw materials accumulated and disposed in accordance with rules whose origins one cannot find save in the farthest depths o f the soul, it produces the sensation o f newness. As it has created the world (so much can be said, I think, even in a religious sense), it is proper that it should govern it.” I must neglect the practical application o f this doctrine (though briefly one might say it involved the rejection o f Ingres and thé praise o f Delacroix) in favour o f a brief reference to the third and perhaps the most neglected o f Baudelaire’s informing ideas—his doctrine o f naïveté. This crops up in almost everything he wrote—on poetry no less than on painting. Naïveté for Baudelaire means “ the dominion o f temperament within manner” , “ knowledge modestly surrendering the leading role to temperament” , and it is “ a divine privilege which almost all are without” . I would say that it is closely related to Keats’s conception o f “ nega­ tive capability” . It does not mean leaving things to chance— there is no pure chance in art, any more than in mechanics. A picture is a machine, whose systems o f construction are intelligible to the practised eye; in which every element justifies its existence, if the picture functions w ell; where one tone is always geared to engage another; and where an occasional fault in drawing is sometimes necessary, so as to avoid sacrificing something more important. That ii 6

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something more important—it may be “ truth o f movement” , fidelity to feeling, but is perhaps that “ absolute emptiness” o f which the Zen Buddhists speak. “ Thus, mastery in ink­ painting is only attained when the hand, exercising perfect control over technique, executes what hovers before the mind’s eye as the mind begins to form it, without there being a hair’s-breadth between them. Painting then becomes spon­ taneous calligraphy. Here again the painter’s instructions might be: spend ten years observing bamboos, become a bamboo yourself, then forget everything and—paint.” 1 The opposite to naïveté is the poncif— '“ The poncif in conduct and behaviour, which creeps into the life o f artists as into their works.” The poncif is the studied effect, the knowing gesture, all that is academic and self-conscious— corrupt conscious­ ness, w e might call it. It is the absence o f faith and spon­ taneity, and in it Baudelaire saw the subtle symptom o f our decadence.

15

The Image in Modern English Poetry sufficiently advanced into the twentieth century to ask whether the poetry o f our period has acquired any sig­ nificant character. Its achievement, in a quantitative sense, is impressive: w e should have to go back to the Elizabethan period for any comparable efflorescence. But we must not forget that English is now the native language o f at least two hundred and fifty million people, most o f them acquiring we are now

1 Zen in the Art of Archery,by EugenHerrigel. London, 1953, p. 102.

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some standard o f literacy as a birthright, whereas the great wealth o f Elizabethan poetry was created by a small society not numbering, on its literate level, more than a few thou­ sands. I f averages were o f any account in this connection, our present rating would be miserably low. The truth is that both numbers and literacy have been handicaps to poetry in our time. I f we suppose that a law o f probability would allow one genuine poet to every thousand children born, then twenty poets would stand a better chance o f being listened to in a population o f twenty thousand, than would a hundred and fifty thousand poets in a population o f a hundred and fifty million. Some principle o f diminishing returns operates in literature no less than in economics. Indeed, our civilization is so organized that the larger it grows and the more literate it is made, the more uniform it becomes in its opinions and the more liable to irrational heroworship. It prefers to be represented by one great man, to crowd to the concerts o f one great conductor, to the perform­ ances o f one leading actor, and finally, to recognize one great poet as the representative o f its collective taste. A critical discrimination that would estimate particular merits and give due attention to individual qualities is nowadays more often to be found on the racecourse than on the campus, and even there the public, left to itself, w ill select a favourite upon w hom it will lavish irrational odds. The Elizabethans had their favourite poets, but each was held to be as good as the other until proved a failure, and competition was encouraged. The apotheosis o f a poet like Shakespeare was the w ork o f later ages, and chiefly o f our own. M y intention is not to deflate any o f the great reputations o f our ow n century, but i f we are to arrive at an estimate o f general characteristics we must take care not to be dazzled by particular glories. No poet has dominated ou r age, in the

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sense o f giving to it a uniform direction or a uniform tech­ nique. I f uniformity exists, it is in public opinion and not in poetic style. W e might use the word drift to describe our course, a derogatory word no doubt, but one exactly descriptive o f the tides and currents o f poetic expression in our time. The so-called “ age o f Johnson” was an age rich in dogmatism, but poor in invention, the least original age in our literary history. I f our age has not been dominated by a single poet, much less has it submitted to a single critic, though there are plenty who wish it had been, and some who would dearly love to occupy the throne o f the Great Cham. But we are now a literate democracy, and what we have to deplore is the dictatorship, not o f an individual, whether poet or critic, but o f a uniformly educated taste. In such circumstances the critic finds himself in a dilemma. Confronted by a uniformity o f taste, he ought to encourage diversity: to insist on the unique achievement o f individual poets. But he has an even more insistent duty, which is to free a poetic essence from all the accretions o f the Zeitgeist— from fashionable causes, political ideologies, philosophical crazes, and all the social and commercial rackets under which that essence is buried. But this is to insist on the singleness o f poetry rather than on its diversity. I do not claim to have any touchstone for testing the poetry o f our century, but by confining m yself to certain technical matters I hope to be able to show in what respects we have kept faith with essential poetry. I shall confine myself to English poetry, but English poetry is the poetry o f the English language, and I hold any attempt to distinguish a specifically British, or a specifically American poetry to be a vulgar heresy, inspired by motives which may be worthy in themselves—nationalistic or patriotic motives —but have nothing to do with literature. The attempt is 119

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shown to be absurd in practice, for we find the bodies o f poets like Eliot and Auden hung, drawn and quartered by the rival factions. This might be an amusing spectacle did not the heresy in question stem from a fundamental misunder­ standing o f the nature o f poetry. Poetry is a linguistic art, an art which is a fusion o f image and utterance. Utterance is instinctive—a mode o f symbolic discourse which the child absorbs from the community within which he is born and bred; even the art o f rhetoric is only an elaboration o f this biological heritage. N o w it is true that certain linguistic differences have grown up between England and America. B illy Potts’s shoulders were wide, and his gut stuck out Like a croker o f nubbins and his holler and shout Made the bob-cat shiver and the black-jack leaves shake . . .

It is expressive language, but the average British reader is left guessing. He reads such lines (they are Robert Penn W arrens) as he reads equivalent lines in French or German poetry, perhaps guessing the meaning correctly, but only pretending to be emotionally affected by the sound. But such lines are rare even in American poetry, and they never amount to the degree o f dialectical obscurity presented by an English poet like Chaucer, or even, occasionally, Shakespeare; and certainly never to the degree o f obscurity represented by a poet writing in the Scots dialect, such as Burns. I f no meaning is conveyed, no poetry is conveyed, but we can exaggerate the disadvantages o f obscurity. Even nonsense poetry has its nonsensical meaning. If I hear an expressive line lik e: The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree

m y poetic reaction is not impeded by the fact that I have no botanically precise visual image o f a chinaberry tree. Indeed, the w ord perhaps conveys to me a more beautiful and phan120

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tastic image than it would i f 1 were actually familiar with a botanical specimen. In other words, the imagination some­ times works more effectively, and more poetically, i f it is left guessing. When, therefore, I speak o f twentieth-century poetry I mean, not British or American poetry, which are nonessential categories, but the poetry o f the English language in all its variability—the poetry o f Frost, Yeats, Bridges, o f Eliot, Pound or Dylan Thomas, the poetry that exists in our common language, uncontaminated by ideas o f race or place. The poetry o f our century began on a soft and sensuous note, as i f tired o f its inheritance, timid to advance into new estates. The Victorian energy—the exuberance o f a Browning or a Swinburne—had been expended. W e listen to the weary voice o f Arthur Symons’ “ Absinthe Drinker” : Gently I wave the visible world away. Far off I hear a roar, afar yet near, Far off and strange, a voice is in my ear, And is the voice my own ? The words I say Fall strangely, like a dream, across the day ; And the dim sunshine is a dream. How clear, New as the world to lovers* eyes, appear The men and women passing on their way ! The world is very fair. The hours are all Linked in a dance of mere forgetfulness. I am at peace with God and man. O glide, Sands of the hour-glass that I count not, fall Serenely : scarce I feel your soft caress, Rocked on this dreamy and indifferent tide. This fin de siècle mood, with its concordant diction, domin­ ated the first decade o f the century. The visible world was 121

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alien. It may be objected that there were exceptions— the pessimistic poetry o f Hardy, the realism o f Kipling, the social protest o f John Davidson. But these were particular sentiments, individual opinions, not part o f the poetical essence o f the period. Even in Hardy we find the same tired rhythm s: I idly cut a parsley stalk, And blew therein towards the moon; I had not thought what ghosts would walk With shivering footsteps to my tune. I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bygone look. I lipped rough rhymes of chance, not choice, I thought not what my words might be; There came into my ear a voice That turned a tenderer verse for me. The lassitude is in that tenderer verse, in moods o f regret that inevitably fall into accents o f the whispering gallery, ghostly echoes o f the past. The only alternative for Hardy is an aw kward artificiality—the artificiality o f those lines on the loss o f the Titanic, where the “ steel chambers” o f the modern ocean liner are seen as “ stilly couching” “ in a solitude o f the sea” , “ the pyres” o f “ salamandrine fires” . T h e image o f “ this creature o f cleaving w in g” fatefully converging on “ a Shape o f Ice” is well conceived, well realized, but the accom­ panying machinery o f an Immunent W ill and a Spinner o f the Years is a creaking structure copied from Schopenhauer, who designed it after a Greek model. It is n ot poetic— rather, it is rhetorical, and like all rhetoric, a corruption o f the poetic consciousness. 122

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This same corruption o f consciousness exists in two further figures who survived well into our century—Housman and Kipling. The tragic sense is keen in each, and when the war came, their poetic interventions did not strike the participant as too unreal. But nevertheless, there is a factitiousness in both. Blood and sweat, spade and hearse, lad and lass, life and death—the antitheses are too easy, semantic marriages, not made in any passionate heaven or hell. True poetry is not so coldly perfect, so immaculate in diction. It is con­ centrated ; it is crystalline; but its edges are sharp and cutting. Kipling knew this, and when he wasn’t, as Henry James said, telling a story in the Smoke R oom , his metaphysical aware­ ness was condensed into perfect images. If any God should give Us leave to fly These present deaths we live And safely die In those last lives we lived ere we were born— What man but would not laugh the excuse to scorn ? For we are what we are— So broke to blood And the strict works of war— So long subdued To sacrifice, that threadbare Death commands Hardly observance at our busier hands. Yet we were what we were, And, fashioned so, It pleases us to stare At the far show O f unbelievable years and shapes that flit, In our own likeness, on the edge of it. Such a poem is not o f our century, in any specific sense: in 123

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form it might belong to the seventeenth century. But the difficult thought is realized in a clear image, and the rhythm winds round the thought with geometrical exactitude. Such an achievement belongs to the universal types o f poetry, and is exempt from the limitations o f the Zeitgeist, which are our particular concern on this occasion. There exist archetypal images which belong to all time, and which may be transferred from language to language without undue loss. I f Kipling’s poem were to be skilfully translated into Greek or Latin, French or German, it would not lose its poetic effect, because that effect is metaphysical, idea reahzed in image, thought felt. The thought process is primary, not in the sense that the poet thinks and then seeks a poetic form o f expression for his thought (which is the recipe for bad poetry) but in the sense that the particular poet is a thinker, a philosopher, and his thought takes poetic form in the act o f expression. This is a rare combination, for the poet is more usually a sensationalist, or possibly an intuitionist, and reacts directly through his imagination—he uses a symbolic rather than a conceptual form o f discourse. His activity, we say, is lyrical. N ow , though many images are archetypal, or universal, and reappear repeatedly through­ out the course o f world literature, the characteristic images o f any age are more immediate and sensuous, a direct reaction to individual experience. The archetypal images are not individual in this sense—they are at once collective and unconscious, and any conscious attempt to tap them is apt to produce an effect o f banality. The ship o f death, for ex­ ample, is an archetypal image—it occurs in the myths o f several cultures, and is particularly familiar to our own cultural tradition in the form o f Charon’s boat. When, therefore, D. H. Lawrence takes this image as the basis o f one o f his most ambitious poems, he is under the necessity 124

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o f reanimating it i f he is to avoid the effect o f banality. He tries to do this by combining his main universal image with subsidiary and more personal images: the image o f the falling apple, that falls to bruise itself an exit from itself—a metaphor for the bruised body, from whose bruised exit the soul oozes. It is doubtful i f he is entirely successful —the new and personal image might have been more effec­ tive if it had not been associated with an old and familiar image. The borrowed images in modern poetry are not always so familiar as Lawrence’s Ship o f Death. One o f the most consistent features o f the whole period is its eclecticism— its willingness to search out and incorporate the symbols and myths o f past ages. Some degree o f eclecticism is char­ acteristic o f all historic cultures— distance lends enchantment to the past, and the enchantment is all the stronger the more distant the time. All the poets o f our English tradition, from Chaucer to Eliot, have freely borrowed the forms and figures o f other cultures. But there is an important distinction to be made at this point, a distinction between assimilation and accretion. When a Shakespeare takes a plot o f even a metaphor from Plutarch or Ovid, he absorbs it into his own poetic system, and reproduces it in the terms o f his own poetic essence. It is not merely a question o f playing Julius Caesar in Elizabethan costume: Julius Casesar is an Elizabethan—more than that: he is a projection o f Shakespeare’s own multiple personality. But when Pound and Eliot take the structures o f Greek drama as a framework for their poetic sentiments, they are avoiding the problem o f creating a contemporary structure. Hamlet is a significant play, not because it relates the tragedy o f a Danish prince o f the Middle Ages, but because it uses this dim figment o f the chronicles as an excuse to present the doubts and indecisions o f a humanistic age. I

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The Waste Land, the most eclectic o f Eliot’s works, is a mythical landscape, a landscape o f broken columns and dis­ carded masks, into which no hero intrudes. Pound’s Cantos are cluttered with literary stage-props. All this is academic vanity. The poet claims that it is not vanity To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered. But the diffidence faltered because it could not fuse the tradition to a modern sensibility—to a consciousness o f the modern dilemma. Eliot became aware o f that necessity and in the Four Quartets redeemed his eclecticism, not in a new myth, but in “ aftersight and foresight” , in meta­ physics, like Kipling (a comparison he would not find objectionable). Again, the words caress the contour o f the thought— . . . words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore. Our eclecticism has been part o f a deliberate attempt to provide the twentieth century with mythical poetry, ignoring the fact that a myth cannot be consciously imported into a culture, but must emerge gradually from the collective un­ conscious. When I am informed that Ezra Pound’s Cantos repeat the pattern o f Homer’s Iliad, or that The Cocktail Party has the same dramatic pattern as some play b y Euripides, I refuse to be intimidated. All that is merely in line, it seems to me, with the repetition, on some American campus, o f the architecture o f an Oxford college. From this point o f view 126

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Yeats proceeded more intelligently than any o f our major poets, for though the cosmography o f The Vision is deliber­ ately worked out, and to that extent personal, it is a serious attempt to submit the imagination to trance-hke inspiration: to follow certain mystical disciplines in the hope that they w ill lead to illumination. Yeats did not succeed in creating an impersonal myth—he did not even establish a cult. But his heresy has consistency: it is not fragmentary, except in the sense that all personal philosophies are fragments o f the truth. W e may conclude that there is no characteristic myth o f our age, and that we are not likely to find one where we are looking—in the overt attempts o f the poets to create one. W e must therefore look for the peculiar virtues o f our poetry in its poetic structure—in its diction, idiom and imagery. W e shall at once be aware o f a difference from the poetry o f other ages. Let us begin with the image, for that is the original sensa­ tional experience o f the poet. He is original in that he sees things for the first time in a metaphorical relation, either to other things, or to his own feelings. But admittedly it is very difficult to isolate the image as a visual event: it is inevitably expressed in words and we are immediately in doubt about the visuality o f the image. In Hardy’s poem, which I quoted, you may have been struck by the unusual image o f a parsley stalk. N o poet o f the classical age would have given such pro­ minence to such a humble plant. Did Hardy depart from poetic usage because his discerning eye had selected the parsley stalk as an object o f visual beauty or formal signifi­ cance, and as such apt for the desired effect o f his poem ? Or did the phrase, “ a parsley stalk” , strike his aural sensibility as poetically forceful and expressive ? D id eye or ear dictate the image ? Impossible to say, but in any case a new image 127

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had been introduced into English poetry, and it is an image characteristic o f a certain phase o f twentieth-century poetry— the phase we call “ Georgian” in England. . . . the yellow flavorous coat Of an apple wasps had undermined. . . .

EDWARD THOMAS Soft as a bubble sung Out of a linnet’s lung

RALPH HODGSON Robert Frost w ill perhaps serve as the transatlantic equiva­ lent: . . . ploughing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine, Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. It is true that one may find visual acuity o f the same kind in earlier poets—in Marvell, Cotton, W ordsworth, Hopkins —but the objects or actions observed are more conventional, less violent. Wordsworth’s acuity is exercised on common objects—on daisies and daffodils—and I doubt i f he would have thought a wasp-eaten apple or a bubble or a dollar sign as images worthy o f his poetry. His aim was to endow earthly objects with a celestial light: to transfuse matter and spirit: to identify his sensational vision with his mystical vision. But the Nature poets o f the twentieth century are not idealists in this sense, but empiricists. They are satisfied —in so far as they are typical o f their time— w ith the sen­ sational effects o f the image, though such an image may be used in a descriptive or sentimental poem where it lies embedded like a barbaric stone in a circlet o f gold. It was 128

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probably the contrast between the sensational image and a traditional diction that first suggested to T. E. Hulme the isolation o f the image. I f the image could be identified as the only poetic force within a poem, w hy not proceed to identify poem and image, as had been the common practice in China or Japan? To cut the cackle— that was to be the first aim o f a modern poetry. But Hulme discovered—as certain French poets had dis­ covered before him—that the cackle could not be cut without a fundamental change o f diction. An image is always jealous o f words—that is to say, it is most effective when conveyed in a minimum o f words. It proved very difficult to reconcile this minimum with any regular metrical structure, for metre is basically aural and quite independent o f imagery. Free verse was not, o f course, invented by Hulme, or by anyone else in our century—in some sense it has existed for many centuries, as in Hebrew poetry. Modern experiments began in France about 1880, but these earlier experiments in free verse had been in the interest o f rhythm—the desire had been to get away from the monotonous regularity o f traditional metres and create new rhythms—rhythms directly expressive o f emotional experience. The free verse o f Whitman and Henley is o f this kind, and is not necessarily accompanied by any par­ ticularly vivid imagery. When therefore Hulme saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge like a red-faced farmer he was not merely introducing a sensational image into a poem, but seeking a verse-form that would effectively con­ vey the image. Actually, within the limits o f seven lines, he found a verse-form for a number o f images—all images o f “ Autum n” : 129

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A touch of cold in the Autumn night— I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded. And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children. The diction o f such a poem is best described as laconic—that is to say, it is just adequate for the occasion. The poetry is in the image, or images, and that, for some time, was to be the distinctive characteristic o f twentieth-century poetry. N o other English poetry—no other poetry o f the Western W orld —had hitherto been based so strictly on visual appeal. The School o f Imagists, which included at one time or another poets like Lawrence and Pound, as well as self-styled Imagists like Aldington and Flint, H.D., Am y Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, was not destined to survive the inter­ ruption and dispersal o f the First W orld War, but its influence on poetic diction was decisive for a whole generation. Even Yeats, through the direct mediation o f Ezra Pound, was in­ fluenced, and influenced for the better. His diction from 19 14 onwards is lean, his imagery precise: That girls at puberty may find The first Adam in their thought Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel, Keep those children out. There on that scaffolding reclines Michael Angelo With no more sound than the mice make His hand moves to and fro. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence. Such images, o f mice and long-legged flies, will not be found 130

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in Yeats’s earlier poetry. B at it is the substance o f Pound’s poetry and Eliot’s : it is the new imagery o f the twentieth cen­ tury. There is no longer an undertone o f verbal music, or naturalistic sentiment, as in Hardy’s parsley stalk, but a direct sensationalism, without benefit o f sweet sound—Eliot’s patient etherised upon a table, crabs scuttling across the floors o f silent seas, newspapers blowing through vacant lots, rats, broken glass; Pound’s full and fascinating junk-shop. But such imagery, which might be called Homeric in its directness i f it were consistent, is, in these two cases, con­ taminated, as it were, by a very un-Homeric eclecticism—by a very unrealistic romanticism, the Classicist and Medievalist romanticism o f Eliot, the Troubadour and Orientalist roman­ ticism o f Pound. But “ eclecticism” is too superficial in its implications to describe a process that is not deliberate, but rather an automatic release o f imagery from what would technically be known as the pre-conscious—that level o f the mind just below conscious memory, from which images can be drawn more or less pell-mell in a state o f poetic excitement. The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tomquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob.

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These are personal memory-images, and the odd thing is that they should be transferable, to constitute indubitable poetry. W e do not know, and need not ask, who were Mr. Silvero and Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist and Fräulein von K u lp ; any explanation would render them less effective, less poetic. They sit under a chinaberry tree, in poetic obscurity. Effective as these automatic images are when personal to the poet, nothing is so ineffective as a conscious imitation o f them: the introduction into verse o f arbitrary images, not preceding from whatever depths the poet’s mind possesses, but consciously invented to produce a similar effect. One might even go farther and say, that even when such images are projected automatically, nothing proves to be so dreary as the furniture o f an inferior mind. The surrealist movement was responsible for much forced imagery o f this kind, and the process itself, which had been so effective in the case o f Eliot (and in the case o f certain contemporary French poets) was eventually discredited by abuse. The spontaneous memoryimage remains, however, a characteristic feature o f modern English poetry, and Eliot’s significant role in the technical development o f modern verse is largely due to his masterly use o f the invention. Pound, o f course, has been no less ener­ getic in this exploitation o f the spontaneous memory-image, and these two poets have made the device an integral part o f modern poetic diction. Imagist development in our period does not end with Pound or even with W illiam Carlos Williams, a poet who has sustained the experimental verve o f the early days o f the movement. The visual image in his verse is always conveyed without obscuring rhetoric, nakedly: (the grapes still hanging to the vines. . .

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like broken teeth in the head o f an old man)

which, incidentally, is an excellent example o f the reversed metaphor so popular with modern poets—the inhuman illu­ minated by reference to the human. Williams’s use and pre­ sentation o f the image is in the tradition o f the Imagist School, but his poetry is not exclusively imagist—he might, indeed, be called a moralist—a laconic commentator on the contem­ porary American scene. He is exceptional in that he has trans­ ferred to a conceptual type o f verse ideals o f economy and precision that were evolved for a perceptual type o f verse. To the visual clarity o f the image corresponds a logical definition that takes an aphoristic form. It might be possible to trace the imagist influence into wider fields and even to find it in unexpected places, but it gradually became merged in that efflorescence o f metaphor which I be­ lieve is predominantly Celtic in its origins. Hopkins, who was partly responsible for it, was strongly influenced by Welsh poetry, and the chief representative o f this metaphorical school has been a Welshman, Dylan Thomas. But we must not forget the influence on Thomas o f surrealism, and, indir­ ectly through surrealism, o f the new significance which began to be attached to the dream image and to automatic projec­ tions o f the symbols o f the unconscious. All those influences created a metaphorical ferment in the mind o f this young poet which at first was too private in its references to convey any emotion: Jo y is no knocking nation, sir and madam, The cancer’s fusion, or the summer feather Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross o f fever, N or city tar and subway bored to foster Man through macadam.

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Rim baud wrote such poetry, and it is not surprising to find it transubstantiated in English words. But the reader cannot en­ dure the blind fury o f it for more than the course o f a few stanzas, and Thomas soon realized the limitations o f this method. He worked towards simplicity and clarity, without sacrificing any o f the force o f the far-fetched image. I give as an example an extract from his lines in memory o f Ann Jones : Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue With the wild beast and blessed and giant skull Is carved from her in a room with a wet window In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year. I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow, Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain; And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone. These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm, Storm me for ever over her grave until The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill. There are images here that are specifically modern, in the sense already discussed. “ Her fist o f a face clenched on a round pain” —I do not think an image hke that would have occurred to a poet writing before 19 10 ; though i f we skip the centuries we shall find an analogue in Shakespeare’ s descrip­ tion o f the death o f Falstaff; and there is Anglo-Saxon sparseness and dinned anvil-clangour in the concentrated mono-syllabic w ords: . . . her death was a still drop; She would not have me sink in the holy Flood of her heart’s fame; she would lie dumb and deep And need no druid of her broken body . . . That is the elemental simplicity o f our unrivalled English music.

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Dylan Thomas’s images were threaded to coherent themes o f birth and death, o f love and sorrow—human, universal themes, to which he gave a fresh, contemporary expression. But these few ideas were intuitive—static convictions rather than the products o f a philosophical activity. Dylan Thomas is not singular in this respect. It is, indeed, difficult to discern in twentieth-century poetry any common ideological trend, such as we find in the Romantic Movement from, say, 1780-1830. W e have had ideological poets—Mr. Eliot is one, Mr. Pound has a political philosophy and Mr. Auden is dog­ matic in an offhand way. But these three typical poets o f the period have nothing in common, ideologically speaking, and certainly have no common philosophy o f art, such as the Romantics had. Each poet expresses, in a personal way, his private philosophy, and in an age such as ours, when there is no integral social consciousness, we need not pay any par­ ticular respect to a philosophy that pretends to be universal. Catholic philosophy, for example, is universal for those who have made a personal choice to be Catholics. It was different in the Middle Ages, or in Dante’s time, when no personal choice was involved. Catholicism was then an expression o f the social consciousness, and the individual was dissolved in that consciousness, and did not assert a separate and personal consciousness. We, who have no integral social conscious­ ness, have only a Zeitgeist to substitute for it, and this super­ individual manifestation, o f which we are rarely conscious, is historical, not universal. It is a product o f a particular environ­ ment—o f economic and social conditions—and after the pas­ sage o f a generation or two, is seen as a deception. Romanticism, in its most general sense, is the only attempt since the end o f the Middle Ages to construct a universal philosophy. Hegel, in this sense, is a romantic philosopher. Romanticism is essentially a philosophy o f immanence, as

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Catholicism had been a philosophy o f transcendence; it re­ mains a philosophy o f immanence when allied to poetry. Poetry, indeed, is an essential instrument o f this philosophy, for, as Schelling claimed, the immanent spirit o f the universe is manifested through poetry, including the plastic arts and music. Poetry has thus the role o f revelation in this immanent religion, and the only universal philosophy o f poetry, since the Middle Ages, gives to the poet the priest-hke function o f mediation. The Romantic poets o f 1780-1830 accepted this role. Goethe and Schiller, Hoelderlin and Novalis, Wordsworth and Coleridge, saw themselves as performing a priest-like task, and they sought for the best method o f ensuring the immediate communication o f their vision. The triumph o f materialism in the nineteenth century brought discredit or ridicule on this romantic philosophy, but only at the cost o f a further and more drastic disintegration o f social consciousness. Nietzsche, the last o f the great romantic philosophers, pro­ claimed the death o f G o d ; M arx substituted the vision o f a society integrated on a basis o f common wealth. But poetry, in any universal sense, had died with God, and all our efforts to revive it, since the middle o f the nineteenth century, have been fragmentary and individualistic. Some o f us attempt to recover the universal philosophy o f the Middle Ages—to resurrect the transcendental G o d ; others seek to revive the universal philosophy o f Romanticism— to recover the pantheistic intuitions o f the Romantic poets. But the Romantic poets realized that the act o f mediation was a poetic act, and not an intellectual effort. Revelation was made evident in the structure and imagery o f poetry. For a short time in our century—the time between the birth o f Imagism and the return to traditional forms in the “ thirties ” —it seemed as though an effort would be made to recover this immediacy

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o f inspiration, but there was no supporting ethos : what ethos there was came from revolutionary politics, and was essen­ tially anti-poetic ; it acted on the false assumption that society could be unified on a materialistic basis. It is too early to pro­ claim the failure o f the new Romanticism—has it not, in Dylan Thomas, produced a poet who continues the tradition on its highest level ? But Thomas, though he has a following, is nevertheless an isolated figure—he has no significance for our materialistic civilization. He wrote “ for the love o f man and in praise o f G od” , but he wrote in subjective solitude. Yeats was probably the only poet o f our age who had some understanding o f the poet’s predicament. He has been ridi­ culed for trying to find a substitute religion in astrology and spiritualism, but his naïve effort is not necessarily more absurd than the attempt to revive a medieval thearchy. He dared, until he was disillusioned, to believe in a rebirth o f Gaelic Ireland—free from commercialism and materialism. He may have underestimated the difficulty o f effecting any correspon­ dence between a practical level o f experience and a symbolic level o f experience—between act and grace, achievement and glory, ceremony and innocence. But in the end Yeats knew that just as twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle So we must await, and might expect, in our darkness, a Second Coming— And what rough beast, its hour come round at last Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born I have been sparing o f names in this survey o f the drift o f twentieth-century poetry, but let us look back across the chart for a moment. There was one clear line o f progress—the isola­ tion and clarification o f the image, and the perfecting o f a diction that would leave the image unclouded by rhetoric or

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sentiment. To that task our greatest poets—Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Thomas—devoted their best energies. But now there is a failure o f nerve: eyes are dazzled, diffidence falters, and once again a veil o f rhetoric is drawn over the vision o f the poet. Sentiment supersedes sensation, the poetic consciousness is corrupted. Many individual voices rise again in the dusk. Yeats dead, Pound silenced, Eliot lost to the theatre, Thomas gone before his time—it is the hour o f the twittering ma­ chines. W e listen to them as w e drink our martinis or smoke a cigarette, and for an hour or two we feel content. Then the night comes and there is no voice to fill the silence. That is not as it used to be. Poetry used to be in speech, in transaction, in worship; at the banquet, before the battle, in the moment o f birth and burial. W hy is poetry no longer our daily bread ? W e have to search for an answer to this question, and the search leads us to the foundations o f our society. W e have the poetry we deserve, just as we have the painting we deserve, the music we deserve; and i f it is fragmented, personal, spas­ modic, we have only to look around us to see the satanic chaos through which nevertheless a few voices have penetrated. The voices are pitched high and may sometimes sound discor­ dant ; but the image they convey has a crystalline brightness and hardness, and cannot be shrouded.

16

D e Tocqueville on Art in America often been paid to the amazing percipience o f De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, but this tribute has

t ribu t e has

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usually referred to the political and socio logical sections o f that great bo ok . It is n ot until one has been to the U n ited States, and then read D e T o cq u e ville , that one realizes h o w com p letely he covered e v e ry aspect o f A m erican life, and a lw a ys w ith the same realistic insight and p rop h etic vision . I read his b o o k on the w a y b ack fro m m y first visit to that co u n try, and its im m ediate effect w as to d ep rive m e o f an y desire I m igh t have had to w rite about m y o w n experiences o r to record m y o w n im pressions. E v e r y detail seem ed to h ave been anticipated b y D e T o cq u e ville . It is not m erely a b o o k about A m e ric a : it is a w o r k o f u niversal significance, ran k in g to m y m in d w ith P lato ’ s Republic and Law s, and m u ch m o re relevant to ou r present needs than b o ok s lik e the Leviathan and the Esprit des Lois. Democracy in America w as based on observations m ade in the years 1 8 3 1 and 18 32 , w h en the author w as in his tw en ty-sixth y e a r : it w as w ritten, and the first v o lu m e published, before the author w as thirty. T h e second vo lu m e , w h ic h is the one I am m ain ly concerned w ith here, appeared in 1840. It has often been quoted before, but fo r m y particular purpose I w o u ld lik e once m ore to d ra w attention to the conclusion o f the first vo lu m e, w h ic h is a rem arkable exam ple o f D e T o c ­ q u e v ille ’ s p o litical v isio n : There are at the present time (i.e. 1834) two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both o f them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention o f mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their exist­ ence and their greatness at almost the same time. A ll other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their pow er; but these are still in the act o f growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance

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with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. The Ameri­ can struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russians are men. The former combats the wilder­ ness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained by the plowshare; those of the Russians by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the des­ tinies of half the globe. There is one phrase in this passage, “ the Anglo-American,,, which indicates a development De Tocqueville did not foresee —the drastic redistribution o f racial elements which has taken place in the United States during the past thirty or forty years. To speak o f Anglo-Americans is an anachronism now : in most parts o f the country, the Anglo-Saxon strain is now a tiny minority, far outnumbered by the Irish, Polish, German, Jew ish or even Scandinavian strains. This nullifies a few o f De Tocqueville’s generalizations: but still more remarkable is the fact, demonstrable in any sphere o f American life, that en­ vironment is stronger than race, education more radical than heritage. De Tocqueville takes the aristocratic view o f art. Art is a product o f leisure, and leisure the attribute o f wealth. Demo­ cratic nations will “ cultivate the arts that serve to render life easy in preference to those whose object is to adorn it. They w ill habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and they will require that the beautiful should be useful” . But in aristocratic nations the ruling class “ derive from their superior and here­ ditary position a taste for what is extremely well made and 140

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lasting. This affects the general way o f thinking o f the nation in relation to the arts. It often occurs among such a people that even the peasant will rather go without the objects he covets than procure them in a state o f imperfection” . De Tocqueville was writing before the industrial revolution had got into top gear, but he already foresaw the doom o f craftsmanship in Am erica: There are only two ways of lowering the price of commodities. The first is to discover some better, shorter, and more ingenious method of producing them; the second is to manufacture a larger quantity of goods, nearly similar, but of less value. Among a demo­ cratic population all the intellectual faculties of the workman are directed to diese two objects: he strives to invent methods that may enable him not only to work better, but more quickly and more cheaply; or if he cannot succeed in that, to diminish the intrinsic quality of the thing he makes, without rendering it wholly unfit for the use for which it is intended. When none but the wealthy had watches, they were almost all very good ones; few are now made that are worth much, but everybody has one in his pocket. Thus the democratic principle not only tends to direct the human mind to the useful arts, but it produces with great rapidity many imperfect com­ modities, and the consumer has to content himself with these commodities. It is not possible to appreciate the full force o f these remarks until one has been to America. In Europe we still have the remnants o f a tradition o f craftsmanship, and when a thing can still best be made by hand, we make it by hand and pay more for it. Hence the superiority o f our leather goods, our tailoring, our jewellery. The richer Americans are willing to pay very high prices for these products o f an “ aristocratic” society, which is very good for our export balance. But apart from these imported articles, it is impossible to find, even in the most luxurious shops o f N ew Y ork or Chicago, ordinary K

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objects o f utility which have any beauty o f finish. A lady's handbag, for example, w ill be spoilt by a hideous machinepunched clasp. There is no love in any workmanship: no time. But where the product is w holly inhuman, devoid o f hand­ work, as in the innumerable gadgets, machines, household equipment, plumbing, then o f course the democratic prin­ ciple triumphs. But even then no time, no material, nothing is sacrificed: the appeal is on the surface, everything is thin, streamlined and synthetic. De Tocqueville anticipated even this characteristic: “ The handicraftsmen o f democratic ages not only endeavour to bring their useful productions within the reach o f the whole community, but strive to give to all their commodities attractive qualities that they do not in reality possess." When De Tocqueville passes to the consideration o f the fine arts, he finds the same tendencies— “ the productions o f artists are more numerous, but the merit o f each production is dimin­ ished". “ In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced; in democracies countries a vast number o f insignificant ones." W e must recall once again the period at which De Tocqueville was writing. American painting was represented by West, Copley and Stuart. He might possibly have seen the work o f Washington Allston (1779-1843), but apart from him, all that we now regard as distinctively American painting was un­ conceived. Winslow Homer, Eakins, Ryder, Whistler, M ary Cassatt and Sargent were not yet born. But De Tocqueville could observe: “ The social condition and the institutions o f democracy impart certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which it is easy to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation o f the soul to fix them exclusively on that o f the body, and they substitute the representation o f motion and sensation for that o f sentiment and thought; in a word, they put the real in the place o f the 142

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ideal.” That observation does not quite fit painters like Allston and Ryder, who might be said to represent a hangover o f European idealism and romanticism, but it looks forward to Homer and Eakins, to Sargent and still farther on to Grant W ood and Charles Sheeler. It is true that more recently the mass immigration o f Jewish and German artists has made Expressionism a noticeable feature o f contemporary American art, but it remains to be seen whether it too will not be assimilated to “ the social condition and the institutions o f democracy” . There were no skyscrapers in De Tocqueville’s time—only “ little palaces” o f “ white washed brick . . . columns o f painted w ood ” . Yet from the tendencies inherent in a democratic w ay o f life (where “ the imagination is compressed when men con­ sider themselves: it expands indefinitely when they think o f the state” ) he could predict that “ the same men who live on a small scale in cramped dwellings” would “ aspire to gigantic splendour in the erection o f their public monuments” . He could even suggest that between these two extremes there would be a blank—which is the first thing that strikes a visitor to N ew Y ork or Chicago—the abrupt transition between palatial skyscrapers and the modest brownstone or even clap­ board house. On “ the literary characteristics” o f the United States De Tocqueville was no less perceptive and prophetic. Once again let us remember what American literature then consisted o f— Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, Franklin and Hamil­ ton, Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper. Poe was not yet known, nor M elville; Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Thoreau and Whitman, though born, had not yet published anything. Looking into that future De Tocqueville could prophesy: Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present,

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as it does in the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science, and art; its form, on the contrary, will ordinarily be slighted, sometimes despised. Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, over­ burdened, and loose, almost always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution more than at perfection of detail. Small productions will be more common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudition, more imagination than profundity; and literary performances will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigour of thought, frequently of great variety and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm die taste. That prophecy looks beyond the N ew England school, to Faulkner and Hemingway rather than to Emerson and Haw­ thorne. But even the N ew Englanders are provided for: “ I have just depicted two extreme conditions/’ writes De Tocqueville, “ but nations never leap from the first to the second; they reach it only by stages and through infinite gradation. In the progress that an educated people makes from the one to the other, there is almost always a moment when the literary genius o f democratic nations coinciding with that o f aristocratic nations, both seek to establish their sway jointly over the human mind. Such epochs are transient, but very brilliant; they are fertile without exuberance, and animated without confusion.” This is precisely the transient epoch o f Emerson, from which Whitman emerged as representative o f a different, a democratic vista. Some further observations might pass without comment. “ Democratic literature is always infested with a tribe o f writers who look upon letters as a mere trade; and for some few great authors who adorn it, you may reckon thousands o f idea-mongers” , “ Democracy not only infuses a taste for letters among the trading classes, but introduces a trading spirit into literature” . “ The most common expedient em­ ployed by democratic nations to make an innovation in lan­ 144

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guage consists in giving an unwonted meaning to an expres­ sion already in use.’5 De Tocqueville approaches the art o f poetry as a confessed Idealist. He did not therefore have much hope o f a democratic poetry, for “ in democracies the love o f physical gratification, the notion o f bettering one’s condition, the excitement o f competition, the charm o f anticipated success, are so many spurs to urge men onward in the active professions they have embraced, without allowing them to deviate for an instant from the track. The main stress o f the faculties is to this point. The imagination is not extinct, but its chief function is to de­ vise what may be useful and to represent what is real. The principle o f equality not only diverts men from the descrip­ tion o f ideal beauty; it also diminishes the number o f objects to be described” . That “ democracy gives men a sort o f in­ stinctive distaste for what is ancient” has hardly proved true, for nothing is more popular in the United States than the tawdry historical romance, and American cities abound in “ antique” shops. There is, indeed, a deep-seated nostalgia for the past in America, but this is a product o f the raw physical environment rather than o f any specifically democratic insti­ tutions. In poetry, however, it remains true that “ among a democratic people poetry w ill not be fed with legends or the memorials o f old traditions. The poet will not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings, in whom his readers and his own fancy have ceased to believe; nor will he coldly personify virtues and vices, which are better received under their own features. All these resources fail him ; but Man remains, and the poet needs no more. The destinies o f man­ kind, man him self. . . with his passions, his doubts, his rare propensities and inconceivable wretchedness, will become the chief, i f not the sole, theme o f poetry . . . ” That song is now attenuated, but American poetry is still

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essentially a song o f the self, o f the separate but no longer simple person. W hen these words were being written, the poet who was to fulfil the prophecy was in a Brooklyn printing office, learn­ ing the trade. When he came to describe his mission as a poet, it was in words which echo De Tocqueville’s : One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.

17

Sotto Voce: A Plea fo r Intimacy A new art generally inherits an old aesthetic. The first pic­ ture-houses were an offshoot o f the fun fair; photography has only with difficulty emancipated itself from the ideals o f painting. Broadcasting was at first treated as merely the diffu­ sion o f what already existed: it was a wonderful invention, like the telephone, which enabled you to overhear what was being said or sung in some distant place. What was overheard was not designed to be overheard: it was a normal noise o f some kind. 146

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Broadcasting still remains largely on that level. I f I turn to the day’s programme I find orchestras playing as they played before broadcasting was invented, lectures which might have been delivered to a learned society fifty years ago, talks about gardening or agriculture which might have been given in the village hall just as long ago, and the Black Dyke Mills Band playing as it might have played in the Crystal Palace in 18 51. I f we turn to the physical shape o f things, we find at one end, the recording end, anything from a theatre to a “ studio” . The theatre may be as large as Co vent Garden or the Albert H all; the studio may be as small as a normal living-room. At the other end, the receiving end, there may be a workshop or a canteen, but the vast majority o f licences are for receivers placed in a normal living-room. Into this room—into this space o f some 1,600 cubic feet—issues the voice o f the lectureroom, the ranting o f the stage, the blare o f the brass band, the concentrated blast o f a hundred female voices, the shattering crescendoes o f some famous symphony. What is the aesthetic effect ? I know there are “ knobs” . There are knobs in Broadcasting House which control the volume before it escapes into the ether (much to the distress o f musical purists); there are knobs on the receiver marked “ Volum e” or “ Tone” . You turn them and the voices are stifled, the brass bands are muffled; we hear the lecture as from the corridor. Our nerves are spared, but our enjoyment is not intensified. A “ reduced” reception o f a Beethoven symphony is like a “ reduced” re­ production o f a Rubens painting: it only gives one a vague idea o f the original. All this could probably be expressed in scientific terms—the ratio o f sound vibrations to cubic volumes. The aesthetic canon would insist on an optimum relationship between the two. It is not merely a question o f frequency, but o f complexity.

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Let us imagine that the three existing programmes were rearranged with this aesthetic principle in mind. Instead o f Home, Light and Third Programmes we would have Theatre, Hall and R oom Programmes. To the Theatre Programme we would give all concerts and music-hull shows, all operas and most plays. To the Hall Programme we would give chamber music and lectures. Finally, we would begin to design a new style o f broadcasting for “ homes’ ’ in the real sense o f the word—for the sitting-room and study, the bedroom and the nursery. The aesthetic principle underlying this new style might be indicated by the word Intimacy. Admittedly a few broadcasters have already cultivated this style—*Max Beerbohm was a master o f it. In talks it can easily degenerate into a mannerism, but essentially I do not mean any “ heart-to-heart” business, nor even necessarily a languid conversational tone. But gentleness is essential—no blustering, no talking at, no conventional “ volume” . Considering how much care is taken not to broadcast a rustling page or a short­ ness o f breath, the broadcaster might be allowed a much lower range o f modulation. A whisper is perfectly audible under normal conditions. Much poetry should be whispered; and many scenes in drama could be whispered. Obviously we need an Intimate Art. It has not yet been realized that broadcasting has created new physical deter­ minants o f art. There is a form o f art called “ drawing-room comedy” , but it is comedy about drawing-rooms, not comedy for drawing-rooms. But that is what we want—plays o f a new kind for an auditorium o f 1.500-2,000 cubic feet. I think they would necessarily be plays with a limited cast—it is difficult to receive more than four or five distinct voices. They would also have a limited duration—an hour is about the maximum limit. They would have a new kind o f content—being utterly independent o f action, they would develop compensations in 148

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pyschological tension, in mood and in intensity o f expression (they could afford to be more poetic). But most o f all they would require a completely new type o f actor. I must confess that at present I find it almost impossible to listen to a radio play. Again and again I make the effort, but I find the normal actor’s voice, divorced from the stage and the Raum o f the theatre, excruciating. It is not merely horrible to listen to : it also completely destroys (for me) the felicity o f the words, should that exist. But a voice can be modulated to the right relationship between recording and room-recep­ tion. Twenty years ago I heard Moissi reciting Shakespeare, and I can still hear him—it was little louder than a whisper, but all Shakespeare’s poetry was in it. Some years ago I over­ heard a woman’s voice broadcasting “ physical jerks” at some very early hour. I was staying with a friend who indulged in this form o f masochism, and I, who have quite different ways o f torturing myself, was on this occasion compelled to grip the sides o f m y bed, so sweetly persuasive was that voice. I have never been inside a dramatic academy and the mysteries o f voice production are unknown to me. But as a lecturer I have often received “ tips” — about pitching m y voice against the back o f the hall, keeping my lungs inflated, breathing rhythmically, holding the audience in photographic focus, etc. (all o f which I either forget, or practice uncon­ sciously). But I suppose that a dramatic academy, like aca­ demies in the other arts, teaches a convention, a tradition, and supports it with all kinds o f technical tricks. Such teaching is no doubt directed towards a certain ideal—a grand manner (shades o f Irving, Forbes Robertson, Sarah Bernhardt). What­ ever it is (and it is no doubt much more streamlined nowadays than I have imagined), it is almost certainly a “ theatre” style — that is all that dramatic art can mean under present conven­ tions. In any case, the products o f such academies are o f the 149

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stage, stagey; and when they are invited to broadcast they bring their best stage manners to the studio. I realize that the distinction I am making is a commonplace among the intelli­ gent producers in Broadcasting House, and that they do their best to restrain their actors, to make them shed their stage voices as well as their stage costumes. But what is needed is not restraint, not a negation o f any kind, but the elaboration and projection o f an entirely new technique. I don’t know what to call it, but it is an art o f “ suggesting” rather than acting. In stage acting there is a correlation o f voice and action; abolish the possibility o f seeing the action and a new situation arises. The correlation is destroyed for the listener; and i f it persists in the actor, what goes across is a limping affair, a voice without its physical crutches. The listener is painfully conscious o f the missing crutches. (Incidentally, I fancy that the practice o f having studio audiences in Broadcasting House for certain programmes [mainly music-hall] is a thoroughly bad one. It encourages the actors to act, to rely on their theatrical tricks. They should be compelled to develop compensations for these tricks—to broadcast to the imagined, the invisible listener. It is said that the listener likes to hear the audience—to imagine himself part o f that audience. This merely shows that the broadcast does not satisfy the intimate needs o f the fireside. A theatre audience should not invade the home, either physically or audibly.) The question I am raising is mainly one o f interpretation, and there is certainly much material already written that would lend itself to an intimate style. The blustering chronicles o f Shakespeare w ill never do, and a Bartholomew Fair is a Babel; but I can imagine an intimate Hamlet and even an intimate Lear. (The soliloquy, so artificial on the stage, is the very idiom o f intimate broadcasting.) I can imagine an intimate Congreve, for the spatial scale is that o f the drawing-room, 150

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and M illam an t should certainly speak to M irab ell in natural tones, n ot m uch above a w h isper. Ibsen and C h e k o v are suit­ able— especially C h e k o v : all his life he w as try in g to subdue the theatre, to reduce it to som e intim ate, hum an scale. M aeterlin ck is another dram atist w h o had the same desire fo r in tim acy. M o st o f his plays are perhaps too languid and etherial fo r present tastes, but i f th ey are even re vived fo r broadcasting, th ey w ill require a v e ry subtle range o f voices. O ne o f his oneact dram as (Les Aveugles— “ T h e Sigh tless” ) calls out fo r a radio interpretation in this intim ate style— it is a p la y about listening! A n o th er ly rica l dram atist w h o has never, so far as I rem em ber, been adapted to broadcasting is H u go v o n H o f­ m annsthal. Y e t his “ lyrische D ra m e n ” are perfect in scale— D er Tod des T izian , D er Tor und der Tod, D er weisse Facker, D ie Frau im Fenster. T h e y dem and a translator o f genius, but at least th ey g iv e us the fo rm and style o f an intim ate poetic dram a. A n d then there is Y eats. It is a p ity that Y eats did not liv e to w rite especially fo r an intim ate radio dram a, fo r I am sure that the qualities he w as seeking on the stage, and n ever suc­ ceeded in find ing, cou ld h ave been realized in broadcasting. H is d efinition o f “ tragic a rt” is so e xactly w h at I w o u ld g iv e as a definition o f intim ate broadcasting art that I m ust quote it (from his Preface to Plays fo r an Irish Theatre, 1 9 1 3 ) : Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner o f dykes, die confounder o f understanding, moves us by setting us to reverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity o f trance. The persons upon the stage, let us say, greaten till they are humanity itself. W e feel our minds expand con­ vulsively or spread out slowly like some moon-brightened imagecrowded sea. That which is before our eyes perpetually vanishes and returns again in die midst o f the excitement it creates, and the more endiralling it is the more do we forget it. When I am watching m y own Deirdre I am content with the players and with myself, i f I am

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moved for a while not by the contrasted sorrows of Deirdre and Naisi, but because the words have called up before me the image of the sea­ born woman so distinctly that Deirdre seems by contrast to those unshaken eyelids that had but the sea’s cold blood what I had wished her to seem, a wild bird in a cage. It was only by watching my own plays that I came to understand that this reverie, this twilight between sleep and waking, this bout of fencing, alike on the stage and in the mind, between man and phan­ tom, this perilous path as on the edge of a sword, is the condition of tragic pleasure, and to understand why it is so rare and so brief. If an actor becomes over emphatic, picking out what he believes to be the important words with violence, and running up and down the scale, or if he stresses his lines in wrong places, or even if an electric lamp that should have cast but a reflected light from sky or sea, shows from behind the post of a door, I discover at once the proud fragility of dreams. At first I was driven into teaching too statuesque a pose, too mono­ tonous a delivery, that I might not put “ vitality” in the place of the sleepwalking of passion, and for the rest became a little deaf and blind. But alas! it is often my own words that break the dream. Then I take the play from the stage and write it over again, perhaps many times. At first I always believed it must be something in the manage­ ment of events, in all that is the same in prose or verse, that was wrong, but after I had reconstructed a scene with the messenger in Deirdre in many ways, I discovered that my language must keep at all times a certain even richness. I had used “ traitor” , “ sword” , “ suborned” , words of a too traditional usage, without plunging them into personal thought and metaphor, and I had forgotten in a moment of melodrama that tragic drama must be carved out of speech as a statue is out of stone. There are one or two definitions in this passage which I would like to emphasize. First, the mood to be induced in the listener to intimate broadcasting—reverie, the intensity o f the trance. That, Yeats realized, is a question o f words, o f words 152

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so spoken that there is no danger o f waking us out o f that trance, once it has been induced. Yeats goes so far as to ask his theatre audiences to shut out the visible stage, to retreat into a stage in the mind. That effort is no longer required in broadcasting—as we sit listening to the disembodied voices that come across the ether, we should have no difficulty in maintaining that perilous path which is the condition o f tragic pleasure, provided the words are appropriate and the voices convey them in their objective purity. The words can only be created by the poet, but the method o f delivery is defined—a delivery without undue emphasis, within a natural vocal scale, and with a natural stress, not monotonous, not too statuesque—yet carved out o f living speech. Yeats probably considered himself as primarily a dramatist, and he would not admit the qualification, a poetic dramatist, for he did not agree that an antithesis exists between drama and lyric poetry. The matter is argued out in the Preface to the 19 1 1 edition o f Playsfor an Irish Theatre, and on the acceptance o f Yeats’s argument depends the kind o f valuation we are likely to give to his dramatic w ork as a whole. He held that “ character” (which his plays conspicuously lack) belongs to comedy alone. In great tragedy, that o f Corneille, Racine, the tragedy o f Greece and Rom e, the place o f character is taken by passions and motives, “ one person being jealous, another full o f love or remorse or pride or anger” . He was faced by the exception o f Shakespeare, but Shakespeare, he pointed out, is always a writer o f tragi-comedy, and “ there is indeed character, but we notice that it is in the moments o f comedy that character is defined, in Hamlet’s gaiety let us say; while amid the great moments. . . all is lyricism, unmixed passion, ‘ the integrity o f fire’ ” . In tragedy it is always ourselves that we see upon the stage, ourselves in the living symbols o f our passions and desires. “ Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner

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o f dykes, the confounder o f understanding, moves us by set­ ting us to reverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity o f trance. The persons upon the stage . . . greaten till they are humanity itself.” I am not suggesting that because he had such a perfect under­ standing o f the requirements o f intimate drama, that Yeats’s own plays are models for broadcast drama. But they should be tried in the style Yeats indicated—beginning, perhaps, with the acting version o f The Shadowy Waters. There is a short play in his last volume called The Death of Cuchulain that might be very successful, i f broadcast in this intimate manner. Between the first play (The Countess Cathleen, 1892) and the last play (The Death of Cuchulain, 1939), there is not so much difference o f form or diction as the passage o f nearly half a century might have brought about in a poet less sure o f his mission. The tragic feeling becomes harsher, the line tends to become shorter, the lyric element detaches itself into song, becomes a crystallization o f the action. But there is no com­ promise with realism (for even The Words Upon the Windowpane is merely grand-guignol realism); there is no compro­ mise with that commercial slickness known as “ theatre” . The poetic diction is perfected, especially in Purgatory (1939). But was the poetic diction o f The Countess Cathleen so much in need o f improvement ? Come, sit beside the fire. What matter if your head’s below your arms Or you’ve a horse’s tail to whip your flank, Feathers instead of hair, that’s all but nothing. Come, share what bread and meat is in the house, And stretch your heels and warm them in the ashes. And after that, let’s share and share alike And curse all men and women. Come in, come in What, is there no one there ?

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There are a few recent plays which have been broadcast and which undoubtedly gained from the intimacy possible in radio production. One was Eliot’s Family Reunion; another was Sartre’s Huis Clos, which is one o f the few radio plays I have been able to listen to without discomfort. But even in these cases the voices were too insistent, nagging away at our aural nerves instead o f falling on them softly, insidiously. I believe that a new style o f production, involving a new school o f actors never trained for the stage, is the first necessity o f intimate drama. There is enough material o f the kind I have indicated to practise on, but eventually our poets and drama­ tists must support this development with appropriate creative work. It need not necessarily be dramatic. The imaginary con­ versation, as Rayner Heppenstall has shown in his produc­ tions, offers great possibilities, not so much for intimate drama (for then it is no longer a separate category) but for the pre­ sentation and broadcasting o f ideas—it should be a variation on the talk rather than on the drama. “ Features” , too, can be devised for the intimate scale. Music already has its intimate forms—thanks, not to broadcasting, but to the habit in earlier ages o f performing appropriate music in intimate circles. I have discussed this problem o f scale in spatial terms, but to some extent time also is involved. I wonder how many people really enjoy a full-length drama or opera, cutting across meal-times and children’s bed-times, incoming telephone-calls and outgoing fires. It is different in the theatre—one has left these interruptions behind, and there is the excitement o f mutual participation in an event. But in the home ? There is a wealth o f works o f appropriate length, even in opera. The limit o f sustained attention, without visual aids, is about an hour. I do not wish to exclude the possibility o f longer broad­ casts ; but i f we are reaching after perfection, in broadcasting

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as in any other art, we must consider every aspect o f this question o f scale.

18

George Lukács o n e of the most prominent figures in the Hungarian R evolu­ tion was George Lukács, Minister o f Education in Nagy's second, short-lived government. But Lukács is more than a Hungarian politician. Thomas Mann called him “ the most important literary critic o f today", and though Mann was no doubt influenced by the attention which Lukács had paid to his own work, I myself, who disagree profoundly with some o f Lukacs’s doctrines, would not dissent from this opinion. His importance as a critic was first made clear to me by the late Karl Mannheim, who had known him well in Hungary, and who again did not agree with the Marxist basis o f Lukacs’s criticism. What one was made to realize after the reading o f a single essay by this critic (and to envy), was the formidable superiority o f any polemicist who com­ bines dogma with sensibility. It is the same kind o f formidability that one finds in certain Catholic writers (such as Jacques Mari tain), and it makes one realize, rather rue­ fully, that sensibility is not enough: our humanist or libertarian criticism must have an equally strong foundation in faith. Lukács was born in Budapest in 1885, the son o f a wealthy bank director (and such an origin was bound always to inspire distrust among his more proletarian comrades). His intelli­

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gence was o f a prodigious kind, and while still in his teens he won a literary prize with a two-volume study on The Evo­ lution of Modern Drama, which I am told is still worth reading today. Other early works, which he later repudiated, include The Theory of the Novel and a volume o f essays on such writers as Hoffmansthal, Stefan George and Rilke. I have not read any o f these early works, and I must confess that I find Lukacs’s German very rebarbative—the syntax o f his thought is presumably Hungarian, and in transposition to another language every sentence becomes a tangled nest o f subsidiary clauses. All the more credit, therefore, to Dr. Edith Bone, who in 1950 produced a very readable English version o f Studies in European Realism. But this is to anticipate. In 1918 Lukács was converted to Communism and was a member o f Bela Kun’s revolutionary government. After the fall o f Bela Kun he went into exile and spent most o f his time in Berlin. When the Nazis made that refuge too uncomfortable for him, he went to Moscow, where he spent twelve fruitful years. When Hungary was liberated by the Russian army at the end o f the war, he immediately returned to Budapest, and has since that time been the intel­ lectual leader o f the Communist party in Hungary, exercising a supreme influence over the intellectual development o f the country. He occupied the chair o f Aesthetics in the University o f Budapest, and when the inner history o f the recent revolt comes to be written I suspect that it will be found that Lukács was its main inspiration. He had a great following among the students and was closely connected with the Petofi Society which set off the revolt. Lukacs’s first important publication after his conversion to Communism was Geschichte und Klassenheivusstsein—History and Class Consciousness—and this no doubt remains the most complete statement o f his philosophical point o f view. Its L

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purpose is described by Professor R o y Pascal (in bis Foreword to Studies in European Realism) as: to analyse the real constituents of the ideological world, that is, to show the process of literary and ideological production as part of die general social process; and thereby to point out the practical task of our own time, the rejection of an oppressive society and a culture grown sterile, and the building of a classless society and a new humanity in which the tensions between man and nature, art and science, subjective “ freedom” and social necessity, theory and prac­ tice become fruitful relations, stimulating men to productive com­ munal labour, and in which art and poetry focus and intensify men’s powers and joy. One recognizes the jargon, and the “ objective” has produced the dreariest mass o f doctrinaire literature since the Age o f Scholasticism. But Lukács is different. He is saved, not only by his innate sensibility, which leads him to respect those ele­ ments o f form and style so often contemptuously dismissed by Marxist critics, but also by his passionate humanism, which leads him to concentrate on Balzac and Tolstoy and to present their essentially humanitarian ideals with sympathy. All this leads, as I said in a review o f Studies in European Realism, to a certain amount o f “ doublethink” ; but how refreshing, for example, to find a Marxian critic expatiating on “ the extra­ ordinary concreteness o f poetic vision” in Tolstoy, or, more generally, seeing in romanticism, not one more form o f bour­ geois escapism, but “ the expression o f a deep and spontaneous revolt against rapidly developing capitalism” . Lukacs’s work on Balzac and Tolstoy is perhaps his most important contribution to literary criticism— certainly the most readable part o f it—but there are other books o f impor­ tance— German Literature in the Age of Imperialism (1946), Goethe and his Time (1947), The Young Hegel (1948), In Search o f the Bourgeois (1945—the w ork on Thomas Mann).

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There can be no question o f the acuteness o f Lukacs’s in­ telligence—he is by far the most formidable exponent o f the Marxist point o f view in literary criticism that has yet appeared anywhere in the world. Like most Marxist critics in whatever sphere, Lukács begins with claims that are merely pretentious. “ M arxism /’ he said in Studies in European Realism, “ searches for the material roots o f each pheno­ menon, regards them in their historical connections and movement, ascertains the laws o f such movement and de­ monstrates their development from root to flower, and in so doing lifts every phenomenon out o f a merely emotional, irrational, mystic fog and brings it to the bright light o f understanding.” This is to ascribe to “ M arxism” what is merely the agreed practice o f all critics who have any claim to be regarded as “ scientific” , and one could mention a hun­ dred names from Taine to Sartre, from Lessing to Schucking, from Dr. Johnson to Dr. Lea vis, who have had the same ideal o f scientific method. What distinguishes Marxist criticism is not its scientific method (for when it comes to the point it disclaims any notion o f “ objectivity” ), but certain a priori assumptions—for example, the assumption that realism is the highest type o f art. Realism is defined as “ the adequate presentation o f the complete human personality” and its “ central category and criterion” is “ the type, a peculiar syn­ thesis which organically binds together the general and par­ ticular both in characters and situations” . This use o f the word “ type” is peculiar to Lukács, or per­ haps to Marxist criticism, but as it runs throughout the book, the reader has to understand that “ what makes a type a type is not its average quality, nor its mere individual being, however profoundly conceived; what makes it a type is that in it all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level o f development, in the ultimate

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unfolding o f the possibilities latent in them, in extreme pre­ sentation o f their extremes, rendering concrete the peaks and limits o f men and epochs” . All that realism opposes is “ the destruction o f the completeness o f the human personality and o f the objective typicality o f men and situations through an excessive cult o f the momentary m ood” . It is necessary to come to terms with this idea and the jargon in which it is wrapped before reading the particular studies on Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy and Gorki which follow— otherwise much that Professor Lukács has to say will seem like arbitrary nonsense. In a short essay it is only possible to point out that this conception o f art is indeed arbitrary. It is equally possible to hold what might be called the heiratic or anti-humanistic view o f art, one that T. E. Hulme developed on the basis o f Byzantine art. There is also a rhetorical con­ ception o f literature, according to which art is a game whose only use is to develop the skill and sensibility o f its practi­ tioners. There is also a pragmatic or pluralistic view o f art, according to which any poem or novel, painting or sonata which happens to give pleasure to a few people needs no further justification. But all these theories o f art, in so far as he admits them into his consciousness, are dismissed by Lukács as bourgeois, reactionary, fascist, etc. A simple, sen­ suous enjoyment o f beauty seems to be the worst sin, for what matters in art is “ an ardent love o f the people, a deep hatred o f the people’s enemies and the people’s own errors [note that!], the inexorable uncovering o f truth and reality, to­ gether with an unshakable faith in the march o f mankind and their own people towards a better future” . Loving and hating in this manner, Lukács proceeds to the analysis o f his chosen authors. The essays on Balzac and Tol­ stoy are the most interesting. There is no doubt that Lukács has revealed new aspects o f these great novelists, and brought 160

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into clear focus certain elements that explain their enduring appeal. But in the end the bourgeois reader is likely to get most pleasure from observing that process which Orwell has satirized as “ doublethink” . Lukács is too honest, too sensitive, to question the greatness o f Balzac and Tolstoy—they are for him the incomparably greatest artists o f their epochs. But the awkward facts are, that Balzac was a reactionary royalist and Tolstoy a utopian anarchist. Doublethink is a little difficult to follow—it is meant to be. But the passionately held views o f Tolstoy, for example, which to him were implicit in all his work and life, become “ historically necessary illusions” , and it has to be admitted that “ a great artist creates immortal masterpieces on the basis o f an entirely false philosophy” . It is even admitted that this “ swimming-against-the-current” was a necessary element in Tolstoy’s development to great­ ness. His bourgeois freedom was essential to his “ specific manner o f concentration” . But then doublethink takes an­ other twist, for it is nowhere implied that such freedom would be permitted to a writer in the Marxist paradise. On the contrary, Gorki is extolled for his perfect conformity, and this somewhat dreary writer (admittedly a fine “ fighting humanist” ) is invested with Tolstoy’s mantle. It is a sorry spectacle. Subject to a few evasions, the integrity o f the critic can be maintained so long as his subject is in the past, but it abdicates entirely to the exigences o f a contemporary tyranny. For it has to be demonstrated “ concretely” (i.e., at all costs) that “ the contradictions o f bourgeois art can be overcome in Socialist practice” .

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The Romantic Revolution within th e past two hundred years the literature o f the Western W orld has undergone many changes o f style and direction, but this time-span begins with one great revolution that dominates them all. 1 refer, o f course, to the Romantic Movement, which was more than a change o f style: it was a sudden expansion o f consciousness—an expansion into realms o f sensibility not previously accessible to the human imagina­ tion. I believe that we are still living within the mental rever­ berations o f that great event; I believe that the w ay then opened still presents itself as a challenge to the human mind. Our duty at the moment, as creative writers and as critics, is to maintain the impetus o f that revolution. It was a great, but perverse American critic o f the last generation, Irving Babbitt, who first specifically associated the Romantic Movement with the name o f Rousseau. Let that name stand as representative. I would add the names o f only two other men, Denis Diderot and Laurence Sterne. All three men were born within a few months o f each other, in the years 17 12 and 17 13, and all had reached the age o f forty before they began to write anything significant. Our attitude to romanticism is likely to be determined by the predominance in us o f either an ethical or an aesthetic standard o f judgment. Babbitt was a moralist, and it wTas as a moralist that he attacked, not only the ethics o f romantic writers, but also their achievements in literature. But from the aesthetic point o f view the literary achievements o f the period are so great that the moral egotism they exhibit seems a rela­ tively unimportant fact. It is not impossible for a moralist to

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condemn romantic morality and at the same time admit his admiration o f the poetry; and the enthusiast o f romantic literature may freely condemn the morals o f romantic writers. But a real dilemma does exist, as we shall see. It was first clearly realized by the great Danish romantic, S0ren Kierke­ gaard. What was the revolutionary idea that first came into the world in the seventeen-fifties ? It would be tedious to pass in review all the various and often inconsistent definitions that have been given o f romanticism, but I think everyone would agree that it is the expression o f a certain kind o f sensibility, and that what was revolutionary in its character was the recog­ nition o f sensibility itself, as the raw material o f literature and painting. One cannot suppose that before 1750 men had no sensibility: human nature does not change from one year to the next. Rather we must assume that the human disposition itself did not change at all, but that certain sentiments which are always ready to overflow from the heart had hitherto been suppressed. That is, indeed, the true and obvious explanation, but we shall not understand what happened unless we realize how it happened. For what is essential to romanticism is not its content, but its form. One might quickly retort that this distinction is unreal: form does not exist in the abstract, to be filled by some fluid substance o f the soul—it is the crystallization o f this substance as it cools in the mind o f the poet. But to think in this way is already to think romantically. To identify form with sub­ stance—that is precisely the romantic revolution. The essential notion is that literature— creative writing whether in verse or prose—is a formative activity. Form emerges spontaneously from the poet’s intuitive apprehension o f the thought: or, i f he is a painter, from his plastic realization o f the image present to his mind. But when the Romantic Revolution acquired its

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full momentum, towards the end o f the eighteenth century, there was the further suggestion, for which the German philo­ sopher Schelling was responsible, that artistic creation is one with natural creation. “ Yes,” said Coleridge, echoing Schel­ ling, “ not to acquire cold notions—lifeless technical rules— but living and life-producing ideas, which shall contain their own evidence, the certainty that they are essentially one with nature . . —such was the profoundest, the most daring claim o f the Romantics. It will now be seen that sensibility, in the romantic sense o f the word, is something more than the crude emotionalism which is all that a critic like Irving Babbitt sees in it. One may perhaps call it subjectivism, but I think that would be merely to substitute one word for another, without any essential change o f meaning. I would prefer to pause a moment on the word spontaneity, for that is the active, the kinetic aspect o f romanticism—spontaneity instead o f cold notions, or lifeless technical rules. It is at this point that I would like to insist a little on the importance o f Laurence Sterne. In one sense Sterne was not an original writer—he continues the humorous tradition o f Lucian, Rabelais and Cervantes. His ideas he owes to Locke, Montaigne and Burton. He plagiarized right and left, and his work is full o f an impudence that spoils him for some serious people. But he is completely spontaneous—that is his distinction and his originality. He became a writer by accident, being provoked to compose and print a satirical account o f a local ecclesiastical quarrel. He continued to write by instinct, free from “ lifeless technical rules” . The result was a style which is the style peculiar to romantic prose— the interior monologue. It begins with Sterne and it ends, for the moment, with the latest disciple ofjames Joyce or William Faulkner. The mono­ logue is not always in the Shandean form—loose, syncopated,

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maze-like; it can be confessional or confidential, clear or ob­ scure, emotive or rhetorical: the style, not only o f Sterne, but o f Jean Paul; o f Charles Dickens and Henry James—the style o f all the great romanticists: Em ily Bronte, Chateaubriand, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Proust and Kafka. It may be objected that these are all prose writers, but romantic poetry, the poetry o f Wordsworth and Coleridge, o f Shelley and Browning, o f Swinburne and Yeats, o f Rilke and Eliot—is, in a sense which I shall now explain, the poetry o f the interior monologue, the whispered secrets o f the self. I have said that the Romantic Revolution began with Rousseau, Diderot and Sterne. That is true so long as we confine ourselves to literature, but the literary revolution had been preceded by the philosophical revolution that began with Descartes and his basic principle, cogito, ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. This philosophical slogan had been given out more than a century before, but Sterne was the first author to apply it to literature and to act on the principle: I think, therefore I write. There had, o f course, been much introspec­ tive writing in previous ages, but i f we examine, say, St. Augustine’s Confessions, or the poems o f Petrarch, we see that they are all governed by the rules o f rhetoric. Augustine had been “ a prime fellow in the Rhetoric Schools” , and “ joyed in it very pertly” ; he was at one time “ a rhetoric reader in Carthage” , and later in Rom e and Milan. His confessions arc full o f the most intimate and moving detail, but the book is composed, and artful. He examines his own soul, but as an object: he sees his past, but as a picture. He writes, above all, not from the love o f Self, but o f God. Petrarch has been called “ the founder o f the modern spirit in literature” (by R en an ); incidentally, he was a favourite poet o f Rousseau. Petrarch is famous for something other than his poetry—for being the first man to climb a mountain 165

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for the sake o f seeing the view. But when he got to the top o f Mount Ventoux he recalled a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions—a passage which says that “ men go abroad to wonder at the heights o f mountains, the lofty billows o f the sea, the long courses o f rivers, the vast compass o f the ocean, and the circular motions o f the stars, and yet pass themselves b y ” ; and Augustine goes on to discourse on the wonders o f memory and imagination. He even discusses man’s unique faculty o f cogitation, which he defines as the drawing together o f dispersed or suppressed memories; and it seems likely that Descartes had this passage in mind when he formulated his famous principle. Thus, though one might say that the principle o f roman­ ticism was latent in such writers as Augustine and Petrarch, yet it was never a principle o f writing until Sterne stumbled on the technique o f it, and Rousseau consciously affirmed it. A t the beginning o f the latter’s Confessions is one o f the shortest and proudest sentences in literature: Moi seul—only myself, nothing but myself, the self in which you w ill recog­ nize your self. St. Augustine began his Confessions on a very different note, admiring God’s majesty, desirous to praise him, but feeling that he carried about a burden o f testimony which he must unload in order to praise God with a pure heart. Rousseau, too, mentions God on his first page, but only to present him with his confessions and to claim that at the Last Judgment they would be found to be uniquely sincere: that no other being would be found capable o f displaying man’s nature with such complete truth. Rousseau has had plenty o f emulators, and i f none has exceeded his sincerity, some, such as a French writer o f our own time, Jean Genet, have had worse tilings to confess. But again, from our present point o f view, it is the manner and not the matter o f the confession that matters: it is the fact 1 66

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that, in a work o f romantic literature, we are in contact with a naked heart, or, to put it more abstractly, with a state o f pure subjectivity, Kierkegaard called it the archimedean point: “ The reason w hy I cannot really say that I definitely enjoy nature” he once wrote, “ is because I am unable to understand clearly what 1 enjoy. A work o f art, on the other hand, I can understand; I can—i f I may so express it—find the archimedean point, and once I have found that, everything easily becomes clear to me. I can then follow the one great thought and see how all the details serve to throw light upon it. I can see, as it were, the author’s whole individuality like a sea in which every detail is reflected. The author’s mind is related to mine, it may well be far superior to mine, but like mine it is circumscribed. The works o f God are too great for m e; I inevitably lose myself in the details. That is also w hy people’s expressions when they look at nature—it is lovely, magnificent, etc.—are so insipid, for they are all too anthropo­ morphic, they stay at the outside; they cannot express the depths within.” (Journals, 1834, trans. A. Dru, p. 1.) “ The depths within” —there lies the unique scope o f modern literature. The depths within the self, “ true inward­ ness” , “ at the maximum proving to be objectivity once again” . Reason itself is found to be part o f that true inward­ ness, and to those critics who assert that modern literature is irrational, and therefore to be condemned, the romantic replies, not only that the heart has its own reasons which Reason does not know (which is Pascal’s answer), but also that there is no true reasoning that does not take the heart into account. Such is the inescapable paradox o f romanticism—it can only find an archimedean point, a sense o f objectivity, within the self. But as Sartre has said, “ the subjectivity we thus postulate as the standard o f truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism, 167

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for . . . it is not only one’s self that one discovers in the cogito, but the self o f others too. . . . When we say ‘ I think’ we are attaining to ourselves in the presence o f others and we are just as certain o f the other as we are o f ourselves (Existen­ tialism and Humanism, p. 45.) That is the existentialist dogma, but it is also the romantic dogma, and existentialism is nowadays the philosophical aspect o f romanticism. “ Before there can be any truth what­ ever,” says the romantic philosopher, “ there must be an abso­ lute truth, and there is such a truth which is simple, easily attained, and within the reach o f everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense o f one’s Self.” (Ibid., p. 44.) But the romantic poet says exactly the same in language which is scarcely distinguishable. “ One realm we have never con­ quered,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, “ the pure present. One great mystery o f time is terra incognita to us : the instant. The most superb mystery we have hardly recognized: the immediate, instant self. The quick o f all time is the instant. The quick o f all the universe, o f all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue.” (Phoenix, p. 222.) The critical Babbitts o f our time—and they include some very distinguished minds—have never been able to under­ stand this affirmation o f self-consciousness as the truth, because in their hearts they have never accepted the Cartesian logic. I know that Descartes has had and still has formidable op­ ponents; but since his time (he died in 1650) this opposed faith in the authority o f impersonal values has not inspired any imaginative literature. The poet does not need to be con­ vinced o f the truth o f Descartes’ proposition for the simple but sufficient reason that he knows that his own creative activity is based on it ; and he knows further that the literature which has been inspired by an immediate sense o f one’s self opens up a completely new range o f human consciousness. 168

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The Romantic does not claim that the subjective poetry o f Goethe, Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Shelley, Baudelaire or R ilke is necessarily greater than the objective poetry o f Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Racine or Pope. But he does claim that it is a different kind o f poetry, and he is fairly confident in his assertion that it has widened the sphere o f human sensibility; and to have done that, Wordsworth said, is the only infallible sign o f genius in the fine arts. That is w hy we claim that the Romantic Revolution is more than a change o f fashion or o f style; it is the discovery o f a N ew W orld, and as a conse­ quence the Old W orld can never be the same, can never return to its former limits. Romantic literature is a “ sentimental journ ey” into this new world o f the Self, and it is possible that the discovery o f a geographical N ew W orld was the inspiring archetype for the poet’s voyage o f discovery. The new world o f the Self still has large areas which we must mark terra incognita, in spite o f the explorations that we associate with names like Balzac and Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Henry James and Proust, Kafka and Joyce. The point I wish to emphasize is that this new world would never have been discovered but for the invention o f new vessels o f exploration—new forms o f literature like the novel and the short story, new techniques like free verse and the interior monologue. Even now further progress awaits new inven­ tions. But what is still more important to emphasize is the continuing need for a prevailing spirit o f freedom. Many o f our pioneers found themselves in conflict with authority. Sometimes it was because, as in the case o f Dostoevsky, their human sympathies had drawn them into political action, for there is a natural sympathy between the artist and the politi­ cian when liberty is in question. But for another and perhaps a narrower reason the freedom o f the artist must be guaranteed by liberal institutions. The very fact that he is engaged in 169

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widening the sphere o f human sensibility means that the artist w ill inevitably outrage an older and more restricted range o f sensibility. Every innovating artist encounters this often insen­ sate and brutal opposition—in our own time we have seen with what difficulty writers like Lawrence and Joyce estab­ lished their right to be read and freely circulated. Their great­ ness is now generally acknowledged, but during their lives they suffered, not merely the negative punishment o f neglect, but also the positive persecution o f ignorant authorities. Modern literature can exhibit many botched experiments, and its pioneers often got lost in the desert, became mad like Nietzsche, or were suddenly silent, like Rimbaud. But its achievement is immense: there is no comparable wealth o f creative literature in any other period o f the w orld’s history. Perhaps 1 am putting undue stress on the word “ creative” , but the guiding motive, throughout the Romantic Revolu­ tion, has been to live life more abundantly. “ It seems a strange thing,” said D. H. Lawrence, “ that men, the mass o f men, cannot understand that life is the great reality, that true living fills us with vivid life, ‘ the heavenly bread’, and earthly bread merely supports this. No, men cannot understand, never have understood that simple fact. They camiot see the distinction between bread, or property, money, and vivid life. They think that property and money are the same thing as vivid life. Only the few, the potential heroes or the ‘ elect’ , can see the simple distinction.” (Phoenix, pp. 285-6.) These heroes in our time have been the poets and novelists, the imaginative artists o f all kinds, who have sought inwardly for the heavenly bread, and have found it in their own vital sensibility. The great paean, the great lyrical celebration o f this inward-turning, was written in a new-found land, in America, just a hundred years ago. At the end o f his Song of M yselfWhitman spoke for all modern poets. “ There is that in

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me,” he said, “ I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me. Do you see O my brothers and sisters ? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness.”

20

The Sustaining Myth is curious that we should return, after two hundred years, to a discussion o f the problem that Lessing made the subject o f his Laokoon. To read that essay now is to plunge into a philosophical sea in which all our values sail upside down. Lessing set out to separate the spheres o f painting and poetry. The false criticism o f his time, he felt, had confused the categories. “ It has produced the love o f description in poetry, and o f allegory in painting: while the critics strove to reduce poetry to a speaking painting, without properly know­ ing what it could and ought to paint; and painting to a dumb poem, without having considered in what degree it could express general ideas, without alienating itself from its destiny, and degenerating into an arbitrary method o f writing.” Hand in hand with Herr Winckelmann and Count Caylus, Lessing turns to the past. Painting, at Breslau in 1760, did not exist. Shakespeare and Pope might be good for a passing reference, but the debate was more logically confined to the paragons o f Greece and Rom e. Homer and Virgil still remain, moving exemplars o f the poetic virtues; but it was unfor­ tunate for posterity that Lessing should have chosen as the it

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marble support o f his logic, a Hellenistic work o f the first century b .c . which now evokes more astonishment than ad­ miration. Alas, that it should have been recovered from the palace o f Titus in time for Michelangelo to see i t ! But it will still serve as an allegory, for the figure in the toils o f the ser­ pent is Lessing himself, and the serpent is that theory o f mimesis which for centuries held art in its suffocating coils. It is fascinating, though perhaps a little indulgent to one’s sadistic sensations, to watch this German dramaturgist struggling with a theory which condemned all art to the imitation o f nature, while his sensibility told him that the mirrors held by the poet and the painter had very different powers o f reflection. The machinery o f German metaphysics must be brought into action—space must be separated from time, the whole from its constituent parts! “ Subjects whose wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition are called bodies. Consequently, bodies with their visible properties are the peculiar subjects o f painting. Subjects whose wholes or parts are consecutive are called actions. Consequently, actions are the peculiar subject o f poetry.” A neat dichotomy, only complicated by the cate­ gories o f space and time. But the two arts were divinely ordained to solve the difficulty, for poetry can describe “ pro­ gressive” actions, canto after canto, to the end o f the epic; painting or sculpture can immobilize all action into a plastic instant, a “ pregnant” instant, “ from which what precedes and what follows can be most easily gathered” . Transposed to the modern technique o f photography, Lessing’s argument makes perfect sense: he describes with acuteness precisely those qualities which should distinguish the camera “ still” from the “ m oving” picture. But o f the fruitful relation that should exist between paint­ ing and poetry, and had existed in examples not so far-fetched as the Laokoon (not a mention o f Poussin or Claude), Lessing

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seems to have no inkling. If art is imitation, and each artist imitates the same model (nature), then logically artists can only imitate each other, and the relation between the poet and the painter can only be one of theft. And theft, even in the arts, is not ethical! The lack in all this logomachy is an overriding theory of the imagination, which was not to be provided until the Romantic philosophers came along: Herder, Schelling, the Schlegels. The imagination was then conceived as a common source of all creativity: as indeed it still is. These hidden springs now have a name: the Unconscious. From that seething cauldron (the metaphor is Freud’s) come the impulses that move the painter no less than the poet; and whether their realization is achieved in the plastic media of the painter or sculptor, or in the images of the poet, does not greatly matter from a philosophical point of view.We have learned to abolish the shackles of space and time, and bodies and actions no longer seem to be so independent. Picasso presents us with a multiple vision of subjects; and the poetry of Éluard is im­ mobilized in the pregnant image. But vitalizing all the arts (even when most abstract) is the sustaining myth of the un­ conscious. The mirror has been shattered, and behind it we have found the ear of Dionysius, a cave of inexhaustible wonders.

21

O n First Reading Nietzsche if a s o n t h is

occasion one is invited to describe the im pact

o f som e w o rk o f art— a poem , a b ook , a painting, any

M

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aesthetic experience which produced a crisis in one’s mental development—then 1 have no doubt what, in m y own case, I must choose. It will necessarily be a book, for much as I have loved and served the visual arts, 1 must confess that their impact on my sensibility cannot compare in strength with that o f certain works o f literature. I f my assignment were to describe those poems, dramas, or works o f philosophy which have enlarged m y experience, or merely hastened a develop­ ment already in progress, then I might well hesitate between various possibilities. I can think o f many books that had an effect—a deep emotional effect— on my nascent mind. The first reading o f Blake’s poems, for example, was a revelation, producing an ecstatic mood o f long duration. But I cannot describe that experience as a crisis, because no conflict was involved. I absorbed Blake—his strange beauty, his profound message, his miraculous technique—and to emulate Blake was to be my ambition and my despair. But there was no crisis— only a joyous acceptance. I could say the same o f other poets —Wordsworth and Donne; and o f certain philosophers and mystics, such as Bergson and Traherne. But the crisis, distinct in its impact, decisive in its outcome, was to take place, at the age o f nineteen, when I first opened a book by the German philosopher, Friederich Nietzsche. This is a confession, and i f you are to understand the force and the excitement o f this experience, I must describe to you in a little detail my circumstances at the time. O f my life o f nineteen years, ten had been spent on a remote Yorkshire farm, utterly removed from any intellectual influences. The next five years had been spent in the almost monastic seclusion o f an orphanage. In both these phases o f m y childhood I had been subject to a strict and unquestioned Christian upbringing. W hen I opened that first volume o f Nietszche, I had lived for barely four years in the outer world—the world o f business,

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o f traffic, o f newspapers, o f theatres, o f bookshops, o f men and women. And then I had found m yself—it was my own design—a student in one o f our provincial universities. Every day, every hour, almost, my horizon was widening, m y im­ mature mind struggling with thousands o f new ideas, new impressions, new sensations and experiences. It was in that condition o f rapid mental expansion—and, I would, add, o f complete intellectual innocence—that I dis­ covered Nietzsche. I will not say that I discovered him by accident—his name was being bruited abroad in those years— 19 11, 12 and 13 —and no doubt it had floated past my reading eyes on many an occasion, with some suggestion o f challenge. But now I had a university library at m y service, and there just waiting to be picked up, I found the works o f Nietzsche—a whole row o f new and shining volumes in the authorized translation then being edited by Oscar Levy. I cannot remember which volume I read first—I think it was the one I should have read last, his masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra. But I read them all, or all that were then available— there were eventually eighteen volumes. Un­ doubtedly, two volumes o f the series produced the deepest effect—two related volumes: the one already mentioned, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and the book which comes imme­ diately after it in chronological sequence—Beyond Good and Evil. These two volumes contain the essence o f Nietzsche’s philosophy and the reading o f them produced a decisive crisis in m y intellectual development. I find it difficult now to reconstruct my pre-Nietzschean state o f mind. But it was a simple state o f mind, a very naive state o f mind. I was pious, I was loyal, I was conventional— though I doubt whether I was destined to remain in that estate o f innocence even without the influence o f Nietzsche. 175

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What I found in Nietzsche, o f course, was the complete destruction o f all m y ancestral gods, the deriding o f all my cherished illusions, an iconoclasm verging on blasphemy. All o f that I might have found elsewhere—there were plenty o f strident atheists and persuasive rationalists about in those days. But I found something more in Nietzsche—a poetic force that survived translation into another language, an imagina­ tion that soared into the future, a mind o f apparently univer­ sal comprehension. Something still m ore: something which I can only call prophetic fire. M y youthful intelligence was tinder to such electric flashes: m y stock o f immature ideas, m y Sunday-school piety and priggish morality—all were utterly consumed in that mental conflagration. M y study was an attic, with no other illumination than a skylight. 1 would take one o f the precious volumes home to this retreat, and read secretly, solitarily, long into the night. I would prop up Zarathustra on an improvised lectern, be­ tween two candles, and declaim its heady rhetoric aloud, to a distant audience o f stars. Did I fully comprehend what I was reading ? Perhaps not, but then (and this is perhaps the important point) I did not take it wholly on trust. Nietzsche was writing about ideas I might not understand, criticizing philosophers I had never read. But I made it my business—no, that is not the right phrase—I was incited to reconstruct the idols that Nietzsche had demolished. These charred remains o f Kant, this bruised image o f Schopenhauer, the dissected corpse o f Wagner— these pitiable sights did not satisfy me. I went back to find what these philosophers had been like before they came into the hands o f Nietzsche, and in that manner I gradually ex­ plored a wide range o f philosophy and literature—it was Nietzsche who first drew me to Pascal and Stendhal, and many others. I f he had done nothing else for me, Nietzsche 176

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would have remained in my memory as the prime educative inspiration o f my life. Some notebooks which I kept at the time have survived, and I can see, sometimes with astonishment, sometimes with amusement, the thoughts which I abstracted from Nietzsche’s works, and sometimes wrote out in emphatic capitals. They are not always thoughts that I still find appealing or profound. I also have copies o f Zarathustra and Beyond Good and E vil which I acquired at this time, and they too bear evidence o f what then appealed to me, and some rarer marginal notes which express disagreement. Here are some o f the aphorisms which I copied out with evident approval: Rebellion is the superiority of the slave. Brave, unconcerned, scornful, violent—thus wisdom would have us be; she is a woman and ever loveth the warrior only. Throw not away the hero in thy soul. Dead are all Gods: now we will that Beyond-man live. One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe pure air. By one’s own pain one’s knowledge increaseth. The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. Aphorisms, we might agree, such as would appeal to a lonely ambitious youth! But among the aphorisms I find in these notebooks, and the passages I have marked in the two volumes I then possessed, there are many which I still find profoundly significant. In fact, now that I have been led back to Nietz­ sche, I am amazed to find how much I owe to him—how much I have unconsciously absorbed; and in this “ much” there is a considerable amount which, a few days ago, I would either have attributed to some other source, or cred­ ited to m y own originality. Take these short passages from Beyond Good and E v il: As little as the act of birth comes into consideration in the whole process and procedure of heredity, just as little is “ being conscious”

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opposed to the instinctive in any decisive sense; the greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels. And this passage: What we experience in dreams, provided we experience it often, pertains at last just as much to the general belongings of our soul as anytiling “ actually” experienced; by virtue thereof we are richer or poorer, we have a requirement more or less, and finally, in broad daylight, and even in the brightest moments of our waking life, we are ruled to some extent by the nature of our dreams. I read and marked these passages long before I had even heard the name o f Freud, but the substance o f what I was to find most valuable in Freud, for m y particular purposes, is clearly expressed in these sentences o f Nietzsche’s. Or take this passage from Zarathustra, which 1 can still declaim with zest and full approval: The State? What is that? Give ear to me now, for now will I speak to you of the death of peoples. The State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it uttereth its lies; and this is the lie that creepeth out of its mouth: “ I, the State, am the people.” It is a lie! Creators were they which created the peoples and imposed on them one faith and one love: thus they served life. Destroyers are they which lay snares for the many and call them States: they impose on them a sword and an hundred lusts. Where there remaineth a people it understandeth not the State but hateth it even as the evil eye and as a sin against customs and rights. But the State liedi in all the languages of good and evil: whatsoever it saith, it lieth; whatsoever it hath, it hath stolen. False is it wholly; it is a biter which biteth with stolen teeth. False are its very bowels. There are the seeds o f my philosophy o f anarchism, though at the same time 1 was reading Tolstoy, W illiam Morris,

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Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter. From such sources, which were fundamentally Christian or humanitarian in their in­ spiration, arose a counter-influence which turned the impact o f Nietzsche into a crisis—a mental conflict which had to be solved. How it was solved is another story, and I would be de­ ceiving you i f I suggested that there was, or is, any easy solution o f what is, indeed, an eternal inescapable dilemma. This dilemma had received its perfect expression, a year or two before Nietzsche wrote Zarathustra, in Dostoevsky's “ Legend o f the Grand Inquisitor", but I think it was not until sometime later that I read this wonderful chapter in the Brothers Karamazov. What I did seize on, so many years ago, was a passage in Beyond Good and Evil, marking it with triple­ lines : and I would like to think that it has never, since then, been absent from m y consciousness. Here it is : Everything in the nature of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking and persuading, in art as in conduct, has only developed by means of the tyranny of arbitrary law . . . Every artist knows how different from the state of letting oneself go, is his “ most natural" condition, the free arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing in the moments of “ inspira­ tion"—and how strictly and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws, which by their very rigidness and precision, defy all formulation by means of ideas . . . The essential thing “ in heaven and in earth" is, apparently . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direc­ tion; and thereby results, and always has resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality—anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish or divine. This is the essential message o f Nietzsche's philosophy, and though since I first came across it I have read much and 179

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travelled far, I still know none finer. But it is not an easy doc­ trine. Indeed, it is a doctrine of hardness. Become hard, cried Nietzsche, but he did not mean become hard towards other people. This is what he meant: “ The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto ? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inven­ tiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, dis­ guise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering? In man creature and creator are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day—do ye understand this contrast?” Since I first read and was moved to the bottom of my being by these and other words of Nietzsche’s, there have been two wars against Germany; and Nietzsche was a German. As a consequence he has been reviled, spat upon, misinterpreted and distorted in a thousand ways, and by both camps. But wars and their pestilential hatreds pass, and they cannot destroy the greatness of a great soul. Nietzsche and his philo­ sophy will return, justly criticized, deeply modified, but still unmistakably Nietzschean. One aspect of that philosophy has already been revived under the name of Existentialism. The existentialists acknowledge their debt to Nietzsche, but I find nothing of value in Sartre, in Jaspers, in Heidegger, which is not expressed more forcibly, more beautifully, and more completely, in the works of Nietzsche. I think that Nietzsche anticipated the existentialists and condemned their short­ comings when he wrote: “ Was it not necessary in the end 1 80

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for men to sacrifice everything comfortable, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? Was it not necessary to sacrifice God Himself, and out o f cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness — this paradoxical mystery o f the ultimate cruelty has been reserved for the rising generation . . .”

22

The Drama and the Theatre The Complete Plays of Henry James have been awaited with some impatience by the devotees o f the Master, and now that we have them we see that there is some excuse for the delay. Together they constitute the most spectacular failure that a major literary artist has ever encountered. In his disillusion, late in life, Henry James could hardly have been brought to look at the typescripts again; but Mr. Edel, who has edited them, is probably right in assuming that he would not have objected to their eventual publication. In 1913, answering a critic who had asked for a sight o f the plays in order to write an article about them, James said: While they were being played they of course came in for whatever attention the Press was paying to the actual and current theatre. They were inevitably then Theatre-stuff, and as such took their chance; but they are now, enjoying complete immunity from per­ formance as they do, Drama-stuff—which is quite a different matter. It is only as Drama-stuff that I recognize their exposure to any public remark that doesn’t consist simply of the critic’s personal remem­ brance of them as played tilings . . . When my Plays, such as they 181

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have been, are published, then of course the gentleman you mention will enjoy all aid to his examination. There is present, in this statement, a distinction which is at the root o f the whole problem o f drama, and which makes this volume, as a classical demonstration o f the issue, o f im­ portance for all who are interested in the craft o f writing. For many years there has existed a certain antagonism be­ tween the imaginative writer and the professional stage (it has now extended to the film). The producer, and the actor, are firmly convinced that there is some sixth sense, a feeling for what is possible in the theatre, a “ stage-sense” , which they possess and which the writer lacks. In the past two hundred years the overwhelming majority o f successful plays have been written by “ playwrights” (an odious word to indicate the singularity o f the tribe), and what they wrote, once the stage had finished with it, is as dead as an old newspaper. In certain cases it is obvious that the writers were at fault— they simply refused to conform to the limitations o f the stage. The plays o f Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne are either inordin­ ately long or massively static. But this divorce between the writer and the stage did not always exist, and the plays o f Shakespeare and Congreve are still “ good theatre” . So, in the period in question, were the plays o f Ibsen and Chekhov. W hy, then, was Henry James, with his immense knowledge, not only o f the craft o f writing, but o f the stage itself, such a spectacular failure as a playwright ? Reviewing, in 1895, the second volume o f Theatricals, the critic o f the Pall Mall Gazette observed: “ . . . w e wish very much that Mr. James would write such farces to please him­ self, and not to please the stage.” And on the same occasion W illiam Archer expressed the opinion that “ Mr. James has never taken up a natural and unconstrained attitude towards the stage . . . I f he w ill only clear his mind o f critical can t. . . 182

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and write solely for the ideal audience within his own breast, he w ill certainly produce works o f art, and not improbably successful plays” . These are shrewd hits, but Henry James might have answered that the dramatist, i f his aims are realis­ tic, must write for the audience that actually exists in his time, must study the successes and be guided by the failures, and generally conform to the taste o f the period. Oddly enough, James had one supreme object in writing plays—to make money. He had been writing novels for a quarter o f a cen­ tury, and had only met with a modest succes cTestime. He had a comfortable private income from property in America that would make most writers envious, but he had also an expan­ sive view o f his social rights and obligations. Cash was a prime necessity, and the theatre was the most direct way o f earning it. At first he had avoided that way because he realized, from his close observation o f the theatre in Paris and London, that the world one enters, in knocking at a manager’s door, is one o f “ deadly vulgarity and illiteracy” . He describes very vividly, in the fourth chapter o f The Tragic Muse (the novel in which he exposed all his theatrical aspirations), the limita­ tions that beset the Victorian dramatist (the position has not changed). “ What can you do,” he asks pathetically, “ with a character, with an idea, with a feeling, between dinner and the suburban trains?” In 1889 he confides to his journal that he had “ practically given up m y old, valued and longcherished dream o f doing something for the stage for fame’s sake, and art’ s, and fortune’s: overcome by the vulgarity, the brutality, the baseness o f the condition o f the English-speaking theatre today. But after an interval, a long one, the vision has revived, on a new and a very much humbler basis, and especially under the lash o f necessity. O f art and fame il est maintenantfort pen question: I simply must try, and try seriously, to produce half a dozen—a dozen, five dozen—plays for the 183

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sake o f my pocket, m y material future. O f how little money the novel makes for me I needn’t discourse here” . The new and humbler basis was to be a dramatization o f his novel, The American, with Edward Compton as producer and leading actor. It ran for seventy performances—not by theatrical stan­ dards a success, but tantalizing enough to encourage both Compton and James to try again. The Album and The Repro­ bate followed almost immediately, but these were not pro­ duced; and then, in 1895, came the decisive event o f James’s dramatic career— the production o f Guy Domville with George Alexander as manager and leading actor. The disastrous first night o f this play, when James was hissed and booed as he came on the stage to take the author’ s call, has become legendary. It was more than the reaction o f a disappointed audience: it was an audience divided against itself, one half applauding the subtlety and grace that had proved to be beyond the coarse sensibilities o f the other half. It was the battle o f the high-brow and the low-brow in all its raw violence, its inequality o f weapons. It was a war for which Henry James had no strategic aptitude. He once more retired from the field. He was to return, twelve years later, with a final group o f plays. Meanwhile the battle for Ibsen had been fought and won on all fronts with the possible exception o f the boxoffice. James had been an interested, indeed, a fascinated spec­ tator. He might deplore in this Norwegian intruder “ the absence o f humour, the absence o f free imagination, and the absence o f style” —especially the absence o f style, all the more mystifying in that “ its place was not usurped, as it frequently is in such cases, by vulgarity” . But humourless, flat and parochial as they might be, James had to recognize that plays like Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck, had a vitality and a verisimilitude such as he had never achieved. This might be 184

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partly due to “ the artistic exercise o f a mind saturated with the vision o f human infirmities; saturated, above all, with a sense o f the infinitude, for all its mortal savour, o f character. But it was also due to something for which James had always had the highest regard— a high sense o f “ the sacred mystery o f structure” . It is perhaps too facile to suggest that the influence o f Ibsen is present in this last phase o f James’s dramatic career, but in one play at least, The Other House, the comparison is unescapable, and is made by Mr. Edel. “ In The Other House’ s provincial setting, the retrospective method em­ ployed in the prologue, the small cast, the use o f Dr. Ram age as a family adviser (an Ibsen type recalling Judge Brack or Rector Kroll) and Mrs. Beever as the objective outsider, able to view the struggling characters with judicial calm, James has reproduced all the Ibsen externals.” Mr. Edel goes on to com­ pare the plot o f this play with Rosmersholm, and the parallels are indeed very close. But for all that, he claims, The Other House stands on its own feet as a distinct Jamesian work. But he claims rather too much in claiming that it is also “ British” in its motives and emotions. It remains to ask what, i f anything, was wrong with James’s plays. One may express a hope that one day they will be tried out on a more sympathetic stage (actors and actresses o f the Irving-Alexander age were, with rare exceptions like Eliza­ beth Robins, totally unsuited for such plays); one may express such a hope and yet at the same time ruefully admit that all is not well with these plays. Actors and critics com­ plained o f the artificiality o f the dialogue, but this was no objection in the case o f Congreve, or even in the contem­ porary case o f Wilde. As Bernard Shaw said o f Guy Domville: “ Line after line comes with such a delicate turn and fall that I unhesitatingly challenge any o f our popular dramatists to write a scene in verse with half the beauty o f Mr. Jam es’s 185

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prose . . . I am speaking o f the delicate inflexions conveyed by the cadences o f the line.” N or can there be any criticism o f the dramatic structure o f the plays. Some o f them are too long, but all are shapely, and move with perfect tempo to their appointed intervals. The real difficulty, in m y opinion, lies elsewhere. James was a master o f the interior drama—o f the subjective processes that are rarely, in real life, expressed in overt action. He writes, said George Moore, “ like a man to whom all action is repugnant” . “ W hy does he always avoid decisive action ? In his stories a woman never leaves the house with her lover, nor does a man ever kill a man or himself. W hy is nothing ever accomplished ? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are o f common occurrence; but Mr. James’s people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight o f volition.” This is very true o f the novels, but it does not make them any the less great works o f art. In this sphere James created a genre o f which George Moore had no conception, and could have had no aptitude. But when it came to writing plays, James was at a loss, and resorted to some o f the crudest melodrama ever intended for the stage. He tried to make up for it by elaborate stage directions—surely the most elaborate stage directions ever written by a dramatist. The concluding directions o f The Other House are an extreme example o f this, and far too long to quote: but apart from various visible actions, the actors are called on to “ smother revulsions” , to “ take in ” another character’s fidelity to his vow , to choke impulses and to give a word “ but the form o f a look” . The stage directions in his last play, The Outcry, are even more subtle in their intentions —and impossible o f exteriorization (“ On which, as having so unanswerably spoken, he turns off again in his high petulence and nervous, restless irritation and goes up and away—the thought o f something still other, and not yet quite at the 186

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surface, seeming to work in him beneath and behind all this . . . ” ). This was the hand o f the novelist annotating the play, increasingly as time went on. But the novelist would never have been responsible for the crude drinking scene in Guy Domville; nor for the astonishing figure o f Rose Armiger in The Other House, who seems rather to have strayed from East Lynne or one o f the more lurid romances o f Hall Caine. That interior drama can be bodied forth on the modern stage has been proved by the author o f The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party. One must conclude that in this matter James never had the courage o f his convictions. He had been dazzled, as a youth, by the Parisian stage, about which he wrote so well and so enthusiastically in the articles now col­ lected in The Scenic Art. The theatre o f Dumas fils and Sardou must have had some point for its contemporaries, but it is now astonishingly dead—so dead that it would be an arduous task to discover to what extent its example was fatal to its fervent disciple. It is, at least, under suspicion. Was all this dramatic effort o f James’s in vain ? Theatrically, there can be no doubt. Some o f James’s plays will be revived when the theatre is less vulgar and commercial; they w ill be given by private societies to small but delighted audiences. But they will never command the stage as Ibsen does, or even Shaw. The defects are too inherent. But indirectly the experi­ ence was o f incalculable value to James, for without the dram­ atic years it is not likely that his narrative art would have reached its wonderful perfection in such works as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. That was Henryjames’s own conclusion. Looking back on the “ whole tragic experience” , “ compensations and solutions” seemed to stand there with open arms for him. “ Has a part,” he asked himself, “ o f all this wasted passion and squandered time . . . been simply the pre­ cious lesson, taught me in that roundabout and devious, that 187

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cruelly expensive, way, o f the singular value for a narrative plan too o f the (1 don’t know what adequately to call it) divine principle o f the scenario ?” Certainly this was the divine prin­ ciple which he applied with such success in his last great phase. In retrospect those days o f struggle and disillusion in the theatre became a “ strange sacred time” , infinitely precious, for they had yielded up the secret o f “ the sacred mystery o f structure.” I had intended, in this essay, to make some comparison o f Henry James and Sean O’Casey. I thought that some lesson might be drawn from the success o f O ’Casey’s plays when contrasted with the failure o f Henry James’s plays. But on consideration I find that their worlds do not meet at any point. Mr. O ’Casey is good Theatre—in that respect he has the advantage o f Henry James. But is he good drama? Good drama, in my opinion, should also be good reading. I enjoy reading a play like Guy Danville or The Other House even though I criticize many o f its features; and this is because it has a literary texture, a verbal wit and dignity. “ I think a poet’s claim to greatness depends upon his power to put pas­ sion in the common people,” says one o f Mr. O ’Casey’s characters, and he is probably expressing Mr. O ’Casey’s own opinion, though another character answers: “ The poet ever strives to save the people; the people ever strive to destroy the poet.” The people certainly tried to destroy Henry Jam es; his poetry was too refined for them. But they will not destroy Sean O ’Casey; his rhetoric shakes the diaphragm and draws their tears, but the sound o f it diminishes down the corridors o f time.

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23

Two Notes on a Trilogy

I

which Henry James himself wrote for the “ N ew Y o rk ” edition o f The Wings of the Dove he discussed in nearly exhaustive detail the aims or intentions he had had in writing this novel, and all that is left for a later and less qualified voice to add are a few things which modesty, or a fear o f egoism, forbade the author himself to utter. The Wings o f the Dove is the first member o f the great trilogy which con­ stitutes the final phase o f James’s work. In the past there has been a tendency—not now, I think, so widespread—to depre­ ciate this final phase, to suggest that it is really a little too much o f a good thing. That attitude shows a complete misunder­ standing o f the whole o f our author’s evolution, which was always, from the beginning, a reaching after the perfection which this novel, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl together represent—a perfection at once intellectually formal and deeply moving. On the question o f the form o f the novel in general no modesty held back the author: on this theme he expatiates endlessly, not only in the Preface already mentioned, but also in his letters and essays, whether in connection with his own w ork or the work o f other writers. N o approach to Henry James is valid that does not recognize his intention to give the novel a shape, a structure in its w ay as rigid, as proof against sentimentality, weakness, irrelevance, inappropriateness, dull­ ness, exaggeration and all the other sins o f literary composition in the preface

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as, say, the classical drama of Aeschylus or Racine. Con­ sidering the previous history of the novel (or, for that matter, its subsequent history, which at no point has come within reach of Henry James in this respect), his ambition was already overweening: the public was not—is not yet—ready for such a discipline. Novel reading, even in intellectual circles, is re­ garded as a relaxation—as compared with the reading of philosophy, science or poetry. That, Henry James would have said, is precisely what is wrong with the novel, and with the reading public. Art has no outer courts: it is absolute—it either is, on the level of Phedre or King Lear or Samson Agonistes, or it is not; it does not admit of adulteration. To give the novel the intensity of the great masterpieces—that, briefly, was James’s ambition; and there can be no doubt, to some of us, that he succeeded, in The Wings of the Dove and equally in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl—succeeded beyond his own hopes, and certainly beyond the achievements of any other novelist who has ever conscientiously practised the art. As for the form which fiction should take—should discover as it were, for itself—here again James left us in no doubt. The Preface to The Wings of the Dove is perhaps the supreme occa­ sion for an exposition of what he called “ the compositional key”, though the other Prefaces are not less suggestive of it. There is, naturally, a centre round which the whole drama is to revolve—though one might equally well use a more static image and call it the keystone whose firm placing locks the whole structure into rigidity. This centre is then illuminated from various points of vantage, each of which is another sub­ ordinate arch or vault held in position by its own keystone (however baroque, even “mannerist”, the style of Henry James, his structure must be thought of in terms of Gothic architecture). In the Preface to this novel he speaks of the 190

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“ fun” o f “ establishing one’s successive centres—o f fixing them so exactly that the portions o f the subject commanded by them as by happy points o f view, and accordingly treated from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks o f wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying pow er; to make for con­ struction, that is, to conduce to effect and to provide for beauty” . He also speaks o f the tension, even the conflict, between drama and picture, between the action as such and the prefigured elements within the dimensions o f which the action must take place, elements which are not mere stage scenery, but mute presences which contribute their share to the development o f the action. One has to go no farther than the first chapter—indeed, the first paragraph—to see the uphol­ stery taking, as it were, the impress o f the characters, the mirrors reflecting their least movements. This kind o f effect is not achieved without the highest skill—the art o f indirect presentation, and with it what James called “ the recording consistency” o f the author. For these reasons, which are highly rewarding in the end, it may nevertheless be some time before the reader gets the “ hang” o f the story. The heroine does not appear before the Third Book, and even thereafter the situation is developed in such a leisurely fashion that the author was compelled, as he confesses, to skimp the scenes as the plot drew to its loaded conclusion. The motive was one which James had for a long time nursed in his imagination. “ The idea, reduced to its essence, is that o f a young person conscious o f a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured o f the w orld ; aware, moreover, o f the condemnation and passionately desiring to ‘ put in ’ before extinction as many o f the finer vibrations as possible, and so achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the 191

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sense o f having lived/’ The young person who is to embody this idea is M illy Theale, an American girl—“ the fine flower o f an ‘ old’ N ew Y ork stem” — who has wealth and charm, intelligence and independence— everything, as it turns out, except health. The author plunges her, eager and ingenuous, into a corner o f English society which might be described as a little gamy—at least, it mingles its finer feelings with specu­ lations that are calculating, even in the crude sense. Kate Croy, who threatens to dominate the novel by the forcefulness o f her character, is more than a foil to M illy’s wistful innocence: she represents the moral ambiguity o f a diplomatic approach to life—which is the typical Jamesian theme, not less impor­ tant for being so seemingly subtle. Her emissary, who is also her lover, is a weaker figure: indeed, we can never quite believe in Merton Densher, so deeply is his masculinity com­ promised in this petticoat government. The plot which these two concoct is staged in Venice, in an atmosphere o f watery corruption which James knew as no one else how to convey. Kate instigates a particularly foul piece o f deception—foul be­ cause, however extenuating the circumstances, it did involve the sanctity o f the passions: the passion which was hers and Densher’s by natural development, and poor M illy’s only on the basis o f their unconscionable pretence. A moral tragedy cannot be epitomized: its excitement is in its subtleties o f observation, its accuracy o f discrimination, its accumulated perception o f issues and dilemmas; and above all in the author’s conscious control o f the final issue. It might be objected that in this tragedy the heroine is not a victim claimed by exacting gods: she dies full o f pity and forgiveness, and the retribution is left to work its poison in the consciences o f the calculating lovers. W e must admit that the pattern is not the classic one. But it would not have been like James to confine himself within such banal limits. Life itself does not conform 192

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to a traditional pattern, and it was life, in all its immediacy and contemporaneity, from which James drew his motives, and in which he could not honestly find the classical formula. But the effect is none the less cathartic; and when M illy dies we feel, i f we have given the story the attention it demands, not perhaps that a great queen has gone to her doom, but rather that once more a martyred spirit has proved the moral grandeur o f simple virtue.

ii

The Golden Bowl, which Henry James began to write in April, 1903, was to be the last completed full-length novel, and it was written, as he himself said, “ with the rarest perfec­ tion’’— the perfection o f all those arts, narrative and dramatic, to which he had by then devoted the concentrated energies o f forty years. The “ germ ” o f the story had been planted in his mind some twelve years earlier— there is an entry o f November 28, 1892, in the Notebooks: “ something lately told one about a simultaneous marriage, in Paris (or only ‘ engagement’ yet, I believe), o f a father and a daughter—an only daughter. The daughter— American, o f course—is en­ gaged to a young Englishman, and the father, a widower and still youngish, has sought in marriage at exactly the same time an American girl o f very much the same age as his daughter.” James immediately began to elaborate the suggestion. “ Say he has done it to console himself in his abandonment—to make up for the loss o f the daughter, to whom he has been devoted. I see a little tale, riest-ce pas ?—in the idea that they all shall have married, as arranged, with this characteristic consequence—that the daughter fails to hold the affections o f the young English husband, whose approximate mother-in-law the pretty young second wife o f the father w ill now have 193

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become. The father doesn't lose the daughter nearly as much as he feared, or expected, for her marriage which has but half gratified her, leaves her des loisirs, and she devotes them to him and to making up, as much as possible, for having left him . . . The reason for all th is. . . resides in the circumstance that the father-in-law’s second wife has become much more attractive to the young husband o f the girl than the girl her­ self has remained. Mettons that this second wife is nearly as young as her daughter-in-law—and prettier and cleverer— she knows more what she is about. Mettons even that the younger husband has known her before, has liked her, etc., been attracted by her, and would have married her i f she had had any money.” He explores the possibilities a little farther and then remarks : “ The subject is really the pathetic simplicity and good faith o f the father and daughter in their abandon­ ment” , and adds: “ the other woman and the father and daughter all intensely American” . This idea for a “ little tale” occurred to James in the midst o f his infatuation with the theatre. Guy Domville, the fatal play on which his highest hopes were fixed, was written during the next summer. The disillusionment came with the disastrous failure o f that play in January, 1895. The next month we find James returning, as i f for consolation, to the theme o f this very novel. He had also on his mind the theme which became The Wings of the Dove, but first there stood in his path, “ brightly soliciting” , “ the idea o f the father ànd daughter . . . who marry—the father for consolation—at the same time, and yet are left more together than ever, through their respec­ tive époux taking such a fancy to each other” . His fingers itched for it—“ I seem to see it as something compact, char­ penté, living, touching, amusing . . . For God’s sake let me try : I want to plunge into it : I languish so to get at an imme­ diate creation.” And then follows a rueful glance back over 19 4

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the dramatic years, and the daring thought that perhaps after all they had not been wasted— that he had “ crept round through long apparent barrenness, through suffering and sadness intolerable, to that rare perception” —the rare percep­ tion being “ the singular value for a narrative plan too o f the . . . divine principle o f the Scenario” . “ The divine principle o f the scenario” is the key to the subsequent development o f James’s narrative art, and there can be no doubt that on what he meant by this phrase depends the singular grandeur o f his final phase as a novelist. The prin­ ciple involves the carrying over into the novel o f the formal demands that are implicit in drama. O f the three novels o f the final phase, The Golden Bowl is perhaps the least rigid in form, — the geometry, at least, is less complicated. He said himself, in his Preface to the N ew Y ork Edition, “ the thing abides rigidly by its law o f showing Maggie Verver at first through her suitor’s and her husband’s exhibitiory vision o f her, and o f then showing the Prince, with at least an equal intensity, through his w ife’s ; the advantage thus being that these attri­ butions o f experience display the sentient subjects themselves at the same time and by the same stroke with the nearest possible approach to a desirable vividness” . And again: “ W e see very few persons in The Golden Bowl, but the scheme o f the book, to make up for that, is that we shall really see about as much o f them as a coherent literary form permits. That was m y problem, so to speak, and m y gageure—to play the small handful o f values really for all they were worth—and to w ork m y system, my particular propriety o f appeal, par­ ticular degree o f pressure on the spring o f interest, for all that this specific ingenuity itself might be.” H ow beautifully the hand is played can only be appreciated in the reading, and the re-reading, o f the book. It is done with a felicity worthy o f the high theme.

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T o this theme I will return before I conclude, but it should be noted first that among the felicities o f this novel is not only “ the better form ” , but also what James in his Preface des­ cribed as “ the finer air” , and which we all too prosaically would call the prose style. (“ It all comes back to that, to my and your ‘ fun’— if w e but allow the term its full extension; to the production o f which no humblest question involved, even to that o f the shade o f a cadence or the position o f a comma, is not richly pertinent.” ) W e realize from his remarks on the subject in this Preface, and perhaps with surprise, that James would insist on the vocal test even for prose—for his own prose especially: “ The highest test o f any literary form conceived in the light o f ‘ poetry’—to apply that term in its largest literary sense— hangs back unpardonably from its office when it fails to lend itself to viva-voce treatment.” And he does not hesitate to define such finer airs. “ W e talk here, naturally, not of non-poctic forms, but o f those whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an inculculable art. The essential property o f such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure—which is o f course the pressure o f the attention articulately sounded.” James’s prose, in this novel above all, answers to those con­ ditions ; it has everywhere “ the touch that directly evokes and finely presents, the touch that operates for closeness and for charm, for conviction and illusion, for communication, in a word.” Here, in fact, in this final trilogy, is to be found the greatest poetry of our time. Such a scene as that on the terrace at Fawns (Book Fifth, ch. II), gleams with whatever contemporary equivalent we possess for the Shakespearean magic. As for the wisdom which this story embodies, it is one more 196

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application o f the subtlest ethical intelligence o f our time. Moral values are not easy to define, except in action, and to describe Maggie Verver’s quality as “ simplicity” or “ inno­ cence” is to give no notion o f its dynamic intensity. N or do such words as “ sophistication” and “ decadence” at all ade­ quately express the complexity o f the values represented by Charlotte and Amerigo (the only character in the book who is not quite convincing—there was always a shade o f senti­ mentality in James’s transatlantic approach to European aris­ tocrats). The truth is that James would have shrunk from any categorization, any codification, o f moral values. The conduct o f life is an art, and the work o f living art is the creation o f a fine aesthetic sensibility, and is to be appreciated only by a similar sensibility. In the scene I have referred to James describes Maggie at one point as being unable to give herself “ to the vulgar heat o f her w rong” . To insist on moral rights, to cry out against moral wrongs—that is precisely the rough justice that leaves its victims bleeding. The whole o f James’s work is a protest against such obtuseness, and in The Golden Bond he found finally that “ large and confident action” , that “ splendid and supreme creation” , which he had, over the years, so assiduously sought.

24

C. G. Jung one d a y as we sat in his study overlooking the lake o f Zurich, I asked Jung what had been the fundamental aim o f all his life’s work, and he answered simply: “ I wanted to

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understand. . . . To understand is m y only passion. But also I have a doctor’s instinct. I want to help people when they are in pain. But to do that, 1 have to understand them.” Carl Gustav Jung is the son o f a Protestant pastor, born in the village o f Kesswill, in the canton o f Thurgau, “ in the year o f the p ig” . That is Jung’s own humorous comment, for in the Chinese calendar the year 1875 is given this symbol, a symbol o f darkness. As a child Jung noticed that the world was dark and obscure: the reality did not tally with the super­ ficial explanations given him by his elders. There was the darkness o f the past—a night in which untold races o f men had lived and left their undeciphered traces: he would study archaelogy. There was the darkness o f language: different races speaking in different tongues, and many languages that men had once spoken had disappeared, leaving only traces in faded manuscripts and broken inscriptions—he would study philology; There was the darkness o f life itself—the mystery o f biological evolution o f the human body, o f the human mind. In this last region was the darkest mystery o f all, and to this he would, in the end, devote all his inquisitive energy. There is little wonder he had this bent in his nature. His ancestors for several generations on both sides o f the family had been either theologians, seeking to solve the mystery o f life by spiritual insight, or doctors, probing into the secrets o f the body. His paternal grandfather, a German by birth, was a poet as well as a physician, who had had to leave his native country on account o f his revolutionary sympathies, and had come to Basle with a recommendation from that great hum­ anist Alexander von Humboldt. Here this ancestor became professor o f anatomy and later founded the first asylum for the insane and the first institution for mentally-defective children. He married the daughter o f an old patrician family, and so did his son. It was to Basle that Jung himself came, at 198

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the early age o f four, and Basle is the city where, so to speak, he wove together the two strands o f his inheritance. In Basle he went to school and college, and completed his medical studies. He had already discovered his particular bent and had been drawn to the psychiatrical side o f medicine. In 1900 he became an assistant to the famous mental specialist Bleuler, who was in charge o f the cantonal asylum and psychi­ atrical clinic at Zürich. Tw o years later he had completed his doctor’s thesis—on The Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena. In tills first publication o f nearly half a century ago Jung already foreshadows, not only certain theoretical concepts which we will mention later, but also two characteristics o f his method—Ills choice o f a subject-matter (in this case 4‘ the occult” ) which is dangerous in so far as it suggests that the author has some personal predilection for i t ; and at the same time a refusal to accept the current and mystifying label attached to this subject-matter—the phenomena are so-called occult, but w ill prove in the author’s opinion to be within the scope o f a scientific method, and as such explicable, under­ standable. This early essay sets out from a consideration o f those forms o f hysteria that take the form o f somnambulism (sleep­ walking), but the main evidence is drawn from the analysis o f a spiritualistic medium made by Jung in the years 1899 and 1900. This case was replete with psychological problems— far more than Jung could deal with at the time; but its im­ portance lay in its challenge to accepted notions o f the work­ ings o f the mind. The idea that part o f the mind is unknown to us, below the level o f consciousness, was not new, o f course. Presentiments o f it are present in Greek philosophy, and w e find it as an idea in Leibniz, Kant, Coleridge, Hartmann and Carus. Freud had made the idea a demonstrable fact, and 199

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though Jung did not meet Freud until 1906, he was from the first in friendly and fruitful relationship with the man and his work. The hypothesis o f a dynamic unconscious is basic in this first essay o f Jung’s, but already Jung has taken a step beyond Freud’s position. Having discussed all the essen­ tial features o f the case significant for an understanding o f the structure o f the mind, Jung goes on to point out that “ certain accompanying manifestations” must be mentioned and these, he fears, are sure to encounter “ a not unjustifiable scepticism” in scientific circles. He calls this new material “ unconscious additional creative w ork” . B y this phrase he meant to indi­ cate the possibility that apart from the results o f unconscious activity which can be explained in terms o f ordinary asso­ ciative processes, and by reference to the past history o f the patient, there are other results (the “ thought reading” o f numbers, for example) which seem to depend on a state o f receptivity in the unconscious greater than any known to conscious mental activity. In short, the unconscious has creative capacities beyond the range o f the conscious. That was the suggestion forced on Jung by this case he observed as a young man o f twenty-four, and his life-work to a con­ siderable extent has consisted in a substantiation o f this early intuition. His patient had been unable to explain how she had acquired the knowledge stored in her unconscious. Jung, how­ ever, could discover a number o f parallels in occultist and gnostic sources scattered throughout all kinds o f works o f different periods quite inaccessible to the patient. That paradox sent him on a journey o f exploration which is not yet at an end. There is a current misconception which sees in Jung an early disciple o f Freud who subsequently deserted his master. Nothing could be more misleading. From the very beginning there were differences o f procedure and o f outlook that were 200

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bound to lead to divergent results. Freud’s work is based on a scientific method restricted to the principle o f causality: that is to say, it is assumed that everything that happens has an explanation in prior causes, and is merely the result o f those causes. The world is a mechanism that can be taken to pieces and we can only understand how it works i f we know how to dismantle and reassemble its constituent parts. Jung does not deny this causal principle, but he says that it is inadequate to explain all the facts. In his view we live and work, day by day, according to the principle o f directed aim or purpose, as well as by the principle o f causality. W e are drawn onwards and our actions are significant for a future we cannot foresee, and w ill only be explicable when the final effect o f the impulse becomes evident. In other words, life has a meaning as well as an explanation; a meaning, moreover, that we can never finally discover, for it is being extended all the time by the process o f evolution. Is such an affirmation mystical ? Not at all, Jung would sa y : it is merely the recognition o f objective facts—awkward facts they may be for minds trained in the discipline o f causal logic, but facts none the less. In this first carefully observed case o f hysteria, it was already obvious that the unconscious, in the elaboration o f systematic fantasies, followed certain patterns unknown to the waking consciousness, and that these patterns were not given by the facts o f the case, but could nevertheless be related to patterns in other systems of thought and imagery. That is to say, the unconscious may be said to have an innate bias towards the formation o f specific symbols, and these symbols have a significance which is more than personal— which is historical, racial, collective—at that time Jung could not say which. But he affirmed the positive and super-personal value o f the symbol, and already in that early act he chose another road 201

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than Freud, who can only see in the symbol a sign or repre­ sentation o f the individual’s primitive sexual tendencies. All symbols, in Freud’s view, could be, must be, reduced to pro­ ducts o f biological (specifically sexual) instincts. That may be their scientific explanation, replied Jung, but “ causality is only one principle, and psychology essentially cannot be exhausted by causal methods only, because the mind lives by aims as w ell” . W e know that man cannot live by bread alone: nor even, Jung would add, from the energy generated by sup­ pressed infantile desires for pleasure or power. Man must also possess hope; and hope, or belief in the purposive value of life, is a vital necessity. Because it is a vital necessity, the uncon­ scious has created (over many thousands o f years) symbolic images or moulds o f thought by which the hopes and aspira­ tions o f mankind can be shaped and expressed. The symbol thus has an evolutionary function. “ The further development o f man,” Jung has written, “ can only be brought about by means o f symbols which represent something far in advance o f himself, and whose intellectual meanings cannot yet be grasped entirely. The individual unconscious produces such symbols, and they are o f the greatest possible value in the moral development o f the personality.” This view, which threatened to reverse the scientific materialism o f the nineteenth century, especially as it affected religious beliefs, has been bitterly opposed, not only by em­ piricist psychologists o f the school o f Freud, but by the whole o f the positivistic and marxist trend in modern thought. Jung remains unperturbed, for he has no axe to grind, political or ecclesiastical. He remains objective. As for religion, he agrees with Cicero in deriving the word, not from “ religare” (to bind fast, as the Church Fathers would have it) but from “ relegere” , which means to observe carefully, to look for hints and wait for hunches, and never seek to be dogmatic. 202

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It is not necessary to be a theologian to get those intimations: they come to all sorts and conditions o f men, and to men, like St. Paul, who least expect them, or want them. They come, o f course, from the unconscious, and our only clue to their nature and operations is the scientific study o f dreams. W e may perhaps get a better notion o f the function ascribed to the dream in Jung’s psychology by looking at the whole process in reverse. W e must imagine, then, a single continuous psychic process, as pervasive and universal as the cosmic process or “ nature” , and equally removed from our human scale o f time and space. As individual persons we are “ carriers” o f this force—we depend on it very much in the same w ay as our bodies depend on air. W e have to keep it under pressure, contained within a sensitive envelope, and it is only this envelope o f which we are normally conscious, and which we present to our fellow-men. But we are not allowed to forget our dependence on this psychic force—we are not allowed to assume that we are self-sufficient and exclusively personal. So in certain states o f inattention (day-dreaming, sleep, hysteria, etc.) the unconscious force is revealed to us, not as an individual possession but as impersonal, racial, even primitively animal. W e call this revelation a dream, and as such it cannot be explained with a psychology taken only from individual consciousness. Again, it is only a hunch we get, for the dream is back and behind, dominating our psychic life : “ we do not dream—we are dreamed” . W e submit to the dream, we are in part the creation o f our dreams, and the created cannot fully understand the purpose o f the creator. “ The dream is a mysterious message from our night-aspect” — from the darkness that we strive to understand. It is never, as the Freudians would argue, fully exphcable in terms o f our reason, or o f our instinctive drives. Jung reiterates: it has a pur­ pose which does not necessarily correspond with the purposes 203

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o f the conscious mind and causality. It follows that there can be no standard symbols, good for all dreams, as there are in Freudian psychology, for the purpose o f the dream w ill vary with every individual and every situation. There is al­ ways a complementary or compensatory relation between the conscious situation o f the dreamer and the dream, and dream interpretation can proceed only i f we have the requisite know­ ledge o f the conscious situation. It is always helpful, says Jung, when we set out to interpret a dream, to ask: “ what conscious attitude does it compensate ?” There is a language o f dreams and it has certain “ roots” in the past, but it is a language that has become full o f inflexions, complex and subtle. The task o f interpretation is bound to be difficult but it is nevertheless an essential part o f psychotherapy. The dream is not an isolated event: it is part o f a con­ tinuous unconscious mental process which by chance we in­ terrupt, and succeed in bringing to consciousness. For that reason it is important to study dreams in series: they are con­ nected by unconscious threads o f meaning, and perhaps the analyst, by taking readings at various points, can guess the lines o f communication. He may find that they cross at a certain point, which becomes the “ centre o f significance” . Once such a centre is established, the task o f interpretation becomes immensely simplified. But not complete. At the centre o f significance may be a symbol, and again Jung is too cautious to give such symbols a simple equivalence in our conscious life. “ The dream speaks in images, and gives expression to instincts that are derived from the most primitive levels o f nature.” W e may not be able to interpret such images in our conscious sophisticated language. But we can recognize them for what they are, mes­ sages from another psychic layer and we can assimilate them, make them our familiars. W e shall find their parallels in our 204

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myths and fairy tales, even in popular fiction and pictorial art. Sometimes they signify positive forces, the forces o f life, the power o f healing and o f fertility; sometimes negative forces, the forces o f self-destruction and death. Contrary to Freud, who regards the unconscious as a depository o f evil forces, Jung treats it as “ that really very natural thing” . “ The unconscious,” he says, “ is not a demonic monster, but a thing o f nature that is perfectly neutral as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste and intellectual judgment go. It is dangerous only when our conscious attitude towards it becomes hope­ lessly false. And this danger grows in the measure that we practise repressions.” Elsewhere he has given an example o f this danger—the Nazi cult o f collective forces, o f tribal gods, o f men o f de­ monic power. Nobody saw the significance o f the rise o f Nazism as clearly as Ju n g ; nobody gave such clear warnings. His voice was ignored and afterwards his clear understanding o f the situation was misconstrued as a sympathetic attitude towards i t ! The physician must be the carrier o f the disease he would cure; the prophet must be stoned for daring to prophesy war and pestilence! But to return to the dream. Jung as a scientist has not found it possible to explain the unconscious by the rigid laws o f causality. It had been Freud’s tendency to regard the uncon­ scious as an empty pit or “ cauldron” which each individual gradually fills as he grows up and adapts himself to a hostile world. E nvy and hatred o f the father, sexually possessive feelings towards the mother, love o f its own excrements— these and many other frustrated instincts are the material out o f which the unconscious, according to Freud, is principally fashioned. His illusion, according to Jung, was to believe that what had in this manner been filled, could, by some technique o f analysis, be emptied! It is true that towards the end o f his o

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career Freud began to speak o f man’s archaic heritage, o f “ inherited trends” , which could not be got rid of, o f “ some primeval phylogenetic experience” which each child is des­ tined to repeat. But that concession was not supported by any extensive evidence that Freud cared to pubhsh, and it is doubtful if he would ever have come to regard the uncon­ scious as possessing “ possibilities o f wisdom that are com­ pletely closed to consciousness” , as having at its disposal “ the wisdom o f untold ages, deposited in the course o f time and lying potential in the human brain” . It was left to Jung to elaborate a theory o f this kind, which he has called the theory o f the archetype, and some explanation o f this term is essential in any account o f Ju n g’s psychology. W e have already seen that in his first published case-history Jung was driven to the conclusion that the unconscious, in the elaboration o f its fantasies, follows, as it were, certain wellworn tracks. There is some kind o f pre-determined pattern which the individual unconscious falls into, like jelly into a mould. The fantasy, the process o f fabulation, “ sets” along defined lines. To this predetermined stress in the unconscious Jung gives the name archetype. It is important to realize that the archetype is not a ready­ made image. It is merely an inherited predisposition or ten­ dency to fabricate definite types o f im agery; certain lines o f force along which the imagery in the unconscious will “ auto­ matically” arrange itself. It may be that the unconscious will “ automatically” rely on certain symbols—the mother, the horse, the phallus, etc.; or that its dramatic constructions (our dreams) will follow the formulas we find embedded in ancient mythology. In any case, the evidence Jung derived from his own clinical experience, as well as from his reading in religious and mystical literature, anthropology, folklore, etc., con­ vinced him o f the existence o f such patterns o f symbolic 206

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expression, and a large part o f his work consists o f an elabora­ tion and consideration o f this hypothesis. The division o f the mental personality into two contrary forces—conscious and unconscious—corresponds with a pola­ rity that runs throughout nature and history. The positive and negative fields o f electro-magnetism, the male and female sexes, good and evil—everywhere we are confronted with pairs o f opposites. The dialectic o f the life process is based upon this fact, yet in our conscious practical life, we try to hide the fact. W e think o f ourselves as single in consciousness, o f one sex, and generally as w holly good in intentions. But this illusion o f unity does not correspond with the reality. N ot only has psychotherapy proved that our mind is divided into levels or processes opposed to each other, but this opposition is expressed in recognizable ways. Such “ ways o f expression” are the archetypes, unknown and perhaps unknowable in their unconscious existence. Inasmuch as they determine the form taken by events in consciousness, they become perceptible. Among them we can distinguish two that are o f universal significance. The first Jung has called the Shadow : it is the personification o f all that we do not admit about ourselves, our “ other aspects” , our “ dark brother” , and since we do not like consciously to own this disreputable side o f our nature, we think o f it as outside ourselves, and we create images (archetypes) like Satan, or Caliban, or Mr. Hyde, or A d olf Hitler, to represent our other self. The pro­ cess that Jung calls “ individuation” , a process o f coming to terms with oneself and striking a balance among our con­ flicting impulses, is at first largely a question o f becoming aware o f our Shadow and o f accepting this inevitable pre­ sence. W e can make no progress towards mental health until we become fully conscious o f this other self and accept it as part o f the total reality o f our being. 207

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Another such archetype is the “ soul-image” , the reflection o f the opposite sex which each o f us, in varying degrees o f intensity, carries in our unconscious. The male carries an “ anima” , or female image; the female an “ animus” or male image. “ Everyman carries his Eve in himself,” says an old alchemical sentence. But in practice again we project the image—we seek its counterpart among our fellow human beings, and woe to the man or woman who makes a wrong choice! “ Despite the fact that such a choice may seem to be as ideal as he feels it to be, it is perfectly possible in the long run that a man finds he has married his own worst weakness.” “ Every man carries within himself an eternal image o f woman, not the image o f this or that definite woman, but rather a definite feminine image. This image is fundamen­ tally an unconscious, hereditary factor o f primordial origin, and is engraven in the living system o f man, a 'typ e’ (‘ arche­ type’) o f all the experiences with feminine beings in the age­ long ancestry o f man . . . in short, an inherited psychical system o f adaptation.” Jung took a further step beyond all contemporary psycho­ logy when he recognized in certain religious images o f the past archetypes unconsciously designed to help the struggling soul towards fulfilment, or wholeness. These images, or unifying symbols, take different forms in different religions, but are all essentially the same. One o f the most frequent images o f this kind is the mandala, or “ magic circle” . In the East it is used as an aid to contemplation. Generally it consists o f an intricate pattern in the form o f a flower, a cross, or a wheel, with a tendency to four-fold arrangement. A Buddhist mandala, for example, will take the form o f a highly stylized sacred building, with a figure o f Shiva or some other divinity at the centre surrounded by an eight-leaved lotus. At the four cardinal points are the four gateways to knowledge and 208

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beyond this an enclosing circle, the horrors o f the burial ground. In Christian iconography Christ is often represented within a circle or almond-shaped compartment, enclosed in a square whose spandrels are occupied by the symbols o f the four Evangelists. The infinite variations o f the Christian cross in Celtic, Caroligian and Gothic art are further illustrations o f the expression o f this archetypal symbol. Another and more recent discovery o f Ju ng’s reveals the significance o f ancient alchemy. The alchemists were appar­ ently concerned with the transmutation o f base metals into precious metals, for example, lead to go ld ; but in their secret writings and recipes, they used a symbolism which was de­ rived from the unconscious and Jung has shown that this symbolism actually represents the transformation o f the per­ sonality through the mixing and joining together o f noble and base constituents, o f elements drawn from the conscious and unconscious. The gold sought was not the substance which is “ at the root o f all evil” , but rather philosophic gold, the elixir o f life. In alchemical representations it becomes a symbol comparable with the Golden Flower o f oriental mysti­ cism, and alchemical experiments have their analogy in Yoga and other spiritual disciplines. What all these researches lead to is an affirmation o f religious symbolism, a proof o f its necessity in the development o f the psyche. At this point one should remember that Jung is first and foremost a scientist. His aim has never been to substantiate “ religion” ; it has been to make sick people well again, and in the clinical experience o f “ curing their souls” , he has dis­ covered that the symbol is not the arbitrary creation o f mystics and poets, but a concrete psychological reality, as necessary to psychological health and wholeness as oxygen is to physical health and wholeness. The unconscious, in its general or col­ lective aspect, is an organic system o f such symbols, and we 209

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arc only at the beginning o f our understanding o f its vast and complicated workings. It is permissible, for those who can make the leap into faith, to believe that these symbols are evidences o f the living and transcendent G o d ; but Jung him­ self has not, so far as we know, made that leap. He remains the scientist, the spectator ah extra, and though he may lead his patients to the threshold o f the Church, the decision to cross or not to cross it must be their own. All that Jung shows to the patient (and in this sick world we are all potential patients) is that in one w ay or another we have to return to the Mother, to abandon our adolescent longing for independence, our pro­ test against instinctual bonds, our intellectual pride. W e have to learn that we are part o f a process, a leaf on the Tree o f Life, and that our freedom and happiness lies in the recogni­ tion o f the bonds, visible and invisible, that bring to us the flowing sap. But the w ay back to integration, involving as it does a coming-to-terms with the collective psyche, is not easy, and is perhaps never wholly secure. It depends on a factor which Jung has not hesitated to call “ moral’’— on the recog­ nition o f a direction in life and on a certain faithfulness to oneself. “ Being analysed” is no cure in itself—that way lies deception and self-delusion, and an opportunity for the clarlatan. Jung has always been severe with his patients. He does not promise to rid them o f their neuroses, to banish their bad dreams, or even cure their complexes. On the contrary, these are the symptoms which the patient must learn to observe for himself: a psychic barometer to be read whenever he wants to know his mental climate. The art—and health is an art— lies in this reading, in this weather-wisdom. Such a view o f man’s psyche has many repercussions in philosophy, and especially in political philosophy. It is true that Jung has repeatedly emphasized that re-integration is an individual process—it is up to each man to save his own soul.

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But the diagnosis o f our age that he has made leads to certain broad conclusions o f a political nature, and Jung has not hesi­ tated to express them. “ W e are living in times o f great disruption,” he has declared; “ political passions are aflame, in­ ternal upheavals have brought nations to the brink o f chaos, and the very foundations o f our Weltanschauung are shattered. This critical state o f things has such a tremendous influence on the psychic life o f the individual that the doctor is bound to follow its effect on the individual psyche with more than usual attention. The storm o f actual events does not only sweep down upon him from the great world outside; he feels the violence o f its impact even in the quiet o f his consultingroom and in the privacy o f the medical consultation. As he has a responsibility towards his patients, he cannot afford to withdraw to the peaceful island o f undisturbed scientific work, but must constantly descend into the arena o f world events, in order to join in the battle o f conflicting passions and opinions. Were he to remain aloof from the tumult, the calamity o f his time would only reach him vaguely from afar, and his patients’ suffering would find neither ear nor understanding.” Jung has realized, with every considerable psychologist o f our time, that the crowd or the mass develops a psychological force o f its own. In the crowd the individual loses his identity, not only physically, but also spiritually, and what merges, and emerges as crowd psychology, is the irrational side o f the collective unconscious. W e freely admit such a possibility when confronted with the barbarian horde, or the riotous mob. What we do not so readily recognize is that the in­ dividual, in those mass-organizations which we call the State, has dwindled away to mere nothingness. He has surrendered his power o f decision, his social responsibility, and finds him­ self a rivet (not even a c o g !) in a machine whose movements 211

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and direction he has no power to control. That might not matter if he could be assured that some exceptionally wise and gifted individuals were in control, but in effect every man is similarly riveted, similarly powerless, and what motivates the machine is a demonic force issuing directly from the col­ lective unconscious. N o other hypothesis can explain the re­ lease against mankind itself o f the terrifying weapons o f destruction now in the possession o f world States. Freud, as is well known, was wholly pessimistic about the future o f mankind. The death instinct drives us on, and the only end is the universal destruction o f life. But Jung does not agree with him. The unconscious, he says, does not believe in death. There is a libido, a general urge to life, and it is true that this urge can be split, so that it works against itself. But fundamentally it seeks to flow onwards, to gather force and intensity. That fundamental characteristic o f the libido allows us to hope that mankind will become aware o f the threat to its existence before it is too late. W e must dare to hope, and it is the daring rather than the hope that will carry us through. But the means, for Jung, is still the integration o f the in­ dividual personality. The group, the party, the nation, the union o f nations, have no freedom o f choice. Within such collectives, psychic powers w ork themselves out as if by an unconscious law o f life. “ There is set going a causally con­ nected process that comes to rest only in catastrophe.’ ’ The epoch, Jung thinks, calls for the liberating personality, “ for the one who distinguishes himself from the inescapable power o f collectivity . . . who lights a hopeful watchfire announcing to others that at least one man has succeeded in escaping from the fateful identity with the group soul” . This distinction between the leader who (like Hitler) is the expression o f unconscious forces that are evil and demonic, and the leader who has stood apart and avoided the general 212

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panic, is perhaps easier to draw in theory than in practice. Jung admits the difficulty. “ There are times in the history o f the world (our own may be one o f them) when something that is good must make w a y ; what is destined to be better thus appears at first to be evil. This last sentence shows how dangerous it is even to touch on these problems, for how easy it would be, according to this, for evil to smuggle itself in by simply explaining that it is the potentially better!” But the risk must be run, and Jung reminds us how, in myth and legend, the life o f the infant hero is always threatened—the serpents and Hera threatened to destroy Hercules, and only by a miracle did Jesus escape from the slaying o f the first­ born in Bethlehem. Life would become meaningless if it were deprived o f its tragic element, for it is danger and desperation that generate the intense awareness, the finer consciousness, that carry life to ever higher manifestations. The “ w a y ” to this new dimension o f existence must be discovered. Each o f the great religions has been a journey o f exploration, and each has its symbol o f the pilgrim’s progress along this way. The Chinese call it Tao, and Jung often speaks with admiration o f the wisdom o f this ancient philosophy. As we sat, on that day already mentioned, looking across the still lake, under the cloudless sky, Jung related the story o f the Rain-maker, as told to him by Professor Richard W il­ helm, the famous Chinese scholar. There had been a terrible drought in Kiou Chou and a man from Shantung was sent for, o f whom it was said that he could make rain. When he arrived he asked for a little hut to be built for him outside the town. When it was ready he retired into it and asked not to be disturbed. He stayed in his hut for three days and three nights and on the morning o f the fourth day a snow-storm broke out such as had never been seen at this time o f the year. 213

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When Wilhelm heard this he went out to the man and asked him how he had set about to make that snow. The man answered that he had not made it. It was simply that he came from Shantung where everything was right. Here in Kiou Chou heaven and earth were separated, everything was wrong and it took him three days to become right again himself. But as soon as he was right rain or snow would naturally fall. Tao, Jung explained, is meaningful coincidence in time— when heaven and earth are working together properly, then things are all right, everything has its due place and function. Like most Chinese stories, at first it seems too simple and pointless, but the meaning grows as we meditate upon it. The inactivity it seems to advocate is merely external. The invisible spheres revolve, and at a certain point in time, they coincide, and at that moment we find ourselves in harmony with nature. At such times things happen as we wish them to happen: we are instruments o f the divine power, vessels filled with grace. That is the full meaning o f integration in Jung’s psychology, and he believes that the world will be saved, i f it is saved at all, by integrated personalities. Ju n g is serene in his retirement. I mentioned the attacks that had been made on him in America and Great Britain, but he dismissed them with a smile. It is always the fate o f a pioneer, he said, to be misunderstood, to be reviled. And there is still w ork to be done, mysteries to be solved, darkness to be dis­ pelled. There is no trace o f anger or o f scorn in his reaction. W e have moved into the garden in the course o f our long talk, and he now sits in the cool shade o f a tree, more than ever like a Chinese sage. W e listen to the plash o f oars on the water, to distant voices, and we fall silent, feeling that here too is a meaningful coincidence. It seems as if earth, sky and water had been listeners, too, and the unity o f the impression 214

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is the unity o f perfect sympathy, o f the Sympatheia that, according to the old Stoics, draws all elements together, in peace and harmony.

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' The Prelude ’ one w in try even ing , a hundred and forty years ago, a party o f friends, deeply attached to each other, was gathered round the fire at a farmhouse near Coleorton, in Leicestershire. There were present William Wordsworth and his family, his sister Dorothy, his wife’s sister, Sarah Hutchinson, Coleridge, and Coleridge’s son, Hartley. To this group Wordsworth read, for the first time, his great poem on “ the growth o f an individual mind” , as he then described it. Everyone present was deeply moved . . . Coleridge so much so that he retired to his room and in the middle o f the night composed those lines beginning:

O Friend! O Teacher! God’s great gift to me! Into my heart have I received that Lay More than historic, that prophetic Lay Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright) O f the foimdations and the building up O f a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell What may be told, to the understanding mind Revealable . . . They had listened to An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chaunted ! 215

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and when it was finished—when, said Coleridge addressing Wordsworth in this poem, when Thy long sustained Song finally closed, And thy deep voice had ceased—yet thou thyself W ert still before my eyes, and round us both That happy vision o f beloved faces— Scarce conscious, and yet conscious o f its close I state, m y being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound— And when I rose, I found myself in prayer.

The poem which Wordsworth read to his friends in January, 1807, was not to be published until the year o f the poet’s death, 1850, and it was then given the title The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; an Autobiographical Poem. It is said that Mrs. Wordsworth invented the title The Prelude, and as a title it is appropriate enough, considering the poem’s origin, and the place it occupies in Wordsworth’s work. Nine years before that first recitation o f The Prelude, Wordsworth and Coleridge had discussed the possibility o f Wordsworth com­ posing a great philosophical poem, to be called The Recluse, or Views on Man, Nature, and Society. Coleridge suggested that Wordsworth “ should assume the station o f a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system o f philosophy. He was to treat man as man—a subject o f eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out o f the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states o f society, assuming something o f the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization o f cities and towns, and opening a melan­ choly picture o f the present state o f degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity 21Ó

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for, the whole state o f man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration” . That grandiose conception was never to be realized. W e have, as part o f it, The Prelude, a poem o f twelve Books and 7,883 lines, The Excursion, nine Books and 8,850 lines, and a noble fragment o f 107 lines o f The Recluse itself, which Wordsworth printed in his Preface to the first edition o f The Excursion, “ as a kind o f Prospectus o f the design and scope o f the whole poem ” . In that same Preface he refers to the unpublished Prelude in these terms: Several years ago, when the Author retired to his native mountains, with the hope of being able to construct a literary Work that might live, it was a reasonable thing that he should take a review of his own mind, and examine how far Nature and Education had qualified him for such employment. As subsidiary to this preparation, he under­ took to record in verse, the origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was acquainted with them. That Work, addressed to a dear Friend, most distinguished for his knowledge and genius, and to whom the Author’s Intellect is deeply indebted, has been long finished; and the result of the investigation which gave rise to it was a determination to compose a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society; and to be entitled, The Recluse, as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement. The preparatory poem is biographical, and con­ ducts the history of the Author’s mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself; and the two Works have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the ante-chapel has to the body of a gothic church. Admittedly, all this sounds a little pompous, even porten­ tous. But we shall never understand Wordsworth, much less 217

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sympathize with him, unless we realize that he regarded him­ self as “ a dedicated Spirit” . At the conclusion o f one o f the most mangificent passages in The Prelude, in which he had recalled “ one particular hour” o f his youth, a moment o f unreflective ecstasy, he breaks o ff to address Coleridge in these w ords: A h! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walk’d In blessedness, which even yet remains. N o great poet has ever taken himself so seriously as Words­ worth. His whole life reveals an obstinate, at times a selfish determination to fulfil his poetic destiny. It was perhaps this very determination, involving as it did seclusion and a limita­ tion o f experience, which explains W ordsworth’s failure to achieve his great plan. Poetry depends, to an extent not al­ ways appreciated by poets themselves, on the maintenance o f normal contacts, on the daily stimulus o f unanticipated events. The Recluse was not the happiest title for a poem on man, nature and society, nor was “ retirement” o f the prolonged kind which actually occurred the right condition. W e must realize that when he set out on his great self-imposed task, W ordsworth hoped to complete the whole o f the great philo­ sophical poem he envisaged in less than two years. In the Advertisement which precedes the 1850 edition o f The Prelude it is stated that this part o f the plan “ was commenced in the beginning o f the year 1799, and completed in the summer o f 1805 ” . That statement is not quite accurate. Professor Garrod has proved that the Preamble to the poem was written in September, 1795. The first draft o f The Prelude as a whole was complete by 1806; The Excursion was not published until 18 14 ; 218

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and as late as 1824 Dorothy writes as though The Recluse were still to be regarded as “ work in progress” , though she says that her brother “ seems to feel the task so weighty that he shrinks from beginning with it” . But Professor de Selincourt was probably right in suspecting that by this time Words­ worth himself knew that he would never go on with The Recluse. What had been conceived as a two-years’ task had petered out after nearly thirty years o f slow, frustrated effort. It was “ comparatively with the former poem ” , that is to say, with The Prelude, that The Excursion disappointed Coleridge’s expectations, and in his letter to Wordsworth about The E x ­ cursion (written reluctantly nine months after that poem had been published) Coleridge conjectured that its inferiority “ might have been occasioned by the influence o f self-estab­ lished convictions having given to certain thoughts and ex­ pressions a depth and force which they had not for readers in general” . Later critics did not seek any such subtle explana­ tions : a few passages excepted, which were o f earlier com­ position, they found the poem desperately dull. But it is only against the achievement o f The Prelude that this judgment becomes o f critical interest. I do not wish to engage in a defence o f The Excursion, which stands in relation to The Prelude very much as Paradise Regained stands to Paradise Lost. The failure is one o f organic continuity. The later poem was, as Coleridge said, “ to have sprung up as the tree” from “ the ground plot and roots” which had been prepared in The Prelude, and as far as there was the same sap in both, they should have formed one complete whole, each revealing, for its distinct purpose, “ the vital spirit o f a perfect form ” . W ell, let us admit that The Excursion has no organic power o f this kin d: let us return to the groundwork o f The Prelude, to that “ Orphic song” which Coleridge could praise without reserva­ tions, and which remains, a hundred and fifty years after its 219

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conception, a poem unique in kind and unsurpassed in its particular brand o f eloquence. The poem is unique, not in its form, but in its subjectmatter. In form it is an epic, like Paradise Lost, but the subject is the poet’s own mind—not the poet himself, as eponymous hero, but the poet as dedicated spirit—as a spirit dedicated to a task for which, without scrupulous self-examination and self-assessment, he might not deem himself sufficiently dis­ ciplined, sufficiently worthy. Wordsworth admitted that “ it was a thing unprecedented in literary history, that a man should talk so much about himself” , but he added, in perfect sincerity, that it was not self-conceit that induced him to do this, but real humility. He began the work, he said, because he was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject, and diffident o f his own powers. A t the same time he confesses, in the first Book o f The Prelude, that when in this w ay he makes “ rigorous inquisition” o f himself, “ the report is often cheering” : for, he continues, I neither seem To lack that first great gift, the vital soul, Nor general Truths, which are themselves a sort Of Elements and Agents, Under-powers, Subordinate helpers of the living mind. Nor am I naked in external things, Forms, images, nor numerous other aids Of less regard, though won perhaps with toil, And needful to build up a Poet’s praise. This is self-confident enough, but a little later he confesses that when it comes to his “ last and favourite aspiration” , some philosophic song O f truth that cherishes our daily life that then 2 20

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from this awful burthem I full soon Take refuge and beguile myself with trust That mellower years will bring a riper mind And clearer insight. Already, in 1805, he had made a very shrewd analysis o f his powers and capacities, o f the psychological inhibitions that would defeat his greater purpose: Thus from day to day I live, a mockery of the brotherhood O f vice and virtue, with no skill to part Vague longing that is bred by want of power, From paramount impulse not to be withstood, A timorous capacity from prudence; From circumspection, infinite delay. Humility and modest awe themselves Betray me, serving often for a cloak To a more subtle selfishness, that now Doth lock my functions up in blank reserve, Now dupes me by an over-anxious eye That with intrusive restlessness beats off Simplicity and self-presented truth. W ordsworth must undoubtedly be described as an egoist— romantic artists commonly are. But do not let us make the mistake o f assuming that he was naive. He is as subtle as Shakespeare in his psychological penetration, and like Shakes­ peare he was, as Coleridge pointed out, always the spectator ab extra—the merciless, objective analyst. From this point o f view, the poetic work that comes nearest to The Prelude is Hamlet. I should now perhaps say something about the structure o f The Prelude. It is in narrative form, divided into books which represent various stages in the growth o f the poet’s mind. But the narrative is interspersed with reflective passages which p

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sometimes, as in the case o f Book VIII (entitled Retrospect) and Book X IV (The Conclusion), extend over the greater part o f that section. The epic character o f the poem is undoubtedly diluted by such philosophic musings. Various versions o f the poem survive. These were collected and collated by the late Ernest de Selincourt, the greatest Wordsworthian scholar o f our time, and his edition o f The Prelude makes a comparison o f the texts very easy. The conclusion that Professor de Selincourt came to after a careful study o f the two main texts was that from a poetic or technical point o f view, the final version, all things considered, is undoubtedly the better one. “ W eak phrases are strengthened and its whole texture is more closely knit,” he says, and he adds: “ The 1805 text . . . leaves often the impression o f a man writing rapidly, thinking aloud or talking to his friend without waiting to shape his thought into the most concise and telling form, satisfied for the moment i f he can put it into metre by inverting the prose order o f the words.” I f our schools and universities were to take an interest in the writing o f poetry (they generally confine themselves to its history and classification) then a study o f the evolution o f the text o f The Prelude would be o f incomparable value. There is no document in the whole o f our literature which has so much to teach the practising poet. Take, for example, the use o f the verb “ to be” as an auxiliary. The auxiliary is always to be avoided in poetry because it produces a softening or dimming o f the statement made. ‘ The gentleness o f heaven is on the sea’ was the original reading o f a line in one o f Wordsworth’s best-known sonnets (“ It is a beauteous evening, calm and free” ). Wordsworth later altered this line to read: “ The gentleness o f heaven broods o'er the sea” , and there is an ob­ vious gain in vividness. In the same way, in The Prelude, to make use o f an example given by de Selincourt, the descrip­ 222

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tion o f the morning o f Wordsworth’s poetic dedication originally ran: Magnificent The morning was, in memorable pomp, More glorious than I ever had beheld. The Sea was laughing at a distance; all The solid Mountains were as bright as clouds. “ Many a poet,” observes de Selincourt, “ would have rested satisfied with those lines as they stood, but no one can miss the gain in strength and vividness effected by the simple changes: Magnificent The morning rose, in memorable pomp, Glorious as e’er I had beheld—in front The sea lay laughing at a distance; near, The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds. The difference is simple—the substitution, for “ was” and “ were” , o f the active verbs “ rose” , “ la y ” and “ shone” .

In this way, and in the revision o f many other details o f composition, the whole text o f The Prelude was cleaned up between 1805 and 1850, and we cannot but agree with de Selincourt that “ the cumulative effect o f such changes, each one perhaps trifling in itself, cannot easily be over-estimated” . N ot all the changes, even o f diction, are for the better—there is a tendency to substitute abstract and grandiloquent phrases for simple words—thus “ thought and quietness” becomes “ meditative peace” and even a “ wom an” is dignified as a “ female” . Other changes are due to a shift in intention—the original version was addressed directly to Coleridge and had some o f the intimacy o f a confession made to a friend; the 223

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final version, though it does not abandon this device, is much more circumspect and discreet. On balance, we have to con­ clude with Professor de Selincourt that the ideal text o f The Prelude would follow no single manuscript, and we must each construct, from the material supplied by de Selincourt, our ideal text. The Prelude is written in blank verse, the unrhymed metre that Shakespeare habitually used, and Milton in his great epics. It is usual to compare W ordsworth’s diction with Milton’s, and there are a few passages o f striking similarity. But in general W ordsworth’s diction bears little resemblance either to the rich imaginative texture o f Shakespeare’s verse, or to the baroque pomp o f Milton’s. W e must remember that Wordsworth’s declared intention was to use in his poetry “ a selection o f the real language o f men in a state o f vivid sensa­ tion” . Coleridge, with his usual perspicacity, found a parallel in “ well-languaged Daniel” . Samuel Daniel is still, as he was in Coleridge’s day, a “ cause­ lessly neglected poet” , but we know that Wordsworth ad­ mired him greatly. His contemporaries thought him prosaic, and most succeeding critics have agreed with them. Coleridge thought his style and language “ just such as any very pure and manly writer o f the present-day—Wordsworth, for example—would use; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style o f Shakespeare” . He further characterized this style as “ the neutral ground o f prose and verse . . . common to both” , but such a neutral style is not negligible. On the con­ trary, Daniel’s diction, wrote Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, “ bears no mark o f time, no distinction o f age, which has been, and as long as our language shall last, w ill be so far the language o f the today and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to us, than the transitory fashions o f our own 224

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particular age” . As an example o f this neutral style in Words­ worth, Coleridge gave the famous description o f skating from the first book o f The Prelude: So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound O f melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. That is the neutral style—no “ multitudinous seas incar­ nadine” : no Hallelujahs from the Empyrean rung, but simple words in natural order, creating, we do not know why, a curiosa felicitas, a subtle beauty beyond analysis. Coleridge distinguished several other virtues in Words­ worth’s poetic diction: I will only mention one further one— what he called “ meditative pathos—a union o f deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as m an; the sympathy indeed o f a contemplator, rather than a fellowsufferer or co-mate . . . but a contemplator, from whose view no difference o f rank conceals the sameness o f the nature; no injuries o f wind or weather, or toil, or even o f ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine” . “ In this mild and philosophic pathos” , Coleridge continues, “ Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such he is: so he writes.” This meditative pathos pervades the whole poem, but a specific instance o f it will be found in the story o f Vaudracour and Julia. The philosophy which emerges from this great exercise in self-examination is a philosophy—or rather, a philosophic faith—that has some relevance to our present quandary and 225

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incessant heart-searchings. Coleridge once—it was in their early days—characterized Wordsworth as a “ semi-atheist” , and in spiritual matters he did indeed question some o f the complacent assumptions o f his contemporaries. But the more we ponder that faith o f his, and contrast it with nihilism on the one hand and intolerant dogma on the other, the more appealing and satisfying it becomes. Wordsworth has also been called a pantheist; that, too, is a misleading label. He was essentially a humanist—not a sceptical humanist like Mon­ taigne, but a pious humanist, like Spinoza or Erasmus. The poet, he said, hath stood By Nature’s side among the men of old And so shall stand for ever. And Nature was valued by the poet because it has the power to “ consecrate” , “ to breathe Grandeur upon the very humblest face o f human life” . This faith is so clearly expressed in the two concluding books o f The Prelude that it is difficult to understand how so many misconceptions o f Wordsworth’s philosophical position could have arisen. It is true that the poem is not all plain sailing—no poet has written 8,000 lines without lapses into flatness or obscurity. I doubt i f Wordsworth is ever hopelessly obscure, but he could be dull. When he attempts the descrip­ tion o f scenes for which he has no innate sympathy—as in the account o f his residence in London—he can be painfully stilted, and at times grotesque. But the style is the man him­ self, a man, like most o f us, o f imperfect sympathies. I do not think we can say with Coleridge that W ordsworth does to all thoughts and all objects add that gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet’s dream. 226

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But he added that light to the widest, the most entrancing landscape in English literature. He did not people that land­ scape with the vivid figures o f a Shakespeare, nor shake its shores with Milton’s “ trumpet-tones o f harmony” . Words­ worth is by no means devoid o f imaginative sympathy, and he had a perfect comprehension o f the simple folk o f his native fells. But the characteristic figure in his landscape is a Solitary, a Wanderer, a man for whom every common sight has sig­ nificance, who from a fund o f natural wisdom can communi­ cate perfect understanding. The best description o f such a figure is his own, in The Excursion: Early had he learned To reverence the volume that displays The mystery, the life which cannot die; But in the mountains did hefeel his faith. All things, responsive to the writing, there Breathed immortality, revolving life, And greatness still revolving; infinite: There littleness was not; the least of tilings Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped Her prospects, nor did he believe—he saw. A spirit that sees, a faith that is felt—Wordsworth’s unique­ ness as a poet lies in his affirmation o f this correspondency between subject and object, between existence and transcen­ dence, between the many and the one, between Man and God. It is a faith that inspired him to write some o f the greatest poetry in our language, poetry that has lost none o f its significance with the passing o f a hundred years.

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Barbara Hepworth the w ork o f any contemporary artist one has always to dispose o f the tiresome question o f influences— tiresome because, being a contemporary question, it is bound to involve those not very creditable emotions w e generally hide under the French phrase amour propre. To the objective student o f art these emotions seem unreasonable, for the whole history o f art is a close texture o f such influences, and those who are most free from them are certainly not the greatest artists. One might even risk the generalization that the great artist emerges precisely at the point where the greatest number o f strands meet, to create, not a confusion, but a pattern o f universal significance. Michelangelo is such a nodus, and in our own time, Picasso. Barbara Hepworth has mentioned the main influences in her own development, and I shall comment on them pre­ sently. But she might have mentioned more, for by quite con­ sciously situating herself in the historical tradition o f sculpture, she allowed her roots to strike deep into the past, as well as to spread widely in the present. One might as well begin with the Aphrodite o f Knidos, for a Torso carved by Barbara Hep­ worth at the age o f twenty-five is conceivably a derivative o f the lost masterpiece o f Praxiteles. One must mention African tribal sculpture, Mexican sculpture, Egyptian sculpture and certainly the sculpture o f the Italian Renaissance, for the secrets o f all these styles were absorbed in an apprenticeship that was as profound as it was passionate. But an artist must finally submit to the strongest influence o f all, which is the influence o f one’s age—that insistent and all-pervasive demand

in approach ing

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for an idiom that will express the dumb consciousness o f a generation resolved to find its own answer to the enigmas o f existence. In this situation the artists o f a period are the language-makers, inventing visual symbols for the hitherto unexpressed intuitions o f an evolving humanity—but expres­ sing them in a common language, a language with a logical syntax and a flexible articulation. Barbara Hepworth has been a contemporary, a compatriot and fellow student o f Henry Moore. Five years older than her, he was five years nearer to these influences which were to be their common source o f inspiration. Until about 1935 they are tacking against the same wind, and their courses though separate are often parallel. Then the wind drops and they move out into the open sea, each to pursue a different direction. The metaphor is commonplace, but capable o f elaboration (I am thinking o f the common dangers they en­ countered, o f the signals they exchanged). But there was, from the beginning, an innate difference o f temperament. This is well illustrated by the statements which they both contributed to Unit One, the manifesto o f a group o f English architects, sculptors and painters published in 1934. Barbara Hepworth evokes a landscape, speaks o f “ the relationship and the mystery that makes such loveliness,,, o f “ projecting her feeling about it into sculpture” ; o f “ building up a new m ythology” and o f “ an impersonal vision individualized in the particular medium” . It is a “ sense o f mystery” that gives her the power to project “ some universal or abstract vision o f beauty” into her plastic medium. I f we turn to Henry Moore’s statement we find a similar concern for nature, but no men­ tion o f mystery or loveliness, but an explicit disclaimer o f beauty (“ Beauty, in the later Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aim o f my sculpture.” ) He goes to nature for a vocab­ ulary o f form—“ form-knowledge experience” , he calls it; 229

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and gives as the aim o f his art, vitality. “ Between beauty o f expression and power o f expression there is a difference o f function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.” The two ideals, distinct in their essence and expression, are denoted by the words “ beauty” and “ power” , and these two words express the divergence that was to take place in the development o f the two sculptors. It is possible to argue that these qualities, in a work o f art, can never be wholly separated; there is power in beauty (“ the terrible crystal” ), and there is beauty in power (Blake’s “ tyger burning bright” ). But if these qualities are sufficiently differentiated as ideals, it must not then be supposed that the one is sentimental or feminine, the other realistic and masculine. What one might venture to suggest is that they represent those two components o f the psyche which Jung has differentiated as the attitna and the animus. According to tills hypothesis, we all carry in us an image o f the other sex, “ the precipitate o f all human experi­ ence pertaining to the opposite sex” , and as we tend to project everything that is latent and undifferentiated in the psyche, man projects his “ E v e ” and woman her “ Adam ” . But the projection o f images from the unconscious is never direct (except in dream or trance); the woman has to disguise her animus in feminine attributes (loveliness), the man his anima in masculine attributes (vitality, virility). In each case the secret power o f the projected image comes from this state o f tension, this sexual ambiguity or dialectic. The dialectic which Barbara Hepworth was to develop from 1934-5 onwards was between the antitheses o f Geometry and Grace (one is tempted to use Simone W eil’s terms Gravity and Grace, especially as she always conceived gravity as a geometrical or mechanical phenomenon). It may be 230

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objected that geometry is not necessarily graceless, but this is to confuse grace, which is lively, rhythmical, mouvmente, and essentially labile and organic, with proportion, which is measured, mathematical or algebraic, and essentially nonvital. To infuse the formal perfection o f geometry with the vital grace o f nature—that might be taken as a description o f the ideal which Barbara Hepworth now began to desire and achieve. The basic studies generally taking the form o f draw­ ings, are geometric. But when we compare the finished sculp­ tures with such preparatory drawings, we see immediately that a subtle but substantial change has taken place. There is a deviation towards organic form. The form, though still geometric, seems to have a vital function, as though a perfect geometrical spiral has been transformed into an organic shell, a nautilus pompilius. As Dr. Johnson observed (it is a quotation used by D ’Arcy Thompson at the beginning o f Growth and Form): “ The mathematicians are well acquainted with the difference between pure science, which has to do only with ideas, and the application o f its laws to the use o f life, in which they are constrained to submit to the imperfections o f matter and the influence o f accident.” (Rambler, M ay 5, 1750.) The sculptor is not constrained to submit to the imperfections o f matter, but rather to its limitations—to its tensile strength, its texture or toughness; and what Johnson calls “ the influence o f accident” becomes, in the artistic process, the influence o f the artist’s own organism—the sense o f vitality, o f change, o f growth. One might say that space is transformed by time, but that is too abstract a formula; we should say rather that idea, in becoming material mass, is transformed by the human pulse, by vibrations that spring from the heart and are controlled by the nerves o f a living and creative being. In the formulation and development o f this dialectic Bar­ bara Hepworth was aided by two artists who worked in close

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touch with her for a number o f years—Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. The closer influence—that o f Ben Nicholson— was no doubt the deeper influence. He himself had been in­ fluenced—not so much directly, as idealistically—by Piet Mondrian, and the ideal which all these artists share is one which has become known under the confusing name o f “ abstraction” . Abstraction was logical enough as a term for those compositions which were derived, or abstracted, from the natural object—the various stages o f cubism were stages in abstraction. The term became ambiguous once the artist began with a non-figurative or geometrical intuition o f form, and either clothed this with features reminiscent o f the natural object (Juan Gris), or pursued the intuition until all naturalistic reference had been excluded. But after a certain stage in his development Mondrian, and Gabo from the beginning o f his Constructivist period, began with a purely formal concept, and what they then create, as an objective work o f art, has no reference whatsoever to naturalistic forms—it is a “ new reality” . The daring originality o f this attempt—daring from both an artistic and a philosophical point o f view—has not yet been sufficiently appreciated by the critics o f modern art. It is not only assumed by these artists that they can produce, by a sub­ jective mental process, images which have no reference to the natural world but which nevertheless are logically coherent (in the sense that they can be communicated to other people), but even that these images express an essential reality which is beyond, or in some sense superior to, the reality o f appear­ ances. It is as i f the artist were a demi-god, capable o f creating a new satellite, a world dependent on this world but not o f it; a new world. It is not a question o f creating a pleasing pattern (for which reason all objections to this type o f art based on its merely decorative function are beside the point): 232

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it is a question o f origination, o f what Heidegger calls Stiftung (establishment). To quote Gabo: “ I am constantly demand­ ing from myself and keep on calling to m y friends, not to be satisfied with that gratifying arrangement o f elemental shapes, colours and lines for the mere gratification o f arrangement; I demand that they shall remain only means o f conveying a well-organized and clearly defined image—not just some image, any image, but a new and constructive image by which I mean that which by its very existence as a plastic vision should provoke in us the forces and the desires to enhance life, assert it and assist its further development.” 1 Abstract art, like realistic art, is always in danger o f de­ generating into academicism. It fails to renew its forces at the source o f all forms, which is not so much nature as the vital impulses which determine the evolution o f life itself. For that reason alone it may be suggested that an alternation between abstraction and realism is desirable in any artist. This does not mean that abstract art should be treated merely as a prepara­ tory exercise for realistic art. Abstract art exists in its own rights. But the change-over from one style to another, from realism to abstraction and from abstraction to realism, need not be accompanied by any deep psychological process. It is merely a change o f direction, o f destination. What is constant is the desire to create a reality, a coherent world o f vital images. At one extreme that “ will to form ” is expressed in the creation o f what might be called free images, so long as w e do not assume that freedom implies any lack o f aesthetic discipline; and at the other extreme the will to form is ex­ pressed in a selective affirmation o f some aspect o f the organic world—notably as a heightened awareness o f the vitality or i “ On Constructive Realism ” , Three Lectures on Modem Art, by Katherine S. Dreier, James Johnson Sweeney and Naum Gabo. N ew York, 1949, p. 83.

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grace o f the human figure. Some words o f Barbara Hepworth’s express this antithesis perfectly: “ W orking realis­ tically replenishes one’s love for life, humanity and the earth, W orking abstractedly seems to release one’s personality and sharpen the perceptions, so that in the observation o f life it is the wholeness or inner intention which moves one so pro­ foundly: the components fall into place, the detail is sig­ nificant o f unity.” A new and constructive image which provokes in us a desire to enhance life, assert it, and assist its further develop­ ment—there we have the definition o f the kind o f work o f art which a sculptor like Barbara Hep worth tries to create. Whether the emotions before such a work o f art are sui generis and distinct from the emotions evoked by a classical work o f art—say the Aphrodite o f Knidos—must still be discussed. W e need not refer to a Rom an copy o f Praxiteles’ work—let us make the adequate comparison o f the Torso already men­ tioned and a constructive image such as that presented in Pelagos (see Plate 6). There is no doubt that both images— the one realistic, the other abstract—convey life-enhancing values. Pelagos conveys them directly: the wood is carved into a tense form which suggests the unfolding point o f life itself (as in a fern frond, or a spiral shell; or the tense coil o f a snake). B y duplicating the point o f growth in a screw-like torsion an infinitely prolonged rhythm is created, but held in momentary stability by the strings connecting the two ter­ minations. The experience o f the spectator is purely emphatic — that is to say, our senses are projected into the form, fill it and partake o f its organization. I f we live with such a work o f art it becomes a mandala, an object which in contemplation confers on the troubled spirit a timeless serenity. To object that such a state o f passive serenity is not “ life-enhancing” is to miss the whole significance o f art, which is not a stimulus 234

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to biological vitality so much as to that apprehending con­ sciousness or cosmic awareness upon which life itself finally depends. The directness o f such an aesthetic experience may now be compared with the indirectness o f the experience conveyed by the Torso. One should perhaps first dismiss, as irrelevant, the sexual appeal o f this particular work (or o f others like it). It is not that its sexual appeal is to be despised; but one does not begin to appreciate a work o f art with the aesthetic sen­ sibilities until one has set it apart from actuality. This is what Susanne Langer has called “ the primary illusion” in art—the form must be closed and must exist in itself and for itself. “ The work o f art has to be uncoupled from all realistic con­ nections and its appearance made self-sufficient in such a way that one’s interest does not tend to go beyond it.” 1 It may be that what one might call the duplicity o f representational art has been a necessary stage in the social evolution o f art; and it may be that socially speaking many o f us are not ready to dispense with “ realistic connections” in a work o f art; but at least let us all realize that these values are secondary and unrelated to the perceptual experience o f form. This is not to separate art from life, or the artistic experience from the sexual experience o f any other kind o f sensuous experience; on the contrary, it is merely to distinguish, for unalloyed enjoyment, “ the pattern o f vitality, sentience, feeling, and emotion” . The analogy o f music may help the reader at this point. Having, I hope, made this distinction clear we may return to a consideration o f the new plastic image, its origins and functions. W e have seen that according to Gabo the image is o f intuitive origin. It is a projection from the visualizing con1 “ Abstraction in Science and Abstraction in A rt” , by Susanne K . Langer. Essays in Honor of Henry M. Shejfer. N ew York (Liberal Arts Press), 19 51, p. 180.

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sciousness, from the imagination (the image-making faculty), and though one must suppose that this function is only pos­ sible to a mind that has had normal visual or tactile experience (experience o f natural objects), the image, in Gabo’s case, is always “ mentally constructed” . The process is not so clearly defined in the case o f Barbara Hepworth. Obviously she sometimes begins with geometrical constructions (generally in the form o f preliminary drawings) and modifies these vitalistically in the process o f transforming them to a sculptural mass. But equally obviously she some­ times begins from a life-study, and many o f her forms sug­ gest, however indirectly, naturalistic prototypes. In a few instances she gives a naturalistic emphasis to an otherwise abstract form by the addition o f a naturalistic detail. This, in my opinion, is an unhappy compromise. I can perfectly well understand a decision not to follow Gabo into a world o f mental construction unrelated to immediate visual experi­ ences ; but having chosen to remain in the world o f organic symbolism, it was surely unnecessary to label the symbol with a representational motive. I admit that I myself in the past have spoken o f a “ counterpoint” o f realistic and abstract motives—the kind o f counterpoint which Klee practised so successfully, where there is a continuous interpenetration o f organic feature and abstract fo rm ; but the naturalistic motives that occasionally get caught up in Klee’s free fantasies are incidental, and not direct pointers to a perceptual image. It is partly, perhaps, a question o f scale. The more monumental sculpture becomes, the less appropriate is such a “ playful” emphasis on the perceptual image. W e may admire the tact with which this counterpoint is always stated, but still retain a suspicion that it is a concession to a non-plastic sentiment o f some kind. Barbara Hepworth’s greatest achievement, up to the pre236

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sent, undoubtedly lies in those monumental carvings destined for a civic setting—the Contrapuntal Forms commissioned for the Festival o f Britain and later erected in the new town o f Harlow, and the Vertical Forms commissioned for Flatfield Technical College. The significance o f such sculpture is more than aesthetic—it is a social challenge. Modern sculpture (and we might say the same o f modern painting) has yet to assume the functions and achieve the status o f a public art, and unfor­ tunately that will not depend on any specific efforts o f the sculptor. One must first reckon with a disunity o f the arts, and however willing the architect and town-planner may be to co-operate with the sculptor, the fact remains that as artists they have different origins, different ideals, and different social functions. A unified plastic vision, embracing all the arts, is a thing o f the past. But even more detrimental to any social acceptance o f modern sculpture on a monumental scale is the almost complete atrophy o f plastic sensibility in the public at large. The bored or busy eyes that contemplate these sculp­ tured monuments will only very rarely penetrate to their secrets, to discover a pattern o f vitality. Harwell may be a “ new tow n” but it is not ready for the impact o f a “ new reality” . All the more credit, it should be said, to those in authority who have had the courage to mount those mono­ liths as advance guards to a new civilization.I I have known Barbara Hepworth throughout most o f her active career, and what has been astonishing and o f some general significance is the fact that she has remained a com­ pletely human person, not sacrificing either her social or her domestic instincts, her feminine graces or sympathies, to some hard notion o f a career. This deserves emphasis because it is often suggested (and the suggestion is often accepted) that an artist must lead a monachal existence, denying himself if not Q

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all human contacts, at least all human entanglements—what Cézanne called les grappins. Any consideration o f the lives o f typical “ great” artists should have shown the absurdity o f this idea. Art is a reflection, however indirect, o f the basic human experiences, and all these daily tensions and conflicts, these surrenders and obsessions which seem at the time to distract the artist from his w ork are secretly replenishing the sources o f his inspiration. The solitariness o f the artist, so necessary for the intermittent flux o f this inspiration, he must carry within himself; the artist is a man capable o f being solitary in a crowd. The serenity o f the artist is not achieved by isolation, but by the cultivation o f those powers o f atten­ tion which make him the spectator ab extra o f the human scene. The other factor in Barbara Hepworth’s career which seems to me to be o f particular significance is her devotion to the technique o f carving. Somewhere 1 have called this a moral, and not an aesthetic prejudice, and I would still maintain that art must be judged by its results, and not by the means used to obtain those results. But the moral factor is not irrelevant in any total estimate o f an artist’s achievement. The act o f carving is not only technically, but one might almost say “ mystically” distinct from any other method o f creating solid forms in space. Chinese mysticism makes much use o f the symbol o f the Uncarved Block ; it represents the possibilities latent in the universe, to be released by contemplation, by mental “ attention” . The plastic images latent in that same block can only be released by similar disciplines— there is in art a law o f compensation by which the greatest impression o f ease is the effect o f the highest degree o f skill. It is not neces­ sary to deny skill to the crafts o f modelling clay or forging iron; but one does deny these materials the capacity for fully satisfying the full range o f aesthetic sensibility. The heirarchy 238

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o f materials is natural, related to profound aspects o f human experience, to that nostalgia which ever seeks, in the flux o f life, perenniality in its monuments.

27

Susanne Langer g r e a t b o o k s do not always take the world by storm; especi­ ally in philosophy they may lie neglected for many years before their significance becomes apparent. This may be due to their novelty, for we are always suspicious o f new ideas that may upset our complacency; or to their difficulty, for most o f us instinctively shy away from a book that obviously demands time and mental effort for its assimilation. And then, o f course, there is the element o f mere chance: an important work is neglected because it is in a difficult language, or is published in a small country. For these reasons Kierkegaard was neg­ lected for nearly a century. In the case o f Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, none o f these reasons holds good. It was first published by the Harvard University Press in 1942, and was even issued, some time later, but only in the United States, in a cheap popular edition. What success such a recon­ dite book had in that form I do not k n o w ; but similar books, such as Whitehead’s Adventures in Ideas, have had a wide cir­ culation in the same format. But Whitehead was already a famous name, and thousands o f people with no specific in­ terest in philosophy may be willing to spend a shilling or two to satisfy their curiosity about anything famous—“ to see” , as they might put it, “ if they can see anything in it” . But

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Susanne Langer was an unknown name, and what fame has come to her in the past fifteen years has been due to the slow recognition o f the unusual interest o f her book. I acquired Philosophy in a New Key as soon as it was pub­ lished—by accident, for it came to me for review. I have to confess that 1 neither reviewed it nor returned it to the art magazine that had sent it to me with the query: W orth a review? The sub-title I must have read: “ A Study in the Symbolism o f Reason, Rite and A rt” ; the dedication to “ Alfred North Whitehead, m y great Teacher and Friend” , should have aroused m y interest; and then I probably glanced down the long analytical list o f contents, and seeing chapter headings such as “ The Logic o f Signs and Symbols” , and sectional headings such as “ The Influence o f Semantic Prob­ lems on Genetic Psychology” , “ The Logical Characteristics o f Language” , etc., I jumped to the conclusion that here was another o f those teasing books on “ the meaning o f meaning” that would have little interest for the readers o f an art maga­ zine. The book found its w ay unread on to a shelf, and there it remained for about five years. I don’t know what eventually impelled me to take up Susanne Langer’s book again. Unread books on my shelves have a w ay o f looking at me with an accusing eye. Perhaps unconsciously, in first glancing through its pages, I had absorbed a phrase or two, and these phrases had lingered as an irritant in m y brain. Or perhaps, in my general reading, I had come across Susanne Langer’s name more than once and had been prompted to attach some more definite significance to it. In any case, I began to read this neglected book, and gradually realized that it was some­ thing I had been waiting for for many years— one o f those synoptic works which, by bringing together separate areas o f knowledge, suddenly reveal the pattern o f reality, and give a new meaning to all one’s piecemeal explorations. 240

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M y first suspicion, that this was another essay in the meaning o f meaning, was confirmed. Mrs. Langer’s work branches off from the science o f semantics, as it is called, to establish a new meaning o f meaning. She begins by pointing out the steady divergence o f philosophy and science during the past three or four hundred years. “ The only philosophy/’ she writes, “ that rose directly out o f a contemplation o f science is positivism, and it is probably the least interesting o f all doctrines, an appeal to common sense against the difficulties o f establishing metaphysical or logical ‘ first prin­ ciples’ . ” Some people profess to be satisfied with a system o f sense-knowledge or fact-finding that leaves out o f account, as stages already discarded in the advance o f humanity, all non-physical spheres o f interest, all those forms o f art and ritual, o f myth and religion, which for other people seem alone to make life worth living. But meanwhile science itself, without the help o f philo­ sophy, has come to the surprising conclusion that our sensedata are primarily symbols, and it is this development that has provoked the new issue. “ In all quietness,” writes Mrs. Langer, “ along purely rational lines, mathematics has de­ veloped just as brilliantly and vitally as any experimental technique, and, step by step, has kept abreast o f discovery and observation and all at once, the edifice o f human knowledge stands before us, not as a vast collection o f sense reports, but as a structure o f facts that are symbols and laws that have their meanings. A new philosophical theme has been set forth to a coming age: an epistemological theme, the comprehension o f science. The power o f symbolism is its cue, as the finality o f sense-data was the cue o f a former epoch.” A pre-occupation with symbolism is the new key in philosophy, and it is therefore very important to know what 241

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is meant by symbolism. As a matter o f fact, as Mrs. Langer points out, there are two distinct conceptions o f symbolism. She writes, “ One leads to logic, and meets the new problems in theory o f knowledge; and so it inspires an evaluation o f science and a quest for certainty. The other takes us in the opposite direction—to psychiatry, the study o f emotions, religion, fantasy, and everything but knowledge. Y et in both we have a central theme: the human response, as a constructive, not a passive thing. Epistemologists and psychologists agree that symbolization is the key to that constructive process, though they may be ready to kill each other over the issue o f what a symbol is, and how it

functions.,, Before arriving at her own definition o f symbolism, Mrs. Langer makes a thorough survey o f previous definitions, but I must confine myself to what is original in her presentation. In the first place, however, it should perhaps be made clear that there is nothing non-scientific, irrational or mystical in Mrs. Langer’s approach to the subject. It is true that she differs radically from the semanticists, according to whom thought begins and ends with language, including, o f course, mathe­ matical and scientific symbols. What is not a language with a scientific grammar, according to this point o f view, is merely unanalysed feeling. Mrs. Langer, in common with certain philosophers such as Cassirer and Whitehead, maintains that the field o f semantics (the science o f meaning) is wider than language: that there are systems o f symbolism, subject to their own logic, that constitute another mode o f thought. In other words, there is both discursive thought (thought that begins and ends with language) and also non-discursive thought (thought that is expressed in non-linguistic forms). Visual forms, for example—lines, colours, proportions, etc.—“ are just as capable o f articulation, i.e. o f complex combination, as 242

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words. But the laws that govern this sort o f articulation are altogether different from the laws o f syntax that govern lan­ guage” . They are non-discursive, and do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously. And generally we may say that poetry, myth, ritual, the plastic arts and music, provide forms which in a purely sensory way con­ stitute a non-discursive symbolism, “ peculiarly suited to the expression o f ideas that defy linguistic ‘ projection’ ” . But this non-discursive symbolism remains within the realm o f ration­ ality; for though, as Mrs. Langer says, “ the recognition o f presentational symbolism as a normal and prevalent vehicle o f meaning widens our conception o f rationality far beyond the traditional boundaries, yet (it) never breaks faith with logic in the strictest sense” . W e can put it this w ay : Feelings have definite forms— there is a pattern o f sentience—and these forms or patterns become progressively articulate and clear in the course o f individual and racial evolution. The Gestalt psychologists, on whom Mrs. Langer relies for some o f her most pertinent evidence, have already shown that there is in our receptor apparatus an inherent tendency to organize the sensory field into “ groups and patterns o f sense-data, to perceive forms rather than a flux o f light impressions . . . This unconscious appreciation o f forms is the primitive root o f all abstraction, which in turn is the keynote o f rationality; so that it appears that the conditions o f rationality lie deep in our pure animal experience—in our power o f perceiving, in the elementary functions o f our eyes and ears and fingers. Mental life begins with our mere physiological constitution” . Or, as Mrs. Langer, who has a gift for the summary phrase, says: “ A mind that works primarily with meanings must have organs that supply it primarily with forms.” “ Rationality is em­ bodied in every mental act . . . it permeates the peripheral 243

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activities o f the human nervous system, just as truly as the cortical functions.,, “ Rationality is the essence o f mind, and symbolic transformation its elementary process. It is a funda­ mental error, therefore, to recognize it only in the pheno­ menon o f systematic, explicit reasoning. That is a mature and precarious product.” Mrs. Langer makes a good deal o f use o f the phrase “ sym­ bolic transformation” . She needs it, not only for the processes o f symbolic logic, but also to introduce the idea o f the pro­ gressive evolution o f systems o f symbolism, such as language itself, such as ritual, myth, music, and art in general. She has a brilliant chapter on the origins and evolution o f language, in which she adopts and develops the hypothesis put forward sixty years ago by J. Donovan in two articles contributed to the journal Mind. These articles were called “ The Festal Origin o f Human Speech” , and they set out to demonstrate that ritual antedates language, and that song antedates speech. Once vocal sounds had acquired an expressive value and become representative, they still constituted a very primitive mode o f communication until there arose a new principle o f language which we now call metaphor. “ One might say,” says Mrs. Langer, in another o f her aphoristic phrases, “ that i f ritual is the cradle o f language, metaphor is the law o f its life.” “ It is the power whereby language, even with a small vocabulary, manages to embrace a multimillion things ; whereby new words are born and merely analogical meanings become stereotyped into literal definitions.” And again, “ Every new experience, or new idea about things, evokes first o f all some metaphorical expression. As the idea becomes familiar, this expression ‘ fades’ to a new literal use o f the once metaphorical predicate, a more general use than it had before.” Language as we use it in discursive reasoning, the practical, prosaic language o f everyday logic and science, is

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metaphorical language devitalized, refined and split into easily combined elements. But at the root o f it is the basic human act o f symbolic presentation. Mrs. Langer follows her chapter on language with an easier illustration o f her thesis in ritual and myth. Here I think the essential point to emphasize is that “ the birth o f symbolic gesture from emotional and practical movement probably begot the whole order o f ritual, as well as the discursive mode o f pantomime. The recognition o f vague, vital meanings in physical forms—perhaps the first dawn o f symbolism—gave us our idols, emblems, and totems; the primitive function o f dream permits our first envisagement o f events. The momen­ tous discovery o f nature-symbolism, o f the pattern o f life reflected in natural phenomena, produced the first universal insights. Every mode o f thought is bestowed on us, like a gift, with some new principle o f symbolic expression . . . The origin o f myth is dynamic, but its purpose is philosophical. It is the primitive phase o f metaphysical thought, the first embodiment o f general ideas.” But beyond myth is a further transformation: “ The highest development o f which myth is capable is the exhibition o f human life and cosmic order that epic poetry reveals . . .T h e epic is the first flower— or one o f the first, let us say—o f a new symbolic mode, the mode o f art” Philosophy in a New Key ends with a discussion o f symbolic transformation in the art o f music, and this discussion is the connecting link with Mrs. Langer’s second book, Feeling and Form (1953), in which she extends her general theory to ac­ count for all forms o f art and all art-forms. It is again a brilliant book, a little diffuse in structure, perhaps, but full o f original observations expressed in a clear and expressive style. The range o f reference is immense, and in at least two o f the arts— music and drama—Mrs. Langer gives an impression o f direct 245

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acquaintance with the creative process. Her handling o f the plastic arts is not so convincing. Mrs. Langer remains in this work primarily a philosopher, and she is therefore much concerned with definition—with the definition o f art itself, and with the meanings we should attach to such words as expression, creation, symbol, import, intuition, vitality, and organic form. Most o f her definitions can be related to a theory o f symbolism which she has inherited from her master, Ernst Cassirer, and w e need not be surprised, therefore, to discover that all the manifestations o f art are to be comprehended by this theory. Art, that is to say, is a symbolic activity, and is to be distinguished from other symbolic activities by the nature o f the material it symbolizes. Mrs. Langer has no doubt about the proper sphere o f art’s symbolizing activity—it is charged with “ the creation o f forms symbolic o f human feeling” . Almost every term in this definition might be challenged. The notion o f “ creation” , for example, is a cause for much perplexity. Mrs. Langer pays little attention to the possibility o f unconscious motivation—though artists have often dis­ claimed the notion o f originality and have spoken rather as i f angels dictated to them. Even the word “ human” , which looks so innocent in the definition, is a little suspect—if the Pyramids are works o f art, what human feeling do they sym­ bolize ? Mrs. Langer has a plate illustrating Stonehenge, but impressive as this monument is, especially at sunrise or sunset, the feeling it symbolizes is again not human. And is the word “ feeling” itself adequate? Here one is somewhat baffled by the absence o f any reference to a basic psychology— one does not know whether Mrs. Langer is using “ feeling” in the sense, for example, in which it would have been used b y William James, or in the quite different sense in which a psychologist like Jung would use the word. What range o f somatic and

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psychic phenomena does it cover? If, as would seem to be the case, Mrs. Langer uses the word in its customary sense to indicate a subjective state o f sensation, desire or emotion, then it is very doubtful i f the definition would cover whole categories o f works o f art where what is symbolized by the work o f art might more accurately be called an intuition. An intuition o f what ? In the case o f architecture and o f certain modern abstract paintings, it is an intuition o f harmony, o f a “ good” Gestalt. The work o f art symbolizes nothing but an intuitive apprehension o f formal relationships. W e may say the result is “ pleasing” , but Mrs. Langer spends a lot o f time arguing that the intention o f the artist is to present feelings not to enjoyment, but to conception. She does not share what Otto Baensch has described as “ the erroneous opinion . . . that the percipient’s delight and assent are the criteria o f art” . The significance o f a work o f art, be it a painting, a poem, a statue or a sonata, lies in its formal organization. Such form is not representational, nor is it merely sensational in its appeal. It is symbolic, and i f we ask: Symbolic o f what ? the answer is : symbolic o f the feeling it is designed to present. The work o f art is not a stimulus to evoke feelings, nor a signal to announce them : it is a logical structure corresponding to the pattern o f sentience, a form which the feeling fits. The form has the power to present the feeling, and by virtue o f the form we apprehend or conceive the nature o f the feeling. Such finely articulated symbols cannot be translated into any other mode o f expression. Art is “ formally and essentially untranslatable” , and the pretence to interpret art is vain. Mrs. Langer says she strongly suspects, though she is not ready to assert it dogmatically, “ that the import o f artistic expression is broadly the same in all arts as it is in music—the verbally ineffable, yet not inexpressible law of vital experience, the pattern o f affective and sentient being. This is the ‘ content’ o f what we 247

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perceive as ‘ beautiful form ’ ; and this formal element is the artist’s ‘ idea’ which is conveyed by every great w ork o f art” . It is a definition that covers, not only the traditional forms o f classical and romantic art, but music in its purest form, and the visual arts in their most “ abstract” form. It follows that artistic truth is the truth o f a symbol to the form o f a feeling— “ nameless forms, but recognizable when they appear in sensuous replica” . But art is a witness to truth that can easily be denied, or disregarded. “ The worst enemy o f artistic judgment,” says Mrs. Langer, “ is literal judgment, which is so much more obvious, practical, and prompt that it is apt to pass its verdict before the curious eye has even taken in the entire form that meets it. N ot blindness to ‘ sig­ nificant form ’ , but blindedness, due to the glaring evidence o f familiar things, makes us miss artistic, mythical, or sacred import.” It is very easy to “ do without” music, or poetry, or ritual; but “ doing without” these things means doing without so many means o f communication, so many insights into the nature or reality. W e become “ partial minds” , as Yeats called us; and I would agree with Mrs. Langer that much o f the misery and distress o f the modern world is due to this “ blindedness” , this incapacity to communicate the pattern o f our feelings. W e have language, but “ the limits o f language are not the last limits o f experience, and things inaccessible to language may have their own forms o f con­ ception, that is to say, their own symbolic devices” . To sup­ press such symbolic devices is to block the free functioning o f the mind. And Mrs. Langer ends Philosophy in a New Key with this warning: “ A life that does not incorporate some degree o f ritual, o f gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage. It is prosaic to the point o f total indifference, purely casual, devoid o f that structure o f intellect and feeling which we call ‘ personality’ . ” 248

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It would be possible to argue that the main object o f art is to do away with symbols. Mrs. Langer defines a symbol as “ any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction” . But one tendency o f art is to strive to avoid abstraction—to come to terms with what the artist apprehends directly as the reality o f the object. This may be a delusive aim on the artist’s part, but when Cézanne painted the Montagne SainteVictoire, he thought he was presenting us with a piece o f nature. “ The litterateur,” he said, “ expresses himself by means o f abstractions, the true painter by means o f design and colour, his sensations and perceptions.” That is to say, a painting by Cézanne is not so much a symbol, but, in Charles Morris’s sense o f the word which Mrs. Langer adopts, a signal. When we come to consider more recent types o f non-representational and constructive art, the lack o f any symbolic reference is all the more obvious. The “ feeling” in such works is not in any sense referential: it is contained within the w ork o f art, it is self-subsistent. Mrs. Langer admits the “ virtual” character o f works o f art, their “ disengagement from belief” , but she then states, rather arbitrarily, that “ abstract form as such is not an artistic ideal. To carry abstraction as far as possible, and achieve pure form in only the barest conceptual medium, is a logician’s business, not a painter’s or a poet’s. In art, forms are abstracted only to be made clearly apparent, and are freed from their common uses only to be put to new uses to act as symbols, to become expressive o f human feeling” . There is the crux o f my disagreement with Mrs. Langer. Abstraction is not necessarily a process o f achieving pure form “ in only the barest conceptual medium” . Chardin achieves pure form in the exact representation o f a wine-bottle, a tumbler, a loaf o f bread and a carving knife. It would be a misuse o f the term “ expression” to say that these objects, as arranged and painted by Chardin, “ express” a state o f feeling 249

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about bread and wine, or any feeling for these objects in their everyday uses. Juan Gris or Braque might have used the same objects and have carried abstraction “ as far as possible” —that is to say, to a point where the objects were no longer recog­ nizable. But the painting would not on that account be neces­ sarily less o f a work o f art. All such works o f art are essentially structures representing what Mondrian called “ pure reality” , and as devoid o f feeling as a mathematical equation. In her earlier book Mrs. Langer made frequent use o f a phrase, “ the pattern o f sentience” , which seemed to me a per­ fect description o f the work o f art. But I see now that it is an ambiguous phrase, for everything depends on where we discover the pattern. I f we find the pattern within ourselves, and faithfully depict it, then w e can say that the w ork o f art is symbolic o f human feeling. This is an exact definition o f expressionistic art, so characteristic o f the Germanic tradition. But more often the artist is possessed by intuitions, prompt­ ings from the unconscious, which have no basis in sentience, but which he reduces to concreteness and precision in the act o f creating a work o f art. Art is a process o f crystallization; but the form is not imposed from without, nor dictated from within. It is a dialectical development, and the final synthesis is a unique event, a new reality.

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Henry M iller to say about Henry Miller is that he can write, but the temptation is then to add, i f only below one’s

the sim plest things

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breath, some word like “ beautifully” , and that at once gets away from the truth. At the beginning o f his first book, Tropic o f Cancer, Miller w rote: “ A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.” That was in 1934, but in whichever is his latest volume, he will list more than twenty volumes, about half o f them already pub­ lished, half “ in preparation” . But not one o f them, Miller would explain, is a book in the ordinary sense o f the word. His whole work is “ a prolonged insult, a gob o f spit in the face o f Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . ” Miller has written consistently in that spirit, and the result, as it mounts up, is one o f the most significant contributions to the literature o f our time. Literature. That again is the wrong word. Anais Nin, the subject o f one o f Miller’s essays in Sunday After the War and one o f the few writers who can possibly be associated with him, wrote a Preface to Tropic of Cancer in which she said: “ The poetic is discovered by stripping away the vestiture o f art; by descending to what might be styled ‘ a pre-artistic level’ , the durable skeleton o f form which is hidden in the phenomena o f disintegration reappears to be transfigured again in the ever-changing flesh o f emotion. The scars are burned away—the scars left by the obstetricians o f culture. Here is an artist who re-establishes the potency o f illusion by gaping at the open wounds, by courting the stern, psycho­ logical reality which man seeks to avoid through recourse to the oblique symbolism o f art.” There are clues in Sunday After the War to Miller’s under­ lying purpose. He confesses that he has “ the itch” to write, but that he already regards as a confession o f failure. “ The truly great writer does not want to w rite: he wants the world 251

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to be a place in which he can live the hfe o f the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word o f the wounded angel: pain.” And on another page he says that no man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. But later on Miller seems to wriggle out o f his nihilistic dilemma, and he does so by making a distinction between art and “ an egotistical per­ formance on the part o f the intellect” . What he is protesting against all through is not art, in any vital sense o f the word, but culture, symbolism, clichés and conventions o f every sort. He recognizes that it is only through art that one finally establishes contact with reality— “ that is the great discovery” . As for “ establishing contact with reality” , that, as Plato held long ago, and as Miller holds now, is a matter o f putting our­ selves in unison with the world order— “ to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another . . . W e have first to acquire vision, then discipline and forbearance. Until we have the humility to acknowledge the existence o f a vision beyond our own, until we have faith and trust in superior powers, the blind must lead the blind . . . The great jo y o f the artist is to become aware o f a higher order o f things, to recognize by the compulsive and spontaneous manipulations o f his own impulses the resemblance between human creations and what is called ‘ divine’ creations. In works o f fantasy the existence o f law manifesting itself through order is even more apparent than in other works o f art. Nothing is less mad, less chaotic, than a work o f fantasy. Such a creation, which is nothing less than pure invention, pervades all levels, creating, like water, its own level” . Genius is the norm—that is another axiom o f such a theory o f art. Miller uses a word which Cezanne was fond of— realization. “ Seeing, knowing, discovering, enjoying—these 252

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faculties or powers are pale and lifeless without realization. The artist’ s game is to move over into reality.” It sounds so simple, but as an individual psychological process it is supremely difficult; it is also tragic, because it involves a complete break with what at any given moment is implied by one’s civilization. Realization and civilization are contra­ dictions, as a psychologist like Trigant Burrow has long maintained: as D. H. Lawrence, who was influenced by Dr. Burrow, also maintained: and as Miller, in many respects a successor to Lawrence and his fervent admirer, also maintains. “ Civilized, we say. What a horrible w ord! What bedeviled idiocy skulks behind that arrogant mark! Oh, I am not thinking o f this war, nor o f the last one, nor o f any or all the wars men waged in the name o f Civilization. I am thinking o f the periods in between, the rotten stagnant eras o f peace, the lapses and relapses, the lizard-like sloth, the creepy mole­ like burrowing-in, the fungus growths, the barnacles, the stink-weeds; I am thinking o f the constant fanatical dervish dance that goes on in the name o f all that is unreal, unholy and unattainable, thinking o f the sadistic-masochist tug o f war, now one getting the upper hand, now the other. In the name o f humanity when will we cry Enough ?” Many people will sympathize with the vivid indignation o f that outcry, but will not be prepared for all that might be involved in the opposite process o f realization. Consider, for example, what the law would call Henry Miller’s ob­ scenity. Ignoring the underground circulation o f porno­ graphy, Miller is probably, in this technical sense, the most obscene writer in the history o f literature. At least, he exceeds the considerable efforts o f writers like Catullus, Petronius, Boccaccio and Rabelais. But he is never obscene for obscenity’s sake—there is no “ effort” about his obscenity—it is all part o f the process o f realization, a natural consequence o f his R

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devastating honesty, and also o f his vitality. The nearest parallel I can think o f is the obscenity o f the unexpurgated Thousand Nights and One Night—those tales are essentially innocent, apparently not designed to shock the unsuspecting reader. But such a comparison is false if it suggests that Miller is in any sense a manufacturer o f pastiches. As Anais N in says so well in the Preface already referred to, “ it is no false primitivism which gives rise to this savage lyricism. It is not a retrogressive tendency, but a swing forward into unbeaten areas. To regard a naked book such as this with the same critical eye that is turned upon even such diverse types as Lawrence, Breton, Joyce and Céline is a mistake. Rather let us try to look at it with the eyes o f a Patagonian for whom all that is sacred and taboo in our world is meaningless,\ The war, which found Miller in Greece, forcibly trans­ lated him to his native States. He reacted violently, and the pages he has since written about his mother country, published under the title The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, con­ stitute the most shattering attack ever launched against the American “ w ay o f life” . Sunday After the War, which is a collection o f extracts from various works in progress, con­ tains fragments from this book, and others from an auto­ biographical narrative called The Rosy Crucifixion. Another narrative piece, “ Reunion in Brooklyn” , is also auto­ biographical and describes the return o f the prodigal son to his poor and depressing home : it is a masterpiece o f realism, as was the episode from the same background which appeared in an earlier volume, Black Spring, under the title “ The Tailor Shop” . What makes Miller distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions. Realization, one might imagine, is such a disinterested process that the result would be the purely 254

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objective naturalism o f a Madame Bovary. But Flaubert’s limitations have become somewhat obvious, and though his method is perfect for as far as it goes, Miller is aware that it must be carried much further, into the realm o f ideas, and that the writer must not be afraid to declare his ideals. Miller’s ideals I find very acceptable—they are the ideals o f what I call anarchism, and have never been expressed better than in these words which come from an essay on “ Art and the Future” in Sunday After the War. The cultural era is past. The new civilization, which may take centuries or a few thousand years to usher in, will not be another civilization—it will be the open stretch of realization which all the past civilizations have pointed to. The city, which was the birth­ place of civilization, such as we know it to be, will exist no more. There will be nuclei of course, but they will be mobile and fluid. The people of the earth will no longer be shut off from one another within states but will flow freely over the surface of the earth and intermingle. There will be no fixed constellations of human aggre­ gates. Governments will give way to management, using the word in a broad sense. The politician will become as superannuated as the dodo bird. The machine will never be dominated, as some imagine; it will be scrapped, eventually, but not before men have understood the nature of the mystery which binds them to their creation. The worship, investigation and subjugation of the machine will give way to the lure of all that is truly occult. This problem is bound up with the larger one of power—and of possession. Man will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it. A power that is open, fluid and free—Miller is thinking o f the relation o f man to his environment, but the words describe the essential quality o f his own writings.

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‘De StijV o f the movement associated in its be­ ginnings with the Dutch review De Stijl undoubtedly lies in the fact that it carried to a logical conclusion certain implica­ tions o f Cubism. When Mondrian went to Paris in 1910 Juan Gris had already established the priority o f the abstract composition (against the priority o f the object to be analysed). But Mondrian was quick to realize that neither Gris, nor Picasso, nor Léger, had followed to its end the path they had chosen. It had led them to the banks o f a dyke which they then refused to cross. Beyond the dyke was an undis­ covered country—a realm o f “ pure reality” , and Mondrian was determined to reach it. But “ pure reality” was only to be attained by means o f “ pure plastics” , that is to say, by means o f forms unconditioned by subjective feeling and con­ ception. The artist was compelled to eliminate all the variable and transient elements o f perceptual experience— “ to reduce natural forms to the constant elements o f form, and natural colour to primary colour” . Pure reality could only be appre­ hended by intellectual or intuitive processes; subjective states o f feeling, such as are evoked by the particularities o f form and the colours o f nature, obscure pure reality. Such was the basis theory and practice o f Mondrian, to which Van Doesburg gave a more verbal and intellectual formulation in the pages o f De Stijl. It is one o f the most coherent doctrines in contemporary art, and must be sub­ jected to a fundamentally philosophical criticism. Such criticism should, I think, in the first place be directed to the process o f “ depersonalization” . But we should make a the sig n ifica n ce

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distinction between the “ depersonalization” and the “ de­ humanization” o f art. What is created by man, particularly by a man o f Mondrian’s great intelligence and sensibility, is not and cannot be in any real sense “ inhuman” . What Mon­ drian and his colleagues were doing was to separate and dis­ tinguish among faculties, all o f which are human, but some o f which are not (in their opinion) so valuable as others. W e might say that they were making a distinction between two classes o f symbols— (i) symbols which refer back to the phenomenal world with all its emotional associations and are therefore liable to create confusion; and (2) symbols which are original and unique and can be related only to an imme­ diate intuition o f “ reality” . What, then, is “ reality” ? Not, evidently, the subjective vision o f circumstance and environment which is the con­ ventional notion o f reality. The Neo-plasticist is committed to one o f two possible alternative views o f reality. Either he must assert that by a process o f intuition he is able to see through the realm o f appearances to a realm o f essence; or he must claim the ability to create an entirely new and valid reality. It seems to me that Mondrian was committed to the first alternative. He was a Platonic artist, whose purpose was, in his own words, “ to discover fixed laws which govern and point to the use o f the constructive elements o f the com­ position, and o f the inherent interrelationships between them. These laws may be regarded as subsidiary laws to the funda­ mental law o f equivalence which creates dynamic equilibrium and reveals the true content of reality” . This is the dividing line between Neo-plasticism and Constructivism, for a construc­ tivist like Gabo rejects such idealism and claims to create a new reality, a concrete reality, not to discover reality in some metaphysical region. Nevertheless, Mondrian’sidealreality is expressed in concrete 257

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plastic symbols, and there is evidence to prove that these symbols are not irrelevant to our daily life, to the evolving consciousness o f society. To give but one example: the R oyal Festival Hall in London is the creation o f two architects, one o f whom, Leslie Martin, has for many years been a devotee o f Mondrian and has admittedly been profoundly influenced by Mondrian s art. Neo-plasticism did not emerge from a social vacuum. It is intimately related, not only as M. Jaffe lias claimed, to the hfe and landscape o f Holland, but to wider economic and social pressures. It is obvious that the modern style in archi­ tecture, in so far as it can be called a style, has evoked in response to specific discoveries in the scientific and tech­ nological sphere, and also in response to economic and social factors. The consequent style in architecture is severely rec­ tangular, materially parsimonious, and whatever aesthetic satisfaction it can give must come from the inherent relation­ ships o f its constructive elements and from what Mondrian called “ dynamic equilibrium” . A congruity has been estab­ lished between modern abstract art (especially Neo-plasticism and Constructivism) and modern architecture, not on the superficial level o f imitation, but at the profound level o f emergent social symbolization. The art and the architecture are equally the expression o f our time. But now to express one reservation. I f we compare paint­ ings by Mondrian, Van Doesburg and Malevich with certain architectural drawings or plans, we observe that they are nearly identical—the architect’s ground-plan looks hke a neoplasticist painting, the neo-plasticist painting looks like an architectural ground plan—what conclusion must we draw from tliis identification ? That art and architecture are one in principle? That all art is architectoric and universally geo­ metric? That would seem to be the argument o f the De 258

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Stijl group. It might be argued, however, that in such cases painting has lost its identity—or, to be more exact, it has lost its freedom. For architecture is not a free art: it is, as we have boasted in our time, a functional art. But the plastic arts o f painting and sculpture are not functional arts. They are imaginative arts. It only remains to assert that nevertheless an imaginative art may be abstract. There remains a problem that cannot be fully discussed within the limits o f a short essay: the denial o f the human craving for representational symbols. Though it is possible that a civilization can altogether dispense with the figurative symbol (we have the Mohammedan civilization to prove it), nevertheless it is doubtful whether our own humanistic civilization can do so without profound changes in its spiritual condition. I think the chances are that the arts will evolve a compensatory balance—that certain arts, such as archi­ tecture, sculpture and music, w ill tend to become more and more abstract, and that other arts, such as the film and drama, w ill adequately satisfy the craving for representational symbols. W e must not attempt to force a totalitarian unity on the arts. “ The complexity o f art,” said Mondrian, “ is due to the fact that different degrees o f its evolution are present at one and the same time. The present carries with it the past and the future. But we need not try to foresee the future; we need only take our place in the development o f human culture, a development which has made non-figurative art supreme.” That, o f course, is a claim that no objective critic can admit —that the present development o f human culture has made non-figurative art supreme. The most we can claim is that non-figurative art has become a necessity, a necessity for a limited number o f people. The masses remain indifferent to it, and one might even say that critics in general remain hostile

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to it. But the same people may be indifferent to existentialist philosophy, or any other significant movement o f our time. W e must not be intimidated because we are in a minority. The indifference o f the majority is a species o f inarticulate­ ness: a failure to make any connection between a way o f life which they accept and the art which is its préfiguration.

30

Ezra Pound i w ill begin this tribute with some personal reminiscences for they will show more clearly than my subsequent argu­ ments why I approach the case o f Ezra Pound in a sympa­ thetic mood. Between 19 12 and 1914 1 was a student in a provincial university. I had just begun to write poetry and had been infected by that spirit o f adventure or experiment that was about in those days. The fashionable poets were the Georgians—their annual anthology began to appear in the year 1913, and when the war broke out one o f their number — Rupert Brooke—suddenly became a national poet, repre­ sentative o f much that was good in the spirit o f the times. But, also representative o f something that I had begun to recog­ nize as sentimental and weak. M y enlightenment was not due to native perspicacity, so much as to the tutoring I had re­ ceived from journals like The New Age and Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, which journals carried on a rowdy opposition to all that the Georgians represented in literature and art. B y far the most active part in this opposition was played by a young 260

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American who had come to London in 1908, and had quickly made contact with the few figures in contemporary art and letters whom he could respect—W . B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, then just emerging as a self-styled Vorticist, and the belligerent philosopher T. E. Hulme. The intimate history o f those pre-war years has still to be written, but a group, quite distinct from the Georgians, began to form. Pound was joined by a young poet, Richard Aldington, along with his Ameri­ can wife, who signed her poems with the initials H. D., by another American, John Gould Fletcher, and by a London poet, F. S. Flint. In the spring or early summer o f 19 12, Pound, H. D., and Aldington decided that they were agreed upon certain principles o f poetry, which they proceeded to formulate. In January that year Hulme had collected in The New Age (25 January, 1912) five poems with the heading “ The Complete Poetical Works o f T. E. Hulme” —poems which were afterwards reprinted as an appendix to one o f Pound’s volumes (Ripostes, 1915), and it is certain that Hulme had a good deal to do with the clarification o f the group’s ideas. The group itself launched an anthology called Des Imagistes, which was edited by Pound and published in March, 1914. B y the next year the group had split and a new anthology, Some Imagist Poets, was published, containing work by Aldington, H. D., Fletcher, Flint, D. H. Lawrence and Am y Lowell, but nothing by Pound. Meanwhile the European W ar had broken out, and all these groups were forcibly dispersed. But the same event had dispersed the group o f students to which I belonged, and for the first time—it was early in 19 15 —I went to London. There were, o f course, many people whom I would have liked to meet at that time, but the poet with whom I most eagerly sought contact was Ezra Pound. I forget exactly when I first met Pound, but I had written to him and he immediately 261

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invited me to tea. He then lived in a triangular room in the Holland Park district o f London. The person I met was probably as shy and embarrassed as I was, and I took away the impression o f an agile lynx, beautiful in features, aggres­ sively dressed, who sprang from conversational point to point very much in the manner that the animal he reminded me o f might spring from branch to branch. W e met occasionally in the ensuing years, but never became intimate; and then, shortly after the end o f the war (I think it was in 1920) Pound left England in disgust and went to live at Rapallo, and from that time I saw less o f him than ever. I met him for the last time the year before the Second W orld War, during a visit o f his to London. I took away from that final meeting an impression o f a man who had become agitated and elated to a dangerous degree. There are, as everyone knows, degrees o f mental distur­ bance, many o f which do not merit incarceration. No un­ prejudiced observer will fail to observe in Pound’s letters1 a progressive egocentricity, and even the cause o f it is not far to seek. A man who sets out (1908) with the idea that “ no art ever yet grew by looking into the eyes o f the public” is bound to find himself increasingly isolated from the social matrix that ensures “ sanity” (which admittedly may be no more than an accepted code o f conduct). Pound started kick­ ing against the pricks from the moment he landed in Europe, and the inertia o f the brute that bore the pricks produced in him the frenzy o f shrill vituperation, scatological abuse, and mere spluttering invective which give his letters their weari­ some unity. O f course one sympathizes, and sometimes the invective rises to a withering temperature. But then one remembers the inconsistency o f it all. Pound professes a great admiration for Confucius; he has translated the Ta Hio and 1 The Letters of Ezra Pound. Edited by D. D. Paige. London, 1950.

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other Confucian classics. But nothing could be further from the Confucian demeanour than Pound’s roaring crusade. The Master said, “ He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.” That is only one o f a hundred maxims from the Analects that might be brought to the attention o f his self-styled disciple. The one virtue Con­ fucius insisted on was “ inperturbedness” ; it is the one virtue that Pound has never possessed or professed. The fault lies in his displacement, his lack o f “ rootedness” , his contempt for human failings. He lacks all humility—not so much personal humility, for he has never sought high rewards; but humility towards his art and towards his destiny. The disintegration which increasingly invades his poetry, and his correspondence, is simply a reflection o f his failure to achieve any degree o f social, and therefore personal, integration. “ Galdos, Flaubert, Tourgenev, see them all in a death struggle with provincial stupidity . . . All countries are equally damned, and all great art is born o f the metropolis (or in the metropolis). The metropolis is that which accepts all gifts and all heights o f excellence, usually the excellence that is tabu in its own village. The metropolis is always accused by the peasant o f ‘ being mad after foreign nations’ .” There, in 1913 (and in spite o f an admiration, expressed elsewhere, for such “ peasant” poets as Homer and Hardy), is the Alexandrian heresy, o f which Pound, in our time, has been the most gifted ex­ ponent. What had drawn me to Pound, and made o f me a devoted disciple, was his poetry and his poetics. But we both belonged to another and wider circle—that which centred round A. R . Orage, the editor o f The New Age, one o f the most influential personalities in the cultural life o f that time. From Orage we had both acquired similar ideas about politics and economics, and though these were to lead us to very different conclusions, 263

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we always agreed on two points—the evil wrought in postmedieval society by the Church’s admission o f the principle o f usury, and the dependence o f any social revolution on its ability to deal with the monetary problem. There was another if a less urgent bond o f interest—an enthusiasm for Chinese art and philosophy, but Pound was to develop this interest to a much deeper extent than I have done. On these three subjects—poetics, economics and sinology—Pound and I have always agreed, and this has perhaps enabled me to penetrate with more sympathy than would otherwise have been possible into the difficult problems raised by his w ork and conduct. I shall concentrate mainly on Pound’s poetry and poetic principles, but his poetry is so involved with his ideas that some appreciation o f these is also essential. Pound would maintain, and I think I would agree with him, that there is an intimate connection between the general decline o f sen­ sibility which has led to the most vulgar civilization in the history o f mankind and the economic fallacies which begin with the religious and legal recognition o f usury at the end o f the Middle Ages. In other words, poetics and economics cannot be separated. But for the moment let us turn our attention to the poetics. So far as the English-speaking world is concerned, Pound is the animator if not founder o f the modern movement in poetry. His experiments—with the exception o f the five or six poems which T. E. Hulme wrote in 19081—predate any similar experiments by other English or American poets. B y this I do not mean that there was no free verse before 1912. Pound did not invent free verse—he re-formed free verse, gave it a musical structure, and to that extent w e may say 1 1 have given the evidence for Hulme’s priority in

of Feeling. London, 1953. Ch. VI. 264

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paradoxically that it was no longer free. But let us try to trace the historical process in Pound’s own work. As a youth in the Middle West he must have modelled himself on romantic poets like Chatterton and Poe, on Rossetti and Swinburne. Then he discovered Italian poetry, possibly via Rossetti, and then the Troubadours and Browning. The result was an eclectic style to which, as time went on, were added accents from Lionel Johnson and Dowson, W . B. Yeats and Fiona Macleod. These pastiches are not to be despised—a poem like “ The Goodly Frere” has found its way into many anthologies, and it is indeed a good fake o f a medieval ballad. Most o f the verse included in the first three volumes Pound published in England between 1909 and 19 11 is o f this nature — romantic poetry in the true historical meaning o f that ambiguous word. Several o f these poems are accompanied by learned footnotes—Mr. Eliot was not the first poet to indulge in this practice. A footnote to “ La Fraisne” , for example, refers the reader to Janus o f Basel, the “ Daemonalitas” o f Father Sinistrari o f Ameno (1600 circ.), the Book o f the Dead, and the Provençal sources o f the legend on which the poem is based. Such was the stage o f development Pound had reached by 19 11 or 1912, when he began his discussions with Hulme, Aldington and Flint. What then emerged was “ The School o f Images” , or Imagism as it was to be called. Like the son­ neteering o f the sixteenth century, it was o f foreign inspira­ tion, mainly French, though we must not forget W alt Whitman, who at any rate served as a terrible warning. Later Pound was to make “ A Pact” with him: I make a pact with you, W alt Whitman— I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child W ho has had a pig-headed father ;

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I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, N ow it is a time for carving. W e have one sap and one root— Let there be commerce between us.

But for the moment it was “ a time for carving” , and it was the French poets, Gautier and the later Symbolists, Verlaine, Francis Jammes, Paul Fort, Tristian Corbière, M ax Elskamp, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, and, o f course, R im ­ baud, who were the master-carvers. But in France itself a new group o f vers libristes had come into existence, and with this group, Jules Romains, André Spire, Vildrac and Duhamel, the English group soon established a sympathetic exchange o f ideas. The guiding critic was R em y de Gourmont, whose Livre des Masques had given definition to the whole move­ ment, and whose Problème du Style is a source-book for many o f the ideas that inspired the literary developments in both France and England at this time. I am afraid it has been forgotten how much we all owed to this brilliant critic. Pound was in direct communication with him until his death. When, as a result o f all this cross-fertilization o f ideas, the group in England began to formulate their principles, they took the following shape : I give them in Pound’s own words : In the spring or early summer o f 19 12, “ H. D .” , Richard Alding­ ton and myself decided that we were agreed upon the three principles following : 1. Direct treatment o f the ‘ ‘ thing’ * whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence o f the musical phrase, not in sequence o f a metronome.

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A n d here are som e further injunctions w h ich Pound w ro te in a p o e try m agazine in 1 9 13 :

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as “ dim lands of peace” . It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions (Remy de Gourmont had said: “ En littérature, comme en tout, il faut que cesse le règne des mots abstraits” —this was on the 27th February, 1898—Preface to Le deuxième livre des masques). Do not re-tell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art o f music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Use either no ornament or good ornament. A n d so on, to advice o f a m ore technical nature. T h e Im agist A n th o lo g y o f 1 9 1 5 (in w h ich Pou nd did not appear) had a m ore elaborate statem ent o f principles, but th ey are m ostly covered b y P o u n d ’ s statement. T h ere is one o f the paragraphs in this m anifesto w h ic h gives a clear definition o f the w o rd Im agist and m ay therefore be usefully quoted :

To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art. W e m igh t explain P o u n d ’s later d evelopm ent b y saying that he began w ith free verse o f a v a g u e ly rhetorical kind, and arrived at a specific k in d o f free verse to w h ich he gave the

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name “ imagism” . Imagism differs from Whitmanesque and other varieties o f free verse in insisting on a concreteness o f imagery, and on a tight musical or rhythmical structure. Nothing is in a certain sense less free than good free verse, for it achieves an exact correspondence between the verbal and rhythmical structure o f the verse and the mood or emotion to be expressed. The result is a quality which Mr. Eliot has recently called “ transparent” — “ that is to say, you listen not to poetry as poetry, but to the meaning o f poetry” . In Pound’s words, you get rid o f the ornament. And when you are rid o f the ornament you are left with the image, the direct percept. The trouble in our kind o f language is that we have to express ourselves in words which do not visually convey the image. It is different in the Chinese language where the ideogram is developed from a visual representation o f the image, and where, however remotely, a suggestion o f the concrete object is present in the verbal sign. I must now deal briefly with Pound’s theory o f poetry, as it developed beyond imagism. This is based almost entirely on one short treatise, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa was an American orientalist who died in 1908. I have never known whether Pound had direct contact with this distinguished scholar, but it was Pound who first published this particular essay in 1918. It is undoubtedly one o f the basic documents o f the aesthetics o f modern art, and provides the bridge between the oriental and occidental cultures. Fenollosa begins with an analysis o f the Chinese sentence, and more particularly o f that sentence when it constitutes a poem. I cannot enter into the details o f Fenollosa’s argument, but he brings out the essential concreteness o f the language, a concreteness that extends to verbs, conjunctions and pro­ nouns as well as to ordinary nouns. More significantly still, 268

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he shows how the Chinese have built up their intellectual fabric, their logical categories, in the same concrete way. They have done this by the use o f metaphor, that is to say, the use o f material images to suggest immaterial relations. The rest o f the argument can be given in Fcnollosa’s own w ords: The whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata of metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself. Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance of poetry. The known interprets the obscure, the universe is alive with myth. The beauty and freedom of the observed world furnish a model, and life is pregnant with art. It is a mistake to suppose, with some phil­ osophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This conception has been foisted upon us by medieval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete in nature . . . Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words. Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor into structures of language and into systems of thought. Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly opposed to logic. Primitive men who created language agreed with science and not with logic. Logic has abused the language which they left to her mercy. Poetry agrees with science and not with logic. The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective inclusions, poetry evaporates. . . . We need in poetry thousands of active words, each doing its utmost to show forth the motive and vital forces. . . .

S

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W e should beware o f English grammar, its hard parts o f speech, and its lazy satisfaction with nouns and adjectives. W e should seek and at least bear in mind the verbal undertone o f each noun. W e should avoid “ is” and bring in a wealth o f neglected Enghsh verbs. . . . the great strength o f our language lies in its splendid array o f transitive verbs. . . . These give us the most individual characteriza­ tions o f force. Their power lies in their recognition o f nature as a vast storehouse o f forces. . . . W ill is the foundation o f our speech. . . . I had to discover m yself w hy Shakespeare’s Enghsh was immeasur­ ably so superior to all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use o f hundreds o f transitive verbs. . . . A study o f Shakespeare’s verbs should underlie all exercises in style.

In this last passage we have indicated the clue to the tech­ nique o f Pound’s later verse— the verse o f the Cantos. It achieves its poetic effect by the juxtaposition o f words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony. A shorter definition still: Poetry is the placing o f words to produce metaphorical overtones. “ The overtones vibrate against the eye.” Shorter still, a definition suggested to Pound by a Japanese student: “ Poetry consists o f gists and piths.” Pound’s literary criticism is developed in several volumes, beginning with The Spirit o f Romance (1910), Instigations (1920), Indiscretions (1923), How to Read (1931), The A B C o f Reading (1934), Polite Essays (1937), Guide to Kulchur (1938), but the cream o f it all is contained in the volume o f collected essays called Make It New, published in 1934. Here are Pound’s articles on the Troubadours, on the Elizabethan Classicists, the Translators o f Greek, on French poets, on Henry James and R em y de Gourmont, and on Cavalcanti, the late thirteenthcentury Italian poet to whom Pound has devoted so much attention. Criticism, according to Pound, has two functions. First, it is a rationale o f composition—it tries “ to fore-run composi­ 270

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tion, to serve as gun-sight” . Secondly, it is a process o f “ excernment” . “ The general ordering and weeding out o f what has actually been performed. The elimination o f repeti­ tions. The work analogous to that which a good hanging committee or a curator would perform in a National Gallery or in a biological museum.” Even this second function is for the benefit o f the actual composer, for it is further defined as “ the ordering o f knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part o f it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues” . It will be seen at once that this very drastically limits the scope o f criticism. That scope, as defined by representative critics, such as Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, has included not merely the composer but also the audience. Admittedly much criticism suffers from not clearly separating these two points o f view, and most o f our critics make for confusion by con­ tinually jumping without warning from one point o f view to the other. Pound avoids that danger. His intention is always clear, his judgment unequivocal. Not the shade o f an ethical prejudice discolours his purely literary opinions. W e may say that he has one general principle o f criticism, and one o n ly: “ Civilization is individual.” That principle is often re-iterated throughout his work, and underlies his poetics, his ethics and even his economics. As to what Mr. Pound believes—his answer to Mr. Eliot’s worried question w as: “ I believe in the Ta Hio.” That is not a witticism: Pound has studied Con­ fucius and devoted a great deal o f time to the translation and elucidation o f the Confucian texts. There is one famous saying o f the Chinese sage which perfectly expresses the general character o f Pound’s criticism: “ What the superior man seeks is in himself: what the small man seeks is in others.” Pound, as we have seen, is in some sense a tradition­ alist: he has studied the past; but in the end he relies on 271

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his individual sensibility. Literature, he would say, depends for its cultivation and continuance on the peculiar sensibihty o f a few artists within each generation. Criticism is a profes­ sional activity—a process o f refinement, above all, a refine­ ment o f language—to make it new, to make it precise, to make it clear. There is plenty o f evidence to show that he has applied his critical faculties to his own work, and there is no modern poet whose work shows such a decisive development from birth to maturity. I shall not try to illustrate this development —it would require too much quotation. Any educated reader who knows an early romantic poem such as “ La Fraisne” , a perfect free verse cadence such as “ Doria” , one o f the “ translations’ ’ from the Chinese such as “ The R iverMerchant’s W ife” , and the “ Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” sequence (the most “ carved” satirical verse in the language), will be incited, i f liable to the poetic contagion, to fill in the evolutionary gaps. B y 1920, when “ M auberly” was published, Pound was already engaged on the immense work which was to occupy him for the rest o f his life, and which is still unfinished. It has never been given a definite title, but is known as “ The Cantos” , and more than ninety o f these have been published.1 They are o f varying length, but they already amount to more than 500 pages o f verse, and constitute the longest, and with­ out hesitation I would say the greatest, poetic achievement o f our time. Technically the poem is the perfection o f Pound’s taut free verse, and there are passages o f the purest lyricism which in themselves, i f extracted, would constitute a body o f poetry for which there is no contemporary parallel. In the complex 1 Section: Rock-Drill £5-95 de los Cantares was published in 1956, N ew Y o rk : N ew Directions.

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structure o f the Cantos these passages are relatively rare, and what we have to explain is a mosaic o f images, ideas, phrases, —politics, ethics, economics—anecdotes, insults, denuncia­ tions—English, Greek, Latin, Italian, Provençal, Chinese— without division, without transition, without cohesion—ap­ parently without structure and without pattern. But all the same there is pattern, there is structure, and there is a con­ trolling force. Pound himself has used the image o f the magnet and the iron filings: “ The forma, the immortal con­ cetto, the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rosepattern driven into the dead iron filings by the magnet, not by material contact with the magnet itself, but separate from the magnet itself. Cut off by a layer o f glass, the dust and filings rise and spring into order. Thus the forma, the concept rises from death.” The dust and filings—these are the detritus o f a civilization in decay, in dissolution. The Cantos must be conceived as a massive attack on this civilization, an exposure o f its rotten­ ness and active corruption. It is an analysis o f history—o f European and American history since the Middle Ages, and o f the grandiose epochs o f Chinese history. Corruption is traced to its source in usury, and those who have opposed usury and tried to eradicate it—Malatesta and Jefferson, for example—are treated as heroes in this epic. Against this corruption is set the harmony and ethical rectitude o f Confucius. I am not going to deny that for the most part the Cantos present insuperable difficulties to the impatient reader, but as Pound says somewhere, “ you can’t get through hell in a hurry” . 1 am not going to defend the poem in detail—there are stretches which I find boring, but that too is no doubt a characteristic o f hell. But I am convinced o f the greatness o f the poem as a whole, and the more I read it the more I get 273

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out o f it. It will need in the future an immense work o f exegesis, and in America that work has already begun. In the end the poem cannot fail to have its effect. In his criticism Pound frequently uses the phrase “ ideas in action” , and that is the general characteristic o f the texture o f this immense poem. Ideas do not exist as abstract counters in a process o f logical reasoning: rather, they are dropped into the mind o f the reader as separate concrete entities which then set up mental reactions. Conceptual reasoning is not the poet’s busi­ ness : it is his business to see, to present, to condense, to com­ bine—all active processes. Pound’s favourite Chinese ideo­ graph represents man and word side by side: a man standing by his word, a man o f his word, truth. I f I do not discuss these ideas on the present occasion, it is not because I consider them nonsense. On the contrary, I think that Pound is one o f the few men who have talked sense in our time. The mistake he has made, in my opinion, is to believe that his ideas could be realized by a modern state. He did not see that the modern totalitarian state is an incarnation o f the principle o f usury, an instrument o f war and oppres­ sion. Because Mussolini was fighting the international bankers, Pound thought that he had turned his back on the monetary game, had seen through “ the great illusionistic monetary m onopoly” . But he was wrong—tragically blind and wrong, and he is now paying the penalty. Pound has always hated war—he did not think that youth and beauty should be sacrificed For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization.

His broadcasts from Italy during the last war were legal acts o f treason against the United States. But Pound would never admit that the United States, in any human sense, were corn-

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mitted to the w ar: the United States were involved in a dis­ aster precipitated by W all Street. Usury is a cancer, Finance a disease, and W ar the dying agony o f a civilization strangled by debt and taxation. These were the ideas that Pound at­ tempted to put into action during the war. The war is sus­ pended, Pound is confined to a mental hospital, but his ideas are still in action.

31

The Architect as Universal Man in dusseldorf a naked figure o f a man realistically modelled

by Georg Kolbe stands incongruously in front o f an office building designed by Helmut Henrich and Hans Heuser. The building is not particularly severe—its façade is masked by balconies that are decorative in effect though no doubt func­ tionally justifiable. There are many other examples in other countries o f archi­ tecture’ s last concession to figurative art—the Henry Moore groups outside the Hertfordshire schools is the typical example from our own country. Sometimes a figure will be clamped to a blank wall, like Lipchitz’s bronze on the side o f the Ministry o f Education and Health in R io di Janeiro, but such an arbitrary juxtaposition o f sculpture and architecture serves only to emphasize the totally distinct plastic conceptions that the two arts now represent. Even the Moore screen on the Time-Life building in London, though it represents a solution reached by architect and sculptor in association, and though the sculptures have been “ denaturalized” to conform better

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with a functional building, nevertheless has the air o f a con­ cession : the architecture admits the sculpture, swallows it up without digesting it. The character o f the building would not change i f the sculpture were to be replaced by a blank wall. Architecture was the parent o f sculpture—indeed, the earliest architecture is sculpture, and even the primitive African hut o f our own time is still a work-of-art-to-live-in. Architecture was perhaps the parent o f all the plastic arts; certainly the patron. The palaeolithic cave was a painted crypt, and even the art o f writing may have been first conceived as an inscrip­ tion on a monument. W e must think o f the archaic temple as a vast Christmas tree, which is then gradually stripped o f the votive works o f art that hang on it. But we must also think o f the architect as a Father Christmas, capable o f distributing those gifts. The specialization o f the arts, like the division o f labour, is a process which, as we look back on the history o f civilization, seems inevitable. An art like painting would never have be­ come so various and so expressive if it had remained an ad­ junct o f architecture. Nevertheless, it is useful to remind ourselves how comparatively recently that independence was established. There was no “ free” painting before the fifteenth century, and no “ free” sculpture before Donatello. Indeed, a unitary conception o f art was normal until the beginning o f the Industrial Age, and as industrial processes have developed in the direction o f mass production, so artistic processes have developed in the direction o f isolation and individualism. The artist once signified a man of total plastic sensibility, just as the artisan was a man o f total practical capability. Music and poetry were not arts in this sense, but rather accomplishments, modes o f communication. Plato distinguished the arts that are based on manual ability from the arts o f rhetoric that are mental. 276

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That this condition o f separation is fatal to the arts is shown in various ways. There is, in the first place, no “ monumental” achievement in the contemporary arts; and many o f our in­ dividualistic painters, perhaps in some measure aware o f their failure to function in this total sense, have, after a period o f restless experimentation, expressed their frustration in forms o f art that are essentially private. In this way the plastic arts seem to aspire to the condition o f music and poetry—that is, become voices, modes o f subjective communication between individual and individual, or between individual and coterie. The monument, on the other hand, is always an autonomous object—a transfusion o f personality into a timeless and im­ personal construction. An Egyptian pyramid, or the Temple o f Somnathpur, or the Parthenon, or a Gothic cathedral, does not “ express a personality” , or even “ convey a message” . W e can, it is true, read “ serenity’ ’ into Greek architecture, or “ transcendentalism” into Gothic architecture, but such exercises have nothing to do with the objective reality o f the building as such: and in any case, serenity and transcenden­ talism are universal concepts rather than sensuous reac­ tions. The quality that concerns me for the moment, however, is the complexity o f such monuments—their esemplastic power as Coleridge used to call it—the reduction o f a multiplicity o f purposes to a unity o f effect. This quality may sometimes be due to some kind o f collective intuition—the working o f several minds to a common conception; the spontaneous over­ flow o f a group consciousness. It is difficult to explain the Gothic cathedrals on any other supposition. But more usually the unity o f effect is due to a single controlling mind, that o f the master-builder, a man who was capable o f conceiving the monument, not as a shell to be adorned (or as a Christmas tree to be “ decorated” ) but as an organism, every particular cell 277

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o f which is morphologically and functionally related to the whole. The last metaphor is misleading if it suggests that every function is utilitarian (in biology or architecture). Nineteenthcentury materialism left us with a very narrow conception o f utility—the useful was anything that promoted the health, wealth or comfort o f mankind—in short, happiness. Those nations that have already secured such blessings (such as the Americans and the Swiss) have discovered that there is some­ thing missing—an intangible ethos, wonder, “ worship” , glory, or simply beauty. W e begin to suspect that this intan­ gible something is just as necessary for life—for life in the strict biological sense—as comfort or wealth; that it is one o f the conditions o f complete health. Slowly we have become aware o f the presence o f a psychosomatic equilibrium in life itself, as well as in the human body. Beauty after all is not an elegant addition to the good life: it is the tone or temper o f all that actually makes life “ good” . It is the style o f life when life is positive, expansive, affirmative. Architecture, which is so intimately concerned with the basic activities o f human life (as providing the necessary shelter —the biological shell for a sensitive organism) is thus required to be always affirmative in this sense—stylistically vital. But the solution o f a practical problem is not stylistically vital in tlxis sense. What moves us, inspires us, incites us is not satis­ faction, but curiosity, wonder, endless search for an ideal per­ fection. Such ideal perfection cannot be limited by necessity or contingency (by functional needs); it must o f necessity ignore and transcend the practical. Fiedler, and probably Semper and Hegel before him, pointed out that Greek architecture (which they assumed to be the highest point o f architectonic genius) had never been concerned with practical needs or technical solutions. “ The 278

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Greeks invented nothing in their architecture, but developed only that which they received, and with such a clear aware­ ness that they necessarily arrived at a result in which every­ thing directly reminiscent o f the demands o f needs and wants, o f the nature o f the material used and o f the conditions o f construction, had disappeared except for faint echoes.” 1 The Greek temple is a pure expression o f form, a monument dedicated to ideal beauty and to nothing else. In this sense Fiedler thought it superior to the Gothic cathedral, which was inspired by practical needs—“ the pointed arch was only a technical development; artistically it was an evasion. In a struggle with practical needs man was not attempting to find a higher expression o f form and did not hesitate to mutilate the form in order to devise a solution to a practical problem, and thereby renounce any artistic progress from the begin­ ning” . One may protest that nevertheless a higher expression o f form did emerge on the basis o f this technical develop­ ment : that at Amiens and Lincoln the intellect has elaborated a practical device into a free form. But Fiedler has made his point—and it is a good one: architecture is a formal and not a technical development; it is a development o f the relatively chaotic and the pragmatic towards ideal form, ideal order: a development which takes place in the aesthetic consciousness o f man and not as the solution o f a practical problem. I have already hinted at a distinction between an aesthetic consciousness determined by time-sense (music and poetry) and an aesthetic consciousness determined by space-sense (the plastic arts). There may be intercommunications, but 1 am more concerned with the unity o f plastic aesthetics. 1 mean that, a priori, the sensibility o f the plastic artist should be expres­ sible in any and all the plastic arts: the segregation o f architect, 1 Conrad Fiedler: On the Nature and History of Architecture. 1878. Trans. Carolyn Reading. Privately printed by Victor Hammer at the Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, 1954.

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sculptor, painter and craftsmen (woodworker, silversmith, weaver, etc.) is merely a division of consciousness and has had altogether deplorable effects on the development o f the arts, above all, o f architecture. W e know that the great monuments o f Greece and o f the Renaissance were, at their best, conceived in their entirety by a single clear intellect and we marvel at the capacity o f an individual like Phcidas or Brunelleschi, or Bramante, or Michelangelo or Wren. But what should cause us more sur­ prise is the complexity o f an architectural enterprise that leaves the structure to engineers or builders who work by calcula­ tion and not by visual intuition; that then expects sculptors and painters to adapt their personal vision (or fragments there­ of) to a technical formula; and expects from this conjunction o f compromised talents a work o f art! T o look at modern architecture from this point o f view results in a new valuation. It does not necessarily mean a general condemnation o f all functional architecture. On the contrary, we may find among the strictly functional monu­ ments o f our time a few that carry technical means to a new clarity o f form—that repeat the Greek achievements by intellectualizing all the material elements—the materials are, as it were, dematerialized and what remains is a form as pure as the Pyramids. Certain buildings and projects by Mies van der Rohe approach this condition. It is true that this architect has always been in the past associated with an antiformal con­ ception o f architecture. “ W e refuse to recognize problems o f form, but only problems o f building . . . Form, by itself, does not exist—Form as an aim is formalism, and that we reject’ ’ (1923). But there are later statements which are not so positive — e .g .: “ M y attack is not against form, but against form as an end in itself. . . Only what has intensity o f life can have intensity o f form . . . W e should judge not so much by the 280

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results as by the creative process . . . Life is what is decisive for us. In all its plenitude and in its spiritual and material relations/’ (Letter to Dr. Riezler, 1927.) “ Let us not give undue importance to mechanization and standardization . . . For what is right and significant for any era—including the new era—is this: to give the spirit the opportunity for exis­ tence’ ’ (1930). It is true that Mies van der Rohe continues to oppose “ the idealistic principle o f order” to “ the organic principle o f order” (inaugural Address o f 1938), but the dis­ tinction is almost verbal, for the organic principle is defined as “ a means o f achieving the successful relationship o f the parts to each other and to the whole” , which was the Greek ideal o f form. He can repeat “ the profound words o f St. Augustine: Beauty is the splendour o f Truth” . I do not assemble these quotations to give a particular emphasis to statements that might seem to imply a mystical outlook in Mies van der R o h e : his buildings are a sufficient refutation o f any suggestion that architecture should be used as a language expressive o f states o f mind or emotion. Archi­ tecture is always regarded as “ the crystallization o f its inner structure, the slow unfolding o f its form ” . But it is distinct from technology, though dependent on it. “ Our real hope is that they (architecture and technology) grow together, that some day the one be the expression o f the other.” That is what happened in Greek architecture: the technology was taken over, nothing was invented, but gradually porportions were refined, forms were defined, until the fusion was com­ plete: the ideal form was a purification, a simplification o f the organic structure. I believe such a fusion has taken place in Mies van der R ohe’s w ork in Chicago—the Minerals and Metals Research Building o f 1942-3, the Alumni Memorial Hall o f 1945-6, the Apartment Houses o f 860 Lake Shore Drive (1951), and 281

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the project for the Architecture and Design Building (1952). To these we may now add the project for the National Theatre, Mannheim (1953). But what we must immediately note about such buildings is that they are “ undecora ted’ ’— no sculptural groups on the façade or in the front—no Kolbe figure declaring its naked humanity on the porch— no “ works” by individualistic artist o f any kind. The details that may be called decorative on all these buildings are deter­ mined by the architect himself, and are usually a decorative use o f normal structural materials— “ structural elements are revealed with decorative effect” , as Philip Johnson neatly expresses it. The Lake Shore Drive buildings have walls o f glass, which might have been left with a smooth surface, as they are in the Lever building in N ew Y o rk ; but Mies van der Rohe has welded vertical steel sections which may serve as windbraces or mullions, but whose real function is to pro­ ject as decorative elements. The decorative use o f material is more obvious in the Mannheim Theatre project, for the building is shown resting on a plinth o f highly dramatic marble. Mies van der Rohe, so far as I know, practises no art other than architecture, though he is an amateur o f painting and has a fine collection o f the works o f his friend Paul Klee. Le Corbusier, to pass to another significant architect o f our time, is a painter o f considerable achievement, a sculptor in wood and concrete, a designer o f tapestry and furniture, and a mosaicist. He is a universal artist o f the Renaissance type, like Leonardo or Alberti. He does not hesitate to combine his various talents in a single architectural conception, but in general he has kept his versatility in the background, perhaps realizing that there is a contradiction between the personalist tendency o f the painting and sculpture, for example, and the impersonal values o f the architecture. A painting or a mosaic 282

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in a Corbusier building is by another artist—Charles Edoaurd Jeanneret-Gris, in fact. Nevertheless, i f we look at Le Cor­ busier’ s achievement in its wider context—as town-planning, la Ville Radieuse, a w ay o f life—we see that the décor is mar­ ginal or additive. It can be swallowed up as a play activity— something taking place within the architecture—but it does not fuse with the architecture, and is not a formal purification o f the underlying technology. The architecture is a separate conception and a complete unity without the décor. The architecture expresses an intolerance o f the detached work o f art which extends to the architect’s own personalist creations. It is only in the church at Ronchamp that Le Corbusier as universal artist has created a monument that exhibits all aspects o f his genius in integral unity. These two examples will serve to present the problem. To take further examples— Frank Lloyd Wright, or Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer or Pier Luigi Nervi, Aalto or Breuer—would not resolve the problem, which is basically a revolt against personalist art and an attempt to find in architecture a new universal art: an art represented proto-typically by Greek architecture and later by Byzantine architecture. The Par­ thenon and Hagia Sophia are the paradigmatic type, the unification o f the arts in the monument, and this unification is not achieved by chance, or even by conscious co-ordina­ tion : it is the all-inclusive concept o f a master mind, a masterbuilder. W e do not know what kind o f future lies beyond the threat o f nuclear weapons—none at all i f the threat becomes a reality and radiation falls like a fatal rain on all mankind. But i f there is to be a constructive future, we may be sure that the transition from our present state o f cultural fragmentation can only be effected through a new conception o f the archi­ tect : the architect as a comprehensive man o f intelligence, a single source o f unity and universality. From that new 283

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concentration o f formal values the arts might once more derive a common style and an organic vitality.

32 Gandhi been said that future ages will regard Gandhi as the most remarkable man o f our time. In his own country he was a legendary hero long before his death; there is material enough, in his acts and sacrifices, to merge the hero into saint. “ Mahatma’ ’ is already more than a reverent title, and his “ autobiography” 1 is a didactic gospel. But it is also more— and less. It is as detailed and banal as a provincial newspaper; it is colourless and often tedious; it is disconcertingly honest and unaffectedly modest. It has neither fire nor force, and its monotony is never redeemed by the remotest breath o f poetry. And yet the reading o f it is a moving, an unforgettable ex­ perience. W e have a Golden Legend from the Middle A ges; this is the first book o f a Leaden Legend. Let us begin with the essential dogmas: it has

W hat I want to achieve—what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years—is self-realization, to see God face to face, to attain Moksha (freedom from life and death). The essence o f religion is morality. I have gone through deep self-introspection, searched m yself through and through, and examined and analysed every psycho­ logical situation. Y et I am far from claiming any finality or infalibility about m y conclusions. One claim I do indeed make, and it is

1 The Story of My Experiments with Truth, by M. K. Gandhi, London, 1949284

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this. For me they appear to be absolutely correct, and seem for the time being to be final! For me, truth is the sovereign principle. This truth is not only truth­ fulness in word, but truthfulness in thought also, and not only the relative truth o f our conception, but die Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God. . . . I worship God as Truth only. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking after Him. I am prepared to sacri­ fice the things dearest to me in pursuit o f this quest.

As a background to these dogmas, let us place certain con­ crete events in Gandhi’s life. He was the youngest son o f his father’s fourth marriage. His mother was “ saintly” . He was married at the age o f thirteen and “ devoted to the passions that flesh is heir to” . He was cowardly—haunted by the fear o f thieves, ghosts, and serpents. “ I did not dare to sit out o f doors at night. I could not bear to sleep without a light in the room .” He was guilty o f petty thefts, and indulged in secret meat eating. He deserted his father’s death-bed to make love to his girl-wife, and was forever remorseful. “ The poor mite that was born scarcely breathed more than three or four days. Nothing else could be expected. Let all those who are married be warned by m y example.” Then came various colour-bar experiences in Eng­ land and South Africa. His natural shyness (“ Shyness m y shield” ) was aggravated by his gaucherie in society. Gandhi’s importance, like Tolstoy’s, lies in his fearless preaching o f the doctrine o f non-violence, in his belief that permanent good can never be the outcome o f force. In this he claimed to be (and proved himself to be) more than a visionary. “ I am not a visionary. I claim to be a practical idealist. The religion o f non-violence is not meant merely for the rishis and saints. It is meant for the common people as well. Non-violence is the law o f our species as violence is the law o f the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute, and he T

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knows no law but that o f physical might. The dignity o f man requires obedience to a higher law—to the strength o f the spirit.” Gandhi devoted the greater part o f his teaching to the elucidation o f this universal truth. Other aspects o f his teaching must seem, at any rate for most western minds, less com­ pelling : his indifference to beauty, his morbid denial o f the sexual instinct (“ I f the observance ofBrahmacharya—chastity —should mean the end o f the world, that is none o f our business’’), his worship o f the cow (“ a poem o f pity” ). But Gandhi was well aware o f his own inconsistencies, and with inborn humility did not insist on an intellectual acceptance o f any o f his doctrines. “ Patient example is the only possible method to effect a reform.” In Christian terms, Gandhi might qualify as a martyr, not as a saint. He was granted no special revelation; whatever “ grace” he possessed was human, not divine. He was, by any standards, a great humanitarian—his love o f his fellow-men was disinterested, spontaneous. Yet it had in it an element o f compensation for his feeling o f inferiority. He became a typical “ agitator” —he was not content to do good within his own competency—he sought to create instruments o f power to redress wrongs. He knew that power corrupts, and he tried to avoid that corruption by blunting the edge o f the sword—by the strategy o f non-violence. He was repeatedly involved in compromise (and confesses: “ All m y life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty o f compromise” ). His organized campaigns, by the very fact o f organization, became factors in power politics. He ended by playing the Congress game, the game o f war and revolution. Contrast the humanitarianism o f his contemporary, Albert Schweitzer—more limited in its immediate effects, but by its very purity producing throughout the world a sympathetic 286

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response o f unmeasurable resonance. But Schweitzer’s God has been Love, whose sphere is human and immediate. Gandhi’s was Truth, indefinable, unattainable, insatiable. His sacrifices to this God were, to say the least, very inconvenient for the people nearest and dearest to him. He treated his wife with ruthless tyranny. He calls himself a “ cruelly blind hus­ band” , and was himself the judge o f what was good for the poor woman. He forcibly took away her jewels, for example. “ I regarded myself as her teacher, and so harassed her out o f m y blind love for her.” In similar ways, as he uneasily con­ fesses, he deprived his children o f education—and gave them instead “ an object-lesson in hberty and self-respect” . His attitude to sex was as egotistical as the rest o f his behaviour. He makes no distinction between passionate love and brutish lust. He decides, for his own good, that he must extinguish sexual passion in himself. If he had had any con­ ception o f the true nature o f passionate love, he would have realized that it is a reciprocal bond, as precious to the wife as to the husband. A unilateral “ extinction” o f such passion is not admissible. But Gandhi’s attitude to sex was not rational, and certainly not humane. It was a revulsion unconsciously motivated by his early association o f love and death. In fact, the death-wish, as an underlying motive, is probably the key to all Gandhi’ s actions. His fanatical vegetarianism (which did not stop at risking the death o f other people), his fasting, his w ill to chastity—all can be interpreted as unconscious opposi­ tion to life. Perhaps it is vain to try to comprehend this mind and personality with the inherited prejudices o f the humanist tradition. Breaking in on that tradition is the element o f Christian asceticism, no doubt o f oriental origin; but that too is in conflict with Christian charity, as well as with the older Greek conception o f measure. According to this 287

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conception, we accept the human body for what it is—God’s gift, but an untuned instrument, an indisciplined daughter o f desires. The art o f life is to introduce harmony and proportion into this impulsive complex. It was the belief o f the Greek philosophers, as o f the Chinese sages before them, that such harmony is possible o f attainment, and that even sexual pas­ sion can be transformed into erotic beauty. It is significant that nowhere in the pages o f Gandhi’s autobiography is there once a mention o f beauty. That is w hy it must be called a Leaden Legend—sullen and ugly. To say “ base” would be to succumb to the temptation o f the metaphor. However much we may be repelled by the insensitive fanaticism o f this votary o f Truth, we must recognize the heroism. It does not trans­ mute the lead into gold, or make the martyr a saint; but it stirs the very life it strove to deny.

33

The Enjoyment o f Art “ tell me w h a t it m e a n s ?” How often that question is addressed to me as I stand with some friend or chance acquain­ tance before a modern painting. And just as often I evade the question, or give some flippant answer, not because I am un­ willing to help the puzzled spectator, but because I realize that the question reveals an attitude towards art so hopelessly wrong that no simple words o f mine can make any difference. I f I were honest on such occasions, I should say: “ I am no miracle-maker. I cannot make the blind see! ” And then m y companion would feel insulted, and would certainly be in no 288

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better position to appreciate the work o f art in front o f us. Perhaps the less direct approach, which I am making in this essay, w ill have no such sad consequences. The arts we are to discuss—painting, sculpture, drawing, etc.—are sometimes called the visual arts, and this indicates the simple fact that we are made aware o f them through a par­ ticular organ o f sensation: the eye. When we think o f other arts which involve other organs o f sensation—the ear in music, or the palate in cooking—it seems faintly obvious that there is a direct relationship between the art and the sensation. When we hear a melody we don’t ask what it means, nor do we attempt to analyse the bouquet o f a good wine. But art, it will be said, is more than sensuous pleasure—there is no comparison between Botticelli and a tender beefsteak! But there is. The connection may be remote, but we must accept as the foundation o f our aesthetics the fact that all art is fundamentally sensuous. It can be many other things besides, but unless we begin with a sensational reaction to the work o f art in front o f us, we are lost. For many reasons, some o f which I will presently explain, most people no longer react sensuously to works o f visual art. One sometimes has the impression that they no longer see the work o f art—to such people the thing seen is like a letter in some language they do not understand, a symbol in some unfamiliar science. What is registered is a certain arrangement o f lines and colours which has got into the wrong brain cell—it has been plugged into the wrong ex­ change. This was brought home to me vividly one day when J. L. Baird, the inventor o f television, came to see me. It was during the last war, and he was feeling depressed. He looked at the pictures on the walls and at my books, and then con­ fessed that it was a mystery to him how anyone could derive either pleasure or interest from painting or poetry. He did 289

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not speak with arrogance—he was genuinely puzzled, and as a scientist he wanted to satisfy himself that there was some explanation. But though we discussed the problem for a long time, we could only arrive at the conclusion that education and environment had made us two different creatures, and that nothing short o f a long process o f rehabilitation would enable him to appreciate Picasso, or my mind to move in a world o f nuclear physics. I might have pointed out, but did not, that a great scientist like Einstein had retained his aesthetic sensibility, and had even claimed that some connection existed between scientific and artistic imagination. The point 1 wish to bring out by this anecdote is that it is perfectly possible to deaden our aesthetic sensibility, and I would go further and assert that this is what normally happens nowadays. A local anaesthetic has been injected into our visual nerves, and most o f us are artistically blind. H ow that has come about is another question, and a very complicated one, but in my own opinion what we call “ education’ ’ is mainly responsible. People in general were not always like this— indeed, we know that until about 1820 what w e now call “ good taste” was endemic: everybody possessed it. W e can­ not explain an epoch o f art like the Georgian Period, when everything from public buildings and cottages to silverware and furniture bears the impress o f instinctive harmony, on any other supposition. The craftsman o f such an age were not “ educated” —they were apprenticed to a master and learned their craft in contact with tools and materials. In the same w ay we cannot help being struck by the unfailing aesthetic in­ stincts o f primitive peoples, tribes in Africa, for example, not yet contaminated by our export drive. Art, we must conclude, has nothing in common with literacy, with the spread o f scientific knowledge, with “ culture” . The education that deadens the sensibility is not confined to 290

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the schools—it is something we drink in all the time from our environment. W e may, o f course, react against our environ­ ment, and there is perhaps more genuine appreciation o f art in the coalfields o f Durham than in the villas o f Surrey. W e are not so easily seduced by positive ugliness as by all the counter­ feits o f art—the conventional objects which we accumulate in the course o f a lifetime, largely because we have no alternative. Nowadays only the rich can discriminate, and they are a shrinking quantity. Most o f us have to accept what we find in the stores, and what we find there are the insensitive pro­ ducts o f the machine— objects made without love, without personal responsibility, for profit and utility. W e can, i f we are desperate enough, modify such an inheritance; but we can make very little impression on the scene as a whole. W e resign; we accept; we live with ugliness and when beauty surprises us, we no longer recognize her features. But, someone will protest, we do love art, we do love beauty; it is your beastly modern art we don’t like and can’ t understand. Explain that i f you can ! Again, I camiot explain the art, but only the situation in which the artist finds himself. It is true that there are many sensitive people who enjoy the art o f the past—painting up to Cézanne, for example, music up to Debussy, the archi­ tecture o f Lutyens, etc. To such people the paintings o f Picasso or Klee, the music o f Stravinsky or Alban Berg, seems a de­ liberate insult. Here again, I think, education is the explana­ tion. The blinkers may not be so wide, but they are effective in a certain direction. Modern art does admittedly need more discrimination—it has not been sifted for us by the experience o f generations. There are charlatans among us, skilful imitators and venal impressarios. But our best protection against such deceptions is a virgin sensibility. I f we bring only convention and prejudice to the appreciation o f modem art, we cannot

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discriminate between originality and eccentricity, between the unknown and the unknowable. I may have given the impression that there is some relation between the appreciation o f art and a state o f naivety, even o f stupidity, but this is far from the truth. W e are miseducated into a condition o f aesthetic insensibility, but assuming we could start with a virgin sensibility, then the full appreciation o f art would depend on another kind o f education, for great art may be infinitely complex. There is such a thing as the education o f the senses, and skill itself, which all great art demands, is an education o f the senses. It is true that we do not need to be a skilful player to appreciate great music or (to mention another form o f art) a great game o f tennis. But we must possess and develop an intuitive understanding o f skill, which is perhaps based on an imaginative participation in these skills—we anticipate, and mentally imitate, every minute and subtle action o f the artist. But this is not intel­ lectual understanding—it is not knowledge in the scholastic sense. It is an instinctive activity. Marcel Proust, who had a profound understanding o f all the arts, once wrote: “ From the moment that works o f art are judged by reasoning, nothing is stable or certain, one can prove anything one likes. Whereas the reality o f genius is a benefaction, an acquisition for the world at large, the presence o f which must first be identified beneath the more obvious modes o f thought and style, criticism stops at this point and assesses writers by the form instead o f the matter . . . This constant aberration o f criticism has reached a point where a writer would almost prefer to be judged by the general public (were it not that it is incapable o f understanding the researches an artist has been attempting in a sphere unknown to it). For there is more analogy between the instinctive life o f the public and the genius o f a great writer which is itself but instinct, 292

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realized and perfected, to be listened to in a religious silence imposed upon all others, than there is in the superficial ver­ biage and changing criteria o f self-constituted judges.” Proust was thinking o f the artist as writer, but what he says is equally true o f the artist as painter or sculptor. The instinctive approach o f the unlettered public, o f craftsmen and artisans, is surer than the sophisticated shying at art indulged in by the typical highbrow. But we must not ignore the qualifica­ tion which Proust puts in brackets in the passage I have quoted. Art is an elaborate discipline, a relentless struggle with intractable materials, and unless the public appreciates this creative process, its instinctive approach to art will not penetrate to the inner court, where enjoyment is most intense.

34 D ’Arcy Thompson certain scientific classics, and Growth and Form is one, which have such a wide significance that they must be­ come, as it were, layman’ s property and be given general currency. Sir D ’Arcy Thompson described his volume as “ an easy introduction to the study o f organic Form ” , and though there are chapters which involve more mathematical know­ ledge than the layman can claim, it is nevertheless a book that must be brought to the notice o f the general reader. Sir D ’Arcy Thompson was not a narrow specialist; he was in the best sense o f the word a humanist, familiar with the specu­ lations o f philosophers and the visions o f poets no less than

there are

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with the multitudinous facts o f natural science. He was o f the same “ blood and m arrow” as Plato and Pythagoras, and he had something o f the geniality o f a Goethe or a Henri Fabre. Its theme apart, his book has an endless fascination merely as a collection o ffaits divers, o f curiosities o f nature; and all this knowledge is presented with such urbanity and charm, that I can imagine it being read for pleasure, like Buffon’ s Histoire Naturelle, long after its findings have become the unacknow­ ledged commonplaces o f science. Its subject is what Goethe was the first to call M orphology: the study o f the inter-relations o f growth and form, and the part which physical forces play in this complex inter-action. It is “ but a portion o f that wider Science o f Form which deals with the forms assumed by matter under all aspects and con­ ditions, and, in a still wider sense, with forms which are theoretically imaginable” ; but with the ancient Greek physi­ cists, Sir D ’Arcy Thompson would maintain that the same laws are operative throughout the known universe— “ for the harmony o f the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry o f Natural Philo­ sophy are embodied in the concept o f mathematical beauty” . Growth and Form is concerned with that harmony only as manifest in organic forms—in flowers and shells, in fir-cones and guillemots’ eggs, in dolphins’ teeth and the narwhal’s horn, in deer’s antlers and spiders’ webs, in concretions, spicules, agglutinated skeletons and the brandling o f blood vessels. In all these divers and sometimes complicated forms, from the amoeba to man, physical forces are seen determining the specific forms assumed in the process o f growth. That Nature keeps some o f her secrets longer than others is fully admitted by Sir D ’Arcy, and there are forms which still elude mathematical or physical analysis: but in this work he has demonstrated clearly, and for all time, that “ throughout 294

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the w h o le range o f organic m o rp h o lo g y there are innum er­ able phenom ena o f fo rm w h ich are n o t peculiar to liv in g things, bu t w h ich are m ore or less sim ple m anifestations o f o rd in ary physical l a w ” . T h is revelation has disturbing con­ sequences fo r tw o p op u lar m y th s: the m y th that fo rm is determ ined, as b y som e supernatural foresight, b y the end or function o f the thing (E n te le c h y ); and the doctrine that form s are prod u ced b y natural selection in a process o f continuous historical evolution. W e m ay still be a lo n g w a y fro m a m echanical th eory o f organic g ro w th , bu t the facts w h ich are co-ordinated in this b o o k suggest tw o conclusions, w h ich to som e extent contradict the accepted theories. T h e y m ay best be g iv e n in the author’ s o w n w o r d s :

(1) When, after attempting to comprehend the exquisite adapta­ tion of the swallow or the albatross to the navigation of the air, we try to pass beyond the empirical study and contemplation of such perfection of mechanical fitness, and to ask how such fitness came to be, then indeed we may be excused if we stand wrapt in wonderment, and if our minds be occupied and even satisfied with the conception of a final cause. And yet all the while, with no loss of wonderment nor lack of reverence, do we find ourselves constrained to believe that somehow or other, in dynamical principles and natural law, there lie hidden the steps and stages of physical causation by which the material structure was so shapen to its ends. (2) In so far as forms can be shown to depend on the play of physical forces, and the variations of form to be directly due to simple quantitative variations in these, just so far are we thrown back on our guard before the biological conception of consanguinity, and compelled to revise the vague canons which connect classification with phylogeny.. . . In the order of physical and mathematical complexity there is no question of the sequence of historic time. The forces that bring about the sphere, the cylinder or the ellipsoid are the same yesterday and tomorrow. A snow-crystal is the same today as when the first snows fell. . . . That things not only alter but improve is an 295

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article o f faith, and the boldest o f evolutionary conceptions. How far it is true were very hard to say; but I for one imagine that a ptero­ dactyl flew no less well than does an albatross, and that Old R ed Sandstone fishes swam as well and easily as the fishes o f our own seas.

I merely record, for I am not competent to discuss, this fundamental difference between the Darwinian conception o f the causation and determination o f form, and that which is based by Sir D ’Arcy Thompson on the laws o f physical science. It is a difference which must inevitably have wide repercussions in philosophy. Meanwhile I feel more confi­ dence in pointing out the significance which this science o f form has for the theory o f art. There is no word which slips more frequently from Sir D ’A rcy’s pen than the epithet “ beautiful” . When he has revealed the physical laws which determine a form, he again and again introduces what is in effect an element o f value to characterize that form. In this, o f course, he is but following the example o f Plato, but never before has such a range o f specific natural forms been shown to possess the harmony and proportion we usually ascribe only to works o f art. In effect, efficient form in the organic world, in the inor­ ganic world, and in the world o f art, is shown to be deter­ mined by identical laws. That, o f course, is not the whole story, either in biology or in art. W e must not confuse form with energy. To illustrate by an example from this book: if a drop o f water, tinged with fuchsin, is gently released at the bottom o f a glass o f water, its momentum enables it to rise through a few centimetres o f the surrounding water, and in doing so it communicates motion to the water around. In front, the rising drop thrusts its way through, almost like a solid b o d y; behind it tends to drag the surrounding water after it, by fluid friction; and these two motions together give rise to “ beautiful” vorticoid configurations. The “ form ” o f these 296

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liquid jets, like the form o f a work o f art, is beautiful; but it would not have existed without the initial pressure which released the drop o f water. In the same way, the form o f a work o f art does not come into existence without an initial act o f imagination, an inspiration. And it is as true in art as in physics, that the matter which is released in inspiration has no prevision o f the form which, under natural laws, it will assume. At least, such is the distinction between an art that is vital and organic and one that is academic and dead.

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A Seismographic A rt a b s t r a c t io n is still the generic term for the tendency most characteristic o f modern art, but the term must be redefined if we are to apply it to the only distinct movement that has arisen since the end o f the Second W orld W ar. The new generation rejects the purism, the absolutism, that we asso­ ciate with names like Mondrian, Ben Nicholson, or Victor Pasmore. Instead they present us with various forms o f the formless—paintings that look like a scraped palette, arbitrary scribbles in colours that have the dramatic flourish o f a signa­ ture, and do indeed signify a personality, and perhaps nothing but a personality. This type o f art, which has not yet earned a generic name (unless we adopt tachismo from the French), is the only face that the atomic age presents to the world—a face o f blank despair, o f shame and confusion. But yet the features can be identified, are recognizable again once they have been seen.

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ART

Abstractionism or non-figurative art developed from cubism—as a process o f universalization. It gradually shed the accidental details o f natural phenomena, until an art o f geo­ metrical and harmonic relations, as detached as music from realism, became possible. The new art is not entirely original —the early Kandinsky paintings o f 1909-12 are unacknow­ ledged precursors—but it differs from cubism and its suc­ cessors in that it deforms rather than refines the natural object. The identity o f this object may be recorded in the title o f the paintings—sometimes fancifully: “ Altar on the Blue Diamond,,J “ Yellow Heartbeat” (Alan D avie); some­ times directly: “ Ant-hill” , “ Beast” , “ Head” , “ CaneBoxes” (D ova); “ W inter” , “ Night Fantasy” (Hultberg). If the plastic mass o f paint is not actually inspired by an object, it is manipulated until it can be associated with an object, either by virtue o f its silhouette, or by some suggestive detail (an eye or a limb). But the recognition o f the object is not essen­ tial : if the painting has any phenomenal significance, it is only like a signpost, which tells us where the inspiration came from, or where it might possibly be expected to lead us. Meanwhile it lies in our way, an object as stubborn as a rock or a treestump. W e are invited to inspect its pattern o f lichen, its veins o f quartz or obsidian; and perhaps we may experience a dynamic force, a mana, a magic, that has somehow been communicated to the shaped form as it passed through the alembicating mind o f the painter. The odd thing is that an art so personal in its origins should be so universal in its distribution. It is sometimes said that it all began with the American painter, Jackson Pollock, who dribbled paint from pierced cans over a canvas laid like a carpet on the floor, and only stopped when the arbitrary result acquired some significant pattern. But Leonardo already recognized the fascination o f such formless forms, and in 298

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France painters o f this kind like Fautrier, Dubuffet and Michaux have an independent origin. It is just possible that the widespread use o f the Rohrschach test in experimental psychology may have had something to do with the origins o f the movement, for that test showed how much (and what various) significance could be read into an apparently mean­ ingless shape—i f only we tried. It seems quite clear that the average reaction to a painting by Fautrier or Dubuffet is exactly the same kind as the average reaction to a R ohr­ schach blot. But is it necessarily an aesthetic reaction ? Can a blot be elaborated into a work o f art ? The mental reactions provoked by the Rohrschach blots prove that the creation o f a blot-like painting (with infinite possibilities o f informal variation, and with all the additional power given to it by colour and texture) is not necessarily non-sensical. A blot can be beautiful, and a painting by Fautrier or Dova is also beautiful. But when we make such a statement, are we stretching an already ambiguous term be­ yond all reasonable limits ? W e have only to consider works o f art so diverse as a painting by Titian or a fountain by Bernini, a Greek vase or a Mexican mask, to see how different the meaning o f beauty can be. It is our sensibility that is fickle, and some external magnetism sends it wavering round the compass o f creative possibility. The particular magnetism that has exerted its power in these past ten post-war years is nega­ tive : a vacuous nihilism that renounces the visible world, and even the inner world o f the imagination, and scribbles a graph o f its uncertainty on the surface o f a blank consciousness. But can w e seriously compare a blotch o f colours, however powerful its sensuous and even psychic evocations, to Titian’s “ Sacred and Profane Love” or Bernini’s “ Apollo and Daphne” ? Contemporary aesthetics is very accommodating, but we must make a fundamental distinction between objects 299

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that arc imaginative, and objects that merely evoke images. In the one case there has been no exercise o f the shaping power o f a mind: an unshaped object enters the consciousness and as we contemplate it we (the spectators) make our associa­ tions, let our fancy play round it—each spectator becomes an artist, and each is creating his own work o f the imagination. But the object that sets this process going is not in itself necessarily a work o f art. It would seem, therefore, that an arbitrary act o f expression (as when we deliberately make a blot on a sheet o f paper) is not sufficient to constitute a w ork o f art: there must be an element o f control, o f shaping, though this may be undeli­ berate, as when an already shapely poem or visual image arises spontaneously in the mind. But the point to insist on is that spontaneity is not in itself a guarantee o f beauty or vitality—a formal element must be present in what is spon­ taneously revealed. This still leaves open the whole problem o f what constitutes aesthetic form. The blotchers might maintain, quite correctly, that aesthetic form is not necessarily measured or metrical form—that there exist irregular forms that are o f undoubted aesthetic appeal. Chinese art—oriental art generally—provides many examples, whilst in Europe the Rococo movement was an assertion o f the aesthetic validity o f such irregular forms. The word “ rococo” is said to be derived from the French rocaille, and rockeries and grottoes were fashionable extensions o f a deeper love o f the formally irregular. Rococo ornament is sometimes as w ildly arbitrary as a painting by Hartung or Mathieu, but the Rococo artist never claimed for it a more than decorative function. Rococo painting sometimes breaks out o f its frame, as in Baciccia’s fresco “ The Triumph o f the Name o f Christ,” in the Gesu church in R om e—though Baciccia (1639-1709) is too early to be more than a precursor o f 300

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the Rococo style. In a Fragonard or a Watteau, rococo signifies no more than an open form, a composition that is imagina­ tively extendable beyond the rectangle o f the picture’s frame. B y contrast, some o f the blotch-paintings o f which we are speaking are self-contained, monolithic, and have no reference to the rectangle o f the canvas, which is merely a place where the painting “ happens” . There is little purpose in longing for a type o f art that has no sympathetic relationship to the prevailing “ spirit o f the age” . Consciously or unconsciously the artists will refuse to supply it. Those who demand a return to realism, or to classicism, should first demand a return to sanity in economics and politics, a return to idealism in philosophy and to modera­ tion in everything. N ot that art is a direct expression o f such conscious states o f mind. Art springs from a deeper source and is prophetic. It expresses a sense o f dissatisfaction with normal concepts o f reasoning, with the conventional reality presented by newspapers, novelists and historians. Always in each epoch, the artist has been seeking a new orientation in a world grown indefinite and muddled—refocusing his sensibility on images that have grown dim and indistinct. The new images presented by the younger artists are not indistinct for lack o f focus: they are authentic symbols o f chaos itself, o f mind at the end o f its tether, gazing into the pit on the other side o f consciousness. This is not the Nothing­ ness o f the existentialists, but the Unconscious o f the psycho­ analysts. To attempt to reach this forbidden region is not unknown in the past; and in the recent past the surrealists came back with authentic discoveries. But surrealist painting was like the effort o f remembering a dream: the images were the product o f unconscious activities that had an arbitrary origin (in the psychosis o f the individual artist, for example): they were seized on the confines o f consciousness, and u

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however much an André Breton might preach the doctrine o f pure automatism they were not automatic because they were the product o f the dream (or the day-dream), and that, as Freud has shown, is a purely deterministic mental activity. The successors to the surrealists, these artists without a generic name, without an identity, are much more genuinely auto­ matic. They deliver themselves, not to the unconscious forces o f the imagination, but to something as irresponsible as an angry gesture. In fact, their painting is instinctive, a reflex activity, completely devoid o f mental effort, o f intellection. As such, it may possess vitality, but never beauty. Beauty is not rational, but it always bears the marks o f intellection— that is to say, o f harmonies and proportions that can be analysed and intellectually appreciated. The artist must not deliberately create these values (that leads to academicism and death) : he has a natural feeling for them, a disposition (per­ haps innate, perhaps acquired by discipline) to make auto­ matic use o f them. The automatism o f the instinctive painter has no such natural limits: it is an emotional earthquake and the seis­ mograph it leaves behind tells us only what happened to an individual sensibility at a certain moment. W e do not even re-experience the earthquake— we merely observe the record o f its force and duration. Once in possession o f this instinctively created graph, the artist can begin to elaborate it consciously. A Mathieu or a Soulages leaves his seismograph untouched: a Fautrier or a Salles plays about with it—adds a vivid touch o f colour here and there : scribbles in a suggestive line or two, even a recog­ nizable feature, an eye or a breast. A “ monster’ ’ may emerge —an idol or a “ presence” . Hence the claim, which Michael Tapié makes, for the magic quality o f such paintings. W e are fascinated, even terrorized, by the mysterious power that 302

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emanates from the object created by “ the artist” . But that, it may be said, depends on the spectator’s sensibility (a sen­ sibility that is in no sense aesthetic). Some people see ghosts, or receive telepathic messages: others do not. Some people, in the same way, respond to a vaguely suggestive mass o f paint. W e may envy them, but at the same time suspect that the experience has nothing to do with art. But also at the same time we must remember that beauty has never been an all-inclusive principle o f art. Combined with it, at times completely replacing it, is the alternative principle o f vitality. Beauty takes us out o f life, to contem­ plate eternal values; vitality puts us at the centre o f hfe, to experience its essential quality, its source and power. There is such an essential dynaminism in some o f the paintings o f this new type, and before we react with scorn or fury, we should consider whether a willing submission to such forms o f ex­ pression might not leave us with a heightened sense o f reality. At least, such art is not tired, feeble, as was the art at the end o f the nineteenth century; nor is it merely negative, like dadaism or a good deal o f surrealism. It has much in common with the futurism o f the period immediately preceding the First W orld W ar; but futurism was more conscious o f its environment, machine-conscious, politics-conscious. The new art is conscious o f nothing but the artist’s own personality, and with an urgent sense o f desperation seeks the principle o f vitality in introspection, in subjectivity. Previous epochs o f vital art, such as the paleaolithic, or the Viking, or the Scythian, sought vitality in external life, usually in animals. The self, one feels, may not be a very constant source o f vitality: it is subject to self-distrust and despair. But such is really the challenge o f the new movement in art: to feel the pulse o f vitality within one’ s own consciousness and then to convey its plastic rhythms in graphic form. 303

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Tribal Art and Modern Man between tribal art and modern art are as old as the Eiffel Tower—exactly, for the Eiffel Tower was built to commemorate the Universal Exhibition o f 1889, and at that exhibition there were numerous anthropological objects which attracted the attention o f the artists o f Paris, above all, o f Gauguin. “ It is great,” said Gauguin. “ In the Java village there are Hindoo dances. All the art o f India can be seen there, and it is exactly like the photos I have. 1 go there again on Thursday as I have an appointment with a mulatto girl.” Van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard:

the relations

There is something I am very sorry to have missed at the Exposi­ tion, that is the collection of dwellings of all the races. . . . So could you, since you have seen it, give me an impression of it, and especially a sketch with the colours of the primitive Egyptian dwelling. . . . In one of the illustrated papers I saw a sketch of ancient Mexican dwel­ lings, they too seem to have been primitive and very beautiful. Oh, if only one knew about those times and could paint the people of those days who lived in such dwellings—that would be just as beautiful as Millet: I don’t say as far as colour is concerned, but in character, as somediing significant, as something in which one has a solid faith. This is eighteen years before Picasso painted Les demoiselles d’Avignon, and note what Van Gogh is saying (and what Gauguin and Emile Bernard were thinking at this time)— namely, that primitive art is beautiful, and that it is beautiful because it is primitive—that because it is primitive it has some­ thing which is significant, something in which one can have a solid faith.1 1 In fact, it is often part o f a very complex culture, and for this reason anthropologists prefer to call it “ tribal” rather than “ prim itive” . 30 4

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Until that time, and indeed till long after that time, an­ thropologists and ethnologists had been completely blind to the aesthetic appeal o f the objects which they piled up in rich confusion in their museums. Their favourite epithet for the description o f such objects, throughout the nineteenth cen­ tury, is “ crude” , and “ crude” I suspect they remain for most anthropologists, who are not accustomed to give any scientific status at all to aesthetic values. Frobenius, towards the end o f the nineteenth century, was probably the first anthropologist to use the word “ art” in connection with tribal organizations, and he did not lay much stress on it. Robert Lowie, as late as 1925, is probably the first an­ thropologist to recognize, in his own words, that “ the aesthe­ tic impulse is one o f the irreducible components o f the human mind . . . a potent agency from the very beginnings o f human existence” ; though he quotes Jochelson, whose work is un­ known to me, as having previously admitted this truth. But what I wish to emphasize is the fact that the whole o f this revaluation o f tribal art—its very recognition as art—was due to artists, and not to scholars and scientists, who, in spite o f their more intimate knowledge o f the material in question, remained obstinately purblind to its aesthetic qualities. All this is matter o f fact, and perhaps not very important. What is more interesting and debatable is the motive under­ lying the recognition o f the aesthetic value o f primitive art, sixty years ago. W hy did the artists o f 1889 find tribal art not merely beautiful, but also significant— “ something in which one has a solid faith” ? That, I take it, is the real problem. 1 think there is little doubt that the answer to this question lies in the artist’s revolt, conscious or unconscious, against the industrial civilization which, by the third quarter o f the nine­ teenth century, had become such a hideous reality. In the case 305

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o f Van Gogh and Gauguin, European civilization was a “ dis­ mal swamp” , corrupt beyond redemption. Gauguin deliber­ ately turned his back on it, and went to Tahiti to seek the primitive reality. To a certain extent he found it, and this is how he describes it : A delight distilled from some indescribable sacred horror which I glimpse of far-off things. The odour of an antique joy which I am breathing in the present. Animal shapes of a statuesque rigidity : indes­ cribably antique, august, and religious in the rhythm of their gesture, in their singular immobility. In die dreaming eyes is the overcast surface of an unfathomable enigma. In the case o f Van Gogh the reaction was less conscious, more introverted, and the end was madness. From the asylum in St. R ém y he wrote o f his horror of life, but he also wrote that he considered the artist’s duty was to think, not to dream, and he said o f Bernard’s and Gauguin’s paintings : “ the thing about them is that they are a sort o f dream or nightmare— that they are erudite enough—you can see that it is someone who is mad on the primitives . . . ” and that gave him “ a painful feeling o f collapse instead o f progress” . But his own concentration on the visual was an escape from the civilization around him—as he said himself: “ It is really at bottom fairly true that a painter as man is too much absorbed by what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently master o f the rest o f his life.” Van Gogh died in this year 1889 which I have given as the one in which the relations between tribal and modern art began, so he does not really come into question. But Van Gogh is the father o f that movement known as Expressionism, and the Expressionists were to become, twenty years later, the most consistent representatives o f a primitive style in modern art. B y a primitive style I mean a mode o f expression more or less directly influenced by primitive prototypes. Emil 306

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Nolde, like Gauguin before him, actually visited the South Seas, and there was the direct impact on other Expressionists, such as Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein and Kirchner, o f Frobcnius’s publications, and o f Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik, pub­ lished in Leipzig in 19 15. To return to France: I would like to suggest that there was no break in development between the discovery o f primitive art in 1889 and its direct translation into cubism from 1907 onwards. Gauguin went on painting until 1903, and his works, o f course, gained in influence after his death. B y 1904 we know that Vlaminck was taking an interest in primitive art, and Vlaminck infected Derain with his enthusiasm, and Derain infected Matisse. Both Matisse and Derain began to collect Negro sculpture before 1907. Then came Les demoiselles d’Avignon and a series o f paintings, by Picasso, Braque, Derain and others, which grew increasingly geometrical in style, and finally developed into cubism: cubism analytical and syn­ thetic, and then abstract and uncontaminated by any repre­ sentational element. Meanwhile another development was taking place which was to have its repercussions on modern art. About the same time that Gauguin was discovering primitive art, Freud was discovering the unconscious. I have no documentary evidence o f the first contact between art and psychoanalysis, but I sus­ pect that it took place in Munich between 1908 and 1910. There is some research to be done on this question, but I think it would establish that both Kandinsky and Klee had some knowledge o f psychoanalysis before 1910, and certainly the group o f artists who assembled in Zürich on the outbreak o f war in 19 14 and established the Dada group were familiar with some o f Freud’s ideas. This group was presently rein­ forced by a trained psychiatrist, Andre Breton, and from the interpenetration o f primitive art, psychoanalysis, the poetry o f 307

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Rimbaud and Lautréamont, post-Hegelian philosophy and I know not what else, the movement known as Surrealism was born. The surrealists from the beginning took a serious and indeed a scientific interest in all forms o f primitive art, and in Paris at any rate there was a close understanding between the surrealist artists, the psychoanalysts, and the anthropologists. The general effect o f this was to reveal a common basis, in the unconscious, for those irrational forms o f art in which the contemporary, no less than the primitive man, felt impelled to express himself. These historical considerations are perhaps unduly pedantic, but the dimensions o f the relations between modern art and primitive art are not fully appreciated. I hope I have shown that it has not been a superficial flirtation ; that on the con­ trary there has grown up, over a period o f sixty years, an intimate connection which, on the one hand, has led to a revaluation o f ethnological material, a great portion o f which has now been rescued from the scientific lumber-room and elevated to a worthy place among the creative achievements o f mankind; and on the other hand has given to the modern artist a new mode o f expression which he finds in accordance with his emotional or spiritual needs. And that brings me to my last point. I have been criticized for using the word Angst [anguish or dread] in this context, and for suggesting that the similarities which exist between certain types o f primitive art and certain types o f modern art are due to a common psychological con­ dition. Perhaps I did not make m y meaning clear, but it seems to me beyond doubt that the trend o f modern art away from representational realism and towards some degree o f abstrac­ tion or symbolism is but a reflection o f those philosophical and religious trends which, themselves no doubt determined 308

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or at any rate intimately related to economic trends, have led mankind into a state o f religious unbelief, o f psychological imbalance, and social unrest. If there is one word which suc­ cinctly defines the universal condition o f mankind today, it is the word insecurity—mental insecurity, social insecurity, metaphysical insecurity. I am not going to suggest that the same or a similar word can be used to characterize primitive man. This term is far too inclusive for our purposes, and we need some classification o f primitive races before we can venture to generalize about their metaphysical characteristics. But there is the general division which I have already referred to—that between tribes whose art is naturalistic, and tribes whose art is geometrical or sym­ bolic. It is roughly, as I have said, the distinction between paleolithic art and neolithic art, between what is usually called bushman art and what is usually called Negro art. At this point I would quite sincerely ask for the anthropologist’s guidance, because it does seem to me that we lack any thorough correlation o f types o f religion and types o f art. I am assuming, however, that such a correlation would reveal a parallel between religions o f fear, terror, propitiation and retribution to which would correspond arts o f symbolic or geometric tendency; and between religions o f ritual and sym­ pathetic magic based on a belief in the beneficence o f nature and o f the gods to which would correspond a naturalistic or representational art. If such a correspondence does in fact show itself throughout the history o f mankind, then it is very easy to explain the return o f the modern artist to forms o f art similar to those we call “ primitive” . The reason lies in mankind’s return to a “ primitive” state o f mind. T o call the state o f mind o f a con­ temporary existentialist “ primitive” is perhaps paradoxical; but when the existentialist (and we must remember that he 309

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represents the up-to-date Christian theologist as well as the up-to-date atheist philosopher)—when the existentialist begins to talk about the anguish or uneasiness which overcomes him when he faces up to the problem o f man’s cosmic predicament, he is merely using elaborate linguistic signs to describe the same feelings which overcome primitive men, but which they can only express in emotive symbols. Well, the modern artist, not being an adept in philosophical verbalization, is reduced to expressing himself in concrete symbols—that is to say, in works o f art that are the objective correlate o f his inner emo­ tional tensions. That is the central fact to be grasped in this debate—I mean the fact that modern man, and the modern artist in particular, is no mere eclectic monkey, trying to imitate for his occasional amusement the artifacts o f primitive races; on the contrary, he is, spiritually speaking, in a tough spot himself, and the more honest he is with himself, the more resolutely he rejects the traditional shams and worn counters o f expression, and the more nearly, and the more unconsciously, he finds himself expressing himself in a maimer which bears a real and no longer superficial resemblance to so-called “ primitive” art.

37

Graham Sutherland remarks, in his book o f travels, that the Chinese consider “ la racine comme plus ‘ nature’ que le tronc . . . Tout ce qui est tortueux dans la nature lui est une douce caresse” . This is not an oriental eccentricity ; it is typical o f an aesthetic

henri m ic h a u x

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that finds more power and significance in the generation o f life than it its florescence. There is vitality in both root and branch, but the element that searches the earth, extending its form in opposition to hard particles o f rock, by that very struggle seems to win a superior grace. B y contrast, how banal seem to be those regular or symmetrical forms that have matured in the unresistent air. This image comes to mind when we contemplate the paintings o f Graham Sutherland. N ot that he is an orientalist, either in style or philosophy; but his work shows the same desire to reveal the directions taken by hidden germinal forces, to record the unexpected shapes assumed by life in its blind proliferation. The painter’s eye is a revealing, not merely a recording organ. But the revelation is also a transformation, for the artist is not a mere discoverer (that would be to con­ fuse his job with the scientist’s), but an interpreter. His forms are aesthetic, which means that he uses the power he takes from living things to give vitality to the creatures o f his imagination. Such abstract formulas o f criticism are invented only when the artist has finished his work o f creation. He himself is guided by instinct. His eye, searching the solid darkness where life germinates, is suddenly aware o f phosphorescent shapes, dim analogues o f roots, o f larvae, o f knots, joints, scarred bark, succulent fibres; o f leaves, too, and brandling tw igs; o f thorns and flowers. R arely o f men or animals, for they do not have the rooting, tentative quality o f vegetation. An artist like Sutherland is not, is essentially not, a humanist. (His por­ traits assimilate the human being to thorny, spicular forms o f life, as though a first frosted sheath o f crystallization had already glazed the skin.) Sutherland is a landscapist, like so many o f his English predecessors. This English obsession, which began more than two hundred years ago as a simple 3ii

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topographical interest, scientific in its motivation, became under the influence o f the Romantic poets, a transcendental philosophy o f nature. Landscape-painting, with Turner, is already a symbolic representation o f cosmic reality—o f the Spirit o f Nature. But such a romantic revelation is always coloured by the mood o f the revealer. Turner was the least philosophical o f men, but he had a naively direct mystical vision which belongs to the same Weltanschauung as Words­ worth’s and Coleridge’s, which it is not merely fanciful to associate with Schelling or Novalis. Sutherland, a hundred years later, has entered another philosophical climate, and though his relations to a Heidegger or a Sartre may be as remote as Turner’s was to Schelling or Novalis, the growing fearsomeness o f the symbols reflects the now prevailing cosmic anxiety. These colours, to a philosophical temperament, may be a shade too acid; these lines and forms too hesitant or too agitated; but a painter whose sensibility is acutely aware o f the metaphysical mood o f the age no less than o f the occular vision o f the scene, must transform the fragments o f his per­ ception into a coherent language o f the spirit. To do less is to be false to the destiny o f the artist, which is always to rend the veil o f Maya, reckless o f what the action may reveal. Sutherland’s naturism is opposed to the humanism o f Moore, but these two examples o f contemporary philoso­ phical art are properly regarded as complementary; together they represent England’s distinctive contribution to the art o f the twentieth century. The position they occupy is not exclu­ sive, even o f other artists in England. I f we assume that these two figures have a representative function at the present moment, we are at the same time conscious that they stand, not only for a general spirit o f the age, but also for many other artists who speak the same language, with accents that may be different but not necessarily less significant. The range 312

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and consistency o f Sutherland’s w ork gives it a more than regional significance. Indeed, Sutherland is possibly the first English painter since Turner who has been bold enough to take up an independent position as an artist, and to maintain it with conviction in the presence o f his European con­ temporaries.

38

Kokoschka is undoubtedly one o f the major artists o f our time, the work o f Oskar Kokoschka is not so well known in the United Kingdom and America as it should be. It is true that the Museum o f Modern Art in N ew Y ork has two superb paintings in its permanent collection, and most o f the impor­ tant art galleries in the United States possess one or more examples o f his work. In England, the Tate Gallery has a portrait and a landscape, and there is a single example o f his work in the National Gallery o f Scotland. But in all these places considerably more space is given to artists o f consider­ ably less stature. To explain this neglect might lead us into social under­ growths which cannot be explored in a short and would-be gracious tribute. In a world o f competing interests, o f con­ flicting nationalisms, o f the increasing commercialization o f art, the fame o f any one particular artist is a counter, thrown into the game o f wits. A poet is good if he sings the praises o f the dominant party leader; a painter is good if he depicts the inevitable progress o f the working classes or flatters the vanity o f the rich; and poet and painter sink or swim with

though he

3U

KOKOSCHKA

the political fortunes o f the country where they happen to be domiciled. If the country is a stable one, it may still be a question o f the relative value o f its exchange rate: for art is an export o f potential value. The dealer plays a part, the press plays a part. What seldom gets a chance, in this sordid trafficking, is the unprejudiced sensibility o f the people—o f those people who can respond to the appeal o f a w ork o f art without the stimulus o f fashion or fortune. But even supposing we were back in a state o f such innocency, and art was to be enjoyed for itself alone, it is idle to pretend that the work o f Kokoschka would everywhere have an immediate appeal for the unsophisticated. That w ork does undoubtedly meet with uninstigated resistance in some quarters, and particularly in England. W e feel abashed by such relentless realism. Even i f w e are not sentimentalists, we shrink from the exposure o f nerves—our own nerves no less than the twitching nerves o f the painter’s victim. It is for this reason that a critic so typically English as R oger Fry could not wholly accept Rembrandt— or Picasso. It is a Quakerish restraint in us. But then, we are not consistent. W e accept El Greco, in spite o f the quivering limbs, the distorted features, the fingers pointed with agony. W e accept El Greco partly because we have been told to accept him by impressive critics, partly because his mysticism and masochism are expressed in Christian symbols. But there is no artist o f the present time so near to El Greco as Kokoschka. I am not saying that the styles are related—stylistic comparisons are not part o f m y present purpose. It is the ideals that are related. Once we have discounted the symbols, which are useful conventions to which an artist may be driven by the circumstances o f his time—then it is the essential humanism o f the two artists that brings them together: they are both artists o f love, o f suffering, and o f redemption.

3H

KOKOSCHKA

Love is, o f course, a soiled word. In Kokoschka it is instinc­ tive identity; identity with the colour o f the flower, the iridescences o f fish scales and shells, the fluctuation o f light over hills, or its splendour as it strikes the massed roofs o f some city. It is the plastic artist’s peculiar power o f translating his sensations into living forms, and that power is effective in the degree that the love o f the objects which arouse the sensa­ tions is pure and intense. There is no pride in such love, no judgment. The flayed carcass belongs to the same order o f existence as the flower. But beyond love is suffering, and it is that perception which makes Kokoschka an exceptional artist in our age. His portraits reveal the mute suffering o f the individual, o f the person crucified on the codes o f false social values. A few larger symbolic paintings resort to symbolism, not Greco’s symbolism, but rather Goya’s, to depict the suffering o f oppressed peoples, the tortures o f war. And then beyond is the note o f redemption. In this case it is not the divine redemption o f the Christian religion, but a human redemption which Kokoschka takes over from his master and countryman, Comenius—redemption by educa­ tion, by creative activity, by art. This theme is not, o f course, explicit in Kokoschka’s paintings. But it is the practical aspect o f his humanism. It is implied in the love o f man and in the belief that man can participate, through art, through creative activity, in the world o f objective beauty—can become a part o f that universal harmony which the great artist sees so clearly revealed in the world o f objective fact.

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The Problem o f the Zeitgeist 1 there exists a confusion o f values, due to temporary conditions o f an economic or social character, psychic disturbances which interfere with the clear perception o f what is enduring in human creation. That is to say, a given age always looks at its contemporary art with contemporary prejudices. When, in the course o f time, these prejudices dis­ appear, the art o f that given age is revalued and again with contemporary prejudices—the prejudices o f a new age. W e need not deny that certain values persist through all ages; but we must recognize that it is always difficult at any historical moment to distinguish them clearly. What we have to recognize is the existence, in every age, o f a state o f intellectual consciousness which is in fact an illusion. For reasons which so far remain obscure certain works o f art are elevated temporarily to the highest rank o f esteem or popularity, and even the best minds o f a period are deceived by them. The duration o f the fame o f such works varies, but it rarely seems to exceed fifty years, and may be much less. All the arts exhibit such phenomena, but they can be ob­ served with most clarity in literature (books have a better chance o f material survival—it is very difficult to trace the works o f a once famous painter, such as Benjamin Robert Hay don). A typical example o f a temporarily inflated genius is James Macpherson, whose Ossianic poems aroused world­ wide enthusiasm between 1760 and 1800. Homer and Milton were evoked for comparison, and the best minds o f the time

in

any

age

1 Originally given as an introduction to a discussion at the IVth International Congress o f Art Critics, Dublin, July 20-26, 1953.

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(Goethe’s, for example) were deceived. The popularity o f Ossian was associated with a general movement—a newly discovered and widely diffused interest in the culture o f primi­ tive peoples, to which we owe literary monuments o f per­ manent value such as Percy’s Reliques. That movement may be regarded as the expression o f an atavism which was a natural reaction to the prevailing rationalism o f the eighteenth century—the Zeitgeist had provoked a revolt in the collective unconscious. But what provokes the Zeitgeist, that particular combination o f curiosity and excitement which leads to a blind and unbalanced judgment o f certain contemporary artists? It is a very complex problem, and it is doubtful if it can be solved without recourse to some form o f group analysis which would lay bare the workings o f unconscious collective motives.1 It is not my intention to provide any such general hypothesis—indeed, I merely wish to pose the problem, with particular reference to contemporary art and literature. W e might say that in any age there are certain conventions (accepted canons o f art) and certain prejudices (ethical or religious) which constitute the taste o f that age. W e know that in the middle o f the eighteenth century, for example, the prevailing taste was “ classical’ ’, and according to that taste certain poets and painters were esteemed above all others. But this does not explain the anomalies within that situation. Exact statistics are always lacking, but we know, for example, that a poet like Abraham Cowley had a reputation out o f all proportion to the merit o f his equally classical contemporaries. In his own day he was probably esteemed more than his con­ temporary Milton, and certainly more than another contem­ porary, Andrew Marvell, whom we now find much more genuinely poetic than Cowley. Cow ley was an infant prodigy, 1 A first attempt from a psychological point o f view has been made by Dr. Erich Neumann. Cf. “ Kunst und Z eit” , in Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1951, pp. 11-56 , Zurich, 1952. X

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and early had a great reputation for his cleverness. Indeed, it seems very difficult for an age to distinguish between clever­ ness and genius among its contemporaries: the works o f genius are probably at first more strange and obscure, and cleverness is always immediately dazzling. I have just said that we nowadays find Marvell “ more genuinely poetic” than Cowley. Sir Herbert Grierson’s opinion, that apart from Milton Marvell “ is the most inter­ esting personality beween Donne and D ry den, and at his best a finer poet than either” , expressed in 1921, would have been inconceivable in 17 2 1 or 18 21 (though by the latter date he had been “ discovered” by Hazlitt and Lamb). The vagaries o f taste in respect o f Donne, and even Shakespeare, are well known, and may be due to a multiplicity o f factors. But we must ignore this secondary, historical process, to concentrate on the problem o f the Zeitgeist, which is always o f its time, and immediate. That it is not merely a question o f the prevailing level o f taste (in other words, o f the Zeitgeist being selective and arbitrary) may be observed by contrasting the fate o f two writers who aroused the same universal enthusiasm at the same time—Macpherson already mentioned, and Laurence Sterne. Macpherson’s name is not remembered by the general public, but Sterne has stood the test o f time: he has never gone out o f fashion, and has even been a fruitful influence in our own day (on Joyce, for example). Obviously Sterne did not sur­ vive because he gave conscious expression to some eternal values which were distinct from the fashionable values repre­ sented by Macpherson. He, too, was a creature o f his time, but he has survived because he gave expression to a new development o f consciousness (made his readers aware o f hitherto unexpressed nuances o f sensibility), and invented a technique appropriate for the purpose. 318

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Ossian and Sterne may be compared with painters like Bouguerau and Cezanne, but there is this difference: Sterne was immediately recognized, but Cézanne was not adequately recognized until after his death. This may be explained as a difference in the speed o f diffusion in the respective arts o f painting and writing. The case o f Sterne leads me to suggest as a tentative hypo­ thesis that the “ eternal’ ’ works o f art—those exempt from the mortality o f taste and fashion—are those which are based on individual sensibility, to the exclusion o f all conceptual or ideological’ ’ motives. But this still leaves the individual at the mercy o f those unconscious forces which we call taste or fashion, unless genius is precisely the capacity to evade those forces, to be “ détaché de son époque” , as Lionello Venturi has suggested. Whether “ eternal values” exist or not, in the aesthetic realm or the ethical realm, is a philosophical question which I will not discuss now. But in the realm o f aesthetic values we know that each age has its own definition o f beauty ; and i f the aesthetic value o f “ beauty” is denied, then we are ready with a substitute value which we may call “ vitality” or “ realism” . In my own opinion there are a limited number o f such values, some o f which are essential to the survival o f a work o f art. W e have admitted that the values o f art are subject to variations in esteem, and what is for the moment fashionable may seem eternal. There are no values in art that have not, at one time or another, been challenged. But this general con­ dition or relativity should not blind us to the fact that the world keeps returning to certain specific values. These values may be few, but they seem to be fundamental. I would men­ tion as examples the geometrical proportions which are common to forms o f organic life as well as to the forms o f

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art— the so-called Divine Proportion, etc.—and those invari­ able qualities o f harmony and serenity to which mankind returns after every period o f storm and stress. I f these values are regarded as eternal, then the variations may be ascribed to certain distortions o f a temporary nature. The origin o f such distortions must no doubt be sought in the economic sphere, which is the most unstable element in human society. The cultural values o f a dominant class do not always correspond to its social status. In any period o f revolu­ tionary upheaval, a hiatus will exist for at least a generation between society and culture. A rising élite in the economic sense brings with it a low level o f taste—perhaps has no taste at all. It is not at ease in manners, speech, clothes, or any form o f expressive possession. Hence for a time this new social class, its own taste uncertain or unformed, will attempt to “ buy culture” . The middleman intervenes. He exploits a favourable situation. Dealers have their “ hunches’ ’ or intui­ tions ; fashions are more or less deliberately created to feed a new market. In such a situation the Zeitgeist is born—a spirit, an illusion, an ignis fatuus. It follows that the Zeitgeist is not a phenomenon susceptible o f rational explanation. At a certain moment there exists a favourable conjunction o f events—o f wants, desires, objects to satisfy these wants and desires, middlemen to act as catalysts in this portentous situation. The collective uncon­ scious is in need o f certain stimuli, o f certain releases o f tension. A significant pattern exists in the social psyche— a synchronicity o f otherwise discrete phenomena. The Zeitgeist finds expression in certain expressive forms, in works o f art that are suddenly fashionable, and that no power o f reason or good taste can prevent from becoming fashionable. The likeli­ hood is that even we, men o f good taste that we are, will be deceived. 320

THE PROBLEM OL THE ZEITGEIST

What is the moral o f all this—what lesson o f humility should we learn from a sober realization o f the facts o f cultural history? Tw o, I think: First, that the fashionable is always suspect—the fame o f the greater part o f the most fashionable artists o f any period docs not survive that period. Second, which is the contrary proposition, that the greater part o f the best artists o f any period have a posthumous fame out o f all proportion to their contemporary fame. Finally, in view o f these general considerations, can we venture to characterize the features o f our own Zeitgeist ? It is a hazardous proceeding, but I will suggest four o f them: 1. Egoism—the prevailing subjectivism o f all forms o f art: the general Zeitgeist o f Romanticism, now two hundred years old. 2. Erethism—by which I mean excessive excitation o f the sensibility, the absence o f serenity. 3. Eclecticism—the tendency to make, both o f poetry and painting, a mythological salad, I might instance, without any critical intention, poems like “ The Waste Land” , paintings like “ Guernica” , the theatre o f Giraudoux and Cocteau. 4. Escapism—the tendency to evade the human dilemma; denial o f the tragic sense o f life. But it is easier to describe the general characteristics o f our Zeitgeist than to decide which particular artists best represent it. In any case, I do not propose to undertake such an invidious task. O f these four features o f contemporary art, I would say that it is unlikely that we can now escape from subjectivism without some great change in human consciousness, such as occurred at the beginning o f the Romantic Movement—and it would have to be an extension o f human consciousness, such

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as the Romantic Movement was, and not a mere return to a narrower outlook. Secondly, w e must remember that vitality is essential to any enduring art—it is the excess o f excitement we must guard against, not its presence. It is the third and fourth characteristics o f our culture which should give us most concern. Though there is a traditional element in all civilized art, and though Shakespeare and Milton are “ eclectic’ ’ in no small measure, nevertheless there is a directness and originality about all “ eternal” works o f art: the myth is used as a paradigm or as ail archetype, not as an exotic mine to be exploited. As for escapism, there is no compromise possible on this issue: to escape from life is to escape from art.

40

The Faith o f a Critic at the basis is pathos. Sympathy and empathy—feeling with

and feeling into: these are the essential psycho-physical pro­ cesses without which all criticism is null and dull. It follows from this that there are no immutable canons o f criticism, no perfect critics. Criticism is good and sane when there is a meeting o f intention and appreciation. There is then an act o£ recognition, and any worthwhile criticism begins with that reaction. Recognition is inhibited by constitutional limitations in the critic. These may be defects o f sensibility (e.g., insensibility to the sensuous quality o f words) or imperfect sympathy due to pathological inhibitions. Contrast the critical reactions o f 322

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two such eminent critics as John Ruskin and Lord Acton to the same author—George Eliot. Ruskin on The M ill on the Floss: “ There is not a single person in the book o f the smallest importance to anybody in the world but themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line o f printer’s type in their description . . . the rest o f the characters are simply the sweepings out o f a Pentonville bus.” A cton : “ N o writer has ever lived who had anything like her power o f manifold, but disinterested and impartially observant sympathy. I f Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light o f our culture, i f Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.” The sources o f such a disagreement must be sought in the psychology o f the critic. In this case there would be a general agreement that Acton was right, Ruskin wrong. I f we seek for an explanation o f Ruskin s blind spot, it would not be difficult to find. It is part o f the same complex that wrecked his marriage. His reaction to Byron, on the other hand, is, unexpectedly, passionately favourable; and has its basis in an identification o f himself with Byron. “ W ith this steadiness o f bitter melancholy, there is joined a sense o f material beauty . . . which in the iridescence, colour-depth, and morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness o f it—with other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be analysed by extreme care—is found, to the full, only in five men that I know o f in modern times: namely, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and m yself. All critics do not so confidently expose their sympathies, or their antipathies, but nevertheless they always exist, and they are inevitable. W e should not confuse criticism with the expression o f imperfect sympathies, however much this is dis323

THE FAITH OF A CRITIC

guised in pseudo-scientific jargon. It may be retorted that the same mistake must not be made about the expression o f per­ fect sympathies, but tills is not the case. Perfect sympathy may lead to exaggerated partiality (Swinburne’s for Victor Hugo, for example); and love may make us blind to many faults in the beloved. But then the performance is no longer critical. I have said that sympathy is the basis o f criticism; the struc­ ture above ground-level is intellectual. Sympathetic criticism is not necessarily favourable criticism. W e can sympathize with the intention and at the same time reject the execution o f it, or object to certain details in this execution. Coleridge on Wordsworth is the best illustration o f this truth: the per­ fect sympathy is not in doubt, but the critic can admit that the object o f his sympathy may on occasion be out of his element—“ like the swan, that, having amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river’s bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and sustaining surface” . “ Though,” says Coleridge, here defining the critical principle, “ though, to appreciate the defects o f a great mind it is necessary to understand previously its characteristic excellencies, yet I have already expressed myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most o f the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore commence with what I deem the prominent defects o f his poems hitherto published.” 1 The word empathy, indispensable to modern criticism, needs some explanation. It is no longer necessary to give it formal definition—it has entered into our critical vocabulary. But it should be used in literary criticism with caution. The process, as the psychologists from Lipps to Koffka have recognized, is so sensational that strictly speaking it only takes place in the plastic arts. W e feel ourselves occupying with our senses the ^Biog.

Lit., ch. xxii.

324

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Gestalt o f the rising column or the spatial design o f a picture. There may be a true empathetic relationship to the sound and shape o f a poem—our response to metre, for example. But in general our use o f the word in literary criticism can only be analogical—as when Acton says: “ George Eliot seemed to me capable not only o f reading the diverse hearts o f men, but o f creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background o f conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences o f thought and knowledge, o f life and o f descent, and having obtained this experience, re­ covering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul o f a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without attraction, preference, or caricature.” 1 The phrases I have italicized undoubtedly describe the empathic process in images that avoid the use o f critical jargon. Scientific method in criticism, in my creed, is only admis­ sible as a secondary activity. The critic with a head but with­ out a heart, armed with instruments o f precision but without love, is the monster who killed Keats. He has had a numerous progeny, and I fancy that the species has found a particularly congenial habitat in American universities (but we have enough to spare for export in England). In so far as he con­ fines himself to textual criticism, he can perform a very useful service. Analysis o f Hopkins’s metre, exegesis o f Eliot’s mythology—these are types o f necessary activities that one must not for a moment despise. But they should not be con­ fused with criticism proper, which is a philosophical activity, concerned, in Acton’s words, with the “ latent background o f conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences o f thought, and knowledge, o f life and descent” . For the same reason criticism proper must be dissociated 1 Letters to Mary Gladstone, pp. 60-1. 32S

THE FAITH OF A CRITIC

from sociological criticism o f the Marxist type. Again, one cannot object to such criticism as a secondary activity; to demonstrate, for example, “ Balzac’s profound comprehen­ sion o f the contradictorily progressive character o f capitalist development” may be o f great importance to the sociologist; and i f a great artist like Tolstoy “ creates immortal master­ pieces on the basis o f an entirely false philosophy” , the Marxist may legitimately deplore the fact, but the literary critic may ignore the fact (if it is a fact).1 Finally, and most important, the true critic will not indulge in moral judgments. W ith Bradley he will distinguish be­ tween moral judgment and moral perception. Moral percep­ tion is a mode o f sympathy: we have to participate in the moral dilemmas presented by the poet, and we may justly criticize the way in which they are presented. “ W hen we are immersed in a tragedy,” wrote Bradley in his Shakespearean Tragedy, “ we feel towards dispositions, actions, and persons such emotions as attraction and repulsion, pity, wonder, fear, horror, perhaps hatred; but we do not judge.” H ow difficult it is for a critic, committed to some code o f ethics or politics, to observe that prime precept o f criticism! How many o f the pundits o f literature, from Dr. Johnson to Irving Babbitt, have failed for precisely that reason! H ow often we, w ho claim to be sympathetic critics, have been false to our imaginative experience! A creed does not admit o f qualifications, and 1 have none to make. It is difficult, however, to convey the meaning o f imaginative experience to those who have no such experience; and to claim such experience for oneself savours o f vanity. It is a question o f organic sensibility. It would be rash to assume that this is a common possession, even in critics. I know from my own attitude to music, an art for which I have 3Both examples from George Lukács: Studies in European Realism. 326

THE FAITH OF A CRITIC

no organic sensibility, how easy it would be to formulate a critical system without imaginative experience. I could begin from m y experience o f other arts, and argue (for example) that since Stendhal whom I admire as a writer o f brilliant critical intelligence expressed a passionate love for the music o f Mozart and Cimarosa, that therefore that kind o f music is likely to be the right kind o f music. I have been tempted to extol the music o f Cimarosa simply because there is an im­ pressive amount o f evidence to show that in his time he was greatly admired by people o f sensibility and intelligence; and because I have never found anyone today who could explain the disappearance o f Cimarosa from our opera houses and concert halls. That greatest o f modern musicologists, Sir Donald Tovey, had no explanation to offer when 1 once questioned him on the subject. I am not making out a case for Cimarosa because I have neither the necessary knowledge o f his music, nor the sensitive equipment to acquire such knowledge. But I have been temped, without these necessary tools, to indulge in critical fantasies about Cimarosa; and I am sure that in literature, where exposure o f such an organic defect is much more difficult, at least half the criticism in existence is a hollow structure o f this kind. The cadences o f poetry are just as sensational as the tones o f music. Many people will readily admit to being tone-deaf in music. I have met very few people who will admit to being tone-deaf in poetry. There remain those overriding considerations which Arnold, rendering Aristotle’s meaning, called higher truth and higher seriousness. Goethe, a little more concretely, spoke o f clarity and serenity. I do not think the critic can do much more than announce the presence o f such qualities in a work o f art. It is doubtful i f the qualities that give Homer, Dante and Shakes­ peare their supremacy can be reproduced by lesser minds.

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The accent of high seriousness, said Arnold (and he was wise to call it an accent) comes from absolute sincerity. That is true, but how do we define sincerity? W e should not make the attempt. W e recognize, we feel, such a quality, and if such an action seems like an abdication o f the critical intelligence, I can only suggest that there are in the House o f Art certain tabernacles which the critic should enter with lowered eye­ lids, so dazzling is their glory.

328

NOTES

I have endeavoured to trace the original appearance o f the essays and articles reprinted in this volume, but in two or three cases m y memory is at fault. To the editors o f these forgotten periodicals I tender m y apologies ; and to those listed below m y thanks for giving first hospitality to m y opinions. 2. Broadcast, Third Programme, B .B .C ., April, 1952. The passage from Fromentin (pp. 23-4) is from The Masters of Past Time translated by Andrew Boyle (London, J . M . Dent & Sons, Ltd., 19 13). The passage from W olfflins Principles of Art History (pp. 26-7) was translated by M . D. Hottinger (London, G. Bell & Sons, 1932). The passage from André Malraux, The Psychology of Art (pp. 28-9) was translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York, Bollingen Series and London, A. Zwemmer, 1949). 3. Art News Annual (New York), 1955. 4. Broadcast, Third Programme, B .B .C ., February, 19 51. 5. Broadcast, Third Programme, B .B .C ., November, 1949. Trans­ lations from Goethe : Wisdom and Experience, selected by Ludwig Curtins and translated by Hermann J . Weigand (New Y ork and London, 1949).

6. Introduction to Naum Gabo (London, Lund, Humphries & Co., 1957 )*

7. 8. 10. 11.

World Review. Broadcast, Northern Region, B .B .C . Architectural Review ; New Republic, November, 1953. Broadcast, European Service, B .B .C ., November, 1948.

12. Broadcast, Third Programme, B .B .C ., November, 1955. 13. London Magazine, March, 1957. 14. The Listener.

329

NOTES

15. Francis Bergen Memorial Lecture, Yale University, February 19, 1954; printed in Encounter. 16. The Adelphi, 1946. I have used the Henry Reeve text edited by Phillips Bradley and published by Alfred A. Knopf, N ew York, 2 vols., 1945. 17. B.B.C. Quarterly. 18. New Statesman & Nation, February 2, 1957; with additional para­ graphs from a review. 19. Presented by the Columbia Broadcasting System in honour o f the Bicentennial o f Columbia University, 1754-1954. Printed in

The London Magazine. 21. Broadcast, Thrd Programme, B .B .C ., February, 1947. Transla­ tions from The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, Edinburgh, 1916. 22. The Complete Plays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel, were published in Philadelphia by the J. B. Lippincott Company, and in London by Rupert Hart-Davis (1949). 23. Introductions to reprints o f The Wings of the Dove (London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948) and The Golden Bowl. 24. The Hudson Review (in part). Translations by R . F. C. Hull from The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (New Y ork and London, several volumes o f various dates); or from Psychological Reflec­ tions, an anthology from the writings o f C. G. Jung, selected and edited by Jolande Jacobi, Bollingen Series, N ew Y ork and Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1953. 25. Broadcast, Third Programme, B .B .C ., April, 1950. 26. Introduction to Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture and Drawings. (Lon­ don, Lund Humphries & Co., 1952.) 27. Broadcast, Third Programme, B .B .C ., 19 51, with additional material from a review in The New Republic 29. Congress o f the International Association o f Art Critics, Amster­ dam, 1951. 30. From an address to the English Society, Durham University. 31. The Architect's Yearbook, 1956, and Casabella (Milan). Statements by Mies van der Rohe from a volume edited by Philip G.

330

NOTES

Johnson and published by the Museum o f Modern Art, N ew Y ork, 1947. 32.

The Listener.

34. The Listener. A new edition o f On Growth and Form was published by the Cambridge University Press in 1942.

35. Encounter. 36. The New Republic, September, 1953. 37. Introduction to a British Council catalogue. 38. Introduction to Oscar Kokoschka by Edith Hoffmann (London, Faber & Faber, 1947). 39. Encounter. 40. The Kenyon Review.

Routledge Revivals

The Politics of the Unpolitical

In this collection of fourteen essays, first published in 1943, Herbert Read extends and amplifies the points of view expressed in his successful pamphlet To Hell with Culture, which has been reprinted here. The ‘politics of the unpolitical’ are the politics of those who strive for human values and not for national or sectional interests. Herbert Read defines these values and demands their recognition as a solvent of social and cultural crises’, and looks forward to the future with constructive vision. This book will be of interest to students of politics, history, and philosophy.

The Politics of the Unpolitical

Herbert Read

First published in 1943 by Routledge This edition first published in 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1943 Benedict Read All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 43001978 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

13: 13: 13: 13:

978-1-138-89111-1 (hbk) 978-1-315-70980-2 (ebk) 978-1-138-91407-0 (Set) 978-1-315-69097-1 (Set) (ebk)

Herbert Read

THE POLITICS OF THE UNPOLITICAL

R outled ge 1943

First published in March 1943 by George Routledge & Sons Ltd. 68—74 Carter Lane, London, E.C. 4

THIS BOOK IS PRODUCED IN COMPLETE CONFORMITY WITH THE AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARDS

Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable Ltd . at the University Press, Edinburgh

CONTENTS PAGE

1. T he P olitics

of the

2. T he C u l t

L eadership .

3. Culture 4.

To

Hell

5. A rt

of

and

L iberty Culture

with

in an

U npolitical .

7. M odern A rt 8. A Question

and

.

and

of

11. T he N ature

or

.

.

34

.

.

.

.

.

47

13. Civilization

.

of

.

.

D eath . .

U nder

and the S ense of

14. A S olemn Conclusion

.

v

.

74

Contemporary . .

81

.

.

.93

.

.100

.

.

.

.106

.

.

.

.112

.

.124

.

.132

.

.146

.

.152

R evolutionary A rt .

from

.1 3

.

A rtist

of the

12. A Civilization

.

F rench D ecadence

L ife

of

.

1

.

I mpotence . .

9. T he C ollective Patron 10. T he F reedom

.

.

E lectric Atmosphere

6. T he V ulgarity A rt . .

.

.

.

Quality .

.

NOTE N early all the essays collected in this volume were written

in war-time, or given as lectures to war-time audiences, but I have submitted the material to a good deal of revision and rearrangement to give it unity and continuity. The second essay has already seen separate publication as a pamphlet in the Democratic Order Series (Kegan Paul); the eleventh as a contribution to a symposium published eight years ago (Wishart). Two of the essays appeared in Horizon, others in The Studio, Now, Transformation, Message , and The Journal o f Education ; one was delivered as a lecture to the Fabian Society, another to the annual congress of the National Union of Students. There are shorter passages incorporated from other sources, and I gratefully tender my thanks to those editors who gave my opinions their first publicity. H. R.

vii

1

The Politics of the Unpolitical I f certain writers feel emancipated enough from all that is human—they would say intellectual enough—to continue to fu lfil under any circumstances whatever, the strange functions o f purely abstract thought, good luck to them. But those who can only conceive their role as writers to be a means o f experiencing more deeply and o f establishing more fully a mode o f existence which they want to be human, those who only write in order to feel themselves living integrally—such people no longer have the right to be disinterested. The trend o f events, and the evolu­ tion o f ideas, i f they run out their course, will lead straight to an unparalleled deformation o f the individual human being. Who­ ever gazes into the future which is being forged fo r us, and can there perceive the monstrous and denatured brother whom one will necessarily resemble, cannot react except by a revolt into Extreme egoism. It is this egoism which must now be rehabilit­ ated. To-day the problem o f the person effaces all others. The intelligence is placed in such circumstances thatfo r it disinterested­ ness and resignation come to the same thing. T hierry M aulnier , L a Crise est dans Vhomme (Paris, 1932).

X H E politics of the unpolitical—these are the politics of those who desire to be pure in heart: the politics of men without personal ambition; of those who have not desired wealth or an unequal share of worldly possessions; of those who have always striven, whatever their race or condition, for human values and not for national or sectional interests. For our Western world, Christ is the supreme example of A

2

The Politics of the Unpolitical

this unselfish devotion to the good of humanity, and the Sermon on the Mount is the source of all the politics of the unpolitical. But others who came before Christ and who may have influenced him elaborated their political ideals in pureness of heart—LaoTsu and Zeno, for example; and among Christ’s direct disciples we must include several philosophers and prophets nearer to our time, whose message is still insistent, and directly applicable to our present condition—Ruskin and Kropotkin, Morris and Tolstoy, Gandhi and Eric Gill. These modern representatives of what we might well call an ancient tradition form a closely interrelated body of thought: Gandhi, for example, has declared his debt to Ruskin and Tolstoy; Gill is a disciple of Morris, who was himself a disciple of Ruskin; Kropotkin was closely associated with Morris. Ruskin, in this succession, has a certain pre-eminence and originality: the vitality and trans­ forming power1 of his writings seem to come straight from his deep study of the Bible and from his prolonged meditation on the words of Christ; though he had in himself that rare power which Gandhi recognized as the specifically poetic power—his power “ to call forth the good latent in the human breast” . We are still far from estimating the full extent of this great man’s influence, but we can describe it as ethical and aesthetic rather than as religious or political. Ruskin’s eloquence did not bring into being either a new sect or a new party: his power is emotive and not calculative, and in this as in other respects he is nearly related to Rousseau, having for our own revolutionary period almost exactly the same significance as Rousseau had for the French Revolutionary period. We may still come to regard Unto this Last as the Contrat Social of a new society— as the Manifesto of those communists who renounce political action in their efforts to establish a new society. Of the six names mentioned, Morris was the only one who compromised on this political issue, but he never, to the end of his life, reconciled himself to the political methods advocated 1 u The one book that brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life was Unto this Last.”— Mahatma Gandhi : His Own Story (London, 1950), p. 163.

The Politics of the Unpolitical

3

by his friends. His lecture on “ The Policy of Abstention” (1887) is the best statement of the case against parliamentary action ever made in English, and it is a pity that it is so entirely forgotten by socialists to-day, and that it is only available in a limited and expensive publication.1 Towards the end of his life Gandhi also, it might be said, has made a tactical com­ promise of some kind with the politically minded leaders of the Congress Party. With them he has worked in close association since 1921, but always in a relationship which he himself has described as “ experimental” . For the whole of Gandhi’s life and teaching have been directed against parliamentary action: the doctrine of ahimsa, or non-violence, rejects the violence of majority government no less decisively than the violence of military oppression. But before accusing Gandhi of political compromise, it would be necessary to know in much more detail the motives which have determined his recent activities; we must wait for the outcome of his final attempt to liberate India. It is characteristic of these six teachers that although they would be included among the most revolutionary figures of the past hundred years, we do not spontaneously associate the word “ democracy” with any of them. Democracy is a very am­ biguous word, and its meanings vary from a sentimental sympathy for the poor and oppressed such as we get in Christian Socialism, to a ruthless dogma of proletarian dictatorship such as we have seen established in Russia. Our Six were all demo­ crats in the former sense; none of them was a democrat in the latter sense. But it is an important distinction, and if in the name of democracy we are more and more inevitably com­ pelled to commit ourselves to the political machinery of the state—to the nationalization of industry, to the bureaucratic control of all spheres of life and to the doctrine of the infallibility of the People (divinely invested in a unique Party)—then it is time to renounce the democratic label and seek a less equivocal name. My use of the word 1 William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, by May Morris (2 vols. Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1956), vol. ii. pp. 454-55.

4

The Politics of the Unpolitical

“ democracy” in the pages which follow is always subject to this consideration. A complete renunciation of the word is not easy: indeed, it has been deliberately made difficult for us, not only by the common usage of many ardent seekers after the truth, but also by the deliberate propaganda of the enemies of liberty. A common form of this Machiavellian sophistry consists in presenting your opponent with an apparently inescapable alternative—an “ either/or” which you accept as covering all the known facts. In our own time, in the sphere of world politics, this either/or is either democracy or fascism. Such an alternative seems to leave communism out of account, but not in reality. If you question people about the relation of com­ munism to democracy, the communists among them will tell you that communism is the extreme form of democracy, and the anti-communists will say that communism as it exists in Russia is merely another form of totalitarianism. Both these views are right. Communism is an extreme form of democracy, and it is totalitarian: but equally the totalitarian state in the form of fascism is an extreme form oh democracy. All forms of socialism, whether state socialism of the Russian kind, or national socialism of the German kind, or democratic socialism of the British kind, are professedly democratic: that is to say, they all obtain popular assent by the manipulation of mass psychology. All are actually majority governments. It has often been pointed out that in some ways the organization of society in Nazi Germany is much more thoroughly demo­ cratic than the organization of society in Great Britain or the United States. The German army is more democratic them the British army; the German industrial system is more demo­ cratic than the capitalist industrial system; German finance is more democratically controlled than finance in a plutocracy like ours. In Germany power and responsibility are not the prerogatives of birth or wealth, but are delegated to the holders of office in a party organization; and though such a system is strongly oppressive of individual freedom and therefore not democratic in the libertarian sense of the word, it is at least as

The Politics of the Unpolitical

5

democratic as a system which delegates the symbols of authority to a parliament and leaves the real power in the hands of those who control the financial system. National Socialism relates justice to service and group loyalty, which may not be defensible from an abstract ethical point of view; but it is at least an improvement on a system which confuses justice with the com­ petitive struggles of the jungle. It is mere hypocrisy on the part of democratic propagandists to pretend that Great Britain or the United States enjoy some mythical happiness or freedom which is denied to the Germans, the Russians, or the Italians. We “ enjoy” chaos just as they “ enjoy” order; we “ enjoy” licence, they “ discipline” ; the choice is in each case equally democratic. I am not suggesting that the democracies of Great Britain and Germany are identical. I am only pointing out that fascism in Germany is a form of democracy, even if an arbitrary one; it is only its extremism which accounts for its intolerance. It is to be observed, however, that political democracy even in Great Britain grows more intolerant day by day, and not merely under the pressure of war. The pressure of an economic system which inevitably proceeds towards monopoly—that is to say, towards a unified control designed to maintain the security of profits and wages—brings about a form of government which, however democratic in appearance, is essentially totali­ tarian. The weaknesses of democracy have been exposed by every political philosopher since Plato and Aristotle. Even Rousseau, the so-called Father of Democracy, rejected it as a system practicable for any society larger than a city state. The philo­ sophers, being men of intelligence, have never been able to suggest anything better than a dictatorship of the intelligentsia; but knowing how unlikely it is that such a dictatorship would be long tolerated by the ignorant masses, they have tried to disguise the inevitability of some alternative form of dictator­ ship under a picturesque formula. Historically the most effect­ ive of these is constitutional monarchy. It has always been recognized that a king might easily degenerate into a tyrant, but

6

The Politics of the Unpolitical

his natural life is limited and can at a pinch be artificially shortened; whereas the reign of an aristocracy, which is the next best possibility, has no mensurable limit: it can only be brought to an end by a civil war with all its miseries. The plain fact about democracy is that it is a physical im­ possibility. In an aggregation of millions of individuals such as we always have in modern society, we may get government o f the people and even government fo r the people, but never for a moment government by the people. But that is the essential test, for if a people does not govern itself, it is governed by somebody else; ipso facto it is no longer a democracy. This is not merely a logical quibble: democracy never has in fact existed in modern times. In our own country, for example, the monarchical system was overthrown by an oligarchy, and since the “ Great” Revolution of 1688 we have been governed by a succession of oligarchies, which might be Whig or might be Tory, might represent the landed interests or the moneyed interests, but never for a moment represented the people as a whole. In our own time a new oligarchy, the oligarchy of the trade unions, as exclusive a caste as ever aspired to power, has competed, luckily in vain, for the control of the state. It is now openly merging itself with the ascendant oligarchy of monopoly capitalism, to form what James Burnham has called “ the managerial class” All this is such an obvious interpretation of the historical facts that no one but a fool can deceive himself in the belief that democracy has ever been, or is ever likely to be, a reality in a modern industrial community. A constitutional monarchy as a cloak to competing sectional interests, as a symbol of unity in a society which would otherwise disintegrate from ruthless class warfare—that is the definition of the British constitution. The French Third Republic, the United States of America, and the Third Reich are all constitutions of the same character: they only differ in nomenclature and the trimming on their uniforms. Nevertheless this must be said (if only in justification of the lip service which so many of us have paid to democracy at various times): the political doctrine known as democracy has

The Politics of the Unpolitical

7

implied an important principle which, if it were not systematic­ ally misinterpreted and misunderstood,* would still justify us in using the word. This is the principle o f equality—an ethical doctrine, even a religious dogma. The equality of man implies many things, but never its literal meaning. No one believes that all m en are equal in capacity or talent: they are in fact outrageously diverse. But nevertheless, in Christian phraseology, they are all equal in the sight of God; and to affirm our common humanity is the first article of freedom. Whatever government we establish, whatever way of life we follow, all our faith is built on error unless we respect the rights of the person—that is to say, his right to be a person, a unique entity, “ human left, from human free” . This is the fundamental doctrine of a Christian community and of all other types of essential communism. It is even fundamental to the communism of Marx and Engels. But the equality acknowledged by democracy has in practice been some­ thing very different. God has been eliminated from the formula and we are left with a mere equalization or levelling of man with man. The spiritual measure has been discarded, and 'man is left to dangle in material scales; and for centuries the counter-weight has been a piece of silver. The only way in which democracy has been able to assess equality is in the terms of money, and it is the inability of the trade union movement, especially in Great Britain and Germany, to break away from this cash valuation of humanity which has, more than any other single factor, made the democratic working-class movement a futile diversion of revolutionary effort.1 1 Chiefly because it has prevented the workers from concentrating on the enhancement of their human dignity by the acquisition of responsibility for the direction and control of industry. But also because, as Franz Borkenau has shown so effectively, it has prevented the develop­ ment of international solidarity among the workers, for the wage-rate is directly dependent on the international market, not only of labour, but of commodities. For this reason the workers have been forced to realize that their interests are bound up, not only with the interests of their employers, but also with the competitive expansion of the national capital. Cf. F. Borkenau, Socialism, National or International (Routledge, 1942).

8

The Politics of the Unpolitical

By what values a man shall be judged absolutely we will not discuss here, but socially, as a man among his fellow-men, he should be judged by his creative ability, by his power to add to the common stock of goods. The value of a man is the value of the art he practises—whether it is the art of healing or the art of making music, the art of road-mending or the art of cooking. We might place first of all the art of making children, because on that the continuance of the human race depends. Procreation is perhaps the only art which is literally creative: the rest of the arts are merely inventive. For this and for reasons more strictly sociological, our social philosophy must begin with the family. The Pope is right, the Archbishop of Canterbury is right, Petain is right; the psycho­ analysts and the anthropologists are right. The Stalinists are wrong, the Nazis are wrong, our own democratic socialists and public school fascists are wrong, for they all exalt the state above the family. From whatever realistic angle we approach the problems of human life, the family is seen as the integral unit, without which there is no social organization, no social progress, no social order or human happiness. But we must insist that this is a sociological problem, and we must dissociate ourselves from those who think it can be solved by moral persuasion. Families are encouraged and sustained by security of life and property, decent housing, and an environment in which nurture and education can be natural and serene. Morality and religion may give their sanction to the social unit thus established: it is the fascist way of thinking to imagine that such sanctions are a substitute for economic action. The next essential group is the guild—the association of men and women according to their calling or practical function. (I obstinately retain the word “ guild” , in spite of its medieval and sentimental associations, because it is more human, and euphonious, than such expressions as “ collective” , “ co­ operative” , “ soviet” , etc.). The guild is a vertical and not a horizontal organization: it includes all persons associated together in the production of a particular commodity. The agricultural guild, for example, would include the drivers and

The Politics of the Unpolitical

9

mechanics who run the tractors: the engineers’ guild would include the men who make the tractors. But the vertical organization will be divided into regional and district units, and the main business of the guilds will always take place in the district u nits; decisions will arise out of personal contacts and not from the abstract and legalistic conclaves of a central bureau. Decentralization is thus also of the essence of this alternative to democracy. “ Real politics are local politics” , and power and authority should be devolved and segmented to the utmost limit of practicability. Only in such a way can the person— every person in society—be assured of an adequate sense of responsibility and human dignity. These qualities for the average person only emerge in his actual sphere of work and in his regional environment. The trend to centralization is a disease of democracy, and not, as is so often assumed, of the machine. It arises inevitably from the concentration of power in parliament, from the separation made between responsibility and creative activity, from the massing of production for greater profits and higher wages. T he evolution of democracy is parallel to the growth of centralization, and centralization is in no sense an inevitable process. The present war has revealed its extraordinary in­ efficiency. Have not the guerillas of Jugoslavia shown more initiative than the bureaucrats of Whitehall? The centraliza­ tion of control in a democratic state is clumsy, inhuman and inert. Incapable of thought, originality or enterprise, it can only act under the dictatorship of a Hitler or a Churchill—even the shrill voices of an exasperated Press have no effect on it. The health and happiness of society depend on the labour and science of its members; but neither health nor happiness is possible unless that work and science are directed and con­ trolled by the workers themselves. A guild is by definition autonomous and self-governing. Every man who is a master of his craft acquires thereby the right to a voice in the direction of his workshop. He also acquires security of tenure and of income. Indeed, his income and his tenure should depend on his qualifications rather than on the tally of his labours. He A*

10

The Politics of the Unpolitical

should begin to receive an income from the moment he has chosen a calling and been admitted as an apprentice to a trade or profession—which will be long before he has left school. His income will rise with his qualifications, and will depend entirely on his qualifications. Any rational society will natur­ ally make use of the services of a qualified worker, because it thereby increases the general well-being. If it fails to do so, that society is restricting production; and if such restriction is in the general interest, then society should pay the worker for his qualifications until they can be used, or otherwise pay the worker to train and acquire more immediately useful quali­ fications. The talents and acquired skill of a person are his property: his contribution to the common wealth. Society should be organized to secure the maximum utilization of its inherent wealth, and the productive organizations themselves will then decide how this common wealth is best increased— by machinery or handicraft, by large factories or small work­ shops, in towns or villages. The human values involved, and not an abstract and numerical profit, will be the criterion. Education, in such a society, is initiation. It is the revelation of innate capacities, the training of these capacities in socially useful activities, the disciplining of these activities to aesthetic and moral ends. Such a natural organization of society leaves little activity to the state as such. The state remains merely as the arbiter, to decide in the interests of the whole the conflicts which emerge in the parts. Such a function is already exercised by an independent judiciary, which might well extend its functions to cover the rights of the citizen as consumer. An Economic Council, constituted by much the same means as the Bench, would be necessary to safeguard society as a whole against a policy of restrictionism in any particular guild, to direct the general volume of production and to maintain a balanced output among its tributary guilds. It is difficult to see the necessity for any other central authority. The Board of Education, for example, would be in fact as well as in name a board of education—an autonomous body charged with the

The Politics of the Unpolitical

11

task of educating the nation’s children, governed and directed by those responsible for this task. The Bankers’ Guild would carry out the functions of the Treasury and the Banks, in so far as these functions are necessary in a society whose production is organized for use and not for profit. And so for all the economic functions of society. All this may seem to amount to a programme far more definite and dogmatic than the title of my essay promised, but to be unpolitical does not mean to be without politics: every attitude that is more than egoistic is to that extent social, and a social attitude is a political attitude. But it is one thing to have politics, and another thing to pursue them. It is one thing to have a faith, and another thing to trade on the credulity of the faithful. It is not the substance of politics we should object to, but the methods of the politician. We should refuse to invest our private interests in a public policy, for we know that what cannot be won by a change of heart, which is also a revolution of reason, is only won by cheats and impostors. Above all, we should realize by now that a new order will never be won by old pensioners, among whom are to be numbered the six hundred and fifteen pawns of our party system. Let me summarize the essential feature of a natural society: I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII.

The liberty of the person. The integrity of the family. The reward of qualifications. The self-government of the guilds. The abolition of parliament and centralized government. The* institution of arbitrament. The delegation of authority. The humanization of industry.

The social order thus envisaged is international because it is essentially pacific: it is pacific because it is essentially inter­ national. It aims at the production of world-wide plenty, at the humanization of work, and at the eradication of all economic conflicts. It may be, as some philosophers hold, that an aggressive instinct is innate in man, and that no organization

12

The Politics of the Unpolitical

of society can guard against its expression. In that case the world can only be made tolerable in the degree that this instinct can be controlled by reason. Reason has no chance if men are starving, or even if they have undue cause for envy. But granted an economy which is no longer competitive, in which the highest yield of production is wisely and evenly distributed among all mankind, then reason will have a chance. Instincts are not immutable: they can be transformed, sublimated, diverted into creative channels. Energy itself is not evil: it only becomes evil by being applied to evil ends. The world is waiting for a new faith—especially the youth of the world is waiting for a new faith. The old institutions, the old parties, are dead at the roots: they receive no refresh­ ment. The young men and women stand apart, indifferent, inactive. But do not let us mistake their indifference for apathy, their inactivity for laziness. Intellectually, they are very wide awake. But they have rejected our abstract slogans and the hollow institutions in which old men gibber about freedom, democracy and culture. They don’t want freedom if it means the freedom to exploit their fellow-men: they don’t want democracy if it means the ridiculous bagmen of Westminster; they don’t want culture if it means the intellectual dope of our academies and universities. They want to get rid of the profiteers and the advertising men, the petty tyrannical bureau­ crats and the screaming journalists, the clubmen and the still too numerous flock of rentiers for ever cackling over their threatened nest-eggs. They want a world that is morally clean and socially just, naturally productive and aesthetically beautiful. And they know they won’t get it from any of the existing parties, from any of the existing political systems. They hate fascism, they recoil from communism, and they despise demo­ cracy. They are groping towards a new faith, a new order, a new world. They are not a party and never will be a party: they have no name and will perhaps never have a name. But they will act, and onto the ruins of war they will cast the tarnished baubles and stale furnishings of those parliaments which brought death and despair to two successive generations of young men.

2 The Cult of Leadership I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies o f the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing o f water, and yet rending the hardest monuments o f man!s pride, i f you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and forem ost; against all big successes and big results ; and in favour o f the eternal forces o f truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top. William J ames, Letters, II, 90.

I n more than one of these essays I am concerned to show that from a certain point of view there is nothing to choose between fascism and democracy—that the economic and military antagonisms inherent in modern civilization involve both fascism and democracy alike and constitute irrecoverable encroachments on the physical and spiritual liberty of the person. The incursions of democracy are far more dangerous because they are far more deceitful. They are always accom­ panied by a smoke-screen of righteousness which hides their real nature and dimensions, even from many who are most salient in the attack. The very preamble of this menacing strategy is the cult of leadership, for this cult is essentially the denial of that principle of equality upon which alone a com­ munity of free individuals can be established.

13

14

The Politics of the Unpolitical

Fascism is a complex social phenomenon for which there is no single or simple explanation. It is obviously not a national phenomenon—it has triumphed in Latin Italy no less than in Nordic Germany, and some of its symptoms have been diagnosed in this country and the United States of America. I do not think it is worth wasting any time on the proposition—sedul­ ously disseminated as part of our war propaganda—that fascism is the inevitable development of certain historical trends in Germany. Germany was the weakest spot in the body of world politics, and for that reason it was most easily and most success­ fully infected by the disease. That weakness in the political structure of Germany can be explained historically, and German philosophers have quite naturally tended to find elaborate justifications for it. But if a disease like cancer attacks, say, the liver, it is quite unscientific to say that the liver is the cause of the cancer. Cancer is a disease of the whole body which may become manifest in the liver or any other “ weak spot” . I do not wish to dismiss the historical origins of fascism as of no importance: they do explain why the disease should develop in one nation rather than in another. History investigates the organic tissue of society just as histology investigates the organic tissue of the human body. History is always post mortem—it can tell us why this happened here. But it cannot explain the processes governing the immediate emotions of the collective organisms we call states or nations. The only science that can attempt such an explanation is psychology. It will be said that I have forgotten economics. Marxians in particular will be eager to point out that I have forgotten my dialectical materialism, but I would claim to have remembered my dialectics as well as my materialism. There is no doubt that economic factors have played an enormous part in the growth of fascism. Hitler himself is fond of tracing the origins of his success to the injustices of the Versailles Treaty, which was an undisguised expression of economic forces. He is not so fond of admitting what is equally true, that he was helped to power by certain groups of capitalists. But the fact that the most powerful of these capitalists, Thyssen, is an exile and

The Cult of Leadership

15

perhaps even a corpse, shows how little essential unity there was between the two parties. If Hitler represented any economic interest, it was that of the “ little m an” , the bankrupt shopkeeper, the small capitalist who had been put out of business by the big monopolies and chain stores.1 But even this sympathy was not genuine. The economic origins of fascism have been traced by more them one writer. In the period after the last war it was the middle class, and particularly the lower middle class, that found itself threatened by the sudden growth of monopolist capitalism. It developed an acute state of anxiety, even of panic: a psycho­ logical neurosis that led to a craving for leadership and a craving for submission. It was of this state of mind, this disease of the spirit, that Hitler took advantage. It is a development in mass psychology which has been very acutely analysed by Erich Fromm in his recently published book, The Fear o f Freedom .2 According to Dr. Fromm, Hitler succeeded so well because he was able to combine the qualities of a resentful petty-bourgeois, with whom the middle classes could identify themselves, emotionally and socially, with those of an oppor­ tunist ready to serve the interests of the German industrialists and Junkers. In actual fact, Hitler has not fulfilled his promise to the middle classes—or only to some few of them. But now that does not matter, because he has the excuse of the war for his failure. This is not the place, nor would I at any time feel competent, to undertake an analysis of the economic principles of the National Socialist movement. Some people—Dr. Fromm, for example— believe that such principles do not exist ; that the only principle professed by the Nazis is a radical opportunism* I think this is a dangerous simplification. It is true that fascism is not basically an expression of economic forces: to 1 “ We want our middle class, which is becoming poorer and poorer and whose means of livelihood are cut off more and more by large business concerns, to be placed in a position where they can have their share in these goods.” —Hitler in an interview with a representative of the Associated Press, 1952, 2 London (Kegan Paul), 1942..

16

The Politics of the Unpolitical

accept that view would be to accept the Marxist interpretation of history, and never for a moment, in theory or in practice, has Hitler done that. His movement is an attempt to deny this principle, and to put in its place a principle of the par­ ticular endowment of races, and in the final analysis of indi­ viduals within the race. Achievement is the result of specific genius or capacity and not of blind forces. Let me quote a key passage from one of Hitler’s own speeches: 44The greatness of a people is the result not of the sum of all its achievements but in the last resort of the sum of its outstanding achievements. Let no one say that the picture produced as a first impression of human civilization is the impression of its achievement as a whole. This whole edifice of civilization is in its foundations and in all its stones nothing else than the result of the creative capacity, the achievement, the intelligence, the industry of individuals: in its greatest triumphs it represents the great crowning achievement of individual god-favoured geniuses, in its average accomplish­ ment the achievement of men of average capacity, and in its sum doubtless the result of the use of human labour-force in order to turn to account the creations of genius and of talent. So it is only natural that when the capable intelligences of a nation, which are always in a minority, are regarded as only of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly subjected to the majority, and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not the rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy. Rule of the people means rather that a people should allow itself to be governed and led by its most capable individuals, those who are born to the task, and not that a chance majority which of necessity is alien to these tasks should be permitted to administer all spheres of life.” 1 1 From a speech delivered to the Industry Club in Diisseldorf, 27th January 1932. From The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, trans. by Norman H. Baynes (Oxford, 1942), vol. i. pp. 784-5.

The Cult o f Leadership

17

This is a classic formulation of the doctrine of leadership. In effect it is the doctrine of power politics, and power politics have always shown an extreme contempt for economics and even for reason. Civilization may owe its highest achievements to individual god-favoured geniuses, but there has always been something haphazard in their incidence, and it is also true that civilization owes its darkest hours to evil geniuses who have been equally individual. A secure civilization cannot be based on such a gamble, and it is only individuals who hope to benefit from such a gamble who erect it into a historical principle. In this way they hope to disguise their naked craving for power, which is the fundamental factor in all their thoughts and actions. This craving for power is an irrational force—it can no more be explained by economic factors than a craving for drink or for drugs, though, like these cravings, it can be encouraged or thwarted by economic factors. The necessary analysis of that craving for power, which is the basic factor in the psychology of fascism, has been done, most convincingly in my opinion, by the writer just quoted, Dr. Fromm. Any such analysis involves the use of more technical terms than are justified in the present context, but let me try to summarize Dr. Fromm’s argument very briefly. It begins dialectically enough with economic and historical factors—with the historical struggle of man to gain freedom from the political, economic and spiritual shackles which bound him through long centuries of darkness and despair. It shows that time after time man has been afraid to use the freedom he has gained, and has fallen back on some alternative system of control. He has submissively held up his wrists to a new gaoler—some new authoritarian religion, like Calvinism; some new economic tyranny, like capitalism. The individual, it seems, is afraid to be alone. “ To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration, just as physical starva­ tion leads to death” . The individual craves for relatedness, for union and, Fromm points out, “ even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however

18

The Politics of the Unpolitical

absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation” . Dr. Fromm then quotes a very effective passage from Balzac: “ But learn one thing, impress it upon your mind which is still so malleable: man has a horror of aloneness. And of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible. The first hermits lived with God. They inhabited the world which is most populated, the world of the spirits. The first thought of man, be he a leper or a prisoner, a sinner or an invalid, is: to have a companion of his fate. In order to satisfy this drive which is life itself, he applies all his strength, all his power, the energy of his whole life.” 1 The true Solution of this problem implies communism, but communism in the original sense of the word, as used by anarchists, and not in the sense used by Marxians and their opponents. I mean communism conceived as a spontaneous association of individuals for mutual aid. But lacking this rational conception, man has only been able to get rid of his isolation by desperate means—by those psychological obsessions which we call sadism and masochism. Sadism is the unconscious impulse to acquire unrestricted power over another person, and to test the fullness of this power by destroying that other person. Masochism is the unconscious impulse to dissolve oneself in the power of another person and to participate in his annihilating power. Fascism is the combined expression of these two unconscious impulses—its peculiarity resides in this ambivalence, this continual shifting from one impulse to the other, from sadistic destructiveness to masochistic submissiveness. There is no need to illustrate these characteristics from the behaviour of the fascist parties in Germany and Italy: that has been done in hundreds of books, and Hitler’s own book, Mein K am p f is at once a case-book and a text-book of these psycho­ logical aberrations. The Nazi leaders are driven by an over­ whelming lust for power—that fact needs no demonstration. The Nazi followers are driven by an equally overwhelming lust to surrender themselves to this power. 1 Op., cit.y pp. 15-16,

The Cult of Leadership

19

Fromm’ s thesis, then, is that these sadistic and masochistic trends in modern history explain the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone, to make use of the freedom he has gained. Accepting this as a convincing explanation of the psychological forces underlying fascism, let us now consider whether there do not exist among us certain tendencies of the same nature—tendencies which, if not checked, will inevitably lead to fascism, whatever the outcome of the present war. The most prevalent manifestation of these latent tendencies is the universal demand for leadership, a demand which, not only by implication, but even in expression, is identical with the Nazi doctrine. Schools are urged to train boys for “ the tasks of leadership” , students are asked to develop the qualities of leadership, selection boards make these same qualities the criterion of their choice of candidates for commissions in the army, navy and air force. Even workers are urged to select their leaders—their shop stewards and shift leaders. In the political sphere we have adopted the Fuhrerprinzip without qualification. We don’t call Mr. Churchill our “ Fiihrer” , but we give him all the attributes of a Fiihrer, and he has not shown any unwillingness to accept them. Before we examine what is involved in this general desire for leadership, let us distinguish a quality which is often con­ fused with leadership, and is perhaps always incorporated in it. I mean the quality of individual initiative. This is funda­ mentally the impulse to originate, to construct, and, in relation to other individuals, the desire to distinguish oneself. *It is a self-expressive impulse, and has nothing in common with the will to power. Now this realization of the self—the expression of the unique­ ness of the individual—is, as I shall emphasize presently, one of the most essential features of an organic community, and must be preserved at all costs. But the individual can only realize himself in the community; or rather, the difference between realizing oneself in the community and realizing oneself in spite o f the community is precisely the distinction I want to make. In the one case, the uniqueness of the individual

20

The Politics of the Unpolitical

becomes part of the pattern of society; in the other case, the individual remains outside the pattern, an unassimilated and therefore essentially neurotic element. What I think emerges from these considerations is that the failure of democracy to realize an integrated pattern of society is largely due to its reliance on leaders. Through generations we have spent our blood and expended our utmost efforts on getting rid of the leadership of priests and kings, aristocrats and captains of industry, only to find that it has all been futile, only to find ourselves with the same infantile longing to be led. We talk about the brotherhood of man, about comradeship and co-operation, and these phrases do describe the deepest instincts of humanity; but in actual fact we are children seeking a father, brothers and sisters full of mutual jealousy and suspicion, repeating on a national scale the neurotic conflicts of the family. It may be argued that, however beautiful they may be as ideals, brotherhood, comradeship and co-operation are im­ practicable modes of conducting the business of a state irTpeace and war—especially in war. We are told that in war we must have discipline, and discipline implies command and obedience, commanders and obeyers, officers and privates. But in the past ten years the falseness of that assumption has been clearly demonstrated. It was clearly demonstrated in the last war, though victory had the unfortunate effect of making it un­ necessary for us to learn the lessons of that conflict. But those lessons, which received a striking confirmation in the Spanish Civil War, were not lost on our enemies, and their successes in Poland, in France, in Greece and everywhere except in Russia, where they came up against an army that had learned the same lesson, is due precisely to what might be called the democratiza­ tion of the army.1 1 The Russian evidence is not unequivocal : cf. General Drassilnikov, in an article quoted by A. Werth in Moscow, ’42, p. 85 : u Presentday warfare requires such enormous moral tension that only the most firmly disciplined troops can face it, and maintain their fighting power intact. That is why such drastic steps have had to he taken towards the final liquidation of the pseudo-democratic traditions in the army, traditions which only undermined discipline.” But, according to Werth

The Cult of Leadership

21

Several independent witnesses have confirmed the genuine­ ness of this process of democratization in the German army. Shirer, for example, in his Berlin Diary, reports that— “ Few people who have not seen it in action realize how different this army is from the one the Kaiser sent hurtling into Belgium and France in 1914. . . . The great gulf between officers and men is gone in this war. There is a sort of himself, the situation is now very different : 44 Since the war began, and since this article was written, the political commissars have, of course, had their power restored ; though not at the expense of the officers. Roughly speaking, the officer is, as before, responsible for the military operations ; but the political commissar is the man who is in charge of the troops’ morale, and, incidentally, of the officers’ morale.” But the commissars were finally abolished by Stalin’s decree on 11th October 1942. Commenting on this news, the Times special corre­ spondent in Moscow observed : 44 When the system of political commissars was introduced, the young Red Army was officered by many men whose loyalty to the revolutionary regime was suspect, and who were only retained in the army because of the shortage of trained officers. Since then, however, the Red Army’s military academies have created commanders who are com­ pletely identified with the regime and whose thoughts and language are the same as those of the men they command [my italics]. There will still be a need for political education in the army. As before, the Red Army man will be told the significance of the operations in which he is playing a part, however small. But the division of duties that was summed up in M. Stalin’s phrase of 1919 that the regimental commissar is the father and soul of the regiment, while the commander is its will, will no longer be so precise. The best of the present commissars will become commanders, and all Red Army commanders will have political aides subordinate to them.” On the same date (12th October) the Times reported a further development in the German army, designed to remove the final traces of class distinction between the officers and their men : 44 According to an announcement by the High Command, candidates for commissioned rank in the German Army need not in future hold a school leaving certificate or have attended a particular type of school. 44 The essential qualifications, in addition to 4 character and pure Aryan blood ’ , are to be 4 worthiness for army service, readiness to serve Nationalist-Socialist Germany and its Fiihrer, and idealism 44 The German News Agency remarks that this decision follows Hitler’s recent declaration that 4every man in the National-Socialist army carries a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack ’.”

The Politics of the Unpolitical

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equalitarianism. I felt it from the first day I came in contact with the army at the front. The German officer no longer represents—or at least is conscious of representing—a class or caste. And the men in the ranks feel this. They feel like members of one great family. Even the salute has a new meaning. German privates salute each other, thus making the gesture more of a comradely greeting than the mere recognition of superior rank. In cafes, restaurants, dining-cars, officers and men off duty sit at the same table and converse as men to men. This would have been un­ thinkable in the last war and is probably unusual in the armies of the West, including our own. In the field, officers and men usually eat from the same soup kitchen.” 1 I do not want to enter into an academic discussion of the distinction between discipline and morale. We all know that discipline depends on the exercise of authority: it has been defined as “ the enforced obedience to external authority” and nothing can disguise its bi-polar nature and internal strain.. It is sometimes said that if discipline is thoroughly enforced it becomes instinctive, but that is not borne out either by psycho­ logical investigations or by military experience. It thus comes about that even while maintaining an undemocratic structure in the army, and an undemocratic structure of society, the present tendency of all governments is to rely on the creation of morale, in the civilian population no less than in the armed forces. Morale is a group feeling: it is a feeling of cohesion, of unity in the face of danger, and at present it is normally only brought about in conditions of danger, when the group is threatened with extinction. These conditions are brought about, not only by war, but by threats of starvation or subjugation. The morale of a trade union on strike, for example, depends not so much on political consciousness, the ideological struggle for better conditions of work and of life, as on the direct feeling of group solidarity in the face of the insecurity occasioned by the stoppage of work. 1 William L. Shirer,

Berlin Diary (London,

1941), pp. 545-6.

The Cult o f Leadership

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What is admirable in the past and desirable for the future is a form o f society which succeeds in maintaining morale—as distinct from discipline—under conditions of peace. The feeling of relatedness, of union, which we all experience spontaneously when threatened by invasion, or air raids, or the blockade, should be realized for positive purposes, for the creation of a just society, a natural way of life. There again I think the fascists have seized on an essential psychological truth—and distorted it by using it for their own ends. They realized that a society can only be built up on the principle of association. They therefore had to abolish the existing organizations, because they were pacifist and international—that is to say, essentially diffusionist—and to replace them by new organiza­ tions designed to canalize the national spirit. But they realized that this could not be accomplished by coercion. The whole of their educational system, their youth movement, their labour front and their party organization has no other aim but the creation of a spirit stronger than discipline. But the morale thus achieved is not limited to the biological function of group preservation; it is then extended to an ideological function of group expansion, group assertion, group domination. A dis­ tortion thus arises from the fact that the spontaneous origin and organic growth of association is thus obliterated, being replaced by an artificial and super-imposed conception of the state, by a new order which is essentially a planned order. We should always clearly distinguish between the aims and the methods of fascism. The aims are entirely undemocratic, irrational and irresponsible. But some of the methods—by no means all— are more democratic, more psychologically effective, and altogether more successful, than the methods hitherto used by the democracies. Even on the question of leadership it seems to m e that the Nazis in particular avoid the psycho­ logical crudities which we not only attribute to them, but innocently imitate. It seems to me—and I am mainly relying on what H itler himself has written in Mein K am pf and on his later speeches and personal behaviour—that in their realiza­ tion of the supreme importance of morale the Nazis have

24

The Politics of the Unpolitical

adopted a conception of leadership which is radically different from that entertained in our public schools and military forces. The difference is rather a subtle one, but at least we must give Hitler some credit for subtlety. In his well-known work on Psychology and Primitive Culture, Professor Bartlett discusses the relationship of the chief to the primitive group, and points out that— “ it is a relationship in which leadership does not depend mainly upon domination or assertion, but upon a ready susceptibility to the thoughts, feelings and actions of the members of the group. The chief, that is, expresses the group rather than impresses it. This is a kind of relationship, entirely different, it seems to me, from dominance and assertiveness. . . .” “ A ready susceptibility to the thoughts, feelings and actions of the members of the group” —this phrase might be taken as an apt description of the very quality which Hitler claims to possess.1 No unprejudiced observer of his career can deny

1 u Owing to the peculiar circumstances of my life, I am perhaps more capable than anyone else of understanding and realizing the nature and the whole life of the various German castes. Not because I have been able to look down on this life from above but because I have participated in it, because I stood in the midst of this life, because Fate, in a moment of caprice or perhaps fulfilling the designs of Providence, cast me into the great mass of the people, among common folk. Because I myself was a labouring man for years in the building trade and had to earn my own bread. And because for a second time I took my place once again as an ordinary soldier amongst the masses, and because then life raised me into other strata (Schichten) of our own people, so that I know these, too, better than countless others who were born in these strata. So Fate has perhaps fitted me more than any other to be the broker—I think I may say the honest broker— for both sides alike” (Speech of 10thMay 1933 : op. cit., vol. i. p. 862). It is this pose of “ honest broker ” which distinguishes Hitler from most of the leaders of the past and all those of the present. The democratic leaders (Churchill, Roosevelt) generally come from the upper strata, but if they do come from the same level as Hitler (Ramsay MacDonald, for example) they either make a virtue of their origins or despise them. Hitler is unique, I think, in trying to maintain this pose of “ an inde­ pendent man ” .

The Cult of Leadership

25

Hitler a certain representative character—though we must remember that a demagogue will always begin by creating the dissatisfaction which he then sets out to exploit. He earns his easiest honours by alleviating imaginary ills. But it is no ordinary faculty which enables a man to do that. Again let me emphasize that we are concerned with an instrument and not with the use to which it is put. Intuition, to use for the moment the term Hitler himself seems to favour—intuition may be an admirable quality in a rational -human being, a beneficent aid to the poet, the scientist and the engineer; but the same quality combined with a sadistic craving for power becomes a destructive force. I repeat, therefore, that we must not underestimate the methods, as opposed to the motives of fascism. The motives are the individual lust for power and the racial lust for world domination; but the methods, which include war, persecution, brutality and bestiality of all kinds, also include the establish­ ment of group unity and devotion to a common ideal—features which we assume are essentially democratic. “ I f ” , says Hitler towards the end of Mein Karnpf “ if in its historical develop­ ment the German people had possessed this group unity as it was enjoyed by other peoples, then the German Reich would to-day probably be mistress of the globe.” And he says elsewhere in the same book that with the Aryan the instinct for self-preservation had reached its noblest form “ because he willingly subjects his own ego to the life of the community, and, if the hour should require it, he also sacrifices i t ” . If only, one cannot help thinking, such a feeling for unity and self-sacrifice could have been devoted to something nobler than the conquest of individual power and racial domination. But that is to ignore the reality of the neurosis from which the lust for power springs. The extraordinary success of Hitler is due to the fact that his sado-masochistic impulses, w'hich are explained by his personal history—the frustrated artist, divorced from his own class and rejected by the class he aspired to, the typical isolated, declassed individual in whom the sadistic

26

The Politics of the Unpolitical

neurosis develops most strongly—the extraordinary success of such an individual is due to the fact that his personal neurosis is representative of the collective neurosis of a nation which has also been frustrated in its desire for expansion, its desire for a superior position in the society of nations. In their masochistic longings such a people will eagerly submit to the absolute power of a leader and will only require one liberty in return— the liberty to satisfy the sadistic side of their neurosis by the persecution of some minority, some degraded class. Hence the important part played by anti-semitism in the evolution of German fascism. I hope I have shown that a dangerous ambiguity lurks in this cry for leadership, this reliance on a popular leader, which characterizes democratic no less than fascist communities in time of war. It is, I believe, not merely a sign of weakness, a sign of war-weariness: it is positively the symptom of a latent state of fascism. If democracy is to maintain its essential difference from fascism, it must not compromise on this question of leadership. Leadership, in the sense of the dominance of the community by a single figure, or a minority, is the acknowledged principle of fascism. What, of course, remains in doubt is whether democracy, as a militant organization, can dispense with this principle. It seems obvious, from the conduct and course of the present war, that it cannot.1 What we need, we are told every day, is more and better leadership. But what this demand involves is a closer and closer approximation to fascism. The fascists alone have evolved an efficient form of leadership: efficient leadership ismfascism. Opposed to the principle of leadership there is nothing but the principle of equality. Equality is absolute, too; it is a mathematical term, expressing exact quantities. It does not admit of compromise, and whenever I hear a person tampering with this principle in the name of efficiency, or of ability, then I know I am in the presence of a fascist. You may say if you like that equality is not rational—that since people are not born equal, not equally 1 It was a presentiment of this fact which drove many genuine democrats in America into the isolationist camp.

The Cult o f Leadership

27

endowed by nature,1 that therefore they do not deserve to live equally. B u t I do not claim that the principle of equality is a rational doctrine. On the contrary, it is an irrational dogma, a mystique. It lays down, precisely because people are born unequal, unequally endowed, they should in the common interest acknowledge a common denominator—a standard of citizenship to which all can aspire, and beyond which none shall venture. I say quite deliberately that unless we are inspired by that mystical or' mythical idea of social equality, we can not and we do not believe in the brotherhood of man. If this dogma is accepted, the practical question remains: how is it given expression in the organization of a modern community? Bernard Shaw, who sees the necessity for this dogma, suggests that it can only be given practical expression in equality of incomes. That, of course, is to remain bound to the concept of economic man, which is inevitable in an oldfashioned Fabian socialist like Shaw. Equality of income might well be the outward expression of equality of status, but in what other, in what more fundamental ways, can equality be expressed? It is curious that we should have to search for an answer to this question, because in spite of economic and social inequalities we in England have in theory and to some extent in practice enjoyed what we call “ equality before the law” . Laws might be unjust, and the expression of social prejudices rather than of natural equity; nevertheless, for centuries a fair attempt has been made to administer them equally to all 1 Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, argues that the love of equality is a natural expression of the instinct of expansion. u A thousand arguments may be discovered in favour of inequality, just as a thousand arguments may be discovered in favour of absolutism. And the one insuperable objection to inequality is the same as the one insuperable objection to absolutism : namely, that inequality, like absolutism, thwarts a vital instinct, and being thus against nature, is against our humanization.” But a further remark shows that his argument is essentially the same as the one used above : 61 On the one side, in fact, inequality harms by pampering ; on the other, by vulgarizing and depressing. A system founded on it is against nature, and in the long run breaks down.”— Mixed Essays (1879).

28

The Politics of the Unpolitical

men.1 In fact, you cannot divorce the idea of law from the idea of equity, and that is such a commonplace—such a logical concep­ tion , as some might say; such a tradition, as others might say—that we fail to appreciate the fact that it is by no means an inevitable state of affairs. Already under fascism we see a contrary con­ ception of law emerging—one law for the Germans and another law for the races they have subjugated; one law for Aryans and another law for Jews. More recently Hitler has secured the formal abrogation of legal procedure in Germany, and has made his personal will superior to the idea of equity. The social hierarchy which we accept almost as a natural order is just as unnatural and illogical as one law for the rich and another for the poor, or as one law for the Germans and another for the conquered Poles. There is no natural aristocracy— though there can be an unnaturally cultivated aristocracy, a pedigree stock of human beings no less than a pedigree stock of cattle. The upper classes and the middle classes, the upper middle and the lower middle and the working classes—none of these is a class ordained by nature*—they are all expressions of economic inequalities, inequalities which have sometimes lasted for generations. They are continually disturbed, not only by shifting fortunes, but by that displacement which sociologists call the circulation of elites, a process which merely expresses the biological fact that luxury and laziness will in the end debilitate the class which enjoys them, and that this class will sink and its place be taken by a class which has led a healthier life. But the circulation of elites—an idea very popular with fascist philosophers—is also not a natural phenomenon. At least, it is no more “ natural” than the circulation of water in a boiling kettle: it is an expression of inequalities in social life —inequalities of work and nourishment and recreation. Equalize the temperature of water and it no longer circulates; 1 In so far as they are administered ! I am well aware that some people cannot afford u to go to law ” , but this injustice is economic and not legal. It should also be clear that I am referring to law as adminis­ tered in Great Britain, and not to the administration of law in, for example, India.

The Cult of Leadership

29

equalize social conditions, let everybody lead a healthy life, and then you will no longer get a circulation of elites. And there the fascist philosopher—and some philosophers who call themselves democrats—think they have got you. Ah, they say, no circulation—that means stagnation! And stagna­ tion means decay! War is justified by such people solely on these grounds—that it prevents social stagnation and encourages the emergence of vital stock. A convincing rhetorical attitude can be struck if the circulation metaphor is maintained. But it is merely a figure of speech, a myth. Why all this bubble bubble, toil and trouble? Does not nature offer us alternative metaphors of balance and symmetry, of poise and repose ? The best fruit grows on the sheltered wall. The deepest waters are still. To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. How easy it is to find, or invent, convincing metaphors of exactly the opposite tenor. Chinese philosophy is full of them. The universe is full of them. I know that the scientist can present a frightful picture of disintegrating worlds, of exploding suns and cooling planets, of nature red in tooth and claw. But the most fundamental discoveries of science are discoveries of significant design: the periodicity of the elements, the structure of molecules, the universal laws underlying organic forms,— these are facts which any reasonable man will make the basis of a positive philosophy. Lao Tsu, the Great Chinese sage, formulated three rules of political wisdom, which required: (1) abstention from aggressive war and capital punishment, (2) absolute simplicity of living, and (3) refusal to assert active authority. These three rules express the true meaning of social equality. They imply that no man has the right to assert his authority over another man, and that likewise no nation has the right to assert its authority over another nation. If no such right is exercised, by indi­ viduals or by nations, then a state of political equality can exist. As for the second rule, which enjoins simple living, that too is not remote from the concept of equality. For the economic complexity of the modern world, involving economic hier­ archies and inequalities of income, involving an economic

30

The Politics of the Unpolitical

conception of man himself—living man reduced to a commodity, like frozen mutton—this is entirely due to the feverish lust for luxuries. The rule does not deny us plenty: only he that is frugal is truly able to be profuse, says Lao Tsu. Indeed, unless there is plenty, equality can only be maintained by authority; and since we renounce authority, we should ensure plenty. Trotsky once expressed the whole truth in a vivid way: If there is a scarcity of goods in the shops, people will form queues; and if there are queues in the streets, you will have to have police to keep them in order. Law, we might say, is-an expres­ sion of want. But it is time I began to draw these observations to some conclusion. I have been questioning the cult of leadership: I assert that it is a denial of the principle of equality. As a counterpart to this cult of leadership we find a state of social irresponsibility, to which I might have devoted more space. But the symptoms of submissiveness, of lethargy and apathy, need no description. I would like to point out, however, that they are not confined to the politically ignorant— I know of no more disastrous example of irresponsibility than the behaviour of the trade unions during the past thirty years. Not only have they repeatedly failed to achieve international unity among the workers of the world: they have been afraid to assume the responsibilities within their grasp at home. I have myself heard one of the leading trade union officials from Transport House declare that the unions had not the necessary managerial ability to control their own industries, and that therefore their policy must be one of compromise and joint control with the employers. That is one instance of what I mean by irresponsibility, and perhaps it deserves a stronger word. Collective responsibility is the alternative to leadership, and the counterpart of equality. If each individual in the social body is a responsible member of that body there is no need for external control. The body acts as an organic whole, and acts spontaneously. The members of the body-politic are, of course,

The Cult of Leadership

31

differentiated according to their function: one is a farmer and another an engineer, one a nurse and another a doctor; and among these members are some whose function is to co­ ordinate others. These are the organizers, the administrators and the managers who are essential to a complicated industrial society; but I see no reason why the co-ordinator should be more highly placed or more highly paid than the originator, the creator, the worker. The manager owes his present status and prestige, not to the nature of his work, but to his immediate control of the instruments of production. In any natural society he would be as unobtrusive as a railway signalman in his box.1 I personally believe that life should be immensely simplified — that much of the complexity of modern society is merely the final complication of the sickness we call civilization. But even our elaborate society can be a functional society, and I see no reason why all functions, which are equally necessary to the health of society, should not have social equality. That, at any rate, is the proper meaning of communism, and in this sense communism, the communism of Kropotkin and not that of Marx, is the only alternative to fascism. Granted all this, my critics will ask: how will you carry on? Somebody must formulate plans, decide on policy, make decisions on behalf of the whole community. I agree, and would now like to recall the distinction between two kinds of leadership made by Professor Bartlett, which I quoted earlier in this essay; between the kind of leader who impresses the group by asserting his authority, and the kind who expresses the group by being susceptible to their thoughts, feelings and desires. It is this second kind of leader, and only this kind of leader, who has a place in a community of free people. And who is the leader who expresses the thoughts, feelings and desires of the people—who but the poet and artist? That is 1 The pretensions of this group to form a new governing class, so ably analysed by James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution (London, 1942), are an inevitable consequence of the cult of leadership in a machine civilization.

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

the conclusion I have been leading up to. It is not a new idea —it is the conclusion that Plato came to, and that Shelley revived in this country: the idea that it is the man of imagina­ tion, the poet and philosopher above all, but equally the man who can present ideas in the visual images of painting and sculpture or through the still more effective medium of drama —the idea that it is this individual whom society should accept as its only leader. Not, of course, at his own valuation. Plato pointed out certain dangers that were to be avoided at all costs. For there are good artists and bad artists, and bad artists are almost more dangerous than bad politicians. Any fruitful analysis of Hitler, for example, must begin with the bad artist rather than the ambitious politician. A free people must therefore be a highly critical people. Such a people does not exist at present, in this or any other country, and it can only be brought into existence by an education and an environment which places first things first—which discounts power and money and competition and all the evil distortions they cause in our social structure and educational ideals. The evil which is among us, woven into the substance of our life, making us unworthy of equality and incapable of achieving a true democracy, is the evil of assertiveness—the assertiveness of the father, the assertiveness of the teacher, the assertiveness of the foreman and the boss, of the capitalist and the statesman. But it is the assertiveness exercised on the child which is the main evil, for this destroys the unfolding sensibility on which taste and judgment should rest, and plants in its stead the seeds of sadism and masochism. Consider only the assertiveness of the teacher, who significantly claims the title of master. He is the first model for the bully, and the early inspiration of the tyrant. It is he who passes on his creed of leadership to the captain of the team and the head of the class: it is he who poisons innocent minds with pride and ambition. How can we expect a libertarian society when our educational system is throughout organized on essentially authoritarian principles? L et us introduce equality into our schools, ask our teachers to be guides and comrades rather than masters and headmasters,

The Cult o f Leadership

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and then we shall at least lay the foundations of a community organically free. “ No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of a free­ born man.” Those words of Plato should be carved above the doors of all our schools and universities, for they express the only condition on which a community of free men can be founded.

fi

3

Culture and Liberty You can never get me to regard freedom as synonymous with political liberty. What you call freedom, I call freedom s; and what I call the struggle fo r freedom is nothing but the constant, living assimilation o f the idea o f freedom. Who possessesfreedom otherwise than as something to be striven fo r possesses it only as a thing without life or spirit, fo r the idea o f freedom has always this quality, that it constantly expands as one assimilates it, so that i f during the struggle one pauses to say : Now I have it ! he merely shows that he has lost it. But to have just this dead kind —a certain static view o f freedom—is characteristic o f state organizations; and it is just this that I have called worthless. I bsen , Letter to George Braudes, 1871.*I

TTH E connection between culture and liberty is not rhetorical, as Plato’s words, quoted at the end of the last essay, might suggest, but vital and organic. That is the general conclusion I shall try to establish in the present essay, but before reaching it I must show, first, what meaning I attach to the word culture; secondly, how culture is related to the kind of society we live in, or intend to live in—and that will involve a definition of liberty; and, thirdly, why culture is incompatible with the kind of society which has been set up by the totalitarian states. What do we mean by this word culture? That is rather an embarrassing question for the Englishman. He is not very conscious of his culture, and rather despises people who are. It will be remembered that in the last war a good deal of insular propaganda centred round the German word 44Kultur” . We English felt, not merely that it was ridiculous to spell the word 34

Culture and Liberty

35

with a “ K ” , but that Kultur with a “ K ” was altogether phoney. And in a sense I think we are right to be suspicious of all this talk about culture, and in the next essay in this volume I shall do my best to dispose of it. For the odd thing about culture is, that the world is not generally conscious of it until it is dead. We can talk about the culture of Greece or Rome, of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance; in each case there are visible traces of it which have survived the test of time. But to talk about the culture of the British Empire, for example, that doesn’t seem possible; nor, even if we spell the word with an English “ C ” , does it seem possible for us to talk about the culture of modern Germany. Culture is, in fact, a slow product of the organic process we call history, and it is very difficult to catch it on the move. For example, contemporary efforts to estimate the greatness of poets and painters are almost invariably wrong. And if occa­ sionally an age does honour the right man, it generally does so for the wrong reason. In our dumb instinctive way I think we as a nation have always realized these truths, and for that reason we have not tried to define the nature of our culture. I dis­ covered this in a very practical way when some time ago I undertook to compile an anthology which would express, through the words of our own great poets, philosophers and statesmen, the quality of English culture, of the English attitude to life.1 Though it was comparatively easy to find passages in which our writers had praised the English landscape, and even described the characters of English men, and though the historical mission of England has often been defined, there is surprisingly little that shows any consciousness of our native genius as it is expressed in our literature and drama, our paint­ ing and music. By comparison, the literatures of Germany and of France abound in such self-examinations, self-criticisms and self-satisfaction. I am not going to make the mistake of confusing culture with what, in a narrower sense, we call the arts. Culture is something wider than art—and something more intangible. 1

The English Vision (Routledge,

1939).

56

The Politics of the Unpolitical

When yon have examined all the architecture and drama, the oratory and philosophy, the poetry, painting and music of a nation, even then you have not exhausted the meaning of the word. To be worthy of the word a nation has to possess some­ thing more— something in its manners, something in its speech and behaviour—something which we might call gentleness, grace or reverence. And this intangible quality may be precisely the essential quality—the one thing which being given to a nation, all others are added. It is precisely this quality which is lacking, and always has been lacking, in the culture of Germany. For German poetry, for German philosophy, for some periods of German architecture, I personally have the greatest admira­ tion, and though I won’t go so far as the late Lord Haldane and describe Germany as my spiritual home, I do not hesitate to confess that I feel for German culture a sympathy which is deep and genuine. But at the same time this feeling of sympathy has always been accompanied by a feeling of despair. It is as though every road taken by German poets and philosophers led to the edge of an abyss—an abyss from which they could not withdraw, but into which they must fall headlong—the abyss which is the second part of Faust, or the transcendentalism of Kant, or the dialectic of Hegel—the abysses of intellect no longer controlled by any awareness of the sensuous realities of life. Now these faults are not unknown to the Germans them­ selves, and some of their greatest writers, Goethe and Nietzsche, for example, have indulged in orgies of national self-castigation. But let me quote a less well-known self-criticism—the words of a very great poet, perhaps the greatest of all German poets, and one whom the Nazis have sometimes perverted to their nationalistic purposes: Friedrich Holderlin. This is what he said about his fellow-countrymen in his Hyperion : 1 “ It is a hard word, and yet I say it because it is the truth: I can think of no people more divided and torn than the 1 Samtliche JVerke, ed. Hellingrath, vol. ii. pp. Peacock, Holderlin (London, 1958), p. 129.

282-6

; trans. R.

Culture and Liberty

37

Germans. You see artisans, but not human beings; thinkers, but not human beings; priests, but not human beings; masters and servants, old and young people, but not human beings. . . . But your Germans like to stick to the most material and necessary tasks, and that is why there is amongst them so much bungling, and so little really free and joyful activity. But even that could be overlooked, if only such men were not so insensitive to all beautiful life, if only the curse of god-forsaken, unnatural life did not rest everywhere on such a people. . . . Everything on earth is so imperfect, the Germans are ever complaining. If only someone would tell this god-forsaken people that things are so imperfect amongst them only because they do not leave purity un­ corrupted and sacred things untouched by their coarse hands; that nothing flourishes amongst them because they do not heed the roots of growth, divine nature; that amongst them life is empty and burdensome and too full of cold, mute conflict, because they scorn the spirit, which infuses vigour and nobility into human activity and serenity into suffering, and brings into cities and dwellings love and brotherhood.” Holderlin here makes an important point: the point that culture is not an affair of crude calculation, or power and purpose, but of the spirit, of what Elolderlin, waiting in German, calls Genius. And this is the essence wdiich, somehow or other, we have to preserve within the structure of our society. Now, what has been proved many times in the past, and what is being proved to-day in Germany, is that this spirit can only exist in an atmosphere of liberty. And by liberty we mean not economic security, which is the only conception of liberty entertained by Hitler, but something much more in the nature of intellectual adventure. This becomes clear if we examine what might be called the incidence of culture, for then the vital difference between the true and the false conception of culture is seen to be a difference of position. I mean that you can regard culture either as something originating in separate individuals, or as something deriving from the collective entity

38

The Politics of the Unpolitical

of the nation. This is a very important distinction, and Hitler himself is quite aware of it. When on 18th July 1937 he opened the magnificent new Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich, he made a speech of one and a half hours entirely devoted to these questions of art and culture. I think he has the distinction of being the first ruler of a modern nation to speak at such a length on such a highbrow subject. During the course of this speech Hitler made quite clear the very close connection which exists between the political and artistic con­ cepts of National Socialism. Art, for Hitler, is not a grace or ornament of civilization; it is the very test and proof of nation­ hood. Art has its roots in the nation: that is the dogma which he reiterates in this speech and to which all his arguments* lend support. But equally there, is the assumption that a nation only flourishes—puts forth its flowers and its fruits—in its art. As a nation grows to self-awareness and to power, so there comes into being an art which is of that nation, peculiar to that nation, a direct expression of its being and ethos. Hitler is full of contempt for art which claims to be of an age rather than of a race, to be contemporary and international. “ The artist has to set up a monument not so much to an age, but to his people. For time is subject to change, the years come and go. That which would only live as the product of a certain age would have to be transitory like the age itself. . . . But we National Socialists recognize only one transitori­ ness, and that is the transitoriness of the nation itself. . . . As long as a nation exists, it constitutes a stable pole in the whirl­ ing flight of time. It is the one enduring element. And thus art, as the expression of this stable quality, is an eternal monument, itself stable and enduring: having thus no standard of yesterday and to-day, modern and not-modern, but only the standard of ‘ valueless’ or ‘ valuable’, and so of ‘ eternal’ or ‘ transitory’. And this eternity is enshrined in the life of the nations, as long as these themselves are eternal, that is, endure.” For these reasons Hitler has enforced a national standard of

Culture and Liberty

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art and has created a whole organization to see that this standard is adopted and observed by all artists, architects, writers and composers within the Reich.1 And with the help of the Gestapo, th at standard has been the only standard in evidence since 1933. The result has been disastrous. It is true that we have not lately had much opportunity to become personally acquainted with the new national architecture, national painting and national poetry of Germany; but of one thing we can already be certain: it is not made for export. We have seen photo­ graphs of the new architecture, and of some of the new works of painting and sculpture. We have read some of the new poetry and drama. In so far as it is not crude propaganda, all this work, in every department of art, is of a dullness and deadness not exceeded by our own Royal Academy. It is not merely the expression of empty life, of cold mute conflict: when not barbarous, it is vulgar and sentimental, and never once lifts itself into those regions of serenity and joy to which all true works of art belong. 1 Translations of representative passages from Hitler’s speeches on “ Kultur ” are given by Professor Baynes in Section 21 of The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (Oxford, 1942), vol. i. pp. 566-615. It has to be admitted that Hitler shows in these speeches a far profounder appreciation of the significance of art in national life than any other political leader of our time ; but the truths which he is compelled to recognize are perverted by racial prejudice and by moral or political intolerance. “ One anxious wish and one alone must therefore fill the hearts of us all— that Providence may grant us the great masters who shall echo in music the emotions of our soul, who shall immortalize them in stone. We know that here more than elsewhere the hitter saying is proved true : many think themselves called to be, but few are chosen. But since we are convinced that in the sphere of politics we have truly expressed the character and the vital will of our people, we believe also in our capacity to recognize and thus to find the corresponding cultural complement. We shall discover and encourage the artists who are able to impress upon the State of the German people the cultural stamp of the Germanic race which will be valid for all time.” {Op. cit., pp. 575-6.) It is the fallacy, which I deal with in another essay in this volume, of assuming that culture is something which can be stamped on the people by means of a steel-punch operated by the state-machine.

40

The Politics of the Unpolitical

Such is the kind of culture that we may expect in a country which subordinates the artist and writer to political censorship and police control. Now the Germans, and the Italians, and the Russians, to whom the same criticism applies, are not unaware of these deficiencies, and the only excuses they can offer are to the effect that a culture is not built in a day, that we must wait for the older and obstinate generation of artists to die off, and that for the moment the state is fully occupied in building up its economic and military strength. Art, according to the Nazi theory, is a sort of reward for national self-sufficiency, and it will blossom when that state of self-sufficiency is securely established. Hitler is welcome to this delusive hope; but his theory ignores the truth of the matter, which is far more subtle. All forms of art, and indeed all expressions of human genius, are the products of exceptionally endowed individuals, and though those products may to a considerable extent depend on the kind of society to which these individuals belong, their actual creation is the result of a very delicate psychological balance of forces within the individual mind. Anyone who has studied this profoundly interesting problem of artistic expression knows that it is one of the most unaccountable phenomena in the whole field of science, and that no means have yet been devised either of inducing creative forces in the normal mind, or of controlling their operation in the mind of the artist. The creative spirit bloweth where it listeth; that is to say, it obeys laws which are beyond our present under­ standing. Nothing can explain why a particular individual, born in a casual place like Stratford-on-Avon and brought up in an absolutely casual manner, should have been endowed with the supreme poetic power of Shakespeare. Nothing can explain the erratic phenomena of art except laws of chance and probability which are beyond calculation. But if we are so ignorant of the positive laws of artistic expression, we do know, on the negative side, that no force is so easily inhibited. It is not merely that the act of expression—the particular inspiration which gives birth to a work of art—is subject to frustration by the least interruption and dispersal of the mood of concentration;

Culture and Liberty

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but the whole artistic life of the artist can be brought to a sudden end by casual and apparently irrelevant causes—by marriage, by age, b y change of climate or even by change of diet. But devastating as these interruptions are, they are as nothing compared with any form of external control affecting the mode and quality of expression. You may put a poet in prison and he will still write: like John Bunyan, he may write all the better in seclusion and enforced solitude. But if you tell him what to write and how to write, either he will not be able to write another word, or he will produce a Coronation Ode or an Ode to Lenin which can only be described as a monument of dullness. That, surely, is obvious to all but the kind of thug or philistine who rules in Russia or Germany, but let us give the thug his due. The Nazis at any rate acknowledge the importance of art, which is more than any British Government has ever done. Fatal as their interference with art has been, do not let us go away with the complacent idea that our policy of laissez-faire is the alternative. As in economics, so in art: laissez-faire within a capitalist economy merely abandons art to the chances of unrestricted competition and the devil take the hindmost. It means that art becomes one more commodity on the free market, and that to succeed it must practise all the wiles of salesmanship—mass appeal, sex appeal, adulteration, and the sacrifice o f quality to cheapness. That, in short, is what is wrong with our culture. It has become part of our stock-intrade. Indeed, what little recognition has been given to con­ temporary art in this country has usually been under the auspices of the Board of Trade. ' The commercialization of art has been accomplished in the past 150 years. Before that time art existed for the most part on patronage , and though we do not nowadays like the sound of the -word, it is to some form of patronage that art must return if it is ever to recover its vitality.1 But this brings us up against a very real dilemma. It is impossible—and will become still more impossible in the socialist state of the future 1 See pages 106-11 below.

B*

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

—to depend on personal patronage. The alternative is obvious, it will be said—state patronage. But how are we to visualize state patronage—how is such state patronage going to differ essentially from the state control of art exercised by Hitler’s regime? You may have a democratically elected Minister of Fine Arts instead of a commissar appointed by the dictator; but how exactly is this Minister to set about his job? Is there going to be a Labour policy for the Fine Arts and a Conservative policy for the Fine Arts, a government policy and an opposition policy? And what exactly is a policy for the Fine Arts? You may, of course, reform the art schools and commission artists to paint murals for all government buildings; you may imitate the Federal Art Project of the U.S.A., which has at least pre­ served American artists from starvation. But all this, although it may create a lot of cultural activity, will not necessarily create a culture. I confess I*do not see any vital connection between culture and collectivism. I do not see how the cold monster of the state can replace the sympathetic patron, how a hetero­ geneous committee can ever be a substitute for the man of taste and sensibility. Not that all patrons in the past were enlightened: some of them were as prejudiced and tyrannical as a Hitler. The only substitute for patronage I can suggest involves some form of guild organization, in which the artists, in each branch of the arts, are so organized that they are able to support themselves by exchanging their products for the products of other organized producers. But this implies a form of guild socialism such as I have outlined in the first essay in this volume. And here let me explain that when I speak of guild socialism, or on other occasions of anarchism or syndicalism, I always have in mind this very problem of culture and liberty, which is for me the ugliest snag in the way of any system of state socialism. It is not merely that I cannot see how the sensuous and spiritual truths of culture can be safely delivered into the hands of ministries and committees; it is not merely that I distrust the calculating minds of economists and politicians; but everywhere I look, whether into past history or at present practice, I see

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the hand of the state as a dead hand, a hand which paralyses every manifestation of the human spirit, not only all forms of art, but even philosophy and religion. What is national socialism b u t a state philosophy or a state religion? I f we are going to oppose national socialism in the fundamentals of its faith, then* we must first and foremost deny this worship of the nation and the state. When Hitler says that the only reality is the nation, we must say No: the only reality is the human being. When Hitler says that art is a direct expression of the being and ethos of the nation, we must say No: art is a direct expression of the emotion and vision of the individual— of one man speaking to his neighbours and for his neighbours, of one man speaking to and for the whole of humanity. But we cannot logically say such things if in the same breath we deny the individual by advocating a form of socialism which, in the pursuit of economic or political ideals, establishes a bureaucracy to which all the ways of life are subordinated. I realize that there is no short cut to that ideal of social freedom which we all desire. But this past quarter of a century through which we have lived has one bitter lesson for all of us. In one country after another we have seen the revolutionary fervour which is the basis of our socialism perverted with apparent ease into an instrument of oppression. Before Stalin there was Lenin, and before Lenin there was Marx; before Mussolini there was Labriola and before Labriola there was Marx; before Hitler there was Noske and before Noske there was Marx. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Marxian socialism leads inevitably to nationalism. Remember that the component elements of the contraction “ Nazi” are “ nationalism” and “ socialism” . All fascist movements represent a nationalistic perversion of the original doctrines of socialism. Let us there­ fore take care that we, too, do not pervert the true doctrines of liberty and equality, and find too late that we have created a machine whose power we can no longer control—a machine which will carry us, helpless passengers, into the realm of totalitarian despotism. I have been carried away from my immediate subject, which

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

was the danger of state patronage. But perhaps I have made it evident with what distrust we must treat the prospects of art and culture under any form of state socialism. I fail to draw, in this respect, any real distinction between state socialism and national socialism, and I suggest that whatever we call it, any form of totalitarian collectivism is fatal to culture, simply because it cannot leave culture alone, but must pervert it into an instrument of power. What, then, is the alternative? There is one other possibility. It is to abolish the artist—I mean, abolish the artist as an economic unit, as a separate profession. Art would then be produced, as it generally is to-day, by people who earn their living in some other way. The only duty of the community would be to see that everyone who wanted it had sufficient liberty to practise an art— and I mean liberty in the concrete sense of free time. It does not seem to me that this is an impossible ideal to aim at, but it is a general social ideal and not one which can be realized on behalf of art alone. It should be obvious that by the time we had reached such a degree of social development, certain types of artist would have been absorbed into the general organization of the life of the community. The architect, the sculptor, and even the painter would be no longer artists, but artisans, and as such organic units in the building guild; the composer and the dramatist would be artisans in the theatre guild. In fact, about the only social misfit would be the poet, and except for poets laureate and political propagandists like Virgil and Pope, they have always been left out in the cold. When I say that we should abolish the artist, what I really mean is that we should all become artists. It is this horrible distinction between art and ordinary things, between artists and ordinary men, which is the mark or symptom of the disease of our civilization. When we have put that civilization to rights, we shall be less conscious of our culture but we shall have more of it. As I present it, this idea may have the appearance of a paradox, but it is not original. It was the conclusion reached by that great artist and great socialist, William Morris: a man who

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thought deeply on this very problem of culture and liberty. Morris perhaps tended to simplify the problem, both in his reading of the past and his vision of the future. But one thing he saw clearly: that in the society of the future the divisions between the artist and the artisan which is so characteristic of our present civilization had to disappear: culture, as he would say, had to become identical with the pleasure of life. All through Morris’s work runs the essential thought, that if you establish the right form of society, culture will be added to it, as naturally as the colour to the rose. And as for the right form of society, let me describe it in Morris’s own words: “ It is a society which does not know the meaning of the words rich and poor, or the rights of property, or law or legality, or nationality: a society which has no consciousness of being governed; in which equality of condition is a matter of course, and in which no man is rewarded for having served the community by having the power given him to injure it.” 1 It is possible that I ought at this point to say more about bringing culture to the people, but it seems to me that it is useless to bring culture to people who have not been prepared for it. In other words, we have to bring the people to culture. To do this we have to begin at the bottom and build up. Any extensive change in the cultural level of the nation can only be brought about by a long process of education which will in itself be an essential part of our social revolution. And by a long process of education I do not mean university extension lectures on the painters of the Renaissance, or exhibitions of modern art in places like Poplar and Pontypridd. I do not mean cultural education of any kind: again I say, make your social revolution and let culture take care of itself. What I do mean is nothing less than a drastic reform of the whole tech­ nique of education. We do not, at present, educate children to use their senses: we teach them as quickly as possible to master abstract symbols and the processes of conceptual thought, 1 From a lecture on u The Society of the Future ” , reprinted in William Morris : Artist, Writer, Socialist, by May Morris, vol. ii. p. 466.

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

and by the age of eleven or twelve we have produced a thinkingmachine of sorts—a machine which will, in the course of time, take its place in the counting-house and be able to absorb a daily potion of newspaper dope. But this machine has lost the faculties it had whilst still an unspoilt child: it has lost its instinctive sense of rhythm and harmony, its vivid imagination and spontaneous delight. Education has killed one half of its nature—the half which otherwise would naturally appreciate beauty in all its manifestations. This is perhaps the essential problem, for what is the meaning of culture to people who are mentally blind and deaf; and what is the use of liberty to people whose sensuous faculties are stiff with confinement, wasted for want of exercise ? Though the workers of the world may lose their chains, what will their new liberty benefit them if they find they cannot any longer move their limbs like free men? The only freedom that matters is the freedom to dance—the freedom to escape from the routine and necessary steps of our economic activities, and to take the air like gods. The spirit which infuses vigour and nobility into human activity and serenity into suffering, which brings love and brotherhood into our cities and dwellings, is the spirit of liberty, and it is its presence among us which is the only evidence of true culture.

4

To Hell with Culture When will revolutionary leaders realize that “ culture ” is dope, a worse dope than religion; fo r even if it were true that religion is the opiate o f the people, it is worse to poison yourself than to be poisoned, and suicide is more dishonourable than murder. To hell with culture, culture as a thing added like a sauce to otherwise unpalatable stale fis h ! E ric Gill. H a v i n g , in the last essay, defined the conditions under which a true culture may be expected to emerge, let us now dispose of a certain legacy of that commodity which is all that our starved civilization has to live on at present. What is this culture which students and professors, Bolsheviks and Nazis, the W.E.A. and the Y.M.C.A., all so eagerly strive to possess? The cultured Greeks, it seems, hadn’t a word for it. They had good architects, good sculptors, good poets, just as they had good craftsmen and good statesmen. They knew that their way of life was a good way of life, and they were willing if necessary to fight to defend it. But it would never have occurred to them that they had a separate commodity, culture—something to be given a trade-mark by their academicians, something to be acquired by superior people with sufficient time and money, something to be exported to foreign countries along with figs and olives. It wasn’t even an invisible export: it was something natural if it existed at all—something of which they were unconscious, something as instinctive as their language or the complexion of their skins. It could not even be described as a by-product of their way of life: it was that way of life itself. It was the Romans, the first large-scale capitalists in Europe, 47

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

who turned culture into a commodity. They began by import­ ing culture—Greek culture—and then they grew autarkic and produced their own brand. As they extended their empire, they dumped their culture on the conquered nations. Roman architecture, Roman literature, Roman manners—these set a standard to which all newly civilized people aspired. When a Roman poet like Ovid talks about a cultured man, there is already the sense of something polished, refined, a veneer on the surface of an otherwise rough humanity. It would not have occurred to a refined Roman of this sort that the craftsmen of his time had any contribution to make to the finer values of life. Nor had they—Roman pottery, for example, may be cultured, but it is dull and degraded. Culture, we are told, went underground in the Dark Ages, and it was a long time before it came to the surface again. The next epoch, known as the Middle Ages, is rivalled only by the Greek Age; but, oddly enough, it too was not conscious of its culture. Its architects were foremen builders, its sculptors were masons, its illuminators and painters were clerks. They had no word for art in the sense of our “ fine arts” : art was all that was pleasing to the sight: a cathedral, a candlestick, a chessman, a cheese-press. But the Middle Ages came to an end, and with them the guild system and the making of things for use. Certain clever people began to grab things—church property, common land, minerals, especially gold. They began to make things in order to acquire more than they could use, a surplus which they could convert into gold; and because they couldn’t eat gold, or build houses with it, they lent it to other people who were in need of it and charged them rent or interest. And thus the capitalist system came into existence, and with it the thing we call “ culture” The first recorded use of the word in its modern sense is 1510, just when capitalism began to get going. It is the time of the Revival of Learning and the Renaissance, and those two move­ ments signify the very essence of culture for all educated people, even unto the present day. But it was not until the beginning

To Hell tvith Culture

49

of the nineteenth century, the period of the Industrial Revolu­ tion, that culture became finally divorced from work.' So long as people made things by hand, certain traditional ways of making them persisted, and were good. It was only when things began to be made by machines that the traditions in­ herent, as it were, in the minds and muscles of the handworker, finally disappeared. To take the place of this instinctive tradition, the indus­ trialists introduced certain new standards. They might be merely standards of utility and cheapness—that is to say, of profitableness; but since sensitive people were not satisfied with these, the manufacturers began to look back into the past, to collect and imitate the good things which had been made by their ancestors. If you knew all about the things of the past, you were recognized as a man of taste, and the sum of the nation’s “ tastes” was its “ culture” . Matthew Arnold, in fact, defined culture as “ the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world” . And with Matthew Arnold, the Prince Consort and the Great Exhibition we reach the peak point of the English cult of culture. After the ’sixties its self-consciousness became too obvious, and we entered a period of decadence—Pre-Raphaelitism, the Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, and all that—until the First World War came and gave a final push to the whole rotten fabric. For the last quarter of a century we have been trying to pick up the pieces: we have had lectures and exhibitions, museums and art galleries, adult education and cheap books, and even an International Committee for Intellectual Co­ operation sponsored by the League of Nations. But it was all a beating on a hollow drum, and a Second World War has brought us up finally against the realities of this question as of so many others. To hell with culture! Gill’s curse finds an unexpected echo in Schlageter, a play by Hanns Johst, the most popular Nazi dramatist iti Germany. There one of his characters, the mouthpiece of the most violent Nazi doctrines, exclaims;

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‘‘ When I hear the word culture, I release the safety-catch on my Browning.” The Nazis also hate the sauce on the stale fish, and they prepare to change it—but to change the sauce, not the fish! They complain that the sauce they have been served with is Jewish, or Catholic, at any rate International, and what they want is an echt German sauce. So they go back to Wotan and the Nibelungs, to the mythology which Wagner exhumed from their misty past, and they mix it with mysticism and sentimentality and think they have got hold of the elements of a new culture. And a “ culture” indeed it is, and being rather simple-minded and slow-witted behind their bombers and brass-bands, they are satisfied. They have found a culture to match their agriculture and industry, an autarkic culture made for home-consumption and not for export. We need neither envy them nor imitate them. It is “ culture” anyhow, and when we say with Eric Gill “ To hell with culture” , we mean to hell with all forms of culture, ancient or modern, genuine or ersatz. It is not that, Nazi-like, I want to burn a heap of books or knock down a lot of ancient monuments. All these things— the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, medieval cathedrals and Chippendale furniture, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and Mr. Charles Morgan, shall be pre­ served for those who can make any use of them; but they shall not be unduly reverenced or made subjects for university degrees. A knowledge of them will no longer be a social certi­ ficate of taste and refinement. Those qualities, which will still exist (more than ever, we hope), will belong to the things we make, and to the people who make them. And the people who make the most efficient and the most pleasing things will be the people we shall honour as artists. A democratic culture—that is not the same thing as a democracy plus culture. The first important point that I must make, and keep on stressing, is that culture in a natural society will not be a separate and distinguishable thing—a body of learning that can be put into books and museums and mugged up in your spare time. Just because it will not exist as a separate

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entity, we had better stop using the word “ culture” . We shall not need it in the future and it will only confuse the present issue. Culture belongs to the past: the future will not be conscious of its culture. Let us now get down to details. The values which I am concerned with in this essay—values which we call “ the beautiful” — were not invented in ancient Athens or anywhere else. They are part of the structure of the universe and of our consciousness of that structure. To argue this point fully would carry us too far into the obscure regions of philosophy, and I have written enough about it in my more technical books. But what I mean, in simple language, is that we should not be pleased with the way certain things look unless our physical organs and the senses which control them were not so con­ stituted as to be pleased with certain definite proportions, relations, rhythms, harmonies, and so on. When we say, for example, that two colours “ clash” , we are not expressing a personal opinion: there is a definite scientific reason for the disagreeable impression they create, and it could no doubt be expressed in a mathematical formula. Again, when a printer, unhampered by the economy standards which are for the time being imposed on him, decides to impose the type on a page so as to leave margins of a definite proportion, he is trusting to his eye, which tells him by its muscular tensions that this particular arrangement is easeful. These are very elementary examples, and when large paintings or poems or musical com­ positions are in question, the whole business is infinitely more complicated. But, in general, we see that certain proportions in nature (in crystals, plants, the human figure, etc.) are “ right” , and we carry over these proportions into the things we make—not deliberately, but instinctively. For our present purposes that is all we need to know of the dreary science of aesthetics. There is an order in Nature and the order of Society should be a reflection of it, not only in our way of living, but also in our way of doing and making. If we follow this natural order in all the ways of our life, we shall not

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need to talk about culture. We shall have it without being conscious of it. But how are we to attain the natural order of making things, which is my particular concern in this essay? Obviously, we can’t make things naturally in unnatural surroundings. We can’t do things properly unless we are properly fed and properly housed. We must also be properly equipped with the necessary tools, and then left alone to get on with the job. In other words, before we can make things natutally, we must establish the natural order in society, which for my present purposes I assume is what we all mean by a democracy. But it is useless to talk about a democratic art or a democratic literature until we are in fact a democracy. And we are a long way off that. Seventy years ago Walt Whitman wrote in his Democratic Vistas: “ We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen and tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.” Democracy is still a great word, and in spite of many wordy prophets who have used it since Whitman’s time, its gist still sleeps, its history is still unenacted. Nothing is more absurd, among all the political absurdities committed by fascists and Nazis, than their assumption that democracy is a system that has been tried and has failed. Democracy has been promulgated and its principles endlessly proclaimed; but in no country in the world has it ever, for more than the brief space of a few months, been put into practice. For democracy requires three conditions for its fulfilment, and until all three conditions are satisfied, it cannot be said to exist. It is only necessary to state these conditions to show that democracy never has existed in modern times:

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The first condition of democracy is that all -production should he fo r use, and not fo r pi'ofit. The second condition is that each should give according to his ability, and each receive according to his needs. The third condition is that the workers in each industry should collectively own and control that industry. It is not my business in this particular essay to defend the conception of democracy underlying these conditions. It does not seem to be the conception of democracy held by the Labour Party, the Trade Union Congress, the Communist Party, Mr. Churchill or President Roosevelt; but nevertheless I would claim that it is the classical conception of democracy as gradually evolved by its philosophers—by Rousseau, Jefferson, Lincoln, Proudhon, Owen, Ruskin, Marx, Morris, Kropotkin, and who­ ever else was democratic in his heart no less than in his head. But what I intend to demonstrate here is that the higher values of life, the democratic equivalent of the civilization of Greece or of the Middle Ages, cannot be achieved unless by democracy we mean a form of society in which all these three conditions are satisfied. I think it will be generally admitted that production for use and not for profit is the basic economic doctrine of socialism. The opponents of socialism might argue that only a lunatic would neglect to take into consideration the needs of the public. But that is to miss the whole point of the statement. Capitalists do, of course, produce for use, and even invent uses for which to produce— in their own language, they create a demand. By their intensive methods of production and their extensive methods of publicity they have keyed up the machinery of production to unimagined levels, and up to a point mankind has benefited from the resulting plethora. Unfortunately capitalism has not been able to solve the problem of supplying the consumer with sufficient purchasing power to absorb this plethora: it could only invent various methods of restricting production so as to prevent a plethora. Capitalism can produce the goods, even if it cannot sell them. But what kind of goods ? It is here that we have to introduce

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

our aesthetic criterion— and don’t let anyone be frightened by the word aesthetic. Let tis first note that the quality of the goods so lavishly produced under capitalism varies enormously. Whatever you take— carpets or chairs, houses or clothes, cigar­ ettes or sausages, you will find that there are not one but twenty or thirty grades— something very good and efficient at the top of the scale, and something very cheap and nasty at the bottom of the scale. And pyramid-like, the bottom of the scale is enormously bigger than the top. Take the case of the chair you are sitting on as you read this book. It may be one of three things: (1) a decent well-made chair inherited from your great-great-grandmother; (2) a decent well-made chair which you bought at an expensive shop; or (5) an indifferent, uncomfortable chair, shabby after a year’s use, which was the best you could afford. (There are some subsidiary categories— expensive chairs which are also uncomfortable, for example; and moderately comfortable seats in public vehicles.) Production for profit means that, at whatever cost to the comfort, appearance and durability of the chair, the capitalist must put chairs on the market to suit every kind of purse. And since the chair will be competing with other needs—carpets, clocks and sewing-machines—it must cost as little as possible even on the low scale of purchasing power at which he is aiming. Hence the capitalist must progressively lower the quality of the materials he is using: he must use cheap wood and little of it, cheap springs and cheap upholstery. He must evolve a design which is cheap to produce and easy to sell, which means that he must disguise his cheap materials with veneer and varnish and other shams. Even if he is aiming at the top market, he still has to remember his margin of profits; and as the size of the market shrinks, and mass production becomes less possible, this margin has to be increased. That is to say, the difference between the intrinsic value of the materials used and the price charged to the consumer has to be bigger; and the subterfuges necessary to disguise this difference have to be cleverer.

To Hell with Culture

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It is then that the capitalist has to put on, among other things, a bit of culture—a claw-and-ball foot in the manner of Chippen­ dale, a wriggly bit of scrollwork in papier-mache, an inlay of mother-of-pearl. In extreme cases he must “ distress” the piece —that is to say, employ a man to throw bolts and nails at the chair until it has been knocked about enough to look “ antique. ” Such is production for profit. By production for use we mean a system which will have only two considerations in mind— function and fulfilment. You want a chair to relax in—very well, we shall discover what are the best angles to allow a man’s limbs to rest freely and without strain. We shall next consider which would be the most suitable materials to use in the manu­ facture of such a chair, bearing in mind, not only the purpose the chair has to serve, but also the other furniture with which the chair w ill be associated. Then, and then only, we shall design a chair to meet all these requirements. Finally we shall set about making the chair, and when it is made to our satis­ faction, we shall offer it to you in exchange for the tokens which represent the good work which, all the time we were making the chair, you were doing for the community at your particular job. That is the economic process under socialism. But I am supposed to be writing about spiritual values—about beauty and all that sort of thing, and where do they come in? We have produced a chair which is strong and comfortable, but is it a work of art? The answer, according to my philosophy of art, is Yes. If an object is made of appropriate materials to an appropriate design and perfectly fulfils its function, then we need not worry any more about its aesthetic value: it is automatically a work of art. Fitness for function is the modern definition of the eternal quality we call beauty, and this fitness for function is the inevitable result of an economy directed to use and not to profit. Incidentally, we may note that when the profit system has to place function before profit, as in the production of an aero­ plane or a racing-car, it also inevitably produces a work of art.

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

But the question to ask is: why are not all the things produced under capitalism as beautiful as its aeroplanes and racing-cars? T h e second condition of democracy is expressed in the Marxian slogan: 4‘ From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This condition is linked to the one we have already discussed. To take the question of ability first. A profit system of pro­ duction subordinates the person to the job. In a rough-andready way it sorts people out according to their ability: that is to say, it continues to employ a man only so long as he is capable of doing the job efficiently, and only so long as there is a job to do. It rarely asks whether a particular man would be better at another job, and it gives that man little or no oppor­ tunity of finding out whether he could do another job better. Capitalism is concerned with labour only as a power element, the partner of steam and electricity. And since the cost of this power has to be reckoned against the possible profits, capitalism does all it can to reduce that cost. One way of reducing the cost is to increase the quantity of work per human unit. Capitalism (and state socialism as established in Russia) introduces the time element into the calculation of results. The best riveter is the man who can fix the greatest number of rivets in a given time. The best miner is the man who can excavate the greatest quantity of coal in a given time. This time criterion is extended to all forms of production, and it is always at war with the criterion of quality. When the work is purely mechanical, the quali­ tative element may not be compromised. A quick riveter may also be a good riveter. But if the work requires any consider­ able degree of skill, care or deliberation, then the quality will decline in inverse ratio to the speed of production. This applies, not only to “ artistic” work such as painting and sculpture, but also to “ practical” work such as grinding the cylinders of an aero-engine or ploughing a field. From each according to his ability can be replaced by another familiar phrase—equality of opportunity. In a natural society

To Hell with Culture

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it should b e possible for people to sort themselves out so that every man and woman is doing the job for which he or she feels naturally qualified; and if, in this respect, nature needs a little assistance, it can be provided by schools and technical colleges which will enable young people to discover themselves and their abilities. That h alf of the slogan does not present much difficulty: it is obviously reasonable that the right man should have the right job, and th at he should do that job to the best of his ability. But then w e say: “ to each according to his needs” , and this is the more important half, and the essentially democratic half, of the socialist doctrine. L et us a sk : what are the needs of each one of us ? Sufficient food and clothing, adequate housing—a certain minimum of these necessities should be the inalienable right of every member of the community. Until it can provide these mini­ mum necessities, a society must be branded as inhuman and inefficient. And that is perhaps all that early socialists like Marx and Engels m eant by the phrase “ to each according to his needs” . But the underlying assumption of this essay is that in any civilization worth living in, the needs of man are not merely material. He hungers for other things—for beauty, for com­ panionship, for joy. These, too, a natural society must provide. We have already seen that by establishing a system of pro­ duction for use we shall inevitably secure the first of these spiritual needs—beauty. To see how the other spiritual values will be secured we must turn to the third condition of demo­ cracy—workers’ ownership of industry. This is a controversial issue, even within the democratic ranks. Since that fatal day in 1872 when Marx scuttled the First International, the socialist movement has been split into two irreconcilable camps. The fundamental nature of the division has been hidden by a confusion of names and a multi­ plicity of leagues, alliances, federations and societies. But the issue is simply whether industry is to be controlled from the

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bottom upwards, by the workers and their elected delegates; or whether it is to be centralized and controlled from the top, by an abstraction we call the state, but which in effect means a small and exclusive class of bureaucrats. The historical fact that everywhere in the north of Europe— Germany, Scandinavia, France and Great Britain— the authori­ tarian or bureaucratic conception of socialism triumphed should not blind us to the still living issue. For this “ conceptual” triumph somehow has not brought with it what we mean by a democracy. Indeed, in most of the countries named it has brought about just the opposite phenomenon—the anti-demo­ cratic state of Hitler, Mussolini, and their satraps Petain, Franco, Quisling, Antonescu, etc. Do not let us deceive ourselves in thinking that this New Order which Hitler is trying to establish in Europe is merely a temporary phase of reactionaryism. Reactionary it is, in the deepest sense of the word, for it denies the advance of the human spirit; and it offers sinister accommodations to the industrial capitalists who have been democracy’s most bitter enemies. But in many of its features it is but a development or adaptation of that authoritarian form of socialism which Marx made the predominant form of socialism. It even claims the name of socialism, and it is somewhat unfortunate that this fact is disguised and forgotten in the popular contraction: Nazi. Hitler’s New Order is socialist in that it establishes a centralized state control of alLproduction. It is socialist in that it establishes a system of social security—guaranteed employment, fair rates of wages, organized amenities of various kinds. It is socialist in that it subordinates the financial system to the industrial system. In ma$y ways it is professedly socialist, but it remains profoundly undemocratic. Because whatever it gives in the shape of social security, it takes away in spiritual liberty. Every Nazi worker must sell his soul before he can belong to this New Order. The Nazis, as I have already said, are very culture-conscious —as culture-conscious as Matthew Arnold and all our Victorian forefathers. But the more conscious they become of culture,

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the less capable they become of producing it. Nazi Germany, in the ten years of its supremacy and intensive cultivation of the arts, has not been able to produce for the admiration of the world a single artist of any kind. Most of its great writers and painters—Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Oskar Kokoschka and many others— are living in exile. A few great artists who have remained in Germany—the composer Strauss, for example— are too old to produce any new work of significance, and too indifferent to the political order to want to produce anything at all. There are a few writers of integrity and genius who remain in Germany—I am thinking particularly of Hans Carossa and Ernst Robert Curtius—but they must be living in spiritual agony. For this general impotence the Nazi leaders may offer the excuse of war and revolution, but other wars and revolu­ tions have been an immediate inspiration to poets and painters. The great Romantic Movement in literature, for example, was directly inspired by the French Revolution, and all the storm and stress of the wars that followed could not diminish its force. The position in Italy is exactly the same, and shows in addi­ tion that the time factor makes no difference. It is twenty years since Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome (or travelled there in a railway carriage), but in all that time not a single work of art of universal significance has come from that country— nothing but bombast and vulgarity. There is only one explanation of this failure of the Fascist and Nazi Revolutions to inspire a great art, and I cannot describe it better than in the words of Giovanni Gentile, a liberal philosopher who sold himself to the fascist regime. Speaking to an audience of teachers in Trieste shortly after that city had fallen into Italian hands at the end of the last war, he declared: “ Spiritual activity works only in the plenitude o f freedom .” It was a fine moment for the Italian people, and this was a fine sentiment to match the occasion. More than twenty years have passed, and Gentile has served Mussolini as his Minister of Education for most of that time, and has done as much as anyone to give fascism a decent covering of in-

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teUectual respectability. As he surveys the tyranny he has helped to establish and sees all around him a spiritual poverty in keeping with an economic poverty, it is possible that this sad and disillusioned man may still repeat, in a whisper which is only heard in the secret recesses of his own mind: Spiritual activity works only in the plenitude of freedom. One thing must be admitted: the lack of any spiritual activity in Germany and Italy is not due to a lack of official encouragement. In Germany there is a vast organization, the Reichskulturkammer, charged with the specific task of super­ vising cultural activities of every kind, and in Italy there is a similar display of state patronage. Outside the fascist countries there is a parallel activity in Russia, and in the U.S.A. there is the Federal Arts Project. This latter organization has a different aim : to relieve distress among artists rather than to encourage the production of a national type of art. But all four types of state patronage illustrate the same truth—that no amount of sauce will disguise the staleness of the underlying fish. You cannot buy the spiritual values which make the greatness of a nation’s art: you cannot even cultivate them unless you prepare the soil. And that soil is freedom—not Freedom with a capital F, not an abstraction of any kind, but simply u letting alone” . 44Letting alone ’ ’ is not the same as 44laissez-faire ” . A person is not left alone if he has a cupboard full of cares. He must be left alone with sufficient food and shelter to safeguard his health, and he must be left alone with sufficient material to work with. Then 44laissez-faire ” —then let him do what he likes to do. To keep a class of people in comfort and then let them do what they please offends the sense of social equity—every dustman might then set up as an artist. But that is not exactly what I propose. I have said: To hell with culture; and to this consignment we might add another: To hell with the artist. Art as a separate profession is merely a consequence o f culture as a separate entity. In a natural society there will be no precious or privileged beings called artists: there will only be workers. Or, if you prefer Gill’s more paradoxical statement of the same truth: in a natural society there will be no despised

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and unprivileged beings called workers: there will only be artists. “ The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.” 1 But among workers there are various degrees of ability. And the people capable of recognizing this ability are the workers themselves in their several professions. For example, architects and engineers will know which few individuals among them design so superlatively well that they deserve, for the common good, to be exempted from routine tasks and encouraged to devote their energies to those types of work which are not so much utilitarian as “ creative” —that is to say, expressive of their own inventive intuitions or perhaps of collective needs— needs which are inarticulate until the artist gives them actuality. It is the same with every other type of artist—the painter and the sculptor no less than the architect and the engineer. The possible exception is the poet, the “ divine literatus” to whom Whitman gave such a vital function in the democratic vista. There is no basic profession which stands in the same relation to poetry as building does to architecture. Writing is, of course, a profession, and in a democratic society it should have its appropriate guild or collective—as it has in Russia to-day. Once it is free from the rivalries and log-rolling which accompany writing for profit (or writing on the backs of ad­ vertisements, as Chesterton called journalism), a Writers’ Guild might be entrusted with the economic organization of this particular kind of work; but genius will often elude its systematic survey. Against this eventuality there can be no social safeguard. There are certain types of genius which are always in advance of the general level of sensibility—even the general level of professional sensibility. In the past such men have been frustrated or have been starved. In a natural society they will at least avoid the second fate. Production for use, mutual aid, workers’ control—these are 1 Gill took this paradox from the writings of another wise man, Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy ; it sums up the teachings of William Morris and the practice of the medieval guild system.

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

the slogans of democracy, and these are the slogans of a creative civilization. There is nothing mysterious or difficult about such a civilization; indeed, some of the primitive civilizations still existing in remote corners of the world, and many primitive civilizations of the past, including that of prehistoric man, deserve to be called creative. What they make, if it is only a plaited basket or an unpainted pot, they make with instinctive rightness and directness. It is impossible to compare such primitive communities with our own highly organized modes of living, but their social economy in its simple way answers to our slogans. Production is for use and not for profit; and all work is done without compulsion for the general benefit of the community. On their simple level of living there is ample social security, and no man sells his labour to a middleman or boss: work is either individual or communal, and in either case it is free from the dispiriting influences of slavery and manumission. But we are not a primitive society and there is no need to become primitive in order to secure the essentials of demo­ cratic liberty. We want to retain all our scientific and industrial triumphs—electric power, machine tools, mass production and the rest. We do not propose to revert to the economy of the handloom and the plough—ideal as this may seem in retrospect. We propose that the workers and technicians who have made the modern instruments of production should control, them— control their use and determine the flow of their production. It can be done. Russia has shown that the essential organiza­ tion can be created, and we should not be blinded to the signi­ ficance of that great achievement by the perversion it has suffered at the hands of bureaucrats. For a brief spell demo­ cratic Spain showed us that workers’ control could be an efficient reality. Workers’ control can be established in this country, and there is not much point in discussing the finer values of civilization until that essential change has been effected. The fundamental truth about economics is that the methods and instruments of production, freely used and fairly used, are capable of giving every human being a decent standard of living.

To Hell with Culture

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The factors which obstruct the free and fair use of the methods and instruments of production are the factors which must disappear before a natural society can be established. What­ ever these factors are— an obsolete financial system, the private ownership o f property, rent and usury—they are anti-democratic factors, and prevent the establishment of a natural society and consequently prevent the establishment of a creative civilization. Economics are outside the scope of this book, but I cannot avoid them. Unless the present economic system is abolished, its roots eradicated and all its intricate branches lopped, the first conditions for a democratic alternative to the fake culture of our present civilization are not satisfied. For this reason one cannot be very specific about the features of a democratic culture. Engineers and designers can make the working drawings for a motor-car, and granted the right kind of machinery, they can be sure that the type of car they have designed w ill run when it is completed. But they cannot predict where that car will travel. A democratic culture is the journey a democratic society will make when once it has been established. If it is well made we know that our democratic society will travel far. And with the man for whom it was made at the wheel, we can be sure that it will travel in the right direction, discovering new countries, new prospects, new climates. W e have already had brief glimpses down these democratic vistas, and presently I shall describe them more fully. But first let us take a backward glance at the dump we propose to leave behind us. I write, not as a philistine, but as a man who could not only claim to be cultured in the accepted sense of the word, but who has actually devoted most of his life to cultural things—to the practice of the arts of the present and the elucidation of the arts of the past. My philosophy is a direct product of my aesthetic experience, and I believe that life without art would be a graceless and brutish existence. I could not live without the spiritual values of art. I know that some people are in­ sensitive to these values, but before allowing myself to pity or despise such people, I try to imagine how they got themselves

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into such a poor state of mind. The more I consider such people, the more clearly I begin to perceive that though there may be a minority who have been hopelessly brutalized by their environment and upbringing, the great majority are not insensitive, but indifferent. They have sensibility, but the thing we call culture does not stir them. Architecture and sculpture, painting and poetry, are not the immediate concerns of their lives. They are therefore not sensibly moved by the baroque rhetoric of St. Paul’s, or the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, or any of the minor monuments of our culture. If they go into a museum or art gallery, they move about with dead eyes: they have strayed among people who do not speak their language, with whom they cannot by any means communicate. Now the common assumption is that this strayed riveter, as we may call him, should set about it and learn the language of this strange country—that he should attend museum lectures and adult education classes in the little spare time he has, and so gradually lift himself on to the cultured level. Our whole educational system is built on that assumption, and very few democrats would be found to question it. And yet a moment’s consideration should convince us that an educational system which is built on such an assumption is fundamentally wrong, and fundamentally undemocratic. Our riveter has probably strayed from a cheerless street in Birmingham, where he inhabits a mean little house furnished with such shoddy comforts as he has been able to afford out of his inadequate wage. I need not pursue the man’s life in all its dreary detail: there he stands, typical of millions of workers in this country, his clumsy boots on the parquet floor, and you are asking him to appreciate a painting by Botticelli or a bust by Bernini, a Spanish textile or a fine piece of Limoges enamel. If drink is the shortest road out of Manchester, there is a possibility that art may be the shortest road out of Birmingham; but it will not be a crowded road, and only a very odd and eccentric worker will be found to respond to the aesthetic thrills that run down a cultured spine.

To Hell with Culture

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There are cultured people who, realizing this fact, are honest enough to abandon their democratic pretensions—they put up an impenetrable barrier between the people and art, between the worker and “ culture” . It is much better, they say, “ that civilization should be retained in the hands of those persons to whom it professionally belongs. Until they are educated, and unless they are, it will be one worker in a million who wants to read a modern poem.” 1 Such people are right, and such people are wrong. They are right to assume that an impenetrable barrier exists between their culture and the worker: they are wrong to imagine that the worker has no cultural sensibility. The worker has as much latent sensibility as any human being, but that sensi­ bility can only be awakened when meaning is restored to his daily work and he is allowed to create his own culture. Do not let us be deceived by the argument that culture .is the same for all time—that art is a unity and beauty an absolute value. If you are going to talk about abstract conceptions like beauty, then we can freely grant that they are absolute and eternal. But abstract conceptions are not works of art. Works of art are things of use—houses and their furniture, for example; and if, like sculpture and poetry, they are not things of im­ mediate use, then they should be things consonant with the things we use—that is to say, part of our daily life, tuned to our daily habits, accessible to our daily needs. It is not until art expresses the immediate hopes and aspirations of humanity that it acquires its social relevance. A culture begins with simple things—with the way the potter moulds the clay on his wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the builder builds his house. Greek culture did not begin with the Parthenon: it begem with a whitewashed hut on a hillside. Culture has always developed as an infinitely slow but sure refinement and elaboration of simple things— refinement and elaboration of speech, refinement and elabora­ tion of shapes, refinement and elaboration of proportions, with the original purity persisting right through. A democratic 1 Sacheverell Sitwell,

Sacred and Profane Love, p. C

88.

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The Politics of the Unpolitical

culture will begin in a similar way. We shall not revert to the peasant’s hut or the potter’s wheel. We shall begin with the elements of modern industry—electric power, metal alloys, cement, the tractor and the aeroplane. We shall consider these things as the raw materials of a civilization and we shall work out their appropriate use and appropriate forms, without reference to the lath and plaster of the past. To-day we are bound hand and foot to the past. Because property is a sacred thing and land values a source of untold wealth, our houses must be crowded together and our streets must follow their ancient illogical mean derings. Because houses must be built at the lowest possible cost to allow the highest possible profit, they are denied the art and science of the architect. Because everything we buy for use must be sold for profit, and because there must always be this profitable margin between cost and price, our pots and our pans, our furniture and our clothes, have the same shoddy consistency, the same competitive cheapness. The whole of our capitalist culture is one immense veneer: a surface refinement hiding the cheapness and shoddiness at the heart of things. To hell with such a culture I To the rubbish-heap and furnace with it all! Let us celebrate the democratic revolution with the biggest holocaust in the history of the world. When Hitler has finished bombing our cities, let the demolition squads complete the good work. Then let us go out into the wide open spaces and build anew. Let us build cities that are not too big, but spacious, with traffic flowing freely through their leafy avenues, with children playing safely in their green and flowery parks, with people living happily in bright efficient houses. L et us place our factories and workshops where natural conditions of supply make their location most convenient—the necessary electric power can be laid on anywhere. Let us balance agriculture and industry, town and country—let us do all these sensible and elementary things and then let us talk about our culture. A culture of pots and pans! some of my readers may cry contemptuously. I do not despise a culture of pots and pans,

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because, as I have already said, the best civilizations of the past may be judged by their pots and pans. But what I am now asserting, as a law of history no less than as a principle of social economy, is that until a society can produce beautiful pots and pans as naturally as it grows potatoes, it will be incapable of those higher forms of art which in the past have taken the form of temples and cathedrals, epics and dramas. As for the past, let the past take care of itself. I know that there is such a thing as tradition, but in so far as it is valuable it is a body of technical knowledge—the mysteries of the old guilds—and can safely be entrusted to the care of the new guilds. There is a traditional way of thatching haystacks and a traditional way of writing sonnets: they can be learned by any apprentice. If I am told that this is not the profoundest meaning of the word tradition, I will not be obtuse; but I will merely suggest that the state of the world to-day is a sufficient comment on those traditional embodiments of wisdom, ecclesi­ astical or academic, which we are expected to honour. The cultural problem, we are told by these traditionalists, is at bottom a spiritual, even a religious one. But this is not true. At least, it is no truer of the cultural problem than of the economic problem, or any of the other problems which await solution. Let us now suppose that we have got our democratic society, with its right way of living and its basic culture of pots and pans. How then do we proceed to build on this foundation? My belief is that culture is a natural growth—that if a society has a plenitude of freedom and all the economic essentials of a democratic way of life, then culture will be added without any excessive striving after it. It will come as naturally as the fruit to the well-planted tree. But when I describe the tree as “ wellplanted” , I am perhaps implying more than a good soil and a sheltered position—the conditions which correspond to the political and economic provisions of a natural society*. I am perhaps implying a gardener to look after the tree, to safeguard it from pests, to prune away the growth when it is too crowded,

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to c u t out the dead wood. I am. The wild fruit-tree is not to be despised: it is a pretty thing to look at, and it is the healthy stock from which all our garden trees have been cultivated. But cultivation is the distinctive power of man, the power which has enabled him to progress from the animal and the savage state. In his progress man has cultivated, not only animals and plants, hut also his own kind. It is just this selfcultivation which we call education, and cultivation, when man directs it to his own species, naturally includes the cultiva­ tion of those senses and faculties by means of which man gives form and shape to the things he makes. I cannot deal adequately with this aspect of my subject without going into the whole question of education in a demo­ cratic society, and that subject I have dealt with in another book.1 But I must state my point of view, because it is funda­ mental. Briefly, then, I cannot conceive education as a training in so many separate subjects. Education is integral: it is the encouragement of the growth of the whole man, the complete man. It follows that it is not entirely, nor even mainly, an affair of book learning, for that is only the education of one part of our nature—that part of the mind which deals with concepts and abstractions. In the child, who is not yet mature enough to think by these short-cut methods, it should be largely an education of the senses—the senses of sight, touch and hear­ ing: in one word, the education of the sensibility. From this point of view there is no valid distinction between art and science: there is only the whole man with his diverse interests and faculties, and the aim of education should be to develop all these in harmony and completeness. It was Rousseau who first realized this truth, and since Rousseau’s time there have been several great educationalists— Froebel, Montessori, Dalcroze, Dewey—who have worked out the practical methods of such an education of the sensibility. It is significant that the last of these, John Dewey, has been led to the conclusion that there is an intimate connection between the right kind of education and a democratic society. You can’t 1

Education Through Art

(London : Faber & Faber, 1943).

To Hell with Culture

69

have a good educational system except in a democracy— only a democracy guarantees the essential freedom. Equally, you can’t have a real democracy without a true system of education; for only by education can a society teach that respect for natural law which is the basis of democracy. “ I cannot repeat too often that it is only objects which can be perceived by the senses which can have any interest for children, especially children whose vanity has not been stimu­ lated nor their minds corrupted by social conventions.” This observation of Rousseau’s should be the foundation of our educational methods. A child learns through its senses, and its senses are stimulated by objects—first by natural objects, and then by objects which are the creation of man. Elementary education should teach children how to use their senses— how to see, to touch, to listen—it is far from easy to learn the full and exact use of these faculties. Then, having learned how to use the senses, separately and conjointly, the child should learn how to apply his knowledge: how to judge and compare the true reports which are rendered by his senses; how to construct things which give a true sensuous response and, finally, how to construct things which express his growing awareness of the world and its potentialities. If we return to our pot and think of the delicate balance of the senses of sight and touch which must guide the potter as the clay turns between his finger-tips, we get some idea of the individual factors involved in all creative activity. If we then remember that the potter must direct the work of his senses towards some useful end—for the pot must function—we get some idea of the social factor involved in all creative activity. Substitute for the potter and his clay any worker and his material, and you are at the heart of all cultural activity: the same conditions persist, from the pot to the poem, from the cottage to the cathedral, from the horse-shoe to the aero-engine. Sensibility is the secret of success. There are degrees of sensibility, just as there are degrees of skill, and education cannot, and should not, smooth them out. But I do not think a democratic society should unduly honour

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the possessor of exceptional sensibility. It is a gift he owes to the chances of birth, and the possibility of exercising his gift he owes to the society in which he lives. So much of the world’s great art is anonymous, and is none the worse, or none the less appreciated, for the fact. Art always aspires to the impersonal. When every man is an artist, who should claim to be a superman? Which is only a modern version of the oldest and best of democratic slogans: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? When once a democratic society is established, it will inevit­ ably lead to the creation of new values in art, literature, music and science. In some distant time men will call these new values the Democratic Civilization, or the Culture of Demo­ cracy, and I believe it will be the greatest and most permanent culture ever created by man. It will have the universal values which we associate with the greatest names in the culture of the past—the universality of iEschylus, Dante and Shakespeare; and it will have these values in a less obscure and a less imperfect form. iEschylus and Dante and Shakespeare are immortal, but they addressed themselves to imperfect societies: to societies still full of moral cruelty, social injustice and perverse super­ stitions; their works are “ poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy” . The limitations of their audiences hindered, in however small degree, the expression of their vision. A perfect society will not necessarily produce perfect works of art; but in so far as it does produce works of art, the very fact that the artist is appeal­ ing to a more highly developed form of society will induce a higher degree of perfection. The artist has a more perfect instrument on which to play. We should not be discouraged by the fact that all hitherto consciously democratic art has suffered from having to be pro­ duced within the framework of a capitalist society. Hitherto not only has the democratic artist had to compromise with the means of communication open to him as a member of a capitalist order— the press, the cinema, the theatre, etc.—but he has had to use the human material and dramatic situations incidental

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to that order of society. His only alternative has been to stand self-consciously aside, limiting himself to “ workers” and their experiences— all of which explains the dreariness and monotony of most so-called “ proletarian art” . The artist cannot restrict himself to sectional interests of this kind without detriment to his art: he is only “ all out” and capable of his greatest range when the society he works for is integral, and as wide and varied as humanity itself. It is only in so far as he is simply “ human” that he is wholly “ great” ; and it is only in a demo­ cratic society that the artist can address humanity and society in the same terms. To this general rule we must admit certain rare exceptions. Certain types of art are “ archetypal” . That is to say, though they may have a limited range—indeed, by the nature of things, must have this limited range—they are formally perfect. A song by Shakespeare or Blake, a melody by Bach or Mozart, a Persian carpet or a Greek vase—such “ forms” , in the words of Keats, “ tease us out of thought as doth eternity” . They tease us out of our human preoccupations—the theme of epic and drama and novel—and for a few brief seconds hold us suspended in a timeless existence. Such rare moments are beyond daily reality, supersocial and in a sense superhuman. But in relation to the whole body of what we call “ art” , they are but the glittering pinnacles, and below them spreads the solid structure of human ideals, human vision and human insight: the world of passion and of sentiment, of love and labour and brother­ hood. The only person who seems to have escaped the limitations that have inevitably beset artists of the predemocratic eras is a poet who, in spite of his evident weaknesses, is a proto­ type or forerunner of the democratic artist—I mean Walt Whitman. The nineteenth-century America in which he lived was by no means a perfect democracy; but the early Americans, especially Jefferson and Lincoln, had had a clear vision of the requisites of a democratic society, and they inspired Whitman with the ambition to be the first poet of this new order. He was fired by a realization of the tremendous

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potentialities of the New World into which he had been born : 44Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms of lasting power and practicality, on areas of amplitude rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political speculations of ages, long, long deferr’d, the democratic republican principle, and the theory o f development and perfection by voluntary standards, and self-reliance.” But these potentialities could never be realized on the political plane alone: 44I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.” 44 The priest departs, the divine literatus comesT In these words Walt Whitman sums up the whole argument of this essay. But let the reader turn to Democratic Vistas, that credo of W alt Whitman’s from which my quotations come, and let him find there in fullness the essential democratic truths, and in particular those that relate to the enduring values of human life, and to their expression in enduring works of art. And from this prose work of the good grey poet let the reader turn to Leaves of Grass and see if he does not find there, shining through the crudities and contradictions which Whitman himself was the first to admit, the lineaments of our divine literatus, our democratic poet and exemplar. Such may not be the form of the art of the future, but it is its prophetic spirit— 64Expanding and swift, henceforth, Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious, A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branch­ ing,

To Hell ivith Culture

73

A new race dominating previous ones and grander fax, with new contests, New politics, new literature and religions, new inventions and arts. These, my voice announcing—I will sleep no more but arise, You oceans that have been calm within me I how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.”

c*

5

Art in an Electric Atmosphere “ Maybe we’ll fix it so life won’t be printed on dollar bills.” Ralph, in Awake and Sing!, by Clifford Odets.*I

O n Thursday, 17th April 1941, the morning after the great raid on London, I was compelled to walk from the City to the West End. There were no buses running on that route, and the few taxis crunched their way slowly and uncertainly over the glass-strewn streets. As I came near to St. Paul’s I found all the approaches blocked. I had to turn and make my way across the Thames by Southwark Bridge. The warehouses and tenements on the south bank were desolate and unnaturally still. I recrossed the river by Blackfriars Bridge and found the Strand blocked. Another detour took me through the Covent Garden district, past burning ruins in Leicester Square, and so into Piccadilly, looking sultry under a smoke-screened sun. There was plenty to think about on that long walk. I had passed the Bank of England, the cathedral dedicated to St. Paul— a better symbol of the Church of England than the Gothic abbey farther up the river—the offices of the Times, and I had ended up near the Royal Academy. But I did not think of these buildings and their symbolism, but of the inexplicable calm of the people I had seen, sweeping up the broken glass, removing their goods from their gaping shopfronts, directing hoses on to the smoking debris. If you have been in an accident you are shaken: you generally stutter a bit and turn pale. These people, after a night of relentless bombing, were not even bad-tempered: they were just normal, unnaturally normal. British phlegm? Cockney imperturbability? Or 74

Art in an Electric Atmosphere

75

apathetic minds unable to measure the extent and significance of the disaster in which they were involved? I had no clear explanation, but as I crossed Blackfriars Bridge and looked at the long reach of the river, the ugly incoherent buildings thrusting their bleached fagades into the haze, the slowly mounting columns of smoke, I realized that I too was un­ naturally calm, one of these millions to whom the phrase “ going about his business” now meant “ picking his way among the ruins” . But the ruins, I reflected, were not merely so much rubble and twisted steel. The endless and intricate structures of a civiliza­ tion were falling down. It was not merely the jewellers’ and furriers’ shops, the workmen’s tenements and the warehouses which I had passed: it was also the Bank of England and the Royal Academy, the Church of England and the Times. These institutions, too, were among the ruins, and if they survived at all, they would have to be rebuilt in a new style. And to be quite honest, many less conservative institutions were looking a bit shaken in that morning air—the Labour Party and the frustrated rump of the Communist Party, for example. And all the bright young art societies, so hopeful and experimental before the war—what had become of them? Indeed, it seemed in this lurid April light that all our institutions, institutes, associations and federations had become so many empty forms, structures with their windows blown out, their walls cracked, their reports and memoranda a heap of sodden ashes. We shall rebuild, of course. Even if we are defeated we shall rebuild. In 1920 a defeated Germany was able to rebuild, and a movement in the arts far more vital than anything that had existed before the war had been born. It was afterwards to be destroyed by the Nazis, but it was destroyed because it was not vital enough, not revolutionary enough. It compromised with its capitalist patrons, its bourgeois democrats and bureaucrats. The situation was the same in France. The Paris that survived the last war, the Paris of Picasso and Stravinsky, was vital enough. But its vitality was unrelated to a political philosophy, to any social integrity. A writer might be revolutionary, but

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he still aspired to the laurels of the Academie Frangaise, or to the entree to some fashionable salon. Only the superrealists had any integrity, and they did their best not to be taken seriously. The trouble with the last time, say our amateur statesmen, was that Germany was not properly subjugated; she was defeated but not disintegrated. The implication is that we must not make that mistake again. But the trouble with the last time was also that we were not essentially victorious. We muddled through to victory, and when November 1918 came, nothing was changed. The same rotten system that had brought about the war staggered through the consequent mess on American stilts. Power remained in tainted hands: the politicians, here and in France, talked boogie-woogie to the public while behind the scenes the monopolists concentrated their power for another struggle. Militarists whose existence was threatened by dis­ armament, diplomats whose function was reduced to insigni­ ficance by the League of Nations, kept the hate fires burning. And now the conflagration they lit is blown back in their own faces. The flames are no longer metaphorical. They roar and crackle through the banks and building societies, through the offices of insurance companies and stockbrokers. The roofs fall and the debt rises. Finance is no longer a reality: it has become a fantasy in whose reality even economists no longer believe. The only realities are tanks and aeroplanes, ships and food, productive labour of all kinds. Meanwhile artists and writers, the producers of culture, were gradually absorbed into the war machine. Seeing our weaken­ ing ranks, the philistines sent up a shout of triumph. The Times celebrated “ the eclipse of the highbrow” , and Lord Elton told us that we should not have despised the unspectacular virtues— endurance, unselfishness and discipline. As in the last war, reactionaries console themselves with the thought that communists and artists and the so-called avant-garde were a lot of stormy petrels announcing the storm that has now broken over u s: that when the storm has passed there will be calm again, no noisy birds, a stable society and a classical art. They ignore the fact that the modern movement has its roots

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far back in the nineteenth century; that it is only modern in the sense th at modern science is modern, or modern political theory. Modern art, in fact, is merely one expression of that principle of revolution which throughout the history has been the only infallible index of vitality.1 What the last war did was to accelerate or intensify in the arts that restless spirit of experiment or adventure which was the prevalent spiritual condition o f the time. I see no reason why the present war should affect the arts in any different way. Unless our civilization is to disappear completely, the post­ war period must in all spheres of human activity be not less but more dynamic than any previous period known to history. This is no age of easy transitions. Even Mr. Churchill, however unwilling to define the future, admits that if we emerge victorious from this struggle for freedom and progress, there will be an “ electric atmosphere” in the world which will demand an enormously accelerated advance towards social unity and justice. He was addressing a luncheon-party given jointly by the British Employers’ Federation and the Trade Union Congress, and it is possible that his idea of what con­ stitutes social unity and justice differed from that of one half of the audience he was addressing. But about the nature of the situation in which we shall find ourselves at the end of the war there could be, in such a realistic assembly, no difference of opinion. War will give place to social revolution, to vast movements of spiritual revulsion and ardent, hopeful planning. The realists, among whom we can confidently place Mr. Churchill, know this, and their only headache is how to control, to their own ultimate interests, the frenzies that have been released from the ruins of capitalist economy. It sometimes seems as though they realize they will need the co-operation of the artist and the poet no less than that of the practical man. 1 Cf. William James : “ All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.”— The Will to Believe, pp. 188-9.

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But it is not for a moment to be supposed that the architects and the painters, the sculptors and the poets of the post-war period will meet the groaning gestation around them with the helpless conformist accents and moral banalities which our preachers and politicians have been accustomed to interpose between their audiences and reality. On the contrary, the art of the future will be more experimental and revolutionary than any we have known in the between-war years. It is precisely in this, its increased revolutionary tempo, that it must be different. As for the “ common m an” , for whom even the Times has recently shown such an unusual concern, he does not find a place in the society of the future—neither the common nor the uncommon man. While it is true enough that people differ in sensibility, intelligence and power of invention, I do not think that this is a difference which can be expressed as artist v. common man. Such terms as artist and layman, craftsman and amateur, seem to imply the continuance of a class society differentiated, not according to function, but according to taste, or wealth, or some equally irrelevant standard. But the society we contemplate, and to whose establishment we shall devote if necessary a positive phase of this revolutionary war when the present negative phase (the war against fascism) is over, this new society will have no use for cultural elites, whether of Burlington House or Printing House Square. It will have no use for any “ culture” that does not spring spontaneously from the progressive energy of the people, and from a people not debased by financial slavery and social subserviency, but a people confident and manly, and above all creative. That the art of such a people will differ radically from the academic art of the past twenty years is not to be denied; but it will not tend to mildness, to moderation, or even to simplicity, that last infirmity of lazy minds. The great art of the past—the art of dLschylus, of Dante, of Shake­ speare, of Milton, of Beethoven—was not simple 1 in the sense 1 When Milton wrote that poetry should be more simple, sensuous and passionate than rhetoric, he did not imply that poetry should neces­ sarily be easy, placid and platitudinous.

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implied by those who complain of the obscurity and perversity of modern art; it was the art of epochs as complex as our own, and it has its relevant artistic complexity, which still baffles the elucidatory efforts of scholars and commentators. The art of the post-war period will be no less complex, or it will fail to represent the period and to appeal to the deepest instincts of the people of the period. Culture may be easy: it can be obtained in a pre-digested form from guide-books and history-books, from manuals and polite essays. It can be worn like a suit from Sackville Street or cultivated like an Oxford accent. But art is difficult, just because it is creative and original—the tight apex of the un­ folding bud of human consciousness. There will be lazy people in the future, just as there have been lazy people in the past, who will not make the necessary effort to sharpen their sensi­ bilities against the astringent light; but in the future, let us hope, there will be fewer of them. Because on the effort to understand art depends the effort to understand life, to under­ stand the principle of liberty which makes life, and which makes human progress. If I am asked what the art of the post-war period will be like, I become as vague as Mr. Churchill. I cam only reply that it will be an expression of the society we then establish. If we go back to the government of the Bank of England and the City, to preposterous monopolies exploiting the essentials of life, to a parliament of fools and an underworld of crime, then we shall go back to an art of convention, sentimentality and pride against which a few revolutionary protests will be more vain and ineffective than ever. But if we discard the notions of victory and defeat, if through common suffering we are driven to humility and goodwill, then reason may prevail in human affairs and we shall build up from the ruins a society free from the grotesque and irrational institutions of finance, snobbery and greed. The art which will then arise as a spontaneous expression of the spiritual life of such a society will bear no obvious relation to any art that exists now. It will incorporate, for those who have eyes to see beneath the surfaces, the eternal

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harmonies of all great art; but it will be so original in its outward manifestations that its first impact must inevitably seem, and be, revolutionary. But in so far as we shall then all be revolutionaries, and art as we know it now will have dis­ appeared in the flames like so much dusty plush, what might be called revolutionary in the language of to-day will then be simply creative.

6 The Vulgarity and Impotence of Contemporary Art The task o f art is enormous. Through the influence o f real art, aided by science, guided by religion, that peaceful co-operation o f man which is now maintained by external means—by our law-courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspection, and so forth— should be obtained by man!s free and joyous activity. Art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this. L eo T olstoy, What is Art?, chap. xx.

A . FEW years ago one might have used the more familiar title D ignity and I mpudence to describe the artistic scene in England. There was a National Gallery, its walls majestic with the genius of past ages; there was a Royal Academy, defending, however inadequately, a tradition of rectitude; and barking in the face of these dignified institutions were all the revolutionaries and secessionists constituting “ the modern movement” . Then came universal war. Tradition retired into bomb-proof cellars and caves (it has a scarcity value); the modern movement, seemingly so secure behind a Maginot Line, was dispersed, to be heard of occasionally in Lisbon, Mexico City, Mozambique or the Isle of Man. What was left on the scene? Two exhibitions, which were held in London during the third year of the war, gave us a glimpse of “ art among the ruins.” At Lancaster House (the London Museum) there was a brave attempt to rally the modern movement—“ New Movements

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in A rt: Contemporary Work in England: An Exhibition of Recent Painting and Sculpture” , to quote its full title. It will be remembered that before the war the modern movement was advancing in two separate and somewhat antagonistic columns, under the banners of constructivism and superrealism. Here (the superrealist column sadly depleted) they marched along together, showing work for the most part executed since the outbreak of the war. It would not, I think, be fair to judge the present position of superrealism from this exhibition—to that I will return presently. But so far as constructivism is concerned, let it be said at once that the column was seen to be advancing: never was there such a miracle of precision and harmony as Gabo’s “ Construction in Space— Spiral Them e” (1941): never had Ben. Nicholson controlled his dimensional relationships with such a sure instinct: and there were various new recruits to the movement who showed that expansion and development are possible in this direction. What Hartley Ramsden, in an introductory note to the catalogue, called “ the intrinsic merits of the work” was not in question: these artists, and others represented in the exhibition, “ pre-eminently fulfil the requirements of an aesthetic standard” . In doing that, and that alone, they anticipated any questioning of the social relevance of their work. Art is always socially relevant, or it is not art. In fulfilling the requirements of an aesthetic standard, a work of art is fulfilling the requirements of a social standard, for an aesthetic standard is an organic standard, a biologically functional standard, and you cannot make a button or a penknife, a bridge or a petrol-pump, a painting or a statue, without invoking this identical standard. Superrealism and constructivism, traditional values and revolutionary experi­ ments, must meet on this same testing-ground of organic fitness. It is simply a question of survival—of the survival of art and of national survival, for if there is a division between a people and its art, it means that one or the other is no longer organically fit, organically vital, and will no longer survive. That such a division now exists in this country was proved by the Forces Exhibition held about the same time at the

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National Portrait Gallery. This was a jury-free exhibition: the only qualification was membership of one of the civil defence or military forces. It consisted not only of drawings and paintings, but also of the miscellaneous products of ‘‘ leisure moments” — carvings in wood and chalk, model engines and aeroplanes, poker work and pastiches of every kind. It was an exhibition typical of several that have been held since the war started, and it may be taken as a fair and uncensored repre­ sentation o f popular taste. In criticizing such an exhibition, one is always in the invidious position of the Superior Person, but even a worm could lift its head above such a level. What stretched before us was the sordid scum left by a receding civiliza­ tion. Aesthetic criticism had no function there: it was an affair for the social pathologist. But to that science the art critic is inevitably driven day by day, and I doubt whether the war has left him with any other relevant basis. For at the other extreme, this art of pure intuition exemplified by the works of Mondrian, Gabo and Ben Nicholson—is this not also a social phenomenon, something left high and very dry by the same receding tide? I ask this question with no certainty of giving a convincing answer, because before answering it I must make certain affirmations which will not be acceptable to those who will be inclined to agree with my answer. I must affirm in the first place that the art represented—to keep to a specific example— by Gabo’s “ Spiral Theme” is the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man.1 This form, hovering like

1 This statement, which I reproduce as it first appeared in Horizon, has given rise to a good deal of misunderstanding. I am not asserting that a particular artist, Naum Gabo, is the greatest sculptor that has ever lived— greater than Pheidias, Michael Angelo, or our contemporary, Mr. X, Y or Z. That is a decision I am modest enough to leave to history. I am saying that in my judgment a particular work of art represents the purest intuition of spatial relationships ever achieved in the history of art. This does not imply that such an intuition of such relationships constitutes the whole duty of the artist—indeed, the rest of the essay surely makes it clear that I am saying almost the opposite : namely, that the artist is called upon to mediate between the purity of his intuition and the veiled vision of his public.

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a still but librating falcon between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, is the crystallization of the purest sensibility for harmonious relationships: and whereas, in constructivist art generally, this crystallization is a mere planning of static relationships, here an axial system crystallizes energy itself. Creation is a much abused word, applied loosely to imitations and logical constructions: it is justified only for that absolute lyricism we call “ pure poetry” , for music, for certain branches of mathematics, and for constructivism in the plastic arts (which includes architecture). But even within this absolute world there is an hierarchy, and at the summit I would place this spatial construction of Gabo’s. In constructivism we have attained, after twenty-five cen­ turies of irrelevant groping, the kind of art envisaged by Plato as the basic art—the art of pure relationships. Anyone who does not Understand constructivism does not understand Plato’s theory of art—and that, I venture to say, includes most philo­ sophers and classical scholars. The utmost banality of imagina­ tion and lack of sensibility is shown precisely by those people who construe constructivist art as merely “ decorative” — though personally I do not condone the derogatory use of this word: to say of a work of art that it is decorative is merely to admit that it is pleasing, and what pleases is good art.1 I find a relief by Ben Nicholson very decorative in the right setting, just as, in its appropriate setting, I find a relief by Agostino di Duccio very decorative: decoration merely implies the accom­ modation of a work of art to its environment, and their failure 1 Cf. Ruskin (in The Two Paths) : u There is no existing highestorder art but is decorative. The best sculpture yet produced has been the decoration of a temple front—the best painting, the decoration of a room. Raphael’s best doing is merely the wall-colouring of a suite of apartments in the Vatican, and his cartoons were made for tapestries. Correggio’s best doing is the decoration of two small church cupolas at Parma ; Michael Angelo’s, of a ceiling in the Pope’s private chapel ; Tintoret’s, of a ceiling and side wall belonging to a charitable society at Venice ; while Titian and Veronese threw out their noblest thoughts, not even on the inside, but on the outside of the common brick and plaster walls of Venice.”

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to accommodate themselves to any contemporary environment is precisely what is wrong with so many contemporary works of art. I do not exclude the possibility that it is the environ­ ment which should be changed. Indeed, the environment is changing very rapidly: war is dissolving it, this war which is a symptom of the greatest social revolution since the fall of the Roman Empire. That is what I mean by m y image of the receding tide, and the question we are asking is, not so much whether the tide will ever flow again —for that is the only presupposition which can justify any intellectual activity at all—but whether, when it does return to our shores, any of this art which we now call contemporary will float on its crest. In other words, is any of this art, any art visible anywhere to-day, prophetic of things to come ? Before I attempt to answer this question, let us glance at the scattered and repeatedly decimated ranks of the superrealists. I have already suggested that they should not be judged by the inadequate representation of their recent work which is now­ adays to be seen in London. Where, then, shall we find the main body of this force which, only six years ago, was storming all our fortresses? Apparently in New York City. There the Grand Instigator (he has refused more pontifical titles) has landed from a refugee boat, and already established a consistory from which proceed the familiar encyclicals and bulls of excommunication. Salvador Dali, anagrammatically transformed into Avida Dollars, is smirched and obliterated with “ black bile” . Eluard is condemned for his collaboration in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise , now reappearing in Paris under the sponsorship of the Nazis. The movement thus loses its most famous painter and its best poet. Breton can still count on M ax Ernst Andre Masson and Yves Tanguy, all now in America; and there is a motley access of new recruits, many of them, no doubt, embarrassing to the G.I. But Dali is the only painter who since the outbreak of war has shown any signs of vitality and of social relevance. He himself has described his new phase as 4‘ classical” , but judging from repro­

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ductions of his recent work,1 “ baroque” would be a better word, and neo-romantic better still. As for evidence of Dali’s vitality, we find it in the ever-increasing fertility of his linear inventiveness, in the novelty and efficiency of his images. His social relevance consists in a violent and consistently maintained protest against the inhumanity of the machine age. This is evident in his titles alone—for example: “ Debris of an auto­ mobile giving birth to a blind horse biting a telephone” , which is not a clever joke, in conception or execution, but a tragic poetry. But equally with Breton we must recognize the paradox of D ali, which Breton describes in crueller terms. This artist is a typical product of the civilization he renounces and reviles. He has none of the integrity of a Jean Giono or an Eric Gill: he looks swell in a Mercedes-Benz. He is the idol of the ’socialites, the pet of expatriated aristocrats and dollar princesses. He cynically exploits the sensationalism incidental to his art. A movement which, whatever its faults, has never for a moment compromised with social inequality may well be excused for not tolerating such behaviour in its ranks. But the defections and exclusions which have characterized the movement since its beginnings have produced a very confused impression in the mind of the public, and a Third Manifesto, which is said to be in preparation, will need to be a very unequivocal document if this confusion is to be dissipated. On his arrival in New York, Breton gave an interview which has been published in View.2 It is a strange mixture of puerility and wisdom. It is perhaps understandable that after the stress of invasion, defeat, escape and exile, Breton should announce his “ initiation into the mysteries of American butterflies” ; but it is a little difficult to accept the invention of a card game which “ proposes to throw an ideological bridge between two worlds” as an event of major significance in this time of Armageddon. But Breton does make one or two observations which show that superrealism may still have some contribution 1 Salvador Dali , by James Thrall Soby (New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1941). 2 Vol. i., Nos. 7-8, published in New York.

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to make to the reintegration of our civilization. He insists, for example, that we are at the end of “ the illusion of independence, I will even say of the transcendence, of the work of art” . He attacks the egocentrism of the modern artist and poet, and reminds us that Lautreamont’s precept, “ Poetry should be made by all, not by one” , remains one of the fundamental tenets of superrealism. He points out, and it is profoundly true, that the egocentrism of the artist brings with it “ indifferentism ” (the artist sets himself above the melee, believes himself entitled to an Olympian attitude), and this state in its turn entails stagnation, for the artist swiftly exhausts his individual resources and is only capable of sapless variations on a barren theme. This point of view has been implicit in Breton’s philosophy in the past, and it is thanks to Breton that superrealism has always had a sociological orientation. One therefore turns eagerly to the few words which he devoted to the future. In so far as they are expressed in general terms they are not disappointing. The following passage strikes me as being inspired by tragic experience and fundamental insight: “ In thumbing through the works of those who pretend to profit from France’s defeat, I am struck by the briefness, not to say sterility, of their views. Conquerors and conquered appear to me headed for the same abyss if they do not instruct themselves before it is too late in the process which set them one against the other: in the course of such a process, the exhaustion of the economic causes of the conflict will but emphasize, in effect, the common misery of our contem­ poraries, which in the last analysis is doubtless of an ideo­ logical order: it is rationalism, a closed rationalism, which is killing the world; physical violence is unconsciously accepted, justified as the issue of mental passivity: in this game the least permeable thoughts—Cartesian, for instance— are those which turn out to be the quickest overthrown. This is so true, the ‘ giving up’ so general, despair so great, that many ask if the salvation of man does not demand his

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The Politics of the Unpolitical 1disintellectualization5 for the sake of a revaluation of his prime instincts. It is certain that as far as faith, honour and ideals are concerned, one sees everywhere to-day the survival o f the sign fo r the thing signified. Faith, ideals, honour ask to be re-established on new bases: in the meantime all the rags which don’t even cling to the body any more ought to be shaken.”

Faith, honour, ideals—three years ago these would have been strange words on the lips of a superrealist, but we must respect Breton for his courage in uttering them, his realization that our tragic situation requires an affirmation of values which have for too long been abused by bourgeois moralists, but which, in their integrity, remain the basis of any natural human order. I will not quote Breton’s indications of the specific activities necessary to achieve this revaluation of values—they might seem a little trivial against the wider vision. I am glad to see that they include a consideration of the significance of Gestalt psychology, for the application of this particular theory to the spheres of art and education promises to be more fruitful than any other system of psychology, psychoanalysis included.1 In agreeing with Breton that a system of closed rationalism is responsible for the present state of the world, and that a process of “ disintellectualization ” is necessary for our salvation, one must be careful to make certain distinctions. The pro­ tagonists of fascism have spoken in similar terms. It may be said that we all agree that what is necessary is a revaluation of man’s “ prime instincts” . We disagree as to what constitutes these prime instincts. Or if we can agree on a scientific classi­ fication of these instincts, we may then disagree on the relative values to be placed on them. According to MacDougall, for example, the prime instincts are of flight, of repulsion, of curiosity, of pugnacity, of self-abasement and self-assertion, of reproduction (the sexual instinct), of acquisition, of construc­ 1 I give some evidence for this statement in Education (London : Faber & Faber, 1943), chap. iii. and passim.

Through Art

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tion, of feeding, together with the parental and the gregarious instincts. Here, obviously, there is plenty of room for disagree­ ment, and any valuation of such diverse instincts must obviously be guided b y an overriding philosophy—a general conception of the purpose of life or the destiny of man. Roughly speaking, the instincts can be divided into antagonistic pairs, and I believe that the distinction between all these pairs has its roots in the Oedipus complex. In the origins of love and hate we may seek the origins o f self-abasement and self-assertion, of curiosity and repulsion, o f gregariousness and pugnacity. On the one side we have instincts which are essentially egocentric, or phylocentric, and these are the instincts which the fascist philosophy exalts above all others. On the other side we have instincts of mutual aid and constructiveness which should be the instincts exalted by am anti-fascist or democratic philosophy. It is per­ fectly possible to distinguish certain instincts and encourage these at the expense of other instincts, and a philosophy which merely looks forward to the free play of any or all the basic instincts is a defeatism of the most fundamental kind. Better fascism than such indifferentism. The closed rationalism to which Breton refers has not been a philosophy of indifferentism, though it has been largely * a philosophy of unconscious assumptions. The most disastrous of these is the very general assumption that devotion to an intellectual concept is an adequate safeguard against the anti­ social instincts. Such concepts are typical products of what is proudly claimed as “ the scientific attitude” (though it is no longer characteristic of the most advanced scientists), and they are so prevalent and various that it needs a considerable effort of the' will to be conscious of their existence. To mention only a few: the belief that every effect must have a cause; the belief that exact statements can be made about phenomenal events; the belief that feeling can be eliminated from thought; the belief in the real existence of entities like the state, the church, the working classes; the belief in the absolute nature of a particular code of morals; the belief in a natural distinction between right and wrong, good and bad, and in the whole

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system of pedagogic and social discipline built up on such a distinction. Fascism is the intellectualization of certain instincts which hitherto mankind has not thought worthy of intellectualization —those instincts of self-assertion, acquisition and pugnacity which can be given the emotional drive and cohesion of racial assertion. It is a further intellectual assumption that these instincts have a high survival value—an assumption which is not, I believe, supported by biological evidence. It may seem that to speak, as Breton does, of reviving “ faith, honour and ideals” is only to fall into the same trap, but that is to ignore the fact that these words indicate emotional attitudes and not intellectual concepts. These attitudes will be based on sensibility, above all on aesthetic sensibility. And this is where Gestalt psychology comes in, for it is being shown that in the very act of perception itself, and a fortiori in the higher organizations of experience known as sensation, memory, learning, thinking and reasoning, the aesthetic judgment is decisive. Our new ideals must be established on a recognition of this fundamental psychological fact, and this means that the whole of our educational and moral outlook must be reorientated away from intellection and towards sensibility. We must over­ throw the tyranny of the concept. It is against the necessity of this reconstruction of our modes of thought and behaviour that we must judge the relevance of the contemporary movements in art. In approaching con­ structivism from this new point of view it would at first sight seem highly suspect, for here is an art which dispenses with the image, and which might be described as essentially conceptual. And that indeed is the basis of the popular complaint about it— people say it is too austere, or too puritanical, or too intellectual for them. Strictly speaking, what the constructivists dispense with is the pictorial image, not the image itself: for a certain defined space, or area of colour, is no less an image than the image of a flower or a human face. The relevant question is whether the constructivist’s use of images is sensible and organic, and I must assert that in the case of those artists who

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really understand what they are doing (Gabo, for instance) it undoubtedly is. Nevertheless, there is a qualification to be made. I think it is perfectly fair to accuse these artists of ego­ centrism, as Breton does. More particularly, they suffer from the illusion o f the transcendence of the work of art. It is quite true that certain composers of music, certain mathematicians and logicians, certain metaphysicians, suffer from the same illusion. Whatever kind of secret or arcane activity the artist or the philosopher may pursue in his “ laboratory” —and such activity is not only legitimate but necessary—he must then sacrifice his discoveries on the altar of the common good. The only real progress is communal progress, and that is why we must exalt the instinct of mutual aid above all other instincts (to the extent of recognizing that the community is the human race and not the intellectually isolated tribe). The work of art is only ratified in the organic ritual of life, and it is only in so far as the constructivist succeeds not only in constructing these platonic models of reality, but also in modifying the communal environment, that he acquires the full stature of the humanist. The artist is not even the mediator between the real and the ideal—that, again, is to overestimate his gifts. The artist, to quote a precept which does not differ materially from Lautreamont’s, is not a special kind of man: every man is a special kind of artist. These strictures apply no less forcibly to superrealism. When one has set aside the pathetic charlatanism which has always disfigured the movement, we are left with a very essential activity, one which the closed system of rationalism has always striven to repress. To pretend that the intimations of uncon­ scious mental activity which we receive in dreams, and which find universal expression in religion, myth, folklore and ritual —to pretend that all these manifestations belong to the child­ hood of mankind and can be safely ignored by a rational civiliza­ tion, is the supreme conceit of the human intellect. For that ignorant folly more than for anything else we suffer our present agony. In any reintegration of civilization, what the superrealists call the conquest of the irrational, but which might more subtly

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be called the wooing of the irrational, must play a decisive part —in education, in drama, film, in every form of activity that invokes the pictorial image. But finally let us realize that it is completely useless to indulge in these speculations on the purely ideological plane. I began by saying that the art critic has been compelled to become a social pathologist: but when he turns to the future he can only conceive it in terms of social reconstruction. These activities which we call art are social activities, they are communal activities. As such they are not conscious activities—no com­ munity ever said, “ Now let us be artistic for a change” . It might have said, “ Now let us praise God” or “ Now let us work” or “ Now let us play” . The art was not even a by­ product of these activities: it was the substance of them. That is why it is not conceivable that a new civilization is possible without a social and economic revolution. Some people think that a change of heart is all that is needed. Hearts have been changing by the million in these last two years, but they still ache with insatiable longings. The mountains are moving. Faith, honour and ideals are hovering above the battlefields. But do not let us disguise the material immensity of our task. So much that we have practised as a diversion must be re­ nounced : so much that we have valued for its refinement must be submerged. The world for many years to come will be at work, working overtime, working all the time, obsessed with work. It is our chance, for in the transformation of work we may see the organic growth of art.

7

Modern Art and French Decadence We live in open corflict with the immediate world surrounding us. . . . In ujhatever direction I turn, this world presents the same appearance o f cold and hostile unreasonableness, the same cere­ monious exterior representing the sign’s survival o f the thing signified. A ll intellectual values are persecuted, all moral ideas in ruin , all the good things o f life tainted with corruption, in­ distinguishable. The filth o f money covers everything. Words like country, justice and duty have become meaningless to us. . . . We offer total resistance to whatever particular obligation such a world attempts to impose on us. Andre Breton, Position politique de Vart d'aujourd'hui (1955).

X t is often thought and sometimes said that modern art, so largely centred in Paris, should long ago have been recognized as a symptom of the rot that was spreading to the heart of the Third Republic. Now that it only remains to carry out an autopsy on the dead body, the symptoms no longer count: they can be dismissed as so much historical evidence of the process that was taking place, that has since run its course, and has now come to a definite end. If Hitler is defeated, if a Fourth Republic rises from the ruins of the Third, then, say these critics, a new art, completely different from the art of the period “ entre deux guerres ” , will take shape and slowly establish itself. There are so many sophisms and confusions in this very prevalent point of view that a somewhat pedantic analysis may perhaps be excused. Before we can discuss the problem, we ought to know, not only what is included under the term 93

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“ modern art” , but also to what extent “ modern art” is speci­ fically French. We should also ask what is meant by the “ decadence” of France, and to what extent such decadence is peculiarly French. Finally, we might also inquire into the credentials of those making the charge, and we might ask for some positive indication of the kind of art which they assume will take the place of “ modern” art. The first and most obvious qualification to be made is that the art usually described as “ modern” art, particularly the art of the so-called “ Paris School” , is by no means exclusively French. To mention only a dozen names, the following painters who worked in Paris and there established their fame were all foreigners: Chagall, Chirico, Dali, Ernst, Gris, Miro, Modig­ liani, Mondrian, Pascin, Picasso, Soutine and Tchelitchew.. Against this dozen one is hard put to name more than half a dozen purely French artists of equivalent significance for the modern movement—Braque, Derain, Leger, Masson, Matisse and Rouault, but who else? It is easy to widen the charge—to admit that modern art as centred in Paris was thoroughly international, but at the same time to suggest that it was by that very fact typical of a decad­ ence which was also international—the decadence of “ the western democracies” . It is also possible, for a Frenchman, to assert that the very admission and assimilation of so many foreign elements into the School of Paris was itself a sign of weakness—that a healthy art is, by contrast, a national and exclusive art. That would certainly be the view of the author of Mein Kampf, and is presumably the view to which Laval and the collaborationalists must now conform. I f the charge is thus widened, it becomes a vast cultural question which we cannot limit to the sphere of modern art. We are, of course, witnessing the breakdown of a certain form of social organization—or lack of organization, for it is the com­ petitive chaos of laissez-faire that has disintegrated. All forms of culture which are characteristic of small-scale capitalism may from this point of view be regarded as decadent; but equally, many forms of culture which are a protest against the values of

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capitalist society must then be regarded as anti-decadent; and few cultural phenomena have been so defiantly recalcitrant to the values o f capitalist society as modem art. The critics, that is to say, cannot have it both ways. If by decadence they mean the moral and social values typical of the bourgeois society of the last thirty years, then modem art can only be regarded as a reaction against these values. Even superrealism, which the opponents of modern art regard as a sort of putrescent shimmer on the decayed body of modern culture, is essentially a protest, and a very moral protest, against the unreality of the conventions which passed for life—in particular, against the inhumanity of the machine age. In this respect, Dali, as he himself would admit, is merely the last and the most logical of the Pre-Raphaelites. But if the critics assert that modern art itself is decadent, then they m ust be prepared to defend the moral and aesthetic conventions against which that art was a protest. And in the circumstances, their defence must be organized among the ruins of the social structure which embodied those conventions. The argument on this universal level is endless, and it can only enhance the significance of a phenomenon which, whatever aesthetic judgment we pass on it, has its counterpart in the catastrophic history of our time. Whatever aesthetic judgment history itself passes on the art of our time, it is bound to take as representative, not the tame and conformist products of the academies, b u t post-impressionism, cubism, constructivism and superrealism. For good or evil these movements have determined the course of contemporary art and of its literary and ideological concepts, and they cannot be expugned from any objective study of our time. This is perhaps only the triumph of the regicide and the assassin: you may despise and condemn such agents of history, but you cannot repress their names or deeds. But it is more profitable to discuss this problem within the specified limits of one country and one event: the fall of France. There may still be people who attribute this disaster to strategic errors or mere mischance, but surely all the evidence, and there is more of it than was presented at the Riom trials,

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makes it quite clear that France was suffering (as, indeed, Great Britain and the United States also suffer) from a break­ down of social institutions, accompanied by political corruption and national disintegration. It is still possible to assert, in so far as this was a kind of disease of democracy, that it was local and not endemic. Democracy had become infected with a virus that had weakened its pulse, brought its blood to one coagulated centre, and paralysed its nerves and limbs. The disease can be scientifically diagnosed in the terms of capitalist accumulation, scarcity economics, production for profit, in­ security neurosis, etc. The framework of democratic theory remains unaffected: for democracy, in theory, is merely the assertion of human values, such as brotherly love, mutual aid, equality and freedom. A system which does not secure these values is ipso facto not democratic. Certain critics of modern art would accept some such political diagnosis and then go on to assert that the nature of modern art has been determined by the economics of the capitalist era. It may be true that a phenomenon like the centralization of the movement in Paris was due to economic factors; and certainly the monetary valuation of works of art has been determined by the mechanism of scarcity economics and the profit motive. One could point out a hundred ways in which the economic system has affected and controlled the art market. But this does not prove that the art is representative of the system which controls it. Capitalist motives have not affected, consciously or unconsciously, the stylistic development of artists so distinct in kind and appeal as Picasso, Rouault, Matisse and Dali. The artists, one might say, have consistently tweaked the noses of their wealthy patrons, and pursued courses which have dis­ mayed, not only their patrons, but the dealers who mediated between patron and artist. L et us now confine ourselves to certain representative French artists. They seem to me to follow three or perhaps four clear trends. There are in the first place painters like Vuillard and Bonnard who continue the impressionist tradition in an exquis­ itely prolonged diminuendo. They, if any modern French

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artists, m ight be described as decadent in the literal sense of the word, because they have refined a particular vision of the world beyond its period of social relevance. Impressionism is the art of a world that had just discovered the significance of movement, but not yet invented the moving picture; a world that was still playing with the science of colour as with a newly discovered secret; and above all, a world that still lived intim­ ately, behind heavy curtains, under shaded lamps. Matisse and Derain, who represent a second though a subsidiary trend, had discovered how to live in sunlit houses, to travel in motor-cars, to assimilate speed. They returned to a static world, or a world dominated by musical rhythm, and gave expression to the new nostalgia: the peaceful landscape, the liberation of colour, the childlike vision, the integral pattern. That was not a plunge into decadence: rather a redressement, an assertion of the individual will, the vitality of bodily sensation, the primacy of the human and the subjective over the material and the objective. There is a certain moral grandeur about the lifework of a painter like Matisse, or a sculptor like Maillol. But if we can say as much for Matisse or Maillol, what shall we say for Georges Rouault, who, in our present distressful perspective, has gained so much in spiritual significance? We were apt, in the years of cleverness, to discount too much for his obstinate medievalism, his Christian passion, his narrow undeviating expressionism. But how massively his art stands now against the background of defeatism and abdication! The France in which a Rouault could work and find appreciation was not a decadent France: rather it was the France of Giono and Bernanos, of the eternal solidity of the peasant and of the conscience that was still free and catholic. Two other painters I would mention because as personalities they are so typically French—massive clear-eyed Normans whose physique at any rate never suggested decadence: Leger and Braque. They represent the extremes of modernism— or shall we add Masson to make sure of including surrealisme ? Leger’s precise architectonic art, so strong in organization, so powerful and direct in colour, has as much moral integrity as D

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Rouault’s art, though infinitely less spirituality: it omits, not merely the “ numenous” of the theologians, but even the preconscious of the psychologists. But if it is limited to the organization of sensation, and omits certain aspects of intuition and feeling, it is none the less a very positive art, far from any suggestion of weakness or decadence. It will remain standing even if the political structure never rises round it again. So, too, will the art of Braque. Not all of it, because he has been more eclectic, more impressionable, less integral. There have been times when he was bored with the social scene, and 4‘ doodled” while he stared hopelessly into the future. But his best work—the pre-1914 cubist paintings, the nature mortes of the ’twenties, the mythical figures of the ’thirties—these are all stages in that “ dissolution of reality” which Carl Einstein, in his extraordinary essay on Braque,1 saw as his positive service to the moral reintegration of the age. It is from the same point of view that we should consider the social aspect of superrealism. Superrealists have always declared, from the very beginning of the movement, that it had taken upon itself the duty of destroying the aesthetic and moral conventions of contemporary bourgeois civilization. If, as the turn of events has proved, that civilization was rotten, and ready to disintegrate, then superrealism can only be praised for its sanitary function. I repeat: the critics of modern art cannot have it both ways: either they must defend bourgeois civilization and try to re-establish its social and economic con­ ventions, or they must admit the correctness and prescience of the superrealist movement. I would like to emphasize this prescience. Along with certain psychoanalysts—particularly Jung— the superrealists again and again warned the world of the coming catastrophe, and the implications of the shape their warnings took, in the paintings of Max Ernst, Dali, Rene Magritte and others, was plainly moral—the most moral and minatory art since the Middle Ages. Change your way of life, your conception of reality, or otherwise the end of the world is upon you. Like Isaiah and Ezekiel of old, they preached 1

Editions des Chroniques du Jour (Paris,

1934).

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with destructive fury, eager to hasten the revolution which was, and still is, the only alternative to the end of our civilization. If we look back on the ten years preceding the outbreak of the war, th e years of steep incline into disaster, then the signi­ ficant figures in the French scene are not the Gides and Valerys, or any competitor for the laurels of the Academie, but Giono, the peasant-anarchist, Bernanos, the integral Christian, and Breton, the superrealist. These are the significant figures, and they are positive figures, creative because destructive, moral in their revolt against contemporary values. Apparently they are disparate figures, working in different spheres, along different levels of human consciousness; but in the total sphere of that consciousness their orbits meet, and include within their points of contact nothing that is compromising, reactionary or decadent; but contain everything that is positive, revolutionary, and creative of a new and enduring world. It will be many years before a just and final estimate of the culture of the early twentieth century becomes possible, but we can already assert, on principles which we derive from the total aspect of history, that growth and form, birth, maturation and decadence, are dynamic processes. The vigour of an epoch is not measured by its stability, which may be deathly, but by its movement, its display of energy. When a civilization becomes moribund, or paralysed by material and economic factors, then the first stirrings of a rebirth will inevitably take the form o f an attack on the repressive environment. The shell must be broken before new wings can take the air. The phoenix rises from a fire, beauty from ashes.

8

A Question of Life or Death I implore you to tell me how a people that has so many philo­ sophers can have so little taste. . . . Voltaire in a letter to the Cardinal de Bernis. You seem to be surprised that philosophy, enlightening the mind and rectifying ideas, should have so little influence on the taste o f a nation. You are quite right: and yet you will have observed that manners have even more empire over taste than have the sciences. It seems to me that in the matter o f art and o f literature, the progress o f taste is more dependent on the spirit o f society than on the philosophic spirit. The Cardinal de Bernis in a letter to Voltaire. Cited by Delacroix, Journal, April 9, 1858.

T h e symptoms of decadence as they reveal themselves in the art of a country are indifference, vanity and servitude. In­ difference is the absence of appreciation: it is the general attitude towards the arts in England to-day. It is true that we still have a few patrons who carry on a bygone system, but they are neither numerous enough nor influential enough to affect the general body of art. It is significant, too, that they confine themselves to the arts of painting and music, whose products can be used for their personal profit—for the decoration of their houses or the amusement of their friends. I know of no modern patrons of poetry, or of literature of any kind. A poet might sell his autograph for sixpence at a charity bazaar, but it would be a poor sort of bazaar that could not procure the far

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more valuable services of a racing motorist, a county cricketer or a film star. Indifference is endemic. It is a disease which has spread through our whole civilization, and which is a symptom of a lowered vitality. The sensibilities are dulled and the average human being no longer cares to feel the keen edge of life, to have freshness in vision or zest and savour in the senses. He prefers to face life in the armour of boredom and cynicism, fending off despair with the brazen shield of dissipation. If he is rich he can command amusements which soothe his exacer­ bated nerves without engaging his mind or intriguing his im agination; if he is poor he will plunge into the cheap makebelieve world of Hollywood where he can enjoy vicariously the glittering life of the rich; or he will gamble his ill-spared shillings on the football pools in the expectation of one day being able to indulge in his own hectic spending. But rich or poor, it is the same fever to escape from reality—above all, from art, which is the mirror in which the reality of life is accentuated. There is one exception to this rule: those people who think they can subdue the artist and use his works for their own profit. The time has gone by in which any credit is to be obtained by the direct patronage of art; no one, for the sake of a dedication, would pay a poet to write an epic. But certain kinds of art can be brought within the orbit of the commercial system—that is to say, they can be given an artificial scarcity value and put on the market. This applies above all to movable objects like paintings. But the process by which a painting becomes a market commodity is not a simple one. The demand must be created and the supply must be restricted. I do not want to suggest that the demand can be created irrespective of merit; but granted the merit, it must be exploited, and it can only be exploited by snobbish means. A painter might paint fifty pictures a year and make quite a good living by selling them at £20 apiece to a wide anonymous public; but in that way he would never become famous in his lifetime. By devious ways it has to be suggested that a few select people should pay

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£1000 for the rare privilege of possessing one of Mr. X ’s canvases. And such is the cunning and efficiency of the art trade that this can be done. But then consider the position of this lucky and perhaps deserving artist. His pictures pass from his studio to the dealer’s rack; from this emporium they are doled out to the public at a rate which will not flood the market. They are priced as high as the audacious dealer dares, and bought by someone rich enough to pay this exorbitant sum. A situation has been created in which the work of art is bought, not for its intrinsic value as a work of art, but simply because it is a commercial rarity the possession of which will reflect credit on the owner. In such a situation there is no organic relation between the artist and the public; there is no real contact, no give and take of expression and appreciation. The artist is working in a closed circuit, and need never break it. The danger in this situation is not that the artist makes a good living and is able to live a life of luxury. Good artists in the past, such as Rubens, have lived like princes and no harm has come to their art. But Rubens lived in direct contact with his public; he dealt, as it were, across his own counter. The modern artist is as remote as the mines of Anaconda or Rio Tinto, and subject to the same quotations and speculations. And very much the same motives govern both markets. The prices of pictures are not quoted in the Stock Exchange lists, but they have their fluctuations on Vanity Fair. So have most of the commodities of the art market. The publisher must exploit vanity for his books, the impresario for his music and the producer for his plays. The only alternative is to substitute entertainment for art. The public will pay for entertainment; the private person for the privilege of possessing something unique. Vanity in the patron of art leads to servitude in the artist. A servile mind is a mind that has committed moral suicide. Art is independence—independence of vision, directness of expression, spiritual detachment. A good deal of nonsense has been written about the anonymous artists of the Middle

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Ages. If we do not know the names of the architects of our cathedrals or of the sculptors and painters who decorated them, it is simply because the artists of that period did not have the benefit of a modem publicity service; the records have perished: the art remains, universal and therefore impersonal in its appeal, b u t none the less the creation of individual minds. If Adam Lock, the thirteenth-century architect of Wells Cathedral, or William Wynford, the fourteenth-century architect o f Winchester, are not so well known as Wren or Nash, it is not that they were inferior as architects, or in any sense less individual. We can affirm it as a simple fact that from the earliest appearance of art in prehistoric times until the present day, art has been the creation of individual minds, reacting freely to their environment, expressing and inter­ preting th e common will, but deriving the essence and the vitality of their works from the make and manner of their own personalities. It is because art is such an individual act of creation that it demands freedom for its perfection—freedom of mind and freedom o f person. It is often objected to this point of view that some o f the greatest works of art were produced in times of stress— that the Divine Comedy was written by a political exile, and Don Quixote in a jail. But if we look more closely into these cases, we find that Dante approximates to a dis­ tinguished political exile of to-day spending his time as a guest in various country-houses—not bad conditions for poetic activity; arid as for Cervantes, prison was a peaceful and care­ free interval in a life of poverty and persecution. The truth is rather that there is scarcely a great artist in the history of modern civilization whose work would not have been incomparably greater if he could have lived in spiritual freedom and economic security. There exists a fragment of a letter from Leonardo da Vinci to his patron, Ludovic Sforza. “ I regret very much” , he wrote, “ that the fact of my having to gain my living should have prevented me from continuing the work which your Highness has intrusted to me: but I hope that within a short time I shall have earned so much as

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to be able with a tranquil mind to satisfy your Excellency, to whom I commend myself. If your Excellency thought that I had money, you were deceived, for I have had six mouths to feed for thirty-six months, and I have had fifty ducats.” This man had perhaps the greatest intellect that the human race has ever produced: he was hindered and reduced to impotency for the want of a few ducats. T he economic servitude of the artist is one cause of the death of art, and there is no age which can escape the shame of keeping its artists in poverty. But poverty is nevertheless an experience from which the artist can derive some benefit, such as a sympathetic understanding of the sufferings of humanity and a knowledge of the behaviour of men in adversity. A certain apprenticeship in humility is perhaps essential to the development of the artist. But there is no sanction at all for that other form of servitude which springs from intolerance. It is understandable that politicians should resent the power of effective expression which is in the hands of the artist, and that they should want to control this power in the interests of a system of government or a policy. It is understandable that a church should want to use this power to propagate its dogmas. Art is not inconsistent with such propaganda, so long as the artist is consenting, or believing, or sympathizing. But that the further step should be taken, and that art should be con­ trolled by politicians in its own supposed interests, is simply catastrophic. Art may suffer determination of aim, and still survive in however debased a form; but that the artist should submit to a dictation of method is inconceivable. In the very act of submission he ceases to be an artist. To declare that the art of a country should be of a particular style—it is always a style from the past—or of a particular content—heroic, realist, moral or eugenic: such action immediately inhibits the artist, and art comes to a sudden end. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that no considerable works of art have emerged from Russia since about 1924, nor from Germany since 1935. It is not that art is incompatible with revolution— far from it. Nor do I suggest that art has no specific part to play in a

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revolutionary struggle. I am not defending art for art’s sake; I am not arguing that art should remain “ pure” — such art is generally the art of the reactionary dilettanti. Art as I have defined it is so intimately linked to the vital forces of life that it carries society towards ever new manifestations of that life. Art, in its full and free subjective action, is the one essentially revolutionary force with which man is endowed. Art is revolu­ tion, and art can best serve revolution by remaining true to itself. Art’s wider significance is biological. It is no idle play of surplus energies, no mere lustre on the hard surface of reality, as materialists have tended to argue. It springs from the centre of life. It is the finest tone of our vitality, the reflexion of harmonious form, the very echo of the organic rhythm of the universe. A nation without art may achieve external order; it may accumulate wealth and exercise power. But if it is without aesthetic sensibility, these things will perish as if from their own weight, their lack of balance and proportion. Perhaps no civilization is destined to survive many centuries, but when a civilization is stricken, we shall then notice, along with a declining birth-rate and an increasing debt, first the censure of originality in art and then art’s complete subservience and defeat. T he decline and fail of a civilization naturally involve the decline and fall of its art; but it is a mistake to assume that art perishes simply because its social foundations are withdrawn. The foundations are the art, and they perish from a rot which has invaded the whole structure. Psychologists say that our minds contain two contrary impulses—the will to live and the will to die; and that the curve of life is the result of the contest between them. So with a civilization. It has a will to live and a will to die; and the highest expression of its will to live is a free and original art.

D*

9

The Collective Patron One o f the reasons why I am out o f employment now, why I have been out o f employment fo r years , is simply that I have other ideas than the gentlemen who give the places to men who think as they do. Vincent van Gogh, Letter to his Brother Theo, July 1880.*I

I HAVE suggested, on an earlier page, that the artist should be abolished: art is not a separate “ profession” , but a quality inherent in all work well done. I have also implied that in a healthy society^.the citizens are not too conscious of their “ culture” : they ^create works of art automatically, instinc­ tively. At the same time I admitted that there were certain “ glittering pinnacles” which pierce through the routine of daily activity, to achieve a timeless universality. In order that these sun-capped peaks shall emerge in the course of a nation’s evolution, it is necessary that, on the basis of a general diffusion of what we call “ taste” , by which word I mean a productive industry which is naturally appropriate and beautiful, a continuous process of comparison should take place. It is the consumer’s attitude to his own and his fellowworker’s product. It is the critical attitude, and it produces a progressive awareness of formal quality in human artefacts. If I am asked whether this is a necessary or a healthy activity, I hesitate to be positive. Self-consciousness in art is the begin­ ning of sophistication, and if it means a loss of social conscious­ ness in the individual, a sense of separateness, I am sure it is the beginning of the end, the first symptom of social decadence. 106

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But criticism can be group criticism: it can be the social aware­ ness of social relevance, and in that sense it is a necessary function. It is the sense of quality, the recognition of achievement. It is the collective appreciation and promotion of art. In a vital community, art is promoted in three ways: socially by appreciation, economically by patronage, and essentially by liberty. These are the three necessities upon which the life of art depends: appreciation, patronage and liberty. We need not dwell on the need for appreciation. There have been artists who have lived and worked without immediate appreciation, but they have been inspired by conviction—by a fanatical faith in the eventual recognition of their genius. Artists like Van Gogh have so much confidence in themselves that they are content to work for a posterity they will never see. But such individuals are very rare. Even the most neglected artists usually have a small circle of devoted admirers, and even two or three spirits of rare perception are sufficient to confirm an artist in his activity. Indeed, there is every reason to distrust more than a moderate success in one’s own tim e: every great artist being under the necessity, as Coleridge said, of creating the public taste by which he is appreciated—a process that takes time. The essential thing is for the artist to have the sense of an audience: to feel that his voice is not echoing in an empty room, with no response. In every great artist’s development there is an imperceptible process of give and take, of appeal and response, of trial and experiment—and he cannot experiment on a dead and unresponsive body. The second necessity for the life of art is patronage : a word which I use deliberately. There are two ways in which an artist can liv e : by selling his art to the public, or by receiving an income which is independent of his artistic activity. In spite of everything that has been said to the contrary, I am convinced that independence is the only proper basis for any kind of creative activity. I do not wish to revive the private patronage which became current in this country during the seventeenth century and persisted until more recent times:

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that had its obvious abuses, and was in fact a form of servile dependence, however enlightened the patron might be. But, unsatisfactory as such personal bonds might be, the com­ mercialization of art which followed was much more disastrous, and I can think of no artist—certainly not artists like Scott or Balzac or Dickens—who would not have been better artists if they had been relieved of insistent financial pressure. It is a fact o f no small significance that a great majority of the painters, poets and composers who have risen to fame since the dis­ appearance of the patronage system have been men with independent incomes derived from inherited estates. Or, like Wordsworth, they have been in possession of official sinecures during a considerable part of their lives. It is instructive to observe how the problem of the artist’s income has been dealt with in a new society like the socialist republic of Russia. The evidence published by various interested parties is conflicting, but briefly we may .say that the arts are divorced from the industries (a sculptor, for example, belonging to an artist’s “ collective” or union, and not to the same union as a stonemason) and organized on parallel lines. There exist co-operative unions for all the various branches of art, with head offices in Moscow and branches all over the U .S.S.R . Any ’artist, on producing evidence of his talent and of his serious intentions, may join the appropriate co-operative. When he has been properly admitted, he then signs a contract of a year’s duration. In this contract the artist binds himself to hand over to the co-operative his year’s work, and the co­ operative in return undertakes to pay him a monthly sum—a minimum of 500 roubles for unknown artists, rising to 2000 roubles or more for artists of established reputation. The co-operatives do not seem to have any difficulty in dis­ posing of the works supplied by the artists: “ fine” art, in that vast republic of 180 million souls, is a scarcity commodity. The difficulty is the artist. He may not produce the quantity of work specified in the contract. For a time the co-operative may allow him to continue in its debt, but finally there is a crisis and the artist is expelled. On the other hand, if the

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artist produces more them he promised, and the co-operative disposes of it all, he is entitled to his share of the surplus. This system is admittedly far in advance of anything existing in capitalist countries, but from the point of view of the artist it has two serious defects. It puts a premium on productivity or facility, and it allows the co-operative, and the Central Art Committee which controls all the co-operatives, to dictate the kind of art that should or must be produced. The first objection might not seem very grave to the public at large, whose work is necessarily of a routine character. And admittedly there are many artists—perhaps the great majority—who can turn out their paintings by the square foot and their books by the page with the regularity of a shoemaker or a riveter. But the exceptional artist—and it is the exceptions that we ar§ con­ sidering— can conform to no such measured pace. He is dependent on endless experimentation, on a slow process of gestation, and on fitful inspiration. He works by intuition and not by rule of thumb; he may need five years to produce a single masterpiece; short periods of creative activity are followed by long periods of equally creative inactivity. Art divorced from industry is no longer an industry, and cannot be governed by the principles of industrial organization. But serious as this defect is, it is not so harmful as the disci­ pline and censorship which such a form of organization permits and even implies. The co-operatives are in effect a part of the state machine, and a close control of them is exercised by the Central A rt Committee, which is the equivalent of a Ministry of Fine Art working under the direction of the central govern­ ment. Now, art is too closely related to education and propa­ ganda to be neglected by a totalitarian regime, and the control of art in Russia has in consequence become increasingly strict, with fatal results. I am not referring to anything that might be excused as political censorship. Art has been condemned and artists imprisoned or exiled for purely stylistic reasons. There are Russian artists here in England who have had to leave their country, not because they were politically suspect, but merely because they would not paint in a naturalistic style. There are

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architects who have been exiled because they refused to build in the neo-classical style of their grandfathers. Poets and composers are in disgrace because their verses do not rhyme or their tunes are not melodic. And for every one of these artists who are known to us we may be sure there are many who are mute because they refuse to submit to the indignity of all such restrictions made in the interests of vulgarity or dogmatism. Patronage of some kind is essential, but it is only tolerable when accompanied by liberty. Patronage need not imply servitude. True patronage is a tribute to the genius of the artist and a recognition of the fact that the quality we call art cannot be assessed in economic terms. I call it a tribute, but this does not imply that it should be a charity. The demand for art, when organized, will be quite capable of sup­ porting the artists. The Russian system, in its broad outlines, is essentially the right system. Free it from bureaucratic regimentation, free it from political intolerance, and then the artist’s collective could ensure, not only a basic livelihood for all its members, but liberty to work at an individual pace and in an individual manner. Art, in its collective aspect, would become the patron of individual artists. The evil of the old system of patronage sprang from the individualism of the patron. It was the patron’s vanity, his desire to use the artist for his own glorifica­ tion, or for the defence of his interests, which demoralized the artist. No artist ever suffered from the gift of a sinecure or the grant of a pension. But art itself was in danger because its economic basis was dependent on the will of an individual who was not himself an artist, and who had not necessarily any under standing of art. An artist’s collective has an historical analogy in the craft guilds of the Middle Ages, but admittedly, in the modern sense and under modem conditions, it is an untried experiment. But I see no alternative which would give the artist economic independence and liberty of action. The true solution of this problem, as I have insisted again and again in my writings, is the reintegration of art and work, so that art becomes simply

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the qualitative aspect of all that is made and done and said in a community. Apart from this, there is only the possibility that the artist of the future should earn his living in some quite different vocation and practise his art in his hours of leisure. That is, o f course, the condition under which many artists work to-day. But what sort of conception of art have we if we imagine that it can be produced by tired workers at week­ ends ? A rt in any worthy sense is not only arduous, but demands a continuous application of the faculties; it requires the full disposition of the whole man, if not in actual labour, then in observation, contemplation and passive awareness. Art is a full-time job. The reintegration of art and work, as I have defined it else­ where in this book, would absorb most of our “ professional” artists: th e architect, the sculptor, the painter, the composer, each has a natural niche in the industrial hierarchy. Only the poet is excluded—the- poet in the widest sense, the seer or visionary in any medium of expression. The “ divine literatus ” is a social outcast. He is the product of his “ contrary experience ’ ’ . If the liberty of the artist could be guaranteed by his guild, then he would, of course, have corresponding duties, a responsi­ bility not only to his guild, but also to the community as a whole. B u t such duties are too intangible to be defined. Or else, they can be defined with simplicity and truth as nothing but the duty to be a good artist. It is sometimes said that the artist is under an obligation to make himself understood. But understood by whom? By “ the man in the street ” ? Obviously not, otherwise we should have to condemn the greater part of our poetry and music. By a select few? Possibly, but only if that few remain hidden and anonymous; for a coherent few becomes a sect or clique, and their demands revive all the abuses of the old system of patronage. The artist is really responsible to a body more universal and remote: to humanity in its widest consciousness and finest power of perception. There are many artists of talent, but greatness lies precisely in this power to realize and even to forecast the imaginative needs of mankind.

10 The Freedom of the Artist The bourgeois believes that liberty consists in absence o f social organization; that liberty is a negative quality, a deprivation o f existing obstacles to it ; and not a positive quality, the reward o f endeavour and wisdom. . . . Because of this basic fa llac y this type o f intellectual always tries to cure positive social evils, such as wars, by negative individual actions, such as non-co-operation, passive resistance or conscientious objection. This is because he cannot rid himself o f the assumption that the individual is free. But we have shown that the individual is never free. He can only obtain freedom by social co-operation. He can only do what he wants by using social forces. . . . But in order to use social relations he must understand them. He must become conscious o f the laws o f society, just as, i f he wants to lever up a stone, he must know the laws o f levers. Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (1938).

O n e of the most obvious generalizations from the history of art is to the effect that at various times in the past different conceptions of the technique and content of art have prevailed, but that in their time these conceptions were always regarded as the normal mode of expression. To the degree that we are aware of this relativity in standards, we shall accept as perfectly natural and inevitable that the peculiar social conditions of our time should give rise to an original style of art. That possi­ bility being granted, we might further regard it as also perfectly natural that there should be a time-lag in public appreciation, and that the new form of art should find itself in opposition to 112

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the traditions inherited from the immediate past. But the special character of the contemporary situation is that there is not an art which we can call specifically modern, but at least four styles of a rt which make that claim. We have in the first place the specifically modern styles best defined by the words superrealism and constructivism, styles which, the more logically they develop, the more incompatible with one another they seem to become. But to complete the picture of art to-day, we must be prepared to admit the independent existence of two further styles: realism and expressionism. By realism we mean that style of art which attempts to represent the objective reality of the external world. The word “ realism” can be used in a narrower sense, to indicate a style of art which concentrates on scenes of low life, or on morbid or horrible details, but that is not a very logical use of the term. Realism is also confused with naturalism, but that word either means the same as realism, and is therefore unnecessary, or it indicates something more restricted than realism—that aspect of the world we habitually identify as “ nature” : trees, flowers, landscape generally, and even human nature. In spite of its ambiguity, realism is the right philosophical term to describe that whole school of art, in literature as well as in the plastic arts, which endeavours to give an exact representation of the external or objective /world, or rather, of select details of that world. Expressionism, too, is based on the observation of the external world, but it no longer pretends to be objective. It admits that the recording instrument, the artist, is a sensitive or subjective element, and it suggests that his view of the world is necessarily affected by his emotional reaction to what he sees. The expressionist artist may believe in the existence of an objective reality; but that reality is merely hypothetical, and the real reality, the only reality which the artist can faithfully record, is the sensation which is provoked in his mind by this external agent. A camera, he would say, may conceivably .record the external features of Mr. Winston Churchill; but that is not the Winston Churchill I apprehend with my senses, nor has it

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any correspondence to the emotional reactions which take place whenever I ^become aware of Mr. Churchill. I f I paint what I see and at the same time feel, it will not be like a camera portrait of Mr. Churchill: it will be more like what would be called a caricature of him. It will, in short, be expressive rather than realistic. I f we divide art into these four groups then I think we shall find that they cover all the manifestations of artistic activity taking place to-day, and indeed, all the manifestations that have ever taken place in the past. The only peculiarity about the situation to-day is that all four types of artistic activity tend to tahe place at the same time, whereas in the past the emphasis has tended to be on one or other of the four types to the exclusion of the other three. What I think it is still necessary to realize is that all four types of activity are natural, and that indeed they correspond exactly to four types of mental activity which have a long traditional history, and which have been revived by modern psychology. T he human mind is not a region which can be charted with any exactitude, but psychologists have resorted to certain schematic representations which help to give us a clear picture of what is an obscure and complex reality. The particular formula which we should find most useful is that elaborated in great detail by Jung, but actually, as Jung acknowledges in his book on Psychological Types, the main areas and boundaries have been gradually evolved by the general science of psy­ chology. Here 1 we do not need to go much beyond these accepted commonplaces, which make a distinction between four primary functions of the mind—four activities or faculties which co-exist in the mind of every individual and which we call Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensation. Now, though it is conceivable that the mind is capable of states of pure thought, pure feeling, pure sensation and pure intuition, most of its activity is of a mixed nature, and takes place between these cardinal points. Thus, thought passes

1 T have discussed the subject in greater detail in Education Through Art, especially in a chapter on u Temperament and Expression

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imperceptibly into intuitive thought, which we call speculation, then through intuition into intuitive feeling, through feeling into sensory feeling, through sensation into sensory thinking (or what w e call empirical thought), and so back to thinking. But in any individual, one or the other of the four primary functions o f the mind will tend to predominate, and according to Jung and other psychologists, what we call the character of the individual—the psychological type to which he belongs— is determined by the particular balance established between the four primary functions. The plastic arts are, of course, all expressed through the medium of sensation, but what they express is the mind or personality o f the artist. If we can distinguish four types of mental personality, there should logically be four corresponding types of art— and we have already found that there are four such types. It only remains to identify each type of art with its corresponding psychological function, and this does not present any difficulty. A detailed demonstration of these correspondences involves psychological technicalities which would be out of place in the present general essay, and which in any case are of purely schematic value. For it must be repeatedly emphasized that there are no exact limits between these divisions of mind and of art: they merge into one another, and between realism and constructivism, between constructiv­ ism and superrealism, between superrealism and expressionism, and finally between expressionism and realism, we get inter­ mediate types of art which fuse thought and intuition, intuition and feeling, feeling and sensation, or sensation and thought. I have only introduced this psychological comparison to make clear what I consider to be the most striking achievement of modern art— an achievement of which it is not yet conscious. Modern art has broken through the artificial boundaries and hmitations which we owe to a one-sided and prejudiced view of the human personality. Modern psychology has shown that the mind of man is complex; that it is a balance of forces— of various impulses or unconscious “ drives” , and that the various psychological types into which human beings can be divided

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are determined by the predominance of one particular impulse or group of impulses. What I am saying, therefore, is simple enough and should always have been admitted: namely, that there is not one type of art to which all types of men should conform, but as many types of art as there are types of men; and th at the categories into which we divide art should naturally correspond to the categories into which we divide men. This statement does not exclude the philosophical problem of value, to which I shall come presently; I am not suggesting that there is no possibility of making judgments about the various types of art, or of man. But from a scientific point of view, each type of art is the legitimate expression of a type of mental person­ ality. From a scientific point of view, that is to say, realism and idealism, expressionism and constructivism are all natural phenomena, and the warring schools into which men divide themselves are merely the products of ignorance and prejudice. A true eclecticism can and should enjoy all the manifestations of the creative impulse in man. I f we could imagine a society in which each individual pursued his course in independence, happily producing what he wished to produce without interference from his neighbours, then in such a community each type of artist could express him self in the manner which he found most apt. Construc­ tivists and superrealists, realists and expressionists, could live and work side by side in perfect amity. I do not suggest that such a community of individuals is too idealistic to contemplate; it is, in fact, the ideal towards which we should aim. But actually, here and now, we live in communities of a very different character. All the various societies which together make up modern civilization are in fact highly organized and complex, and according to their type of organization they encourage a particular type of art, or even discourage all types of art. Modern societies can be divided into two general types— democratic and totalitarian. It is true that you might find, in India or the Pacific Ocean, a small state which still represented a different conception of society—feudal or communist—but such societies are vestigial. The general drift of modern

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economic forces compels society in general to adopt one or other of th e complex and highly organized forms which we call democratic and totalitarian. In theory, the distinction between these two forms is very sharp—indeed, it is so irre­ concilable that it has led to the present deathly conflict. In practice, an d particularly under the stress of war, there is a tendency for the two forms to approximate—the totalitarian making concessions of liberty in the interests of morale, the democratic elaborating a centralized control in the interests of immediate efficiency and power. In the present context therefore, it would be better to abandon the ambiguous word “ democracy” and to present the contrast in irreconcilable terms—totalitarian and libertarian. The broad distinction between the totalitarian and the libertarian state is that society in the former is a planned organization to which all the constituent individuals or units are forcibly subordinated, whilst in the latter, society is the result of th e free co-operation of individuals for their common benefit. T h e totalitarian state has the apparent advantage of efficiency, but by killing individual initiative it tends to make the state an inelastic, inorganic and anti-vital machine. The libertarian state is haphazard, apparently inefficient, certainly exasperating to men with tidy minds, but we claim that, like nature itself, though wasteful, it does live and let live, and that, above all, it allows for the development of individual sensibility and intelligence. Accepting these facts, what we would then a -priori expect does in fact occur. The two most completely totalitarian states, Germany and Russia, are precisely the states in which the realistic style in art not merely prevails, but is made to prevail. It is the official and definitive style, to which all artists within the state m ust conform. All other styles are banned, and the artists who practise them are persecuted. It is interesting to note that this ban is applied, not merely to superrealism and expressionism, which might be supposed to have some socially disintegrating effects, but also to constructivism, the aim of which is so positive and tectonic. This only goes to show that

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people who exalt the rational motive above all others inevitably and instinctively reject any activity which proceeds from another region of the mind. In the case of the democratic state, we are not able to make any such neat a priori identification—and for a very good reason. The libertarian attitude is essentially an experimental attitude, and therefore in the field of art it welcomes any form of activity which will provide a working hypothesis. The American philosopher, John Dewey, has recently identified democracy and the scientific method. Let me quote a few relevant sentences from his book, Freedom and Culture : 1 “ It is of the nature of science not so much to tolerate as to welcome diversity of opinion, while it insists that inquiry brings the evidence of observed facts to bear to effect a con­ sensus of conclusions—and even then to hold the conclusion subject to what is ascertained and made public in further new inquiries. I would not claim that any existing demo­ cracy has ever made complete or adequate use of scientific method in deciding upon its policies. But freedom of inquiry, toleration of diverse views, freedom of communication, the distribution of what is found out to every individual as the ultimate intellectual consumer, are involved in the demo­ cratic as in the scientific method. When democracy openly recognizes the existence of problems and the need for probing them as problems as its glory, it will relegate political groups that pride themselves upon refusing to admit incompatible opinions to the obscurity which already is the fate of similar groups in science.” Similarly, I feel inclined to say that when such a society, which must therefore be a libertarian society, openly recognizes the existence of distinct types of personality, and the necessity for these types to express themselves artistically, it will relegate artistic groups that pride themselves upon refusing to admit incompatible styles to the obscurity which is already the fate of similar groups in science. Any kind of exclusiveness or 1 London (Allen & Unwin), 1940, p. 102.

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intolerance is just as opposed to the principles of liberty as social exclusiveness or political intolerance. In this respect art, and all cultural modes of expression, are of exactly the same status as political opinions. The scientific method implies, nevertheless, some progress and some definite conclusions. The progress may be slow and the conclusions may be tentative, but at some stage the problem seems to be solved and a certain line of action to be indicated. It is only in chess, in the crossword puzzle and sometimes in mathe­ matics, that the problem is set for the mere sake of arriving at a solution. The organization of society has, therefore, or should have, a definite aim, and though that aim may be described in general term s as the achievement of the good life, the greatest happiness o f the greatest number, and so on, from time to time it has a more specific aim—or rather, this general aim is divided into many detailed aims—shorter stages towards the final achievement. At the present moment most of these aims are subordinated to the one aim of defending our liberty from the threat of -the totalitarian power of Germany, but in more normal tim es we have various social and cultural aims, some of which impinge very directly on the province of the artist. It is precisely because these aims are various that they will demand, not one type of artist, but all types. Let me try to indicate briefly the possible ways in which each type of artist might, find his function in a libertarian society of the future. A democracy does not despise or suppress that faculty which the totalitarian socialist makes so exclusive—his thinking or rational faculty. The libertarian socialist must also plan, but his plans, apart from being tentative and experimental, will make the widest use of all human faculties. Thus, he will plan the building of a new city, or the rebuilding of an old one. But in so doing he will not merely consider the rational factors, such as the distribution of the buildings, the width and direction of the streets, the provision of open spaces and recreational amenities, all of which can be arrived at by the process of thought; he will also consider the relation of mass to mass, of surface to surface, of line and outline, until he has reached,

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through the faculty of intuition, a natural harmony. But even that is not sufficient. The libertarian planner must also remember that cities are built for citizens, and that the houses and buildings will be inhabited, not by ciphers, but by human beings with sensations and feelings, and that these human beings will be unhappy unless they can freely express them­ selves in their environment. It may be that these faculties can only be expressed individually, or in group activities like dram a and sport; but at least your city must be so planned that it allows for the possibility of such activities. No doubt the planner will remember to provide a theatre and a sportsground; what he is likely to forget is some provision for the retirement and seclusion of each person. For it is upon personal happiness that society ultimately and collectively depends. It is, still more certainly, upon personal happiness that the future of art depends. But by “ happiness” I do not mean that state of eupeptic contentment which is actually of all states of mind the one least favourable to the production of a work of art. Happiness, in the field of art, means work: the capacity and ability to create something near the heart’s desire. The happiness is not in the possession of the thing created, but in the act of creating it. It is the thesis so often and so rightly defended by Eric Gill—the thesis “ that human culture is the natural product of human living, and that human living is naturally and chiefly a matter of human working; that leisure is in its essence recreative, that the object of recreation is to fit us for living, that we may rejoice as a giant to run the course ” . We make a table and call it work; we make a picture and call it art if we mean to sell the picture, recreation if we make it for our own amusement. But there is really no distinction: the art is not determined by the purpose of the thing we make, but by its inherent qualities, the qualities with which the artist has endowed it; and the pleasure of art comes from the act of creating these and, in a secondary and stimulating way, from the mental act of re-creating them in contemplation. What I wish to prevent is any narrow conception either of the artist or of the work of art. Every human being is potentially

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an artist, an d this potentiality is of considerable social signi­ ficance. T h e individual and society are the opposite poles of a very complex relationship. The individual is anti-social at the time of birth—observe the early days of any baby. He only becomes social by a painful process of adaptation, during which he acquires what we call, paradoxically, his personality, but actually th at compromise character which is the result of subordinating personality to the prevalent conception of social normality. The psychological ills from which human beings suffer are a product of this compromise, or mal-adjustment. What becomes more and more certain is that these ills can to a large extent be avoided by the practice of some art. The people who make things—I have no evidence beyond my own observation— seem to be less liable to nervous breakdowns, and one of the recognized forms of treatment for mental diseases is known as “ occupational therapy” . No one would suggest that the function of art is merely to keep people healthy; but it has its subjective effect. The artist not only creates an object external to him self: in doing so he also vitally reorganizes the balance of impulses within himself. Our glance at the social function of art therefore reinforces the libertarian conception of art. All types of art are not merely permissible, but desirable. The needs of society comprise, not only the outward structure of a world to live in, but also the inward structure of a mind capable of enjoying life. We m ust therefore search for methods of encouraging the artist—the artist latent in each one of us. There still remains the question of value in art. We may all become artists, but unless our human nature changes radically, only a few of us can become great artists. How do we measure this difference—the difference between mediocrity and genius? The truth is, there is not one measure, but several. Some people, and possibly the majority of people at some time, use one only of these measures; others use a combination of two or more measures and take their average. Actually I find that these measures are again four in number. There is first the direct application of what we call a canon—that is to say, an

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established law. It may be a law of geometrical proportion, of colour combinations, of a definite type of human figure, of a definite “ order” in architecture. It is a measure we are conscious of, and can apply exactly. Then— and this is the measure that has been most used in the past century—there is the measure of sensibility. The human being is regarded as a sensitive instrument who gives out and receives delicate vibrations in the presence of colours, textures and spatial relations, and a work of art is measured by the number and intensity of the vibrations which emanate from him. Nearly related to this kind of sensibility, but in reality quite distinct, is our intuitive apprehension of space and time, and our expression of their relations in rhythm and harmony: our intuition of the absolute values of form. Finally, there is our appreciation of the dramatic or symbolic significance of the pictorial content of a work of art—the feelings which are aroused in us by the images which the artist uses to express himself. W e have thus four methods of critical approach to the work of art, and each method is valid for its corresponding type of art. Between these critical poles there will again be mixed modes of apprehension and judgment, so that the satisfaction we derive from the observance of academic canons can be modified on the one side by our intuition of harmonic relations, and on the other side by our sensibility to colours and textures. At the other extreme the psychological significance of our dramatic images may be combined with a sensitive rendering of these images, and even by an “ abstraction” of such images; in other words, superrealism will merge, as we know it does, towards constructivism on the one side and towards expression­ ism on the other. But again I think it will be found that the opposite points of the compass tend to conflict—we cannot, that is to say, at one and the same time satisfy the very rational and conscious laws of an academic canon and express the fantasies which we find ready-made in the unconscious. Nor do I think that the extreme sensibility which we get in the impressionistic paintings of Monet or Renoir can combine with

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the formal intuitions which are the basis of the art of Seurat or Ben Nicholson. But the mind of the spectator has more than one mode of appreciation—more than one approach to art— and I find nothing reprehensible—indeed I find it but natural—that one man’s taste should be universal. Art, like the human mind itself, embraces contradictions; it is the balance of these contradictions that produces the high degree of tension necessary for the production of the greatest works of art. Actually we each tend to select the critical approach which is appropriate to the psychological type to which we belong. Whether the wholly harmonious mind exists—the mind equally balanced between thought and feeling, between intuition and sensation—is perhaps doubtful, but surely that is the ideal towards which we ought to strive. Only such a mind can appreciate the fullness and richness of life. If we come to the conclusion that this complete and harmonious being cannot exist in our modern form of society, then our aim should be to change that form of society until such a life becomes possible. In this great aim, in which the energies of humanity will be absorbed for centuries to come, a right under­ standing of the nature of art and of the function of the artist is fundamental.

11 The Nature of Revolutionary Art L ik e industry, art has never adapted itself to the demands o f theorists; it always upsets their plans o f social harmony , and humanity has found the freedom o f art f a r too satisfactory ever to think o f allowing it to be controlled by the creators o f dull system s o f sociology. The M arxists are accustomed to seeing the ideologists look at things the wrong way round, afid so, in contrast to their enemies, they should look upon art as a reality which begets ideas and not as an application o f ideas. G eorges S o rel , Reflections on Violence.

I n the fragmentary notes which conclude his Introduction to The Critique o f Political Economy, Marx recognized “ an unequal relationship between the development of material production and artistic production” , but did not despair of reconciling such a contradiction by means of the dialectical method. He himself never had the time or opportunity to resolve the problem, and some of his remarks on the subject are in the nature of hasty generalizations which no doubt he would have corrected on further consideration—as, for example, his explanation of the eternal appeal of Greek art as due to the eternal child in us, an hypothesis evidently derived directly from Vico. Marx’s hesitation and, indeed, faltering over this problem should at least have deterred his followers from a superficial treatment of one of the most complex categories of history that still await dialectical analysis. This immense subject does not concern us now, but on the basis of a superficial and essentially undialectical approach to the whole problem, certain assumptions have been made as to the nature of a true 124

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revolutionary art, or a true proletarian art, which only bring ridicule on the cultural aspects of the revolutionary move­ ment. Revolutionary art should be revolutionary. That surely is a simple statement from which we can begin the discussion. We can at once dismiss the feeble interpretation of such a statement as am injunction to paint pictures of red flags, hammers and sickles, factories and machines, or revolutionary subjects in general (if I take examples from the plastic arts, I do so only for convenience, and what I say would apply equally to music 1 and poetry and all the arts we are concerned with). But such a feeble interpretation does actually persist among communists, and is responsible for the partisem adulation of a competent but essentially second-rate artist like Diego Rivera. We can best approach the question from the angle of an abstract art like architecture. (That this particular art has undergone some queer transformations in Russia is beside the point; there are explanations of the anomaly, but they have little to do with aesthetics.) Architecture is a necessary art, and it is intimately bound up with the social reconstruction which must take place under a revolutionary regime. How do we, as Englishmen, conceive a revolutionary architecture? As a reversion to Tudor rusticity, or Georgian stateliness, or the bourgeois pomp of the neo-classical style? Surely none of these styles can for a moment be considered in relation to the city of the fiiture. Must we not rather confidently look forward to a development of that architecture which, in Walter Gropius’s words, “ bodies itself forth, not in stylistic imitation or orna­ mental frippery, but in those simple and sharply modelled designs in which every part merges naturally into the compre1 A pathetic moral may be drawn from the development of the composer Shostakovitch. An excellent analysis of the progressive deterioration of this artist under political pressure has been made recently by Gerald Abraham in Horizon, vol. vi. no. 33 (September 1942). The u pressure ” may not be overtly political : it may be the politician’s interpretation of popular taste, which is rather worse, for then the politician is presuming to make and enforce an aesthetic judgment. Cf. Emma Lu Davis, quoted on p. 137 below.

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hensive volume of the whole” ? Only in this manner, by following the path clearly indicated by Gropius and his followers, cam we find “ a concrete expression of the life of our epoch” . T h at surely must be admitted. If we then pass from archi­ tecture and ask ourselves what is the parallel to this new style in the arts of painting and sculpture, can we for a moment be satisfied with a Rivera or a Tsapline? Is there not rather an essential contradiction between such anecdotal and “ literary” art and the vitality and intellectual strength of the new archi­ tecture ? T h e question cannot be answered without a short digression on the nature of art. Any considerable work of art has two distinct elements: a formal element appealing to our sensi­ bility for reasons which cannot be stated with any clarity, but which are certainly psychological if not physiological in origin; and an arbitrary or variable element of more complex appeal which like a suit of clothing seems to cover these underlying forms. It is at least arguable that the purely formal element in art does not change; that the same canons of harmony and proportion are present in primitive art, in Greek art, in Gothic art, in Renaissance art and in the art of the present day. Such forms, we may say, are archetypal; due to the physical structure of the world and the psychological structure of man. And it is for this reason that the artist, with some show of reason, cam take up an attitude of detachment. It is his sense of the importance of the archetypal which makes him relatively indifferent to the phenomenal. T h e recognition of such universal formal qualities in art is consistently materialistic. It no more contradicts the material­ istic interpretation of the history than does a recognition of the relative permanency of the human form, or of the forms of crystals in geology. Certain factors in life are constant; but to th at extent they are not part of history. History is concerned with that part of life which is subject to change; and the Marxian dialectic is an interpretation of history, not a theory of th e biological structure or morphology of life. Another consideration which mitigates the objection to the

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formalistic attitude is that, granted the existence of permanent and unchanging elements in art, there is, admittedly, at various periods, a different valuation of such elements. In fact, what is the difference between classical and romantic epochs but a difference in the emphasis given to the formal basis of works of art? We cannot say that a romantic painter like Delacroix lacks form— or that a classical painter like Poussin has too much of it. If we could in any way measure the degree of form in these two artists we should probably find that it was equal. But in the classical artist the form is so important that the subject-matter is almost irrelevant; whilst in the romantic artist the subject-matter is so important that it completely overwhelms the form. It is merely, we might say, a difference of accent. But it is in -precisely such a way that a reasonable Marxist would expect art to be inflected. We can, therefore, in any broad historical generalizations, dismiss the underlying formal structure of art, to concentrate on style and mannerism. For it is in style and mannerism that the prevailing ideology of a period is expressed. If we adm it so much, it follows that it is a mere illusion for the artist to imagine that he can for ever maintain an attitude of detachment. I can only see one logical exception—the artist who can so deprive his work of temporary and accidental qualities th at what he achieves is in effect pure form . And, significantly enough, that is the claim of one extreme of the abstract or constructivist movement, an extreme which includes some of the most talented artists now living. Having no sympathy with any existing ideology, they attempt to escape into a world without ideologies. They shut themselves within the Ivory Tower, and it is just possible that, fo r the time being (the very special time in which we live), their tactics may be of some advantage to the art of the future. Their position will become clearer as we proceed. Apart from such a desperate retreat, we have to admit that the artist cannot in any effective way avoid the economic con­ ditions of his time; he cannot ignore them, for they will not

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ignore him. Reality, in one guise or another, forces the artist along a determined course, and if the artist does not realize this, it is only because he is in the middle of the stream, where the water is deep and the current strong. A s I have said elsewhere,1 this question of the relation of the individual to the collective society of which he is a member is the fundamental issue, in art as well as in politics. It is the fundamental question within religion too, for jvhat is the Reformation but the affirmation of the autocentric will of the individual against the collective rule of the Church? Philo­ sophically it is the issue between Scholasticism and Cartesianism, between materialism and idealism. Rut the relation between m ind and reality, between the individual and the community, is not one of precedence; it is more one of action and reaction, a process of tacking against the wind. The current of reality is strong, and troubles the mind; but the mind embraces this contrary force, and is lifted higher, and carried away farther, by the very opposition. And so with the individual and the community: complete freedom means inevitable decadence. The mind must feel an opposition—must be tamped with hard realities if it is to have any blasting power. T h at by no means exhausts the problem of the relation of the individual to society. It is a problem which in its psychological as well as sociological aspects I have discussed more thoroughly in another book,2 and all I can say at present is that I think the relative freedom of the individual—I mean, of course, his intellectual freedom—can be justified within the Marxian orthodoxy. Stalin has said that “ Marxism starts out with the assumption that people’s tastes and requirements are not, and cannot be, equal in quality or in quantity, either in the period of Socialism or in the period of Communism” . Tastes and requirements do not become differentiated in quality without independence of thought and criticism, and such independence is essential for any dialectical development in culture. The U .S.S.R . has found it necessary, purely for pragmatic reasons, 1 2

Art and Society (London : Heinemann, 1937). Education Through Art (London : Faber & Faber,

1943).

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to admit a certain degree of what is called 4‘ self-criticism ” , thus recognizing a social rather than a political justification for intellectual freedom. The psychology of the individual cannot be separated from the psychology of the group, and for that reason alone the old conception of individuality will not serve for the new order of society. L et us return to the actualities of modern art. Excluding the great mass of academic bourgeois art, and within the general category of revolutionary art, we have two distinct movements, both professing to be modern, both intentionally revolutionary. The first of these has no very descriptive label, but is essen­ tially formalist, in the sense already mentioned. It is some­ times called abstract, sometimes non-figurative, sometimes constructivist, sometimes geometric. It is most typically repre­ sented by painters like Mondrian, Helion and Ben Nicholson; and by sculptors like Brancusi, Gabo and Barbara Hepworth. The second movement has a distinctive name—SurrSalisme or Superrealism—and is represented by painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Miro, Tanguy, and by a sculptor like Arp. The first movement is plastic, objective and ostensibly non­ political. The second group is literary (even in paint), subjective, and is actively communist, though generally anti-Stalinist. Those distinctions are obvious, on the surface. But I want to suggest that we cannot be satisfied with such superficial distinctions. We cannot accept the superrealists at their own valuation, and welcome them as the only true revolutionary artists. Nevertheless, they are performing a very important revolutionary function,1 and it must be said on their behalf that they realize the importance of their function with far more clarity than the official Marxians, who have shown them no favour. For official Marxians, concentrating on their eco­ nomic problems, do not see the relevance of the cultural problem, more particularly the artistic problem. The mind of the artist, they complacently assume, that too will, in Trotsky’s phrase, limp after the reality the politicians are creating. 1 See p. 98 above. E

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B u t everywhere the greatest obstacle to the creation of this new social reality is the existence of the cultural heritage of the past—the religion, the philosophy, the literature and the art which makes up the whole complex ideology of the bourgeois m ind. The logic of the facts—the economic facts: war, poverty amidst plenty, social injustice—that logic cannot be denied. But so long as the bourgeois mind has its bourgeois ideology it will deny the facts; it will construct an elaborate rationalization which effectively ignores them. T h e superrealists, who possess very forceful expositors of their point of view, realize this very clearly, and the object of their movement is therefore to discredit the bourgeois ideology in art, to destroy the academic conception of art. Their Whole tendency is negative and destructive. The particular method they adopt, in so far as they have a common method, consists in breaking down the barriers between the conscious reality of life and the unconscious reality of the dream-world—to so m ingle fact and fancy that the normal concept of reality no longer has existence. It is a similar tendency which Carl Einstein found in the later work of Braque, and to some extent Braque may be considered as a superrealist—Picasso too. Superrealists like Ernst and Dali complete the disintegration of the academic concept of reality begun by Picasso and Braque. W e can see, therefore, the place of superrealism in the revolutionary movement. What of this other kind of modern art— the art of pure form immured in its Ivory Tower? T h at art, too, I wish to contend, has its revolutionary function, and in the end it is the most important function of all. Super­ realism is a negative art, as I have said, a destructive art; it follows that it has only a temporary role; it is the art of a tran­ sitional period. It may lead to a new romanticism, especially in literature, but that lies beyond its immediate function. B u t abstract art has a positive function. It keeps inviolate, until such time as society will once more be ready to make use of them, the universal qualities of art— those elements which survive all change and revolutions. It may be said that as such it is merely art in pickle—an activity divorced from reality,

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of no immediate interest to the revolutionary. But that, 1 maintain, is a very short view of the situation. And actually such art is tiot so much in pickle as might be supposed. For in one sphere, in architecture and to some extent in industrial art, it is already in social action. There we find the essential link between the abstract movement in modern painting and the most advanced movement in modern architecture—the architecture of Gropius, Markelius, Lloyd Wright, Aalto, Le Corbusier. . . . It is not merely a similarity of form and intention, but an actual and intimate association of personalities. This single link points the way to the art of the future—the art of a classless society. It is impossible to predict all the forms of this art, and it will be many years before it reaches its maturity. But we cannot build a new society—and we must literally build such a society, with bricks and mortar, steel and glass— we cannot build such a society without artists. The artists are there, waiting for their opportunity: abstract artists who are, in this tim e of transition, perfecting their formal sensibility,1 and who w ill be ready, when the time comes, to apply their talents to the great work of reconstruction. Reconstruction is not work for romantic traditionalists and literary sentimental­ ists. Constructive socialism is realistic, scientific, essentially classical. B u t let us realize that we have false romanticists in our midst— tender-minded idealists who would like to blur the precise outlines of our vision with sentimental ideals of naturalism, homespun simplicity and social naivety, com­ munity-singing and boy-scoutism. Such people imagine that revolutionary art is a kind of folk-art, peasant pottery, madrigals and ballads: the Stalinists encourage the debased lacquer and papier-mache crafts of Palekh and Mstera, and their so-called “ socialist realism ” is merely bourgeois pictorialism. We want a conception of art which is at once more imaginative and more precise, even intellectual and “ difficult” , something which we can without falsity and self-deception put beside the great creative epochs of the past. 1 I have dealt with the social function of the abstract artist in (London, 1934).

and Industry'

Art

12 A Civilization from Under F o r the most part we shall be too busy doing the work that lies ready to our hands, to let impatience fo r visibly great progress vex us too much; but surely, since we are servants o f a Cause, hope must be ever with us, and sometimes perhaps it will so quicken our vision that it will outrun the slow lapse o f time, and show us the victorious days when millions o f those who now sit in darkness will be enlightened by an Art made by the people and for the people, a joy to the maker and the user. W illiam Morris, The Beauty o f Life.

C e r t a i n general problems connected with the social function of the artist tend to be neglected because they are not practical problems of design in relation to particular objects or particular industries. In the ordinary course of discussion we simplify the factors involved. We think of the object to be designed—something simple and comprehensible enough. We think of the designer—an individual who has to be brought into relation with this object. We think of the manufacturer, again as an individual who has to be persuaded to employ the designer; and perhaps, if we are considerate enough, we think of the consumer, again as an individual who has to be persuaded to buy the object designed. It then looks like a simple series of links which have only to be made aware of each other to form an unbroken chain. B u t it is not so simple in reality. Just as the economists find that their economic man—the Robinson Crusoe of the text­ books—has little or no correspondence to the mass-man of modern society, so we discover that our designer, our manu132

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facturer and our consumer cannot be considered as isolated units. T h ey are all part of a social complex which cannot be dismantled— which adds up to something more than the sum of its component units. In the end it turns out that we are not dealing with single or simple units of any kind, but with social groups, vocational groups, national groups, and in general with what we call psychological or ideological factors—habits and fashions which have their roots in tradition, in superstition, in the un­ conscious levels of the human personality. It may all be expressed in the old proverb: “ You may take a horse to th e trough, but you cannot make him drink.” All our efforts to improve design are useless unless we can persuade the public to adopt them. But that does not express the real necessity. W e do not persuade the horse to drink; it drinks when it is thirsty. There must arise in the public, therefore, a natural appetite for things of good design. That appetite must exist as a normal state of health. Now the dogma to which I cling, and for which I could if necessary offer psychological and biological evidence, is that the instinct for what we call good design is an innate possession of every unspoilt human being. It is one of the ironies of history that all the cycles of civilization still leave the savage and the peasant in possession of the surest instinct for the fundamentally right plastic forms. These primitives have not got what we call the brains to design a motor-car or a seaside pavilion, but they never fail to make a good job of a bowl or a basket, a blanket or a boat. It is logical to conclude, therefore, that it is all a question of education— that if we can bring up our children in such a way that their taste is not corrupted, then this natural instinct for good design will have free play and gradually the whole taste of our time and country will be purified. A right system of education is, admittedly, going to be one of the principal agents of reform, but the moment you approach this aspect of the problem with any practical intention, you encounter overwhelming difficulties. It is not a question of

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squeezing in an extra hour for art, or of making handicraft a compulsory instead of an optional subject; it is not even a question of finding teachers with the necessary qualifications. I f we are going to solve the problem in this way we shall be faced with the necessity of revising the curricula at every stage of the educational system, because not only must we secure tim e and opportunity for the -positive teaching of good design, b u t we must also make sure that no negative and frustrating tendencies exist elsewhere in the educational system. In other words, it is no good developing the creative and appreciative exercise of the aesthetic impulse in the child if at the same time in some other direction our methods of teaching are inhibiting and deforming this impulse. The whole balance of education, as between intellectual and instinctive activity, must be re­ dressed. Let us frankly face the fact that the joyful expression of rhythm and harmony and colour has nothing whatever to do with logic, reason and memory and the rest of our intellectual fetishes. I am not an anti-intellectualist. I do not say that we had better trust to our instincts in all the affairs of life. But I do say that our educational system is grossly over­ weighted with intellectual aims; that this rationalization of the child has a stultifying effect on its aesthetic impulse and is directly responsible for the triumph of ugliness in our age. B u t the educational difficulties do not end with that immense problem. We may educate the child in school, but outside the school another educational process goes on all the time—the influence of the child’s environment. It is no good developing the creative and appreciative impulse in the child if at the same tim e we compel it to inhabit ugly schools, to go home through ugly streets and to live in an ugly house surrounded by ugly objects. And so, insensibly, we are led to the wider social problem. Education alone will not suffice, because education can only be partial and is perhaps impossible in the chaos of ugliness which the industrial age has created. It is such considerations as these which may well lead to the conclusion that no good can be done in this sphere unless and

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until the social system is changed. That seems to be the logical and inevitable conclusion to which we are driven. But at the same time we have to guard against the assumption that we have only to change the social system to secure our aims. The great international exhibition which was held at Paris a few years ago was very instructive in this respect. There we saw displayed side by side the industrial art of all the countries of the world. It was possible to criticize the display and say that one or another pavilion did not represent the best that a particular nation was capable of. But in any case there was enough to be seen to establish certain general conclusions of a negative kind. It was quite impossible, that is to say, to find any law of correspondence between the artistic level of the products of the countries represented and their social or political institutions. It was not possible to say that obviously the totalitarian states were making a better job of industrial design than the democratic states. Indeed, in quite different ways and for quite distinct reasons, the exhibits of Russia and Germany were among the worst to be seen, whilst those of the other totalitarian state, Italy, were surprisingly good. The best of all, perhaps, came from the small democratic but still capitalist states of Holland, Sweden and Finland. But though we might quarrel in detail about the relative merits of the various national exhibits at Paris, I think we should all agree on the point I am concerned to make: that no particular social system—communism, fascism or capitalism— will necessarily o f itself guarantee good design in objects of daily use. It is simple enough to trace many of the inartistic and de­ cadent qualities in the things we make and use to the prevailing industrial system. The material conditions of poverty which most people support throughout their lives, the lack of leisure and consequential dullness and ignorance—these are the social aspects of the system which prevent any element of quality or discrimination entering into daily life. Tt is also possible to argue that the very system in its actual mechanism also

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prevents the emergence of quality—by the division of labour, m ass methods of production, material economies demanded by the universal profit motive. But in fairness it m ust be pointed out that the system, even under its present economic motiva­ tion, can and does produce many objects which have aesthetic qualities, and that we may fail to perceive these qualities because of our anti-industrial prejudices. I refer to the aero­ planes and motor-cars and other typical products of the modern industrial system which are by no means devoid of those elements of beauty which we find in classical art. I do not wish to insist on this aspect of the question, but it should serve to warn us that there is no necessary connection between the economic and even the ethical characteristics of an industrial system and the aesthetic merits of the products of that system. L e t us turn for a moment to the positive evidence offered by the case of Russia. In one vast industrial area, amounting to one-sixth of the world, the old economic system was destroyed by revolution a quarter of a century ago, and a new economic system which has gradually eliminated the profit motive and has given the workers of Russia indirect control of the processes of production has been established. The technical features of capitalist production remain, and have even been intensified. Division of labour and mass production remain. There is still little leisure, and though there is no longer acute poverty, there is no great abundance. It is still an economy of scarcity, and it is still a money economy. Workers are paid wages according to the kind and amount of work they do, and the more they do the more they are paid. It is not necessary for me to go into all the details of the Soviet system; the very act of presenting them might arouse controversy. The most general and most significant feature of the whole Soviet economy, distinguishing it from ours and from every other system in the world, is that it is centrally controlled for the total benefit of the people. This centralization means not only that the kind and quantity of goods is planned on a national scale, but also that there is every possibility of con­ trolling the quality. And great efforts are made to this end.

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Artists and designers are organized in co-operatives, and their services are placed at the disposal of the soviets and factories.1 We all know what a great part museums and exhibitions playin the social life of the country, and even more direct encourage­ ment is given to artists. “ Annually (to quote a recent au­ thority 12) the Council of People’s Commissars now offers monetary awards to men and women who have attained distinction in the arts. In 1941 these awards embraced music, painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre, opera, dramatic writing, ballet, motion pictures, fiction, poetry, literary criti­ cism. In each division three to five artists received a first award of 100,000 roubles each, and from three to ten a second award of h alf that sum.” From all this it would seem that Russia must be an earthly paradise for the artist, and undoubtedly the artist is treated with more respect in Russia than anywhere else in the world. Let me quote one more witness—a well-known American sculptress, Emma Lu Davis: “ In the Spring of 1935 I went to Russia. I wanted to see how the artists were organized over there, how they were utilized in the scheme of life, and how socialized patronage affected the arts. I found that from an economic-social standpoint the Soviet artist enjoys the happiest situation in the world; as a trade union member he enjoys protection and social security, he never lacks employment, and building and decorative projects are broad enough to include all varieties of work—except good work. This, I believe, was in no way the fault of socialism. Soviet artists are not regi­ mented any more than artists in other countries, but it happens that the pressure of popular taste is toward bad and tawdry styles in painting and sculpture. Russia has not a broad or intelligent popular base of appreciation of real beautiful projects. The Russian tradition of real folk painting disappeared four or five hundred years ago with the last of 1 See p. 108 above, for further details. 2 Maurice Hindus, Russia Fights On (London, 1942), p. 127, E*

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th e fine ikons. Since then there has been nothing but a second-rate tradition of academic paint and clay pushing.” 1 T h e significant fact which emerges from all the evidence we can collect about the situation of the artist in Russia is that in spite of a fundamental change in the economic system, and in spite of all this direct encouragement of the arts by those in authority, there has not been anything in the nature of an artistic renaissance. In spite of state-supported artists’ co­ operatives, in spite of large monetary awards and official honours, in spite of a socialized and centrally planned economy, R ussia does not turn out for the admiration of the world pots which are better than the pots we make in Staffordshire, glass­ ware which is better than the glassware of Sweden, furniture which is better than the furniture of Finland, films which are better than the films of America, paintings and sculpture which are better than the paintings and sculpture of France or Spain. Its theatre, its opera and its ballet are undoubtedly better than anything of their kind in Europe, but these are arts which are traditionally good in Russia, and which have no direct relation to the economic system. T his is a very significant and even a very disturbing fact, and it should be examined dispassionately, without the least trace of political bias. It is a scientific problem. A nation has taken certain measures to produce certain results. In one respect the experiment failed. We are about to make the same experiment. Let us take care not to make the same mistake. I believe the mistake is fundamentally this: You cannot impose a culture from the top—it must come from under. It grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work. It is a spontaneous expression of their joy in life, of their joy in work, and if this joy does not exist, the culture will not exist. Joy is a spiritual quality, an impalpable quality; that too cannot be forced. It must be an inevitable state of mind, born of the elementary processes of life, a by-product of natural human growth. Obviously there are material conditions 1

Americans, 1942

(New York : Museum of Modern Art), p. 44.

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which favour its emergence. A people cannot be joyful if it is hungry or poverty-stricken, if it is stricken by war or oppression. Unfortunately the Russian people has been hungry and poor, threatened by war and oppressed. We cannot, therefore, sit in academic judgment on the quality of its culture. But I think it is evident enough that the worst kind of oppression came from within. The first authority I quoted just now, an observer who has written many sympathetic books about the Soviet regime, goes on to say that these men and women who compete for the awards offered to the artists, and others like them, “ have had to speak the political language, the political thought of the Kremlin, which, with no concession to difference of opinion or will, has, in its own way, been ruthlessly driving the nation everywhere, to its own formula of living, its own steely resolve to convert the country as rapidly as possible into a far-flung military fortress” . To-day no one conscious of the magnificent efficiency of that far-flung military fortress, and of all that it has meant to our own security and comfort in this country, would for a moment question that ruthless aim, in spite of all it has entailed in cultural shortcomings. We have not the right, and I hope not the impudence, to criticize Russia in this respect. At the same time, we must acknowledge the facts, patiently observe the sociological processes that are taking place under our eyes. If we do that in the spirit of science and realism, then I do not think we can avoid the conclusion that this centralized control of the arts and of all modes of artistic expression has defeated its own end in Russia. The arts, we may conclude—and not only from this vast modern experiment, but from the vaster experiment of human evolution—can only thrive in an atmo­ sphere of liberty. Artists may be prosperous under a tyranny, and most dictators, conscious of the judgment of history, try to weave a cloak of culture to hide their misdeeds. But the judgment of history is absolute, and when tyrants and artists have passed away, the art remains, to be tried by laws which are neither economic nor utilitarian, but solely aesthetic. I suggest that certain broad conclusions emerge from all

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these confusing issues. I think we can state that a vital culture requires in the first place an economic system which guarantees a certain measure of security to a class, and preferably to a whole people. I do not want to confuse security with wealth, or even with comfort: some of the finest art in the world has been produced by peasants, and even by the people we call savages. In the second place, I think we may conclude that a vital culture requires spiritual liberty—freedom to express individual feelings and aspirations without fear of condemna­ tion. Security and freedom—these are, as it were, the external conditions for the emergence of a great culture. But external conditions are not enough, and no social system, regimentary or liberal, totalitarian or democratic, will achieve a native style of art unless that style has a wide basis in the natural taste of the people at large. This is the essential internal condition, and though it has its outward aspect, which we might describe as vitality, it is really a spiritual energy which cannot be con­ sciously cultivated by the individual. It springs from social integration, from'the satisfaction of common needs, from mutual aid and from unity of aspiration. I say we cannot cultivate such spiritual energy self-consciously as individuals, and by this I mean that it cannot be inspired by preaching or spread by propaganda. But naturally we can and m ust provide the conditions suitable to its emergence, and these conditions are, not only the security and freedom essential to the artist as an individual, but also a mode of upbringing or system of education which is social rather than individual in its methods and ideals. This is a subject which I have dealt with in a separate book,1 but I must give a clue to my meaning. The word “ education” implies many things, but in our modern practice it is always a process of individuation, of developing individual or separate qualities—what schoolmasters and poli­ ticians call “ character” —qualities which distinguish the individual from his group or environment. The development of such qualities in the individual is very necessary, essential to the variety of our democratic way of life. But in itself this 1

Education Through Art.

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kind of education is socially disintegrating, and it should be accompanied by some process which corrects the tendency towards disintegration, and brings the individual back into the social unit. In primitive societies—societies which are nearly always remarkable for the cohesion of their culture and the vitality of their way of life—there exists such a process. Instead of “ education” we find certain rites of “ initiation” —a drawing of the individual into society, to merge him with the group. We use the same word in connection with religious communities —and always with the implication of a leading “ in ” , and not a drawing “ out” . Education should be balanced by initiation —a drawing of the individual into the community, making him conscious of its collective life, its collective ideals and aspirations. We vaguely realize this truth in our attempt to create a youth movement. But I mean something much more intimate and far-reaching than anything implied in such social patchwork. I mean a conception of education which is socialized from the kindergarten up, in which every classroom is a busy little workshop, every schoolboy a novice seeking initiation into the mysteries of art and science, every lesson a group activity, binding and inspiring the individual, creating that collective consciousness which is the spiritual energy of a people and the only source of its art and culture. Now if that is true—if this interpretation of the obvious facts is admitted—then it must make a difference to our policy. It is only too easy—I confess it has often been my own state of mind—to give up the direct struggle for an immediate object in the hope or expectation that a social revolution of some sort will change everything for the better, including in its general sweep the aim for which we have been so vainly struggling. But that is disproved by the evidence of the past twenty years. In no single case can it be said that a social or economic revolution has brought about a higher standard of public taste. If any­ thing, the evidence shows that unless accompanied by an intelligent system of education, an increase in the social and economic well-being of any group of people only leads to an expansion of vulgarity and bad taste.

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It follows that we must strive now and always for our im­ mediate objectives. Our struggle is on the artistic or aesthetic plane, and to secure our ends, to establish our purely aesthetic ideals, we must be prepared to think outside the categories of the existing political systems. In particular, we must abandon the idea that all our problems can be solved by “ the state” . I do not question the power of the state: it is said that the Mother of Parliaments can do all things, even unto changing the sex of her citizens. But that is not the point. In so far as it is a question of preserving life and property, of securing decency and cleanliness, the state now acts with an almost excessive thoroughness. But it almost completely ignores the equally important questions of what I will call public appear­ ances—the colour and shape and visual agreeableness of what everybody has to see and use every day of their lives. It is difficult to understand why the state, which prevents a man from getting drunk or committing a felony, should not only allow but even encourage this same man to foul the public vision with an ugly house or a hideous piece of. furniture. It can only be because the state as such is an expression of purely economic values. In any less materialistic standard of values the sin of ugliness would rank a good deal higher than the sin of covetousness. We need a reform of public taste—a vast cultural movement comparable to the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century. But a reformation is a violent process; it doesn’t just happen. It means breaking down old habits, making new associations, adapting ourselves to new conditions. It is a difficult and uncomfortable experience for the majority of people, and the majority of people are just not going to bother to reform themselves if it involves conscious effort. We must not forget that the Englishman’s home is his castle, and that he quite instinctively, and quite rightly, resents the interference of people who propose to invade his private domain, and not merely invade it, but pass rude remarks about what they find there—the china and the curtains, the carpets and the chairs, even the ornaments on the mantelpiece. And that is the

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attitude not only of the man in the street, but also of the manu­ facturer of such carpets and chairs and ornaments. Such people resent the activities of the reformer still more bitterly—to them we are just obnoxious interlopers trying to tell them how to run their business. There is, of course, a technique for dealing with the manu­ facturer. We can point out to him—indeed we can prove to him—that what we call good design is a commercial asset, and that in a world of shrinking markets, where the manufacturer can depend less and less on the exploitation of new consumers, the appearance and quality of his goods is going to be the determining factor. But our obligations do not end with the conversion of the manufacturer, much as that is to be desired. We must still work on the imponderables—public taste, public education, the general level of culture in the masses. I have said that you cannot impose a culture from the top— it must be a by-product of the natural productive activity of the people. But this does not mean that we must just sit back and wait for the miracle to happen. Regeneration will begin at the bottom, in the family, in the school, in the workshop and in the parish and the borough. Action will be regional rather than national, but we might make a beginning with those institutions which are already subject to regional and communal control. Already a vast amount of production and distribution is carried out by public or semi-public bodies which might take the lead in those “ rites of initiation” which will give the individual a social morality and a pride in public appearances. When we consider that it is our ambition not only to improve the design of pots and pans, of furniture and textiles, b u t also of public buildings like town halls and railway stations, council houses and government offices, of roads and all they carry in the way of signposts and lighting systems; when we consider, moreover, that a democratic organization like the Co-operative Movement is one of the worst offenders in the field of design—then we shall begin to see why we must create a public conscience in this matter. We must create a public standard of taste (decent design) comparable to the

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public standard of behaviour (decent conduct— which does exist though it is not always observed). And design is some­ thing more tangible than conduct. Bernard Shaw once said with reference to the proposed national theatre: “ It is a simple historical fact that cultural institutions have to be imposed on the masses by rulers or private patrons enlightened enough to know that such institu­ tions are neither luxuries nor mere amusements but necessities of civilized life.” I don’t agree with this dictum: I believe that cultural institutions “ imposed on” the masses are so much dead weight—to hell with such culture! But this does not mean that the taste of a people should not find spontaneous expression in national institutions, and I would like to see, not only a National Gallery and a National Theatre, but also a National Cinema, a National Ballet, and a national institution for the exhibition of the beautiful things created by a people’s industry. We need not call it a Museum—that conveys the notion of a place where the past is preserved. We want a place where the future is forecast. Let us call it, therefore, the House of Good Design, and let it be worthy of the power and potentialities of our industries; let there be at least one cathedral to com­ memorate the achievements of the Machine Age. I realize that I have not yet answered the simple and devast­ ating question: to what end? Why should we take this trouble and expend this energy for the sake of something so intangible as beauty? There is the economic argument already used, but the economist might turn on us and say: let us rather have a League of Industrial Peace to eliminate all competitive factors, among them design. After all, from a strictly economic point of view, there is no need to make things beautiful so long as they function satisfactorily. No; in the end we must abandon the economic argument. We must use it for strategic purposes, but finally we shall have to confess that beauty is its own end: that we are fighting for better design as part of a better world. In the end our argument is not economic, nor practical, nor even ethical; it is simply biological. We may have the con­ viction— certainly I have—that there is a final correspondence

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between what is efficient and what is beautiful and what is tru e: a conviction that art is a human contribution to the universal design. B u t our front is definite, our scope is strict: we con­ centrate on one aspect of the necessary revolution, while ad­ mitting th at this necessary revolution is necessarily total. We realize th at the vulgarity of which we complain runs through the whole fabric of our civilization. We have no feeling for beauty because we have no respect for truth and goodness. Eric Gill used to say that if we got our moral and religious values right, the rest would follow: beauty would look after herself. With qualifications which involve a whole theory of aesthetics and a whole philosophy of life, I would agree. But at the conclusion of an essay which is already long enough I can only make these bleak affirmations:

Beauty is a quality in things made—“ the radiance o f things made as they ought to be made” (Gill). Beauty is therefore something which appeals directly to the senses. A n epoch o f art becomes possible only when workmen are not concerned to make things beautifully, are not told to make things beautifully , but do so just because they don't know any worse. A great civilization or culture can only arise on the basis o f a natural instinct to make things as they ought to be made. And th at is why I call it a civilization “ from under” . I will deal with some of the overtones in the next essay.

13

Civilization and the Sense of Quality It is a r t that makes life , makes interest, makes importance, fo r our consideration and application o f these things, and I know o f no substitute whatever fo r the force and beauty o f its process. H enry James, Letters, II, 508.

A r t , as I have so often insisted in these pages, is one of those vague spheres of human activity which escape any very precise definition. Criticism is merely an approximation towards that unattainable end, an endless multiplication of distinctions. One such distinction which is more firmly established than most is that between art and entertainment. An entertainment is something which distracts us or diverts us from the routine of daily life. It makes us for the time being forget our cares and worries; it interrupts our conscious thoughts and habits, rests our nerves and minds, though it may incidentally exhaust our bodies. Art, on the other hand, though it may divert us from the normal routine of our existence, causes us in some way or other to become conscious of that existence. Matthew Arnold defined poetry as the criticism of life—with a saving clause, if I remember rightly, about “ high seriousness” . I do not like the phrase, for it suggests that art is some kind of intellectual activity. Art is rather an expression of our deepest instincts and emotions; it is a serious activity whose end is not so m uch to divert as to vitalize. I avoid words like “ improve” and “ uplift” because they only apply to a special kind of art. Art is not necessarily a moral activity, and its tonic effect is 146

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made, through the senses. Nevertheless, even in its purest, or most abstract, in Oscar Wilde’s sense, its most useless forms: in one of Shakespeare’s songs, or a minuet by Mozart, or a drawing by Boucher—even then art is radically different from amuse­ ment. It does not leave us without affecting us, and affecting us, according to some scale of value, for the better. This virtue in art is shown by its survival value. Historically speaking, we cannot distinguish a civilization except by its art. At any rate, the more a civilization is subjected to the test of time, the more it is reduced to its works of art. The rest rots away. E ven the remote periods of pre-history become vivid for a moment in some cave-drawing or fragment of carved bone. Historical civilization begins with the epic poems Gilgamesh, or the Bible, or Homer. Shards of pottery, painted or incised, are more eloquent than the names of emperors or fields of battle. Cities and fertile lands disappear, but buried in their ruins, in tombs and sanctuaries, we find a vase, a jewel, a few coins, m ade by the artists of those days, which speak to us in clear language and tell us of the status and character of that lost civilization. They tell us not merely that such and such a people worshipped the sun, or that they fought in chariots, or believed in the resurrection of the dead. These are incidental items of knowledge which we might possibly derive from some other source. But works of art speak more directly to us: for b y their form and style they give us a measure of the refinement of a civilization. The aesthetic sense — the faculty b y which we appreciate works of art—has its vagaries; at one moment we execrate, say, Gothic architecture, and a century later it is exalted above all other styles. But there is an ideal aesthetic scale of values, just as there is an ideal scale of moral values; and by the measure of this scale all civiliza­ tions are given their due rank. The survival value of art may be readily admitted, but what, the cynic might ask, is the value of survival? What does it matter, w hat did it matter to the caveman of the Stone Age, or the sculptors of Assyria, or the potters of China, that some remote civilization would disinter their works and judge them good ?

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Here we face a problem which is fundamental to our faith in th e good life. It is the fundamental question which divides mankind into those who believe that all human activity is vain, and leads to no realizable improvement in this world; and those who believe that, however slowly and however tentatively, man has acquired the instruments of selfimprovement, and moves towards a more enjoyable world condition. There is a phrase, the perfectability of man (probably first used by Godwin or his disciple Shelley) which has been the object of much ridicule on the part of those who despair of mankind, and find perfectability only in divine or unattainable realms of being. It is, obviously, an incautious phrase; a state of perfectibility would be a state of immobility, of final attain­ m en t; and it is difficult to conceive of life as thus stabilized. But the phrase does not represent the true doctrine of progress, which is not so much a doctrine as a myth. One can take a long view or a short view of the future of mankind. On a short view we can only be practical and realistic: if man improves, it is at a rate to which we cannot accommodate our immediate politics. A precise set of dogmas is probably as much as one generation can cope with. But a belief in progress belongs to a long view of mankind’s future: it is a mythical conception quite parallel to the mythical conceptions of religion. It merely substitutes, for a supernatural Kingdom of Heaven to be attained in another world, a Golden Age to be attained in this world. And as a myth it is as good as any other myth; I would claim that it is much more sensible because it is much more human. The dogma of original sin, which is offered as an alternative, would be insupportable did it not have, as a corollary, the promise of salvation through divine intervention; and one may suggest without cynicism that in this case the wish is father to the thought. The myth of progress, on the other hand, has no illegitimate offspring. It is born as a wish, or as a will, and there is no attempt to disguise its innocent and hopeful nature. The spirit of disillusionment which prevails in our war-

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ridden world is probably a reaction to the evolutionary optimism of the nineteenth century. Let us freely admit that much that goes by the name of liberalism is to be identified with that same spirit of optimism. But I think by now we have learned to distinguish between the freedom to do as you like and the duty to create a world of freedom. I see no reason at all why the right to create an artificial scarcity of goods, or the right to exploit native labour in the colonies, should be even remotely associated with the concept of liberty. Liberty and freedom, these values we are now defending, have no economic purpose: they are spiritual values, and as such depend on the fine per­ ceptions of those who guard them. Just as the dogmas of religion depend for their interpretation on fallible human agents, so the ideals of liberty are subject to the same chance. You cannot put on one side certain ideals of life, of conduct, of social order, and say that these represent a divine dispensation to which all men must submit; and on the other side place all other ideals and condemn them as human, all too human. The choice is between the interpretation of dogma, supernatural or divine in origin, and the interpretation of the natural phenomena of life—between faith and reason. In either case the interpreting agent is a human being, and the fallibility inherent in our humanity extends to every range of thought and feeling. We m ay therefore reaffirm a rational faith in human progress. But let us be very clear that we do not confuse spiritual with material progress; let us recognize the uncertainty of our aims and the feebleness of our agents; let us proceed with humility and measure. But let us at the same time declare, that through­ out all the chances of history, in the face of defeat and despair, in spite of long epochs of darkness and retrogression, man has established faculties which enable him to distinguish between immediate satisfactions and absolute values. He has established a moral sense to guide him in his dealings with his fellow-men and an aesthetic sense to enable him to modify the life of reason; and though the life of reason is still subject to all manner of raids and rebuffs, it exists as a practical ideal, extending to wider and wider circles of humanity, and promising an earthly

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paradise never to be attained only because each stage towards its realization creates its superior level. I have just defined the aesthetic sense as the faculty which enables man to modify the quality of his environment. Quality is, of course, the essential word in this definition. There are other faculties, faculties which might be described as technical or practical, which enable man to modify the qimntity of his environment: to produce more corn, to utilize more power, to conserve more energy. But these faculties, though they play an important part in the growth of civilization, are not our present concern. I freely admit that in some cases it is difficult to disentangle the two elements: the aesthetic appeal of the Gothic cathedral, for example, depends very directly on the solution of technical problems in building; more obviously, the quality of music has, within certain limits, been governed by the technical perfection of the instruments available. If we make this distinction between art and the instruments of art, then I think we are bound to admit that whatever progress in art is discernible within historical times is due to an improvement in its instruments rather than to any change in the instinct which operates them. The difference between a bushman’s engraving of an antelope and the drawing of a similar animal by Pisanello is fully explained by the difference between a sharpened flint working on the surface of a rock and a silver-point pencil working on parchment. The civiliza­ tions behind these two manifestations of the aesthetic sense bear no comparison; but the aesthetic sense is the same. Similarly, who would be bold enough to say that the poetry of Tennyson, or even of Shakespeare, showed any qualitative advance on the poetry of Homer? Whatever art we examine, we are driven to this conclusion: that the underlying faculty or impulse is relatively constant; that the variations are due to the accidents of time and circumstance which release this impulse or faculty. The faculty with which we are endowed must be educated, encouraged, provided with suitable instru­ ments and a rewarding material. Art does not, like technical

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skill, arise from the necessities of a situation: it is not an invention. Alas, it is perfectly possible for the whole processs of civilization to carry on without art. “ To carry on” — the phrase has a provisional ring; and from a wider point of view it is equally certain that a civilization without art will perish— perish materially and fade from the memory of mankind. Art is grace, art is form, art is— among all possible manners of doing or making a thing—the most memorable. That particular manner of doing or making a thing is memorable because it stimulates our senses, because it brings human inventions within measurable distance of organic growth, because for a moment the will of man seems to be identified with the universal forces of life. Art redeems our actions from monotony and our minds from boredom. We have to make things and to do things in order to live, b u t the routine of this endless repetition of menial tasks would dull the senses and deaden the mind unless there was the possibility of doing things and making things with a progressive sense of quality. That sense of quality is the aesthetic sense, and in the end the aesthetic sense is the vital sense, the sense without which we die.

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A Solemn Conclusion There are no abstract truths—no Mass-Man, no proletariat. There is only Man. When the Pulse has been nailed upon the crossbeams, lo, Reason gives up its viable breath and becomes a wandering ghostly Error. Truth and folly are ever about to expire, so that we, like our beloved Sancho Panza kneeling at the death-bed of Don Quixote, must always be ready to go out to receive the holy communion o f cudgels and distaffs, fo r the rebirth o f the Pidse, living anew, in our veins and bones, as the quickened Truth. Edward D ahlberg, D o These Bones Live? (New York, 1941).

E v e r since democracy became a clear political conception, in the city-state of Athens, democratic philosophers have been faced with the anomaly of the artist. It has seemed to them that the artist, by his very nature, cannot be accommodated within the structure of an egalitarian community. He is inevitably a social misfit, allied to the neurotic, and to rational thinkers like Plato it has seemed that the only solution is to banish him from the community. A modern rationalist would probably recommend that he should be cured of his neurosis. There are two main problems: (1) What is it that seems to separate the artist from the rest of the community, making him unique among men? (2) What is it nevertheless which reconciles the community to this separatist individual—that is to say, what values does the artist contribute to the community which make the community accept or tolerate his presence among them? 152

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The essays which are collected in this volume return again and again to these problems, and by way of conclusion I would like to attempt a general summary of the view I have put forward. We ought first to decide whether the artist is physically unique. W e know that mankind is divisible into various distinct psychological types, and that these types have a basis in physiological factors. Is the artist such a type? There is a certain amount of evidence which suggests that he is. We know that some musicians possess what is called “ absolute pitch” . It is a natural disposition, which is inherited and which cannot be acquired. A similar faculty in poets and plastic artists is not so commonly recognized, but nevertheless it exists. In poetry it is an absolute awareness of the identity of word and image, and in the plastic arts it probably takes the form of what we call “ an intuitive sense of proportion” , with or with­ out an intuitive sense of colour harmony, and these “ senses” are strictly analogous to the musician’s absolute pitch. These facts, although incompletely investigated, must, I think, be admitted. But it must also be admitted that they are not essential. Several famous composers have been without absolute pitch, and there have certainly been poets without absolute identity of word and image—in fact, to insist on such an identity, in view of the limitations of language, would con­ siderably restrict the range of poetry. One can also easily think of great painters whose colour sense has been defective, and of great architects who have had to rely on consciously applied canons of proportion. In the end, the most that one would be able to claim is that the possession of such unique gifts merely gives special quality to the work of a particular artist. Apart from the occasional possession of such physiological peculiarities, it is obvious that the artist is not a separate psycho­ logical type. There are introvert and extravert artists, schizo­ phrenic and manic-depressive artists. In fact, every psycho­ logical type is potentially an artist—which is only another way of agreeing with Eric Gill that every man is a special kind of artist. The acceptance of this fact—and I for one do accept it—

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involves us logically in an admission that art is skill: a man does something so well that he is entitled to be called an artist. We are still left with a wide scope for argument, for we must ask what that something is : what is the purpose of that skill? It was at this point that Gill and I, in our prolonged dis­ cussions, used to diverge, for I would insist that art is not merely skill to make, but also skill to express. Express what? Gill would ask, and if I was careless enough to use a phrase such as: “ To express his personality” , Gill would be at me with the m allet and chisel he kept in his mind no less than in his hands, demanding if I had ever seen a personality, and how in God’s name it could be expressed except in the making of something useful. And so the argument went on, to its inconclusive end. But I still maintain that there is a sense in which art is expression, and not merely making, and it is important that I should maintain my point, because it bears directly on this problem of the artist and society. For it is not sufficient to say that the artist is a skilled worker, and that he will always be valued by the community because his skill is useful. The truth is that the artist is very often (oftenest when he is greatest) offering some­ thing to the community which the community does not want to accept, which the community at first finds very unpalatable. The mistaken presentation of my point of view, of which I have myself been guilty in the past, is to describe art as selfexpression. If every artist merely expresses the uniqueness and separateness of his self, then art might be disruptive and disintegrating, and anti-social. A lot of art in the past has been of that kind, and has given rise to the whole problem of “ dilettantism” . The dilettante is the curse of our civiliza­ tion— the parasite of culture which Gill and I united in con­ signing to hell. A social art can never be dilettante art— dilettante art can never be social. Obviously the great artist who is not merely making some­ thing, like a carpenter or a cobbler, but expressing something, like Shakespeare or Michael Angelo or Beethoven, is expressing something bigger than his self\ Self-expression, like selfseeking, is an illusion. It is the action of an individual who

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pits him self against the community, who says I am bigger, or better, or stronger than other men, and will therefore enslave them, make them serve my individual purposes. But a democracy would be right to resent the presence of such individuals in its midst, for democracy as I conceive it starts from the proposition that all men are equal—if this mystical statement is not accepted, then the word democracy is being used in a sense which I do not regard as legitimate. For me the word democracy always implies, not only liberty and fraternity, but also equality.* Society expects something more than self-expression from its artists, and in the case of great artists such as those I have mentioned, it gets something more. It gets something which might be called life-expression. But the “ life” to be expressed, the life which is expressed in great art, is precisely the life of the community, the organic group consciousness. It is the artist’s business to make the group aware of its unity, its com­ munity. He can do this because he, more than other men, has access to the common unconsciousness, to the collective instincts which underlie the brittle surface of convention and normality. I cannot say why the artist should have this gift, any more than I can say why he has absolute pitch, etc. It is probably a con­ sequence of his early upbringing, the actual course of his adaptation to society in earliest infancy—the complicated process which psychoanalysis is slowly reconstructing. What­ ever the explanation, the function of the artist in modern society is much the same as that of the medicine-man or magician in a primitive society: he is the man who mediates between our individual consciousness and the collective un­ consciousness, and thus ensures social re-integration. It is only in th e degree that this mediation is successful that a true democracy is possible. This office of mediation cannot be forced upon the artist. His function is catalytic—he aids the social revolution without himself undergoing any change, without being absorbed by the social substance. That, it seems to me, is the central doctrine of Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads ,

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which is probably the most careful definition of the poet’s function ever made. I don’t think there are any essential problems of the artist in a modern society which we do not find anticipated there. The Preface was first published in 1800— at a time, that is to say, very comparable to our own. Two years earlier, in 1798, Wordsworth’s political consciousness had reached a crisis—he had experienced a final disillusionment with the French Revolution. The crisis for so many poets and artists of to-day has come after a similar interval and is of exactly the same nature. The signing of the pact between Germany and Russia was probably the breaking-point, but the Moscow trials and executions, and a gradual realization that the Russian Revolution had followed precisely the same course as the French Revolution, had created a psychological tension which was bound to break sooner or later. Hundreds of poets and artists of every kind found that their idealism was suddenly dead— betrayed by the cynical politicians who had for so long deceived them. Poets who now turn in on themselves, to discover the truth about the poet and society, begin to tread the same labyrinth as Wordsworth. They might save themselves much trouble by re-reading the Preface , weighing it phrase by phrase. Two particularly relevant phrases to which I would like to draw attention are based on the words “ pleasure” and “ tran­ quillity” . The second phrase is the more familiar, though it is nearly always distorted in quotation: “ poetry takes its origin fro m emotion recollected in tranquillity” . The first phrase has not caught the popular imagination so readily, though it is no less striking: “ We have no sympathy but what is pro­ pagated by pleasure” . This second phrase, explains Wordsworth, refers to “ the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which (man) knows, and feels, and lives, and moves . . . we have no know­ ledge, that is, no general principle drawn from the contem­ plation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone” . Further, “ wher­ ever we sympathize with pain, it will be found that the sym­

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pathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure” . This statement, which might have been derived from Epicurus or Lucretius, is also remarkable as an anticipation of Freud’s pleasure-principle. (Cf.: “ We may put the question whether a main purpose is discernible in the operation of the mental apparatus; and our first approach to an answer is that this purpose is directed to the attainment of pleasure. It seems that our entire psychic activity is bent upon procuring pleasure and avoiding pain, that it is automatically regulated by the pleasure-principle.” — Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 298.) But we are concerned now with the function which Wordsworth gives this pleasure-principle in the process of poetic activity.1 It is a function which enables us to return to the artist the uniqueness which we began by taking away from him. Gill, we saw, went so far as to suggest that there is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan—between, shall we say, Shakespeare and the carpenter who made his second-best bed. And we came to the conclusion that there may not have been much difference in the quality of their skill: the carpentry of the plays is not above criticism, and the second-best bed was well enough made to be specified in the poet’s last will and testament. What, then, did Shakespeare possess that was denied to this carpenter? There is no mystery about it : it was the capacity to work in psychological material, to make a work of art out of more them words: out of human desires and emotions, fears and fantasies. 1 According to Wordsworth, the following stages are involved : (1) The origin of the process : emotion recollected in tranquillity. (2) Contemplation of this recollection continued until, “ by a species of reaction ” , the tranquillity gradually disappears and is replaced by (5) an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation. (4) Composition may then occur inducing (5) a state of enjoyment, whatever the nature of the emotion that is being experienced by the poet.

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And that is where the peculiarity and what we recognize as the “ greatness” of the artist conies in: for these materials cannot be worked superficially, on the surface. The artist must be ready to delve below the level of normal consciousness, the crust of conventional thought and behaviour, into his own unconscious, and into the collective unconscious of his group or race. It is a painful experience: creative work on this level is only done at a cost of mental anguish. And this is where Wordsworth’s perception of the realities o*f poetic com­ position becomes so acute; for there is no doubt that the poet’s creation, his sympathetic penetration into the tragic significance of life, however painful, “ is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure” . The artist is always something of a masochist. He is also an escapist. Wordsworth does not define what he means by tranquillity, but his meaning is obvious enough if we remember his social behaviour and his practice in composition, as described by his sister Dorothy and other witnesses. Tranquillity, for Wordsworth, meant literally a flight from society; and the actual moment of composition meant a flight from even those members of his household with whom he habitually dwelt. The modern practice has, of course, been quite the contrary. We have been exhorted to go out into the streets, into the factories, even actually to become proletarians or workmen.1 1 u I t ’s been often said that an author must go and study production. But it does not mean that some fellow . . . having bought a sixpenny note-book, goes to the factory, gets into everybody’s way, gets into a mess among machinery and then writes all sorts of rubbish in the newspapers. . . . I believe that you have got to actually work in pro­ duction, but if that is not possible at least take part in all the everyday occurrences of the working class. I understand this work about the importance of obeying the slogans about safety, those that tell you not to put your hand into machinery, the greatest care about electric currents endangering the life of the workmen, care that nails should not be left lying on staircases, not to touch engineering belts, etc. This appeals to my pen and my rhymes and I consider it’s more im­ portant than the most inspired themes of the long-haired lyricists.” —Vladimir Mayakovsky. From Mayakovsky' and his Poetry , compiled by Herbert Marshall (London, 1942).

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We have been exhorted to fight in Spain, to sit under the bombs, to sleep in shelters, to join the Home Guard. None of these conditions ensure “ tranquillity” —there is, in fact, no tranquillity in the modern world, least of all, perhaps, in the “ comparative safety” of New York or Hollywood. Wordsworth’s precept has been powerfully reinforced nearer our time b y Rilke, in those Letters to a Young Poet which are so full of profound wisdom. “ I can give you no other advice” , said Rilke to his correspondent, “ than this: retire into yourself and probe the depths from which your life springs up. . . . For the creative artist must be a world unto himself and find every­ thing in himself and in Nature, of which he is part and parcel.” And again: “ Love your loneliness, and endure the pain which it causes you with harmonious lamentations {schoenklingender Klage). T he word Einsamkeit (loneliness, solitariness, tran­ quillity) recurs like a refrain through all these letters, and indeed through all Rilke’s work. It will be remembered that Milton also spoke movingly of “ a calm and pleasing solitariness ” . Rilke, it might be objected, was writing in 1905, when solitariness could be found, if not easily, at least possibly. But that artificial isolation, which I have called fortress-solitude, is not the same thing as Rilke’s Einsamkeit or Wordsworth’s tranquillity or Milton’s solitariness. It is not, in Rilke’s phrase, bound to Nature—by which he means a natural way of living. In such fast seclusion the poet cannot be, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “ a man speaking to men” . It may seem unreasonable to non-poetic people, but what the poet nevertheless demands is a kind of society in which tranquillity, withdrawal, is a natural right. He must be able to go into the press and out of it as easily as he passes from his own house into the street. The charge he makes against the modern world is that it has invaded his house of quiet, invaded it with cares and rumours, insistent politics and totalitarian wars. The poet is therefore compelled to demand, fo r poetic reasons, that the world shall be changed. It cannot be said that his demand is unreasonable: it is the first condition of his existence as a poet.

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B u t the poet must realize that the changes promised by all the existing political parties are not valid for him. They do not guarantee his solitude. They all imply a more exacting social contract, a more complete surrender of individual liberty: surrender to the state, surrender to the curiosity of the press, surrender to mass opinions and mass standards. The direction m ust be reversed—political power must be distributed among the counties, the cities, the villages and the parishes— dis­ tributed and broken into human, tangible units. Economic power must be distributed among the guilds and workshops. Financial power must be altogether excluded from society. Productive labour must be recognized as the basic reality, and honoured as such. That is why the poet must be an anarchist. He has no other choice. He may temporize with liberalism, with democratic socialism, with state socialism; and in peaceful times any of these political systems may be persuaded to patronize culture, including poetry.. But they cannot inspire culture, they cannot guarantee the creative activity of the poet. For the last thing they can afford to guarantee is the solitude of the poet, which is a withdrawal from the social contract, a denial of the principle of collectivism. It is a bitter lesson to learn, for those poets who have put their faith in the non-poetic prophets —in Marx, in Lenin, in Hitler. Poets should not go outside their own ranks for a policy; for poetry is its own politics. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and the epithet was well chosen. The catalyst is un­ changed, unabsorbed; its activity therefore not acknowledged. It is peculiarly difficult for the artist in society to accept this thankless task: to stand apart, and yet to mediate: to com­ municate to society something as essential as bread or water, and yet to be able to do so only from a position of insulation, of disaffection. Society will never understand or love the artist, because it will never appreciate his indifference, his socalled objectivity. But the artist must learn to love and under­ stand the ‘society which renounces him. He must accept the contrary experience, and drink, with Socrates, the deadly cup.