Anarchism is not enough

JONATHAN CAPE London

First Published MCMXXVIII

Printed In Great Britain By Butler & Tanner Ltd Frome

Contents

THE MYTH Page 9

Language And Laziness 13

This Philosophy 15

What Is A Poem? 16

A Complicated Problem 19

All Literature 20

Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo 22

An Important Distinction 25

The Corpus 27

Poetry And Music 32

Poetry And Painting 37

Poetry And Dreams 39

Jocasta 41

How Came It About? 133

Hungry To Hear 136

In A Café 138

Fragment Of An Unfinished Novel 142

William And Daisy: Fragment Of A Finished Novel 150

An Anonymous Book 152

The Damned Thing 187

Letter Of Abdication 209

Anarchism Is Not Enough

The Myth

When the baby is born there is no place to put it: it is born, it will in time die, therefore there is no sense in enlarging the world by so many miles and minutes for its accommodation. A temporary scaffolding is set up for it, an altar to ephemerality--a permanent altar to ephemerality. This altar is the Myth. The object of the Myth is to give happiness: to help the baby pretend that what is ephemeral is permanent. It does not matter if in the course of time he discovers that all is ephemeral: so long as he can go on pretending that it is permanent he is happy.

As it is not one baby but all babies which are laid upon this altar, it becomes the religious duty of each to keep on pretending for the sake of all the others, not for himself. Gradually, when the baby grows and learns why he has been placed on the altar, he finds that he is not particularly interested in carrying on the pretence, that happiness and unhappiness are merely an irregular succession and grouping of moments in him between his birth and his death. Yet he continues to support the Myth for others’ sake, and others continue to support it for his. The stronger grows the inward conviction of the futility of the Myth, the stronger grows the outward unity and form of the Myth. It becomes the universal sense of duty, the ethics of abstract neighbourliness. It is the repository for whatever one does without knowing why; it makes itself the why. Once given this function through universal misunderstanding, it persists in its reality with the perseverance of a ghost and continues to demand sacrifices. It is indifferent what form or system is given to it from this period to that, so long as it be given _a_ form and _a_ system by which it may absorb and digest every possible activity; and the grown-up babies satisfy it by presenting their offerings as systematized parts of a systematized whole.

The Myth may collapse as a social whole; yet it continues by its own memory of itself to impose itself as an æsthetic whole. Even in this day, when the social and historical collapse of the Myth is commonly recognised, we find poets and critics with an acute sense of time devoting pious ceremonies to the æsthetic vitality of the Myth, from a haunting sense of duty which they call classicism. So this antiquated belief in truth goes on, and we continue to live. The Myth is the art of living. Plato’s censorship of poets in the interests of the young sprang from a realization of the fact that poetry is in opposition to the truth of the Myth: I do not think he objected to poetry for the old, since they were nearly through with living.

Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, religion, philosophy, history and science--these are essentially of the Myth. They have technique, growth, tradition, universal significance (truth); and there is also a poetry of the Myth, made by analogy into a mythological activity. Mythological activities glorify the sense of duty, force on the individual a mathematical exaggeration of his responsibilities.

Poetry (praise be to babyhood) is essentially not of the Myth. It is all the truth it knows, that is, it knows nothing. It is the art of not living. It has no system, harmony, form, public significance or sense of duty. It is what happens when the baby crawls off the altar and is ‘Resolv’d to be a very contrary fellow’--resolved not to pretend, learn to talk or versify. Whatever language it uses it makes up as it goes and immediately forgets. Every time it opens its mouth it has to start all over again. This is why it remains a baby and dies (praise be to babyhood) a baby. In the art of not living one is not ephemerally permanent but permanently ephemeral.

* * * * *

Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship. So one finds oneself surrounded with numbers of artificial selves contesting the authenticity of the original self; which, forced to become a competitive self, ceases to be the original self, is, like all the others, a creation. The person, too, becomes a friend of himself. _He_ no longer exists.

* * * * *

Words have three historical levels. They may be true words, that is, of an intrinsic sense; they may be logical words, that is, of an applied sense; or they may be poetical words, of a misapplied sense, untrue and illogical in themselves, but of supposed suggestive power. The most the poet can now do is to take every word he uses through each of these levels, giving it the combined depth of all three, forcing it beyond itself to a death of sense where it is at least safe from the perjuries either of society or poetry.

Language And Laziness

Language is a form of laziness; the word is a compromise between what it is possible to express and what it is not possible to express. That is, expression itself is a form of laziness. The cause of expression is incomplete powers of understanding and communication: unevenly distributed intelligence. Language does not attempt to affect this distribution; it accepts the inequality and makes possible a mathematical intercourse between the degrees of intelligence occurring in an average range. The degrees of intelligence at each extreme are thus naturally neglected: and yet they are obviously the most important.

Prose is the mathematics of expression. The word is a numerical convenience in which the known and the unknown are brought together to act as the meeting-place of the one who knows and the one who does not know. The prose word accomplishes no redistribution of intelligence; it merely declares the inequality, and so even as expression it has no reality, it is an empty cipher.

Poetry is an attempt to make language do more than express; to make it work; to redistribute intelligence by means of the word. If it succeeds in this the problem of communication disappears. It does not treat this problem as a matter of mathematical distribution of intelligence between an abstract known and unknown represented in a concrete knower and not-knower. The distribution must take place, if at all, within the intelligence itself. Prose evades this problem by making slovenly equations which always seem successful because, being inexact, they conceal inexactness. Poetry always faces, and generally meets with, failure. But even if it fails, it is at least at the heart of the difficulty, which it treats not as a difficulty of minds but of mind.

This Philosophy

This philosophy, this merchant-mindedness: how much have we here? what sum? And of what profit? Somewhere, in the factories of reality, all this has been produced which now floods the market of wisdom, awaiting its price-ticket. What is science? yard-measure and scale to philosophy, expert-accountant, bank clerk. What is poetry? miserable, ill-fed, underpaid, ununionized labourer, pleased to oblige, grateful for work, flattering himself that poverty makes him an aristocrat.

* * * * *

Only what is comic is perfect: it is outside of reality, which is a self-defeating, serious striving to be outside of reality, to be perfect. Reality cannot escape from reality because it is made of belief, and capable only of belief. Perfection is what is unbelievable, the joke.

What Is A Poem?

In the old romanticism the poem was an uncommon effect of common experience on the poet. All interest in the poem centred in this mysterious capacity of the poet for overfeeling, for being overaffected. In Poe the old romanticism ended and the new romanticism began. That is, the interest was broadened to include the reader: the end of the poem was pushed ahead a stage, from the poet to the reader. The uncommon effect of experience on the poet became merely incidental to the uncommon effect which he might have on the reader. Mystery was replaced by science; inspiration by psychology. In the first the poet flattered himself and was flattered by others because he had singular reactions to experience; in the second the object of flattery makes himself expert in the art of flattery.

What is a poem? A poem is nothing. By persistence the poem can be made something; but then it is something, not a poem. Why is it nothing? Because it cannot be looked at, heard, touched or read (what can be read is prose). It is not an effect (common or uncommon) of experience; it is the result of an ability to create a vacuum in experience--it is a vacuum and therefore nothing. It cannot be looked at, heard, touched or read because it is a vacuum. Since it is a vacuum it is nothing for which the poet can flatter himself or receive flattery. Since it is a vacuum it cannot be reproduced in an audience. A vacuum is unalterably and untransferably a vacuum--the only thing that can happen to it is destruction. If it were possible to reproduce it in an audience the result would be the destruction of the audience.

The confusion between the poem as effect and the poem as vacuum is easily explained. It is obvious that all is either effect or it is nothing. What the old romanticism meant by an uncommon effect was a something that was not an effect, an over-and-above of experience. Although it was really not an effect, it was classified as an effect because it was impossible to imagine something that was not an effect. It did not occur to anyone to imagine nothing, the vacuum; or, if it did, only with abhorrence. The new romanticism remedied this inaccuracy by classifying the poem as the cause of an effect--as both cause and effect. But as both cause and effect the poem counts itself out of experience: proves itself to be nothing masquerading as something. As something it is all that the detractors of poetry say it is; it is false experience. As nothing--well, as nothing it is everything in an existence where everything, being effect of effect and without cause, is nothing.

Whenever this vacuum, the poem, occurs, there is agitation on all sides to destroy it, to convert it into something. The conversion of nothing into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse of these rescued somethings. In discussing literature one has to use, unfortunately, the same language that one uses in discussing experience. But even so, literature is preferable to experience, since it is for the most part the closest one can get to nothing.

* * * * *

The only productive design is designed waste. Designed creation results in nothing but the destruction of the designer: it is impossible to add to what is; all is and is made. Energy that attempts to make in the sense of making a numerical increase in the sum of made things is spitefully returned to itself unused. It is a would-be-happy-ness ending in unanticipated and disordered unhappiness. Energy that is aware of the impossibility of positive construction devotes itself to an ordered using-up and waste of itself: to an anticipated unhappiness which, because it has design, foreknowledge, is the nearest approach to happiness. Undesigned unhappiness and designed happiness both mean anarchism. _Anarchism is not enough._

A Complicated Problem

A complicated problem is only further complicated by being simplified. A state of confusion is never made comprehensible by being given a plot. Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them. The truth is always laid out in an infinite number of circles tending to become, but never becoming, concentric--except occasionally in poetry.

All Literature

All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents. How not to write literature, how not to be precocious: cultivate inattention, do not learn how to express yourself, make no distinction between thoughts and emotions, since precocity comes of making one vie with the other, mistrust whatever seems superior and be partial to whatever seems inferior--whatever is not literature. And then, if you must write yourself, write _writing-matter_, not _reading-matter_. People will think you brilliant only if you tell them what they know. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid knowing what they know. Write to discover to yourself what you know. People will think you brilliant if you seem to be enjoying yourself, since they are not enjoying themselves. To avoid being thought brilliant, avoid pretending to be enjoying yourself. Make it clear that you know that they know that nothing is really enjoyable except pretending to be enjoying yourself.

* * * * *

People may treat themselves as extraneous phenomena or as fundamental phenomena--it does not matter which. It does not matter, so long as they behave consistently as one or the other. What discredits character is not self-importance or self-unimportance, but the adjustment of personal importance according to expediency.

Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo

Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo, the great mathematician and lexicographer, then put aside his work and said: ‘_adultery_ and _adulteration_ can wait until I return.’

For Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Do was at one thing or the other by turns, and this particular morning he felt his mathematical genius complaining: it was undoubtedly true that it was a long time since he had been out to get Numbers. So, leaving _adultery_ and _adulteration_ to take care of themselves, he walked out into the Square, and from the Square into the Gardens; and in the Gardens he sat down on a bench near the rockery and began to think with the mathematical half of his brain.

‘Let me see. I left off with _honey_ last time. Now the problem will be to show that honey as a purely mathematical symbol is equivalent to honey as a philological integer. If I can do this I have once more proved that 2 × 2 = 4 is the equivalent of “two times two is four.” For it’s not enough to show a thing is true: you must also show that true is true. By being a mathematical lexicographer and a lexicographical mathematician, I am therefore able to check the truth with the truth. My last words are never “that’s true” but “that’s correct,” which explains how I can be a philosopher and a gentleman at the same time.’

With this Mr. Doodle-Doodle-Doo crowed three times: once for lexicography (Doodle), once for mathematics (Doodle), and once for himself (Doo), wherein the truth was checked by itself and found correct. The immediate matter in hand, however, was honey. So he left off crowing and proceeded with his calculations, which went so quickly that it is very difficult to record them. But they were something like this:--

H O N E Y = HONE + Y G O N E + Y = GONEY (sailors’ term for albatross) L O N E + Y = LONE(L)Y B O N E + Y = BONEY O N E + Y + M = MONEY

Boney Goney Honey Lone(L)Y Money 1 2 3 4 5 H O N E Y 1 2 3 4 5

At this point he stopped following him. But that his researches must have reached some happy conclusion was obvious from the enthusiasm with which he later returned to his lexicography. His calculations then ran something like this:--

1 2 3 4 5 H O N E Y 1 2 3 4 5 A D U L T [ E R Y

1 2 3 4 5 H O N E Y 1 2 3 4 5 A D U L T [ E R A T I O N

∴ H O N E Y E R Y ∵ H O N E Y E R A T I O N

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 But H O N E Y = S W E E T 5 4 3 2 1 5 4 3 2 1

∴ S W E E T E R Y ∵ S W E E T E R A T I O N

Which went far enough to persuade him that in lexicography he was, if anything, even more skilled than in mathematics.

An Important Distinction

The important (but infrequently drawn) distinction between what is gentlemanly and what is dull in poetry. Most people read poetry because it makes them feel upper-class, and most poetry is written by people who feel upper-class; at least by people who take pleasure in describing themselves as upper-class; for instance, by men who make themselves feel upper-class by holding gentlemanly feelings toward woman, and by women who make themselves feel upper-class by acknowledging these feelings. This poetry is idealistic poetry: it dramatizes a non-existent emotional life and seems real because it is not real. It also seems ‘interesting’ because it is not real.

Practical poetry is written by people who do not feel upper-class: who do not feel anything. It describes themselves, but not as upper-class, not, in fact, as anything. It is real and therefore not dramatic and therefore seems unreal. It therefore seems (and is) dull. The only reason that people ever read dull poetry (such as some of Shakespeare’s) is that they mistake it for gentlemanly poetry (such as all of Browning’s). For few people are really interested in anyone else’s description of himself except as it makes them feel upper-class. They mistake it for gentlemanly poetry because of their inability to distinguish between the interestingness of dull poetry and the dullness of ‘interesting’ poetry.

The Corpus

The first condition was chaos. The logical consequence of chaos was order. In so far as it derived from chaos it was non-conscious, but in so far as it was order, it had an increasing tendency to become conscious. It therefore may be said to have had a mind of which it was unconscious and of which it remained unconscious in its various evolutionary forms until the mind developed to a point where it in turn separated from order and invented the self. The occasion of the self was a stage in the most anarchic evolutionary form, man, coeval with the general transformation of chaos into a universe. A consciousness of consciousness arose and at the same time divided between order, in which mind was the spirit of cohesion, and the individual, in whom mind was the spirit of separation. In the ensuing opposition between these two, order yielded to the individual by allowing him to call it a universe, but triumphed over him since, by naming it, the individual made the universe his society and therefore his religion. Order was the natural enemy of the individual mind. To conciliate it order appealed to the individual mind for sanction. This sanction, the original social contract, was not between man and man, but between man and the universe as men, or society. Although the sanction was given on the basis of natural instinct, or the non-conscious identity of man and the universe, society has always claimed authority over conscious thought and purpose. In incorporating the man it attempts to incorporate the mind and in turn to give the mind its sanction through the sanction which it first had from the man: it constitutes itself the parent past and the mind present memory of it.

The social corpus is tyrannically founded on the principle of origin. It admits nothing new: all is revision, memory, confirmation. The individual cosmos must submit itself to the generalized cosmos of history, it must become part of its growing encyclopædia of authorities. Such a generalized cosmos, however, must have been formulated more by the desire of people to define themselves as a group than to account for the origin of their personal existence. Origin, indeed, is properly the preoccupation of the individual and not a communal interest. The group is only interested in the formal publishing of individuals for the purpose of establishing their social solidarity. Art, for example, is record not creation. The question of origin is only emphasized in so far as it proves the individual a member of the group, as having a common pedigree with the other members of the group. Thus God, the branding-iron of the group idea, does not appear in societies where as yet there is imperfect differentiation between the individual and the type; where as yet there is no need for branding. Once the distinction between the group mind and the individual mind could be made the group mind really ceased to exist. The distinction, however, could only be made by minds complete in themselves, and as such minds have always been extremely rare, the fiction of a group mind has been maintained to impose the will of the weak-minded upon the strong-minded, the myth of common origin being used as the charter of the majority. The tyranny by which this majority can enforce its will may be either democratic or oligarchic. The only difference is that in the first case, provided that the democracy is a true democracy (which it very rarely is), the group mind is so efficient that it acts despotically as one man; in the second case the group mind is less efficient and, by a process of blind selection, the most characteristic of the weak-minded become the perverse instruments of unity.

Both the individual mind and the group mind are engaged in a pursuit which may be described as mind-making or, simply, truth. The object of group truth is group-confirmation and perpetuation; while individual truth has no object other than discovering itself and involves neither proofs nor priests. In order, however, to win any acceptance it must translate itself into group truth, it must accommodate itself to the fact-curriculum of the group. But not only is such truth forced to submit to group terminology and order, but the group conscience demands that the individual mind serve it by working with the purposes of the group. The group, indeed, tries to preclude all idiosyncratic thought-activity and to use what intelligence it can control against it. This civic intelligence is found simplified in the catechism instructing children ‘to order themselves lowly and reverently before their betters and to do their duty in that state of life unto which it has pleased God to call them.’

The confirmation of the candidate as a member of the group establishes the superiority of group opinion over individual opinion and the authority of the group to define this relationship as one governed by civic duties. It is the nature of these duties which determines the categories into which civic intelligence falls. The group can never be anything more than a superstition, but the categories assemble all available material into a textual Corpus. There being no real functional group surviving, this Corpus of group texts is used as the rallying point of the group, the counterpart of the primitive clan totem, the outward and visible sign of a long-extinct grace.

The Corpus, in making categorical demands upon the individual, thus limits the ways in which works may be conceived and presented. These demands become the only ‘inspiration’ countenanced, and theoretically all creative supply has its source in them. This seems a fairly plausible view of the status of the arts and sciences in human society. The occurrence of a supply independent of Corpus demands, its possibility or presence, is a question that the social limitations of our critical language prevent us from raising with any degree of humane intelligibility.

* * * * *

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.

Poetry And Music

There is a weakling music and a weakling poetry which flatter each other by making critical comparisons with each other: there is a literary criticism of music in which words like ‘wit’ and ‘rhetoric’ excuse musical flabbiness, and a musical criticism of poetry in which words like ‘symphonic’ and ‘overtone’ excuse poetic flabbiness. This mutual tenderness leads to false creative as well as false critical analogies between poetry and music; to the deliberate effort to use the creative method of one art in the other.

I am not distressed by the poeticization of music because I do not much care what happens to music; it is a nervous and ostentatious performance, and little damage remains to be done to it. I am, on the other hand, distressed by the musicification of poetry because poetry is perhaps the only human pursuit left still capable of developing antisocially. Musicified or pictorialized it is the propagandist tribal expression of a society without any real tribal sense. We get a ‘pure’ poetry, metaphysically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet for a civilized tribal sense and for poetry as an art intellectually coördinating group sympathies: and we get a sort of jazz poetry, politically musical, that reveals a desire in the poet for a primitive tribal sense and for poetry as an art emotionally coördinating group sympathies.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts. Poetry I consider to be an art only when the poet consciously attempts to capture social prestige: when it is an art of public flattery. In this sense Beaumont and Fletcher were greater artists than Shakespeare--better musicians. Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.

To explain more precisely what I mean by this distinction between what I believe to be poetry and what I believe to be art I shall set down a number of contrasts between poetry and music.

1. All real musicians are physically misshapen as a result of platform cozening of their audience. They need never have stood upon a platform: there is a kind of ingratiating ‘come, come, dear puss’ in the musical brain that distorts the face and puckers up the limbs. All real poets are physically upright and even beautiful from indifference to community hearings.

2. The end of a poem is the poem. The poem is the only admissible test of the poem; the reader gets poetry, not flattery. The end of a musical work is an ear, criticism, that is, flattery.

3. A musical work has a composer; it is an invention with professionally available material and properties. A poem is made out of nothing by a nobody--made out of a socially non-existent element in language. If this element were socially existent in language it would be isolated, professionalized, handed over to a trained craft. Rhyme and rhythm are not professional properties; they are fundamentally idiosyncratic, unavailable, unsystematizable; any formalization of them is an attempted imitation of music by poets jealous of the public success of music.

4. Music is an instrument for arousing emotions; it varies only according to the emotions it is intended to arouse and according to the precision with which these emotions are anticipated in the invention of the music. Emotions represent persons; not persons in particular but persons in general. Music is directed toward the greatest number of persons musically conceivable. It is a mass-marshalling of the senses by means of sound. Poetry is not an instrument and is not written with the intention of arousing emotions--unless it is of a hybrid musico-poetical breed. The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind. It appeals to an energy in which no distinction exists between physical and mental conditions. It does not massage, soothe, excite or entertain this energy in any way. It _is_ this energy in a form of extraordinary strength and intactness. Poetry is therefore not concentrated on an audience but on itself and only produces satisfaction in the sense that wherever this energy exists in a sufficient degree of strength and intactness it will be encouraged by poetry in further concentration on itself. Poetry appeals only to poetry and begets nothing but poetry. Music appeals to the intellectual disorganization and weakness of people in numbers and begets, by flattering this weakness (which is sentimentality), gratifying after-effects of destructive sociality. The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence on itself; indeed, it has no end. It isolates energies in themselves rather than socially dissolving one in another.

5. Music provides the hearer with an ideal experience, a prepared episode. Poetry is not idealistic; it is not experience in this episode or programme sense. There is an entertaining short-story variety in music; a repellent, austere monotony in poetry. Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go. Poetry is defeat, the end which is not an end but a stopping-short because it is impossible to go further; it makes mad; it is the absolutism of dissatisfaction. Music brings not the consciousness but the _material_ of experience to a certain degree, always to different degrees. It makes pleasantly happy or unhappy. It is the vulgarity of satisfaction.

6. Music disintegrates and therefore seems active, fruitful, extensive, enlarging. Poetry isolates all loose independencies and then integrates them into one close independency which, when complete, has nothing to do but confront itself. Poetry therefore seems idle, sterile, narrow, destroying. And it is. This is what recommends it.

Poetry And Painting

Painters no longer paint with paint except in the sense that poets write with ink. Paint is now only a more expensive, elegant ink. What do painters paint with, then? They paint with poetry. A picture is a poem in which the sense has been absorbed by the medium of communication of sense. It is not an intelligible series of hieroglyphics, but the poem itself forced into a kind of outrageous, unnatural visibility: as if suddenly the thing mind were caught in the hand and made to appear painfully and horribly as a creature. The development of painting is toward this poetic quality; the better (the more literal, the less realistic) it gets, the more horrible. So much for the so-called abstractness of painting: the sense is made identical with the medium by forcibly marrying it to the medium. Medium and sense are a legally fictitious One in which the medium, the masculine factor, forces the sense, the feminine factor, to bear his name and do honour to his bed and table. _She_ is all meek, hopeless amicability, _he_ is all blustering, good-humoured cynicism.

This poetic progress of painting influences the pictorial progress of poetry. There is a great response in modern poetry to the demand by painters that it should be more poetic. See for yourself how many of the newest poems have not their names lettered in aluminium on their doors, with a knocker designed by the latest French abstract sculptor (master also of golf), humanly visible furniture within (all primary colours), and nobody home.

Poetry And Dreams

I do not believe there is any more relation between poem-making and dream-making than between poem-making and child-making. The making of poems, dreams and children is difficult to explain because they all somehow happen and go on until the poem comes to an end and the sleeper wakes up and the child comes out into the air. As for children, there are so many other ways of looking at the matter that poetry is generally not asked to provide a creative parallel. As for dreams, they are the dregs of the mind, anxious to elevate themselves by flattering comparisons. As for poems, they are frequently (more often than not) concocted in the dregs of the mind and therefore happy in an understanding of mutual support between themselves and dreams.

The only real resemblance between poetry and dreams is that they are both on the other side of waking--on opposite sides. Waking is the mind in its mediocrity. Mediocrity is of such large extent that it pushes off into obscurity the mental degree _beyond_ mediocrity, in a direction _away from_ sleep. The mental degree _before_ mediocrity, _toward_ sleep, is the dream. So the stage before the lowest degree of mediocrity and the stage beyond the highest degree of mediocrity are bracketed together by mediocrity because they are both outside of mediocrity--the mind at its canniest intelligence and the mind at its canniest imbecility.

Jocasta

§1

The pathetic differences between wrong and right are well illustrated in the persons of Otto Spengler and Wyndham Lewis. Herr Spengler is a pessimist who has succeeded in cheering himself up with a romantic view of Decline. Mr. Lewis is an optimist because he is right, forced into pessimism by the general prevalence of wrong. He sees wrong (rightly) as Time, Romance, Advertisement (forced optimism), Righteousness, Action, Popular Art (Time, Romance, Advertisement, Righteousness, Action, united in an inferiority complex). Since he is right his right quarrels with the various manifestations of wrong he is able to distinguish: the more he is able to distinguish the more corroborations he has of his rightness. Herr Spengler, being wrong, has this advantage therefore over Mr. Lewis: whereas Mr. Lewis’s success must be confined to seeing wrong in the most unorganized (that is, various) manner possible, _his_ success depends on his being wrong in the most organized manner possible--the more organized he seems, the more right he seems. Unfortunately this situation brings about a competition between Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis: Mr. Lewis feels obliged to organize his unorganized view of wrong, which cancels the potency of his rightness, which is only valid so long as it is unorganized (that is, commentarial instead of systematic). So he becomes a colleague of Herr Spengler in righteousness, the advocate of a vocabulary. We find him, as he himself admits, trying to give ‘compendious’ names to what is wrong: which places him immediately in Herr Spengler’s class.[1]

To be right is to be incorruptibly individual. To be wrong is to be righteously collective. Herr Spengler is a collectivist: he believes in the absorption of the unreal (right) individual in a collective reality (History or Romance)--by which the individual becomes functionally (as opposed to morphologically) really-real. Mr. Lewis is an individualist in so far as he is opposed to organized functional reality. But he is unable to face the final conclusion of individualism: that the individual is morphologically as well as functionally unreal, and that herein alone (in this double withdrawal from both nature and human society, or history) can he be right. How does Mr. Lewis come to believe in the morphological reality of the individual? By devoting himself so violently to revealing the sham of historical action in art--the unreality of functional reality--that he creates by implication a real which, since it cannot exist in historical romance (society), which is all sham, must exist in non-historical romance (nature). Further, both Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis think through the same machinery--the machinery of knowledge. Indeed it appears as if they thought because they possessed this machinery and had to use it: this is the constant impression made by Herr Spengler, the frequent impression made by Mr. Lewis. I do not think that Mr. Lewis really thinks because of and by means of knowledge. I am convinced that he thinks. But I see also that he is unable to face uncompromisingly the problem of individualism. He is not content with being right; he is stung by his irritation with what is wrong into the desire to be real as well as right. He therefore organizes the same material that Herr Spengler organizes--to prove that it is sham, as Herr Spengler to prove that it is real. He even uses the same false organizing system as Herr Spengler--analogy. Herr Spengler, by proving the analogical consistency of his views, merely proves that wrong is wrong. Mr. Lewis, by overstudying the analogical consistency of wrong, establishes his right by the same system that Herr Spengler uses in establishing his wrong. He is making of his right a competitive Romance to argue with Herr Spengler’s Romance. With both Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis I feel in the presence of realists. Herr Spengler, I feel, is happy in being a realist, Mr. Lewis, I feel, is not. He is not, I think, because he is fundamentally right, but afraid of facing the unreality of rightness. It is difficult to explain this because it is a difficult situation; and I wish if possible to avoid compendious names. It would perhaps be simplest to say that Mr. Lewis is timid (as he has himself privately admitted).

Mr. Lewis attacks the principle which is to Herr Spengler the right of his wrong. He attacks the reality of the collective-real. But in doing so he opposes to it an individual-real. The collective-real is man in touch with man. The individual-real is man in touch with the natural in him, in touch with nature. Neither Herr Spengler nor Mr. Lewis dares face the individual-unreal: both believe in unity and integration, Herr Spengler in the unity and integration of history, Mr. Lewis in the unity and integration of natural as opposed to historical existence. ‘I am for the physical world,’ Mr. Lewis says. One of the reasons he is for the physical world is, apparently, that the historical world, in keeping up with itself, not only worships the fetich of Romance, but the fetich of childishness as well. In pointing this out Mr. Lewis is both wise and courageous; but he reveals at the same time an important fetich of the individual-real, adultishness. Nor, maddened by the vulgar success of the historical world with itself, can he see that the fetich of childishness in only a half-clue to the story of Gertrude Stein, that Miss Stein has one foot in the collective real and one foot in the individual-unreal--which is more than can be said of Mr. Lewis, who has both feet planted in the individual-real.[2]

I must next give an illustration of the individual-real in contemporary literature. This will perhaps not please Wyndham Lewis and will certainly not please its author, Virginia Woolf. I can only say that I do not mean to attack either of them but merely to explain the individual-real. And Mrs. Woolf’s most recent book, _To the Lighthouse_, seems to me a perfect example of the individual-real. In the first place, it is individual: not in the sense that it is personal, warm, alive to itself, indifferent to effect or appreciation, vividly unreal, but in the sense that it individualizes the simple reality of nature, gives it distinction--shade, tone, personal subtlety. In the second place it is real--meticulously, mathematically like life: not historical time-life, which is an easy approximation, but natural flesh-life, which must be laboriously, exquisitely, irritatingly, painfully rendered. To do this language must be strained, supersensitized, loaded with comparisons, suggestive images, emotional analogies: used, that is, in a poetic way to write something that is not poetry--used to argue, prove, prick the cuticle of sense, so to speak, in a way that is extravagant, unpleasant, insincere (since it purports to be pleasant). The method, in fact, has no creative justification: it merely drives home the individual-real, which is physical emphasis of self-individual because it is physically self, real because as physical it shares in the simple reality of nature. All this delicacy of style, it appears, is the expression of an academic but nevertheless vulgar indelicacy of thought, a sort of Royal Academy nudeness, a squeamish, fine-writing lifting of the curtains of privacy. In the third place, it (the individual-real as illustrated in this novel) is adultish--advanced but conservative: it does not belong to childish, democratic mass-art, but neither does it belong to the individual, non-physical, non-collective unreal. It is over-earnest constrained, suppressedly hysterical, unhappy, could give no one pleasure. Pleasure is doing as one pleases. In works like this neither the author, who is obsessed by the necessity of emphasizing the individual-real, nor the reader, who is forced to follow the author painfully (word for word) in this obsession, may do as he pleases. There is only one novel-writer who really did as he pleased, let his characters do as they pleased and his reader to do as he pleased, and that was Defoe. He could do this because he was, as Pope said, ‘the unabashed Defoe,’ and he was unabashed because he was unreal, vividly unreal--personal, warm, indifferent to effect (consistency). Mrs. Woolf defends herself from any such analysis of her work as I have made here by declaring that there is no such thing as a novel. If _To The Lighthouse_ is not to be treated as a novel, then it must, by its language-habits, be treated as a poem. Analyse it then as a poem: what then? It proves itself to be merely a novel; and an insincere novel--the use of the material of the collective-real to insinuate dogmatically the individual-real. Defoe used the material of the collective-real as it could only be used sincerely--to insinuate the individual-unreal: and so Defoe, if you like, did turn the novel into poetry.

I once discussed this point with E. M. Forster and we found that we had each read _Roxana_ in entirely opposite senses. Mr. Forster was certain that Defoe followed Roxana in every word he wrote of her, and that Roxana likewise followed Defoe, that there was no do-as-you-please break between her and Defoe or between her and the reader or between Defoe and the reader; that all was one intense, physically compact and consistent exposition of the individual-real. I pointed out the striking division in, for example, Roxana’s long feminist declamation against marriage to her Dutch lover--a division in which all the _dramatis personæ_, including author and reader, are released to accept the declamation with whatever bias they please. In this division I find Defoe’s sincerity. Mr. Forster, on the other hand, understands the declamation as a remarkably unified, _innocent_, three-dimensional slice of that individual-real which is the story. If I thought that Defoe had written that passage innocently, with realistic consistency, I should catalogue him as a fine writer and skilful hypocrite. But I am persuaded he was neither of these. I am sure that the feminist recital was wilfully unreal, inconsistent, many-dimensional; that it was delicate common sense for the Dutch lover, frank but sentimental expediency for Roxana, sound doctrine for Defoe and undisguised storifying for the reader present in the story; and that none of these was deceived in his bias, but could if he wished change it for any other without damaging the consistency of the piece, since there was none. _The Tempest_ has the same sort of inconsistency as a Defoe novel; it is the most unreal of the plays and to me preferable to the more realistic plays. Others are more poetic, as Mrs. Woolf’s _To The Lighthouse_ is more poetic than _Roxana_. But they do not contain so many poems, as there is no passage in _To The Lighthouse_ with the dimensions (the contradictions) of Roxana’s recital to her Dutch lover. In _The Tempest_ there is not only a continuous chain of such inconsistencies (poems); the characters themselves have the same many-dimensional inconsistency--the unreal Caliban, the unreal Prospero, interchangeable in their inconsistency.

Before leaving this question and returning to Herr Spengler, whose wrong has not in my opinion been sufficiently disorganized, I must come back to the suffocating, nearly sickening physical quality of what I call the individual-real--not a strong, fresh, casual frankness of flesh, but a self-scented, sensuous, unbearably curious self-smelling of flesh. The collective-real is crude, symbolic, sham; the individual-real is exquisite, more than symbolic--literally, intrinsically metaphorical. I have in mind, in connection with _To The Lighthouse_, a book of E. M. Forster’s, _A Room With a View_. Before reading this book I had met Mr. Forster and found him charming; the book was recommended to me by my friends as a charming book. I read it. I could not deny that it was charming. Yet it was to me unpleasantly painful to read. It was too charming. I do not mean to be flippant, or to disgust, or to alter my original conviction of Mr. Forster’s personal charm, which I have had an opportunity of confirming since reading this book. But the truth is that it affected me in the same way as would the sight of a tenderly and exquisitely ripe pimple. I longed to squeeze it and have done with it. At the time I could only reproach myself with this rather shameful morbidity and admit that my reaction seemed preposterous. It was a simple, exquisitely written story about simple, unexciting people; and the unpleasant excitement it gave me was unnatural. Since then I have come to be able to identify and understand a little the individual-real, and it is now perfectly clear to me why Mr. Forster’s book affected me in that way, although then I could only feel a vague physical reaction to its metaphorical realism. That I recognized it as an essay in metaphorical realism is proved by the persistent image of the pimple with which the book came to be associated in my mind. And indeed, if I had thought a little more closely about metaphorical realism at the time, I might have arrived very soon at the same conclusion that I have here arrived at, _via_ Otto Spengler, Wyndham Lewis, and so forth.

In the ordinary time-world or art-world of the collective-real, symbolism, however romantically it may be used, never denies that it is symbolism. Its very effectiveness depends on its being recognized as such. Further, since symbolism is here collective rather than individual, since the symbol, that is, is _chosen_ to collectivize individual emotions which would otherwise have separate and presumably weaker communication with the thing for which the symbol stands, it is clear that the symbolic method of the collective-real is selective: it implies a graded choice of the things which it seems necessary and important to symbolize. This method, whose psychology Herr Spengler attempts to discover, is all that Mr. Lewis says it is (it is really the symbolic method of the time-world that he attacks). In the literature and art of the collective-real it is easy to recognize because they are frankly symbolical: it is part of their technique to insist on the symbolic quality of the symbol. This means that symbolic art is generally bad art, full of double meanings, vulgar obviousness, facile concessions to sentimentality, flattery of the mass-emotions which confirm the relation of the symbol with the thing it represents.

Yet there is a proficiency, a vulgar good in this bad art that gives great and pure pleasure--great because it has the strength of what is purposively, defiantly bad, pure because it makes no attempt to conceal its badness. And there is one further virtue in the symbolism of the collective-real, that, being a selective symbolism, it does not symbolize everything--if it symbolized everything it would destroy the time-world, the organ of communication and author of symbols. Instead, it lets pass much which it realizes would be proof against symbolism and thus threaten its prestige: it admits that there is much that is unreal and, in so far as is consistent with its authority, leaves it alone. Poetry, therefore, in the world of the collective-real, is given a little chance.

Symbolism, in the nature-world of the individual-real, denies itself to be symbolism. It uses all the tricks of the symbolism of the collective-real, but to insist that it is individually, not collectively real, that it is, therefore, not symbolic but literal, not ‘artistic’ but natural. It is not selective, since if it were it would admit itself to be symbolical, but makes everything it touches equally significant, physical, real. Its technique is to insist on the authentic quality of the symbol. This means that it is only a more ambitious, expert, clever symbolism than the symbolism of the collective-real. It is literally instead of suggestively symbolic. It is morbidly physical instead of merely morbidly sentimental. It is difficult (not by nature but by art), adult, aristocratic, _better_. The difference between the collective-real and the individual-real as revealed by their respective methods of symbolism proves itself to be no more than a snobbish difference of degree: the art of the individual-real is self-appointed good art. And as such it is strained, unhappy-hypocritical, slave to an ideal of superiority that I can only properly describe as the ideal of slickness. There is no opposition here of right to wrong, only a more academic, individual wrong (or real) than even the best democratic, collective wrong. The right (the unreal) remains (as it should) categorically non-existent.[3]

I recall with pleasure an outrageous example of the vulgarity, sentimentality, proficient badness of collective-real literature; a novel by Rebecca West. It is a long time since I read it, and what I can reproduce of it is from memory. I remember in particular one passage, in which it was told how delightful it was to hold an egg in the little hollow in the front of the neck, and in which baked potatoes were charmingly mixed up with cirrus clouds. It was all so frankly false, so enchantingly bad, so vulgarly poetical without the least claim to being poetic, that it was impossible not to enjoy it and not to find it good: one was being sold nothing that was not obvious. After Rebecca West put Katherine Mansfield, a cross between the collective-real and the individual-real, a perplexed effort, a vapour. Then put the development of the individual-real, culminating in the art of Virginia Woolf, in which nothing is thrown out since it admits no unreal, in which poetry has no chance because the individual-real itself is so poetic, in which one is sold poetry without being aware of it; this super-symbolical, unsufferably slick alchemy that takes poetry out of the unreal and turns it into the dainty extra-pink blood by which reality is suffused with reality:

‘She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to things, inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.’

I submit that this is _more wrong_ than Rebecca West’s writing because it is better, slicker. It bends the bow of taste (to use the manner of Mrs. Woolf) back into a contorted, disdainful, monotonous, sensuously bulging circle. The collective-real, when a revolution takes place in it (when it is threatened by the unreal and makes a violent gesture of self-assertion), acknowledges the shadow that has passed over it, accepts the consequences of pledging itself to be with time: shortens its skirts, chops an inch off its hair, puts a cheerful face on its modernity--its progressive retreat from the unreal. The individual-real, on the other hand, secure in Nature’s fortress, insists that no shadow of the unreal can fall upon it. It is everything--real because it is individualistic, unreal because it is symbolical: it cannot come to harm. If it is threatened, it lengthens its skirts, swishes grandly along the ground, grows its fingernails, scratches exquisitely the plaster wall that surrounds it, sharpens its pencil till it has nerves and writes just a little more finely than is possible. And whatever it touches turns to spun-silk under it. It is the delamarish memory-fairy.

Yet certainly there is much that cannot, except in the fairy-tale of memory (the individual-real) be turned into spun-silk. To make everything real, no matter how unreal, how personal it may have been in its occurrence, is to symbolize it for the democratic mass. Thus psycho-analysis is not unacceptable to the individual-real, thus in individual-real literature we find grating public exhibitions of individuality. Any personal incident may be stroked, coaxed, maddened by fine torture into symbolic existence. For example: when I was fourteen I used to read the _New York Times_ every afternoon for an hour (for a pittance) to an old man whose eyesight was poor, a veteran of the Civil War. He had a most eccentric mispronunciation, which I had to adopt in reading to him. It was very difficult, as on the other side, at school, I was being trained in pronunciation. I concentrated on mispronunciation, and one day, when I had just about become expert in it, I knocked at his door to find that he had died. There I was, with all that mispronunciation on my hands; and to a certain extent it is still on my hands. Now, if I were a psycho-analytic individual-realist, I should symbolically refine this. I should have a mispronunciation complex, I should say that life was like that and associate it with other incidents in which life was like that, I should have a mental ejaculation every time I mispronounced, and so on. As it is, it is merely an incident--what I may call a statistical incident. It happened, I occasionally mispronounce, it is all very personal, unreal, illogical, unsymbolical and poetic to me. I have never told it, poetically, as a good story to illustrate this or that or to mean this or that.[4] And in treating it in this way I am sure I am closer to the incident as it happened and as it affected me, though I am not closer to what is called the reality of the incident. This is perhaps trivial and even irrelevant to the argument. Yet it is to me an exposition in life of the always threatening danger of the individual-real in literature and art.

§2

I have already said that I considered Herr Spengler wrong and Mr. Lewis right. To say that Herr Spengler is wrong is to say that he is wrong. To say that Mr. Lewis is right is to imply, because I place his right side by side with Herr Spengler’s wrong, that I regret the argumentative rightness of his right: I not only object to Herr Spengler’s systematic wrongness because it is wrong, but also because it is systematic. Herr Spengler perceives a conspiracy and is delighted, Mr. Lewis perceives a conspiracy and is infuriated. Therefore, though I admire Mr. Lewis because he is right, I restrict my admiration in so far as he is systematic: the obsession with conspiracy is no more wrong in Herr Spengler than in Mr. Lewis. I regret to see Mr. Lewis decorating his right with the trappings of argument: I regret to see him dramatizing his right realistically to impress the same audience as Herr Spengler does--emphasizing the individual-real as Spengler does the collective-real. I should like to see Mr. Lewis being right, being unreal, being himself, rather than sending out his right to instruct the democratic mass on the same stage on to which Herr Spengler sends out his wrong. It is none of my business, of course, what Mr. Lewis does with his right; but in admiring Mr. Lewis and not admiring Herr Spengler it is only fair to point out that the former as well as the latter is guilty of realistic projections.

By projections I mean saying more, thinking more, knowing more, observing more, organizing more than is self. I mean creating the real. In Herr Spengler’s writing I find nothing unreal; I find no self. In Mr. Lewis’s writing I find a considerable unreal projecting itself realistically, organizing itself against, for example, James Joyce. I do not speak merely of attacking James Joyce or Sherwood Anderson or D. H. Lawrence. I speak of attacking by advocating a system to take the place of the system which certain aspects of James Joyce’s work, say, represent to Mr. Lewis. I think this system should indeed be attacked in so far as it is a system and in so far as is necessary for a preservation of integrity. I do not think it should be replaced. I want the time-world removed and in its place to see--nothing. I do not want to see the unreal--Mr. Lewis’s, mine, anyone’s--become more than itself, become either intellectual (Spengler) or physical (Lewis). I want it to remain inhuman and obscure. Both Herr Spengler and Mr. Lewis make it, the one in his wrongness, the other in his rightness, human and glaring. To me the secularistic subjective softness of the first is no more aggressively realistic than the secularistic ‘objective hardness’ of the second. For all Mr. Lewis’s unreal, the question remains to him ‘whether we should set out to transcend our human condition or whether we should translate into human terms the whole of our datum.’ I agree with Mr. Lewis in discarding the first alternative, but I submit that the second contains in it two other alternatives and that in choosing the _wrong one_ of these (as he does by creating the original pair of alternatives) Mr. Lewis leans towards rather than away from transcendentalism. For what he calls the datum is nothing but the unreal; to call it the datum and, further, to suggest the necessity of its translation from the unreal into the real, the personal (inhuman) into the human (physically collective) is only to oppose one kind of transcendentalism to another--the individual-real to the collective-real. In this he is identifying himself with critics who, like I. A. R. Richards, wish to find a place for literature and art ‘in the system of human endeavours,’ to prove the unreal to be but ‘a finer organization of ordinary experiences’; that is, in order to combat the gross romanticism and rhodomontade of democratic realism, he turns merely to a more classical, aristocratic realism.[5] He thus reduces the difference between himself and Herr Spengler to a difference in taste rather than in principle; the distinction between right and wrong, unreal and real, which Mr. Lewis might be one of the few people able to maintain, becomes, as has already been pointed out, merely the distinction between good and bad, between two types of the real or between degrees in the real.

Man, as he becomes more man, becomes less nature. He becomes unreal. He loses homogeneity as a species. He lives unto himself not as a species but as an individual. He is lost as far as nature is concerned, but as he is separated from nature, this does not matter. He is in himself, he is unreal, he is secure. This sense of unreality, however, varies in individuals: it is weakest in the weakest individuals. These weakest individuals, missing the physical homogeneity which reality in nature would give man, construct by analogy an ideal homogeneity, a history, a reality of time. ‘The means whereby to identify living forms,’ Spengler says, ‘is Analogy.’ As systematic analogy with nature becomes more and more difficult, the basis of analogy, parallelism with nature, is removed; but the system of analogy remains. A transference is made from what Herr Spengler calls morphological equivalence to functional equivalence. Instead of being nature-like (like the species _man_ in nature) he becomes man-like (like the species man in man). The individual is like himself collectively, really, not like himself individually, unreally. It is now possible perhaps to discuss more clearly the significance of the terms I have been using: pessimism, optimism; collective-real, individual-real; unreal. Herr Spengler, I should say, is pessimistic at the sight of the disintegration of man as a natural species; he consoles himself with a vision of man as a consistent analogous rather than homologous social mass. He has, we might say, a melancholy, mystical vision of an eternal structure of decay, whose processes may be collectively appreciated and participated in. His vision is the collective-real, by which he manages to transcend the unreal. Mr. Lewis, I should say, is fundamentally optimistic at the sight of the disintegration of man as a natural species. He is not distressed, I believe, by the fact that there is a problem of individualism. He would face it cheerfully if he were not so annoyed by Herr Spengler’s gloomy evasion of it--by the whole time-philosophy for which Spengler is but one of many spokesmen. But he is distracted from his pursuit of the problem of individualism into the unreal, where is to be found its only satisfactory conclusion, by his annoyance with evasions of it like Herr Spengler’s or Dr. Whitehead’s. And in his annoyance he remains permanently distracted; he succeeds in doing no more than substituting for it another kind of evasion. I do not say that Mr. Lewis is an official spokesman of the individual-real in the way in which Herr Spengler is an official spokesman for the collective-real. But in opposing him without fully acknowledging the unreal he seems to me to be identifying himself with a brand of realism that is in its way as obnoxious as collective realism.

Let me elaborate what I consider to be the viewpoint of the individual-realists. They perceive the disintegration of man as a species and resent the philosophical substitute which the collective realists, with the help of history, make for the natural species--this analogical instead of homological species. They recognize that however removed man may now be from nature, analogies of the individual with natural history are less false than analogies of the individual with human history. Analogies of the individual with nature will become less and less exact as man becomes more and more removed from nature. But it is at any rate true that these analogies will hold as long as it will be possible to make them. Analogies of the individual with history will, on the other hand, become more and more exact, since they are invented rather than discovered analogies, analogies maintained by a system of representational cohesion. Historical analogy thus stands for the tyranny of democracy, while physical analogy stands for a Toryish anarchy--the direct communication of a few individuals with the physical world without the intervention of the symbolic species.[6] I think that anarchism is very nice; but I do not think that anarchism is enough. I agree that morphological analogy is more literal than functional analogy; but as morphological analogy is bound to become less and less exact as the individual’s memory of himself as a member of a species becomes more and more shady, it seems to me idle to maintain it at all (except humorously); especially idle to maintain it, this individual-real, categorically against the collective-real, and in doing so to lose sight of the only quality in which the individual is secure, in a certain personal unreality not affected by analogy of any kind. I am not much concerned about the philosophical invalidity of the individual-real; I am ready to admit that it is philosophically a more tenable position than the collective-real. Philosophical positions have all to do with versions of the real, and have varying degrees of tenability: but if a philosophical position have the maximum degree of intelligibility it does not alter the fact that any philosophical position is irrelevant to the individual and relevant only to a symbolic mass of individuals. The only position relevant to the individual is the unreal, and it is relevant because it is not a position but the individual himself. The individual-real is more indulgent of the individual-unreal than any other philosophical position; but this is a disadvantage rather than advantage to the unreal, since it actually means an encroachment upon, a parody of the unreal by the individual-real. It is about this encroachment and parody as it takes place in literature that I am really concerned. To put it simply, the unreal is to me poetry. The individual-real is a sensuous enactment of the unreal, opposing a sort of personally cultivated physical collectivity to the metaphysical mass-cultivated collectivity of the collective-real. So the individual-real is a plagiarizing of the unreal which makes the opposition between itself and the collective-real seem that of poetic to realistic instead of (as it really is) that of superior to inferior realistic; the real, personally guaranteed real-stuff to a philosophical, mass-magicked real-stuff. The result in literature is a realistic poeticizing of prose (Virginia Woolf or any ‘good’ writer) that competes with poetry, forcing it to make itself more poetic if it would count at all. Thus both the ‘best’ prose and the ‘best’ poetry are the most ‘poetic’; and make the unreal, mere poetry, look obscure and shabby. And what have we, of all this effort? Sitwellian connoisseurship in beauty and fashion, adult Eliotry proving how individually realistic the childish, mass-magicked real-stuff can be if sufficiently documented, ambitious personal absolutes proving how real their unreal is, Steinian and Einsteinian intercourse between history and science, Joycian release of man of time in man of nature (collective-real in individual-real), cultured primitivism, cultured individualism, vulgar (revolutionary) collectivism, fastidious (anarchic) collectivism--it is all one: nostalgic, lascivious, masculine, Oedipean embrace of the real mother-body by the unreal son-mind.[7]

§3

In showing how the distinction between the collective-real and the individual-real meant really no more than a difference of degree--between degrees of good, for example--I might have carried the argument further. I might have shown that in thus revealing themselves as merely differences of degree, they reduced all oppositions that might be made between them to differences of degree. Take the opposition of _intellectual_, of the time-world (collective-real), to _physical_, of the selves-world (individual-real): _intellectual_ proves itself to mean based on an emotionally maintained unity; _physical_ proves itself to mean based on a unity maintained by reason. The opposition then of _intellectual_ to _physical_ (of Herr Spengler, say, to Mr. Lewis) or of intuition to intelligence (of John Middleton Murry, say, to T. S. Eliot) is a restatement of the more hackneyed opposition of _emotional_ to _intellectual_; which in turn proves itself to be not an opposition at all but an expression of degrees of historical advancement.

Thus to Herr Spengler ‘Soul,’ the felt self, is an eternal, romantic youthfulness in man; which expresses itself by comparing itself (analogy) continually with the world, the not-self, the unfelt self; which is the permanently aged, self-apprehending, being self of nature. Herr Spengler does not see that once having made this opposition he has placed himself in the position of choosing between them, that one or the other must represent the illusion of one or the other. Failing to do this, by maintaining a communicative opposition between them, he shows that both are illusions (mutually, one of the other). To compare mathematics and logic is to show wherein both are false, by reason of their resemblance to each other. If the likeness were true, it would be a complete likeness, it would be identity, and one or the other must disappear; and it follows that the one in whose terms the likeness is stated is the most false, the most illusory. The likeness is maintained by the self’s fear of self, the fear of personal loneliness. The mathematical unity of the world sets an example for the historical unity of the Soul, the time-child of the world; a community self, a Culture, is invented to keep the self company. All the values by which this self is organized are derivative values. ‘Logic is a kind of mathematic.’ Language is an expression of functional relationships, it is not just language, the tongue of a self; it must co-ordinate, _express_ the members of the community self rather than _say_ each self; it must be comprehensible, that is, it must show likeness--if it does not show likeness it is attacked as obscure. A painter or a composer or a sculptor is one who demonstrates, through his medium, this communicative opposition between the world of reality and the world of self. The poet is one who, by personal duplicity, takes it upon himself to prove that the opposition is so and not so; his poetry is a demonstration of the righteousness of duplicity. ‘Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically.’ Self is poetic self. Nature, mathematical life, is the become, the eternally grown-up; History, logical life, is the becoming, the eternally childish.

The time-advocate, whom I shall call the philosopher, does not see, or is afraid to see, that the become and the becoming are both mutually illusory Worlds of reality: that they are self-created refutations of individuality to which the individual succumbs from imperfection. He forgets, that is, that the individual is an _unbecoming_ and that the categories ‘becoming’ and ‘become’ are really a derivation from him, a historical reconstruction. Unbecoming is the movement away from reality, the becoming unreal. What is called the become is therefore really the starting point of the unbecoming. What is called the becoming is therefore really a hypothetical opposition to the unbecoming. The become and the becoming are both oppositions to the unbecoming; the become from which the becoming is derived is a static order organized against the unbecoming, the become is the material of disintegration. The becoming is an attempt to check the disintegration of the become from real to unreal by reversing its direction, turning it from real to more real, making Nature suggest History. This is done by reading into Nature a necessity and inventing for the species man, a digression from Nature, an analogical Darwinistic Nature. The necessity of Nature is then called Causality, the necessity of History, Destiny.

The philosopher, then, is the formal opponent of the unreal. To him the individual is a piece, Nature is a whole, and the individual cannot match the wholeness, the real of Nature, except by sharing in a community self, the collective-real. To one who recognizes the reality of the unreal, each individual is a positive unit produced by the disintegration of the reality of Nature. Nature is a process; and the pieces of this process are the wholes, not Nature. To the philosopher thought is a reintegration of the scattered pieces into a symbolic whole, which may then be related to the literal whole of Nature; it also brings about a close interrelation of these pieces among themselves, a functional conformity. To a believer in the unreal, thought confirms disintegration. It is not a collective system. It is each self.

This opposition of the philosopher to the individual-unreal remains merely a philosophical opposition. For it is the nature of the believer in the unreal to be without a system--a system implies collective association (it is even impossible to give him a label, like ‘philosopher’); and the philosopher could only be opposed by a system. Indeed so thoroughly ‘unselfish’ is the character of the unreal self that its just conclusion is a sort of social disappearance. This is practically impossible because to the unreal self is attached a physical memory of the process by which the self was made, a birthmark of piecemealness opposing to the complete unreal self a reconstructed, ideal whole of origin. The unreal self is forced to indulge this. Sex, for instance, is an indulgence by the unreal self of romantic physical nostalgia. To the unreal self this indulgence is incidental, to the philosopher it is fundamental. Herr Spengler’s whole inspiration is nostalgic. (So is T. S. Eliot’s. So is Mr. C. B. Cochran’s--every ‘Cochran’s Revue’ is a variation on the theme of the integration of historical pageantry, an epistemological medley of primitivism, Shakespeareanism, Charlestonianism, etc.)

The philosopher has, however, his formal opponent. His formal opponent is one who resents the gross personification of man as the ideal individual of the species; to whom Spenglerish dualism is only ‘bad philosophy’ (Mr. Lewis); to whom good philosophy is a severe monism, a literal, aware dwelling in the mathematical (being) self of Nature. Instead of History we have Criticism: the formal opponent of the philosopher is the Critic. And, once more, the difference between them shows itself to be only a difference of degree; criticism defines itself as ‘better,’ more intellectual philosophy than ‘intellectual,’ ‘bad’ philosophy. The critic (this new, anti-philosophical type that I am speaking of) dismisses the childish, historical self as a travesty of the adult self of physical reality; as that sick, inner-eyeish, Strindbergian ‘subjective’ self, which has poisoned instead of nourished itself on reality, that the psychologist, physician of reality, attempts to redeem from the subconscious (run-down, pathological reality). For the philosophical system of logic the critic substitutes the mathematical system of reason. The world of Self is not to be deduced from the world of Nature; there is but one world, and the self is in this, a like fact with other facts, not a subjective fact in a shadowy world of analogy. What Mr. Lewis calls the ‘success of reason’ would permanently establish self as objective fact, as the individual-real. The language of the individual-real neither expresses the members of a community-self nor isolates each self. It expresses the extrinsic value of the self for a system in which there are only extrinsic values; as the language of the collective-real expresses its intrinsic value for a system in which there are only intrinsic values, which are made valid, however, by means of oppositional relation to a system of extrinsic values. So that for the individual-realist, the self is also poetic self; rational instead of intuitive, ‘physical’ instead of ‘intellectual’; a poetic detail of real reality rather than a real detail of poetic reality.

The critic, then, like the philosopher, is an opponent of the unreal. The unreal self is intrinsic self, intrinsic without respect to a system of extrinsic values; it is without value. It is more than anarchistic; it does not treat individualistically with values; it supersedes them. The unreal self is not poetic self, it is self. It is not a detail of co-ordinated reality.[8] It is an absolute, disconnected, hopeless whole. To the philosopher thought is memory of Mother-Nature. To the critic thought is thoughts--diverse, objective, related facts of reality. There is no antithesis between the position of the philosopher and that of the critic: the philosopher invents instruments for observing and measuring reality from afar and has dream-embraces of reality: the critic says: ‘Sentimental stuff and nonsense! I am _in_ reality.’ The critic, that is, is a little more sentimental, ambitious, intellectual, poetic, snobbish than the philosopher. To both of them thought means connection with reality. To both of them poetry means eloquent consciousness of life. To the unreal self, to whom they are both brother-opponents, thought is separation from reality, and poetry is the consciousness (the perhaps ineloquent consciousness) of what is not life, of what is self. A tree (even this is doubtful, for it is a late, nearly human form) is not born; it lives. What is born ceases with birth to live; it is self, unreal self. For this reason it is impossible to call the unreal self poetic self: ‘poetic’ and ‘poetry’ are words drunk with reality, they have indeed become by popular use rhetorical substitutes for ‘real’ and ‘reality.’ By reality I mean organized, ‘universal’ reality. It would be possible to speak of the unreal self as the real self, the self of separate reality, were it not for the community sense that belongs to philosophical or critical reality. I might have said, instead of unreal self, dissociated self. The problem of the right word is more difficult in the case of ‘poetic’ and ‘poetry.’ I can point out that the real self is poetic, and, in opposition to both real and poetic, put the unreal self. It is painful, however, to be forced to leave ‘poetry’ to the real self and to call the poetry of the unreal self unreality. Poetry is a stolen word, and in using it one must remain conscious of its perverted sense in the service of realism, or one suddenly finds oneself discussing not poetry but realism; and this is equally painful. But if poetry is a stolen word, so is reality: reality is stolen from the self, which is thus in its integrity forced to call itself unreal.

Poetry may perhaps for the moment be saved for the poet and for the unreal self if the collective-real, the individual-real, philosophy, criticism, are denominated ‘literature.’ Literature then clearly represents the symbolical, the rational, the romantic, the classical, the collective, the individualistic reality of man. Further, if we make it clear to ourselves that all literature is poetic, then we are separating poetry from literature and drawing a sharp line between what is poetic and what is poetry. Further still, we are discovering that literature is everything but the unreal self, it is the society of reality; it is History, it is Nature, it is Philosophy, it is Reason, it is Criticism, it is Art. Most of all perhaps literature is Art, the seizure and confirmation of reality by the senses, the literalizing of the world of reality. The more ‘abstract’ Art is (the less symbolical) the more real it is. Poetry is thus seen to be neither literature nor Art. Literature is the ladder of reality: the historian yields to the scientist, the scientist to the philosopher, the philosopher to the critic, the high-priest of Reason, of which ‘great works of art’ are the visible signs: for Reason is Reality.[9]

§4

This has been, so far, the elaboration of a point of view. From here on will be found various applications of this point of view. Generally in expositive writing there is no distinction made between what is organically elaborative and what is incidentally applicative: all is elaborative and therefore over-elaborative. The argument continues to elaborate itself even though it has come to an end; it incorporates the application of the point of view in the development of the point of view; it does not distinguish between argument and comment. I wish to distinguish carefully here between argument and comment. A certain very small amount of illustration and instancing is necessary to focus an argument properly: the smaller the better, since most specific reference and substantiation is a concession to the audience, which generally cannot think purely, that is, without the machinery of learning. Once the argument is focused, it should not develop further. It should repeat itself, like an acid test, in each fresh application. All philosophical or critical systems are the absorption of an original point of view by the facts to which it applies itself: the force of the point of view is lost, it becomes a convenience by which facts organize themselves and eventually dominate the point of view. All philosophical or critical systems are no more than learning, a synthesis of instances, and therefore develop generalizations that mean nothing without instances. I have no philosophical or critical system to advance; I am interested in generalizations that mean something without instances, that are unreal, since they mean something by themselves. Generalizations of this sort, when applied to instances, should not be absorbed by them. The argument should dismiss instances with comment on instances, remain meaning in itself. If it does this then it is capable of maintaining an opposition between right and wrong. If it does not, it only becomes a better wrong than the wrong it attacks. It becomes real.

By this I do not mean that I am a subjective critic. A subjective critic is one who converts his point of view into a system, makes it real: his point of view must be continually fed by works of art, otherwise it ceases. I propose here a point of view that is completely unto itself, that is unreal, that is independent of instances. When it meets instances it comments on them by repeating itself. Nor is it subjective, since subjectivity implies an objective world of experience from which it must perpetually derive itself. I speak of a point of view which is self and only self, of an unreality which is every one’s to the extent to which he is able to extricate himself from quantitative reality and be, instead of a purse-proud something, a proud and purseless nothing. What is this I am describing?--the poetic (a stolen word) self.

1

Mr. Herbert Read (_Reason and Romanticism_).

‘That the critical spirit, expressed in reason, will ever evolve a synthesis capable of fulfilling the functions of religion is evidently impossible. Reason and emotion only unite in very rare and special perceptions; such perceptions are not capable of generalization.... Emotions are too diffuse, too widely distributed, ever to be unified in reason, which is an evolved possession, never perfect at all, and only approaching perfection in the rarest individuals.’ The impossible, Mr. Read admits, is attainable in the rare ‘universal mind.’ Universal in the strict critical sense proves itself to mean ‘broad’ in the eighteenth-century sense--aristocratic. So Goethe (both for Herr Spengler and Mr. Read) is the ideal universal type; so is Leibnitz, so is Diderot. Mr. Read confirms my description of the philosophico-critical system in his definition of universality as ‘a capacity _to receive_ all knowledge and events with equanimity and unprejudiced percipience; and to build up a positive attitude on this clear and perceptual basis.’[10] From here we are gently conducted to the proposition that ‘poetry is, in short, delectation.’ Poetry is, in short, a game-like, sporting, snobbish exercise of reason, the most ambitious display of knowledge possible: ‘and the greater our knowledge, the more surcharged it is with the perception of values, the deeper will be the delight aroused in us.’ What is reason? Reason is socialized reality, ‘the sum total of awareness, ordained and ordered to some specific end or object of attention.’

Mr. Read on metaphysical poetry: metaphysical poetry is ‘emotional apprehension of thought.’ This means, we discover, individual mind systematically apprehending reality: ‘... we find in Donne a mind poised at the exact turn of the course of philosophy drawing his inspiration right back from scholastic sources, and yet at the same time eagerly surveying the new future promised by the science of Copernicus and Galileo. Chapman, on the other hand, is in a remarkable degree the forerunner of humanist philosophy--of Hume and Spinoza in particular. He is aware, above all things, of “the constant and sacred harmony of life.”’ In this way criticism classifies poetry according to the poet’s intelligence of reality--that is, according to his conventionality, his politeness; whereas that Donne wrote poetry at all was because he was able to separate himself rudely from the reality of which he was in a class sense a privileged agent.[11]

On Dante and Guido Cavalcanti: ‘Or, more exactly, all experience, whether intellectual or sensual or instinctive, was regarded as equally and contemporaneously the subject-matter of their poetry. The result was a desirable continuity or coherence; imagination, contemplation, and sensibility becoming fused within the perfect limits of a human mind.’ Mr. Read then quotes from William Walrond Jackson, D.D., ‘Introduction’ to his translation of the _Convivio_ (Oxford, 1909), p. 18: ‘The poet was inspired by an overmastering desire to link the present with the past and with the future, to blend all knowledge into one coherent system, and to bring the experiences of life into one harmonious whole....’ Plainly, this donnish, publicly fostered service of the poet to reason would be absorbed, if he were a poet at all, in his essential, enduring unreality by the time his work reached the criticism of four hundred years later. Instead criticism keeps artificially alive the derived reality of the work, submerging in it what intrinsic unreality it may have had. ‘The true metaphysical poet is conscious of no such dualism: his thought is in its very process poetical.’ Poetry is reason. ‘Leibnitz has defined an intelligent author as one who includes the most of reality in the least possible compass.’ And further ... ‘the poet is in a very real sense the product of his age--witness especially Dante’ (‘age’ meaning ‘the most of reality in the least possible compass’). These two statements comment sufficiently on themselves. What recommendation has Mr. Read for the modern poet? He looks ‘to the modern physicists, whose work would seem to provide a whole system of thought and imagery ready for fertilization in the mind of the poet.’ This again, is its own best comment on itself.

2

Mr. Lewis is merely a pamphleteer of anarchism, T. S. Eliot is a serious moralist, bent on professing rather than on attacking. We therefore look to Mr. Lewis for explanatory rhetoric and to Mr. Eliot for explanatory ritual: in many respects his modest behaviour is more illuminating than all Mr. Lewis’s language. After years of hard and brilliant service as a poetical yogi Mr. Eliot suddenly discovered that he had all the time been acting on behalf of the universe of man, of human nature, instead of in behalf of the universe of reason, of natural nature. So he replaced religiousness by priggishness; he went from a popular, mystical cult to an exclusive Thomist club; from large, symbolical (ironic) outer circle abstractions to small specific (concrete) inner circle abstractions.

Instead of attacking the time-mob, like Mr. Lewis, he withdrew himself from it and left it to carry on the orthodox, unanimous flux so obnoxious to Mr. Lewis, yet so necessary to both Mr. Lewis’ and Mr. Eliot’s anarchism: the basis of anarchistic individuality is not authentically individualistic, but snobbish. Mr. Lewis’s incentives to anarchism are political--‘for the sake of the ride’; Mr. Eliot’s are moral, that is, self-protective--the ride was for the sake of running away. He ran away from the collective-real to the individual-real (the _Criterion_ furnishes us with a progressive record of Mr. Eliot’s movements). Like Mr. Lewis he opposed aristocratic orthodoxy (anarchism) to democratic orthodoxy (co-operation); he deserted the collective dogma of periods for the collective dogma of individuals. ‘For those of us who are higher than the mob, and lower than the man of inspiration, there is always _doubt_; and in doubt we are living parasitically (which is better than not living at all) on the minds of the men of genius of the past who have believed something’ (from the _Enemy_, January, 1927). Mr. Lewis advocates grandiloquently but vaguely aristocratic orthodoxy in general; Mr. Eliot is dryly and specifically in pursuit of _the_ or at least _an_ aristocratic orthodoxy. The difference is that between irritated rightness and alarmed priggishness. Mr. Lewis is merely led astray by his extravagant though praiseworthy fury with democratic orthodoxy; his worshipful enthusiasm for the classical man of quiet is not dogma but pique against the modern romantic man of action (time-flux, space-motion). Mr. Eliot upholds the man of quiet from dogma. He is a minority-representative, as the man of the time-flux is a majority-representative. Mr. Eliot’s position demonstrates clearly the relation of the individual-real to the collective-real: it is a priggish, self-protective minority-attitude to the same material which is the substance of the dogma of the collective-real. But he objects to ‘mentalism’ not only, I should say, because it generally means mob-mentalism, but equally because it may mean unreal, unorthodox individuality; his anarchism is timidity fallen between two stools. Mr. Lewis, however, objects to mentalism, I feel, chiefly because it generally means demogogic mob-mentalism. ‘By this proposed transfer from the beautiful _objective, material_, world of common sense, over to the “organic” world of chronological mentalism, you lose not only the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you commonly apprehend; you lose also the clearness of outline of your own individuality which apprehends them.’ I do not think Mr. Eliot would have been capable of saying ‘your own individuality’; I do not indeed believe that Mr. Lewis is naturally an individual-realist, but that he has been unfortunately stung into a pose.[12]

Aristocratic (as opposed to democratic) orthodoxy is not, as I have already indicated, a pose with Mr. Eliot. I said he had _an_ orthodoxy. It would be helpful to an understanding of the problem to discover what the nature of an aristocratic orthodoxy may be. In Mr. Eliot’s case, this is all too obviously: a humble, up-to-date respect for the best, internationally sifted great names. A practical-minded Toryism, which says, in gently criticizing Mr. Anthony M. Ludovici’s more journalistic Toryism (The _Monthly Criterion_, July, 1927): ‘Mr. Ludovici is engaged in forming what might be called a myth or idea for the Tory Party. Such a myth or idea has much to commend it; and I sympathize with so many of his views that I may declare at once what seems to me the great weakness of his construction: he isolates politics from economics, and he isolates it from religion.’ What Mr. Eliot’s attitude to economics is it is difficult to determine; I should say from various evidences that economics to him did not mean a human problem but an academic tradition worthy of study. Mr. Eliot has, from time to time, spoken more specifically on religion. In the review from which I have just quoted, Mr. Eliot further says: ‘Toryism is essentially Anglican; Roman Catholicism, which in our time draws its greatest support from America, is more in harmony with Republicanism. The problem of Toryism should be rather to make the Church of Laud survive in an age of universal suffrage....’ Further, he ardently seconds Mr. Ludovici in his recommendation that the Conservative Party should encourage _thought_, ‘the activity of men of thought who are not and who do not desire to be parliamentarians.’ In such quiet language does Mr. Eliot phrase his gospel of timid, aristocratic mentalism--a kind of politico-literary extract of Anglo-Catholicism, if we may judge by signs. His demands are familiar to every properly brought-up British schoolboy: that the Church must have more power, that the Kingship must be strengthened, and that Aristotle must be studied, supplemented by an Anglican reading of St. Thomas if the lad is to enter literature. Yes, literature. I had nearly forgotten that Mr. Eliot began his Progress as a Poet. But Mr. Eliot, finding himself higher than the mob and lower than the man of inspiration, is modest; he does not ask to be considered, or consider himself, as a poet. Unless we are deceived by his modesty, he would be content to be Bishop or to be Professor Saintsbury.

3

Mr. Roger Fry in _Transformations_ concerns himself with the distinction between pure and impure art--‘a distinction which Mr. Richards has the good fortune to be able to ignore.’ Mr. Richards, we learn from his _Principles of Literary Criticism_ (published in 1925, the first text-book of psychologico-literary criticism) is interested in value rather than in purity. Criticism is to him a minute and comprehensive gradation of what T. E. Hulme called the world of religious and ethical values; purity, a social rather than æsthetic attribute; a moral term, by which a work is described as a public act of its author. To Mr. Fry a work is not conduct, it is a thing; its purity as a thing depends on its dissociation from authorship. It is impossible not to prefer Mr. Fry’s criterion to Mr. Richards’; the former is plainly trying to discover the laws of goodness in works, the latter, the laws of goodness in humanity. The works we have with us; humanity, the idea of species, must be philosophically evoked.

But what is the nature of the work as thing? According to Mr. Fry its nature would seem to be reality. It is created by a sharp separation of the author’s personality from the material with which he works, so that his work, when complete, is to be classified with nature, the world of mathematical reality, rather than with man, to whom reality is a sentimental objectification of his subjectivity. I should say that Mr. Fry’s criticism made possible a clearer sense of a work’s _self_ than Mr. Richards’, but that it created a misunderstanding of the nature of this self by identifying purity with reality. In Mr. Fry’s criticism the homologue of a work would be a thing. But what is a thing and how is it pure? Pure means being whole, single in element, nothing but self, thoroughly new and fresh. Impure means being more and less than whole, complex in element, not possessing thoroughly new and fresh selfhood. The ‘things’ of what is called reality are mere interpretative morsels, tainted with pedigree. To me the thingishness in a work depends on no real homologue; the work is a thing of its own kind, without homologue. The material with which an author works is not reality but what he is able to disentangle from reality: in other words I think the identity is rather of purity and unreality. An author must first of all have a sure apprehension of what is self in him, what is new, fresh, not history, synthesis, reality. In every person there is the possibility of a small, pure, new, unreal portion which is, without reference to personality in the popular, social sense, self. I use ‘self’ in no romantic connotation, but only because it is the most vivid word I can find for this particular purefaction. When this self has been _isolated_ from all that is impression and impurity of contact in an individual, then a ‘thing,’ a work, occurs, it is discharged from the individual, it is self; not _his_ self, but self. If it is not discharged, it is immediately reabsorbed in that composite accident of reality by which he is known to others as a person. Thus many people without creative ability--the ability to discharge self--must feel for one passing moment that isolated purity in themselves which might, if they were able to sustain it a little longer, turn into ‘things.’ In those who can from time to time discharge self, the power is not constant: if it were, ‘creation’ would cease--creation is intermittent recurrence and repossession of this power--and there would be death, bright death.

The power, then, is not synthetic, is not to compose things, but to isolate them; it is an analytic power. Mr. Fry describes the reaction to works of art as a reaction to a relation. This could only refer to works which were compositions, attempts to create, by a synthetic, material (non-personal) action of the senses, real things; for relation can only result from synthesis. A work-thing of this kind is a pattern of reality, an arrangement of elements; and pattern is accident. The author of a synthetic work can choose the elements of which it is to be composed, but they work themselves out: the so-called necessity of reality is really _accident_. The reaction therefore to the kind of work Mr. Fry speaks of, a ‘real’ work, is a reaction to accident: the critic, himself presumably a pattern of reality, experiences a shock from meeting another pattern which is commandingly different and hypnotizes him into a rearrangement of the elements of which he is composed--‘the esthetic emotion’ is here a sensual recombination of personality. For this reason I consider such esthetic emotion false and escapist. The experience, on the other hand, of a critic confronted with an ‘unreal’ work, would, I believe, be this: if it were a thing of pure, isolated self, he could not perceive it except with what was pure, isolated self in him. He would be forced for the moment to discard what was real in him; he might, by means of the thing, succeed in discharging self: the operation of the thing on him would have an analytic effect separating in him the pure from the impure, protecting him for the moment from the ‘esthetic emotion’ with which in fact he generally reacts to everything. When Mr. Fry says ‘In literature there is no immediate sensual pleasure,’ he is really commenting on the analytic, unreal quality of the word as opposed to the synthetic (sense-combining), real quality of the instrumentalities of the material arts. Word-works in which there is an immediate sensual pleasure are ones which have been artified, realized. Words in their pure use, which I assume to be their poetic use, are denials rather than affirmations of reality. The word _hat_, say, does not create a real hat: it isolates some element in the real hat which is not hat, which is unreal, the hat’s self.

But my description of this unreality would at first seem to correspond with the unreal world of poetry described by A. C. Bradley. Mr. Fry quotes Dr. Bradley: ‘For its (poetry’s) nature is not to be a part, nor yet a copy, of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase), but to be a world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous.’ The key-word in this definition is _world_: Dr. Bradley is not writing about unreal self but about romantic humanity. Poetry represents to him the world of fancy; and by fancy he means ethical, realistic fancy--the real world of man as opposed to the real world of mathematical nature. Nor is this a true opposition: it is impossible to overlook the significance of the term _world_--we have here all over again the ambitious, analogical Soul-World of Herr Spengler.

Mr. Fry is at pains to point out the alien, psychological, literary element in various plastic works, in determining what is ‘pure’ art. The very term ‘art’ forces him to confine his definition to the purely real. So that he can do no more than make a sharp distinction between the art of the real world and the art of the unreal (psychological, literary) world. We are to conclude that in its way the art of the unreal world (literature) is pure: what is impure is a mixing of these two worlds. Mr. Fry is only annoyed by literary art, not by artistic literature.

But the unreal, literary, psychologically organized self-world is the collective-real: its existence depends on a belief in reality, though in reality as a myth. Nor is the self of Mr. Fry’s real world any less ‘psychological’: but merely a more anarchistic, individualistic associate of reality, reality hence as reason rather than myth, or, as Mr. Lewis might put it, as God Himself rather than religion. And so the issue between realism and idealism is no more than a quarrel over methods of affirming reality: rationalistic instinct as against emotionalistic intellect, short-way-round as against long-way-round, anarchistic as against communistic psychology. Realism is the method of artistic art, idealism, of literary art. Art is the use of self to make syntheses--things _like_ ‘real’ things: all controversy about art-methods narrows itself down to a disagreement over what real things are _like_.[13]

The controversy, that is, is not over principles but over style; and style is, ultimately, not so much the manner of a work as the manner in which it is talked about. The end of most criticism is not to determine what a work must be but to fix the language of criticism; and it follows that most works are therefore without the quality of self: they are made merely to fit the language of criticism popular at the time or that happens to have made an impression on the author.

Criticism has to do with what is already done, with what has already happened: it is a cataloguing of reality, and reality is the past. A work that invites criticism is an exercise in history, whether its author has the man-history point of view or the nature-history point of view; it is the creation of old stuff. Most works are old stuff, differing only in style; in how they innovate old stuff; in their critical language: they agree in principle, that only old stuff is possible--reality, synthesis, pattern, recombination.

Mr. Read blames Mr. George Moore for using the word ‘objective’ to describe what he means by ‘pure poetry’--‘objective,’ Mr. Read complains, is a psychological term. It is not one of the what Mr. Read calls ‘universal terms.’ A universal term should convey ‘an inner conviction of necessity.’ What Mr. Read is really complaining of is the unsystematic use of a psychological term. Criticism should use the same language about art as it does about reality; it should unite philosophy and art in Reason. Reason is personal, direct, conscious traffic in reality. It is enlightened magic (‘an inner conviction of necessity’). Primitive man, being more instinctively aware of reality, did not need to have his magic (his art) enlightened. The primitive artist was a seer, the civilized artist is a visionary: to Mr. Read reason is the ability to have correct visions of reality. It is interesting to find that Mr. Lewis uses the same language of criticism. The artist is to him a wide-awake dreamer; ‘Don Quixote, or the Widow Wadman, is as _real_, to put it no higher than that, as most people ostensibly alive and walking the earth to-day’; ‘For me art is the civilized _substitute_ for magic.’ To both Mr. Read and Mr. Lewis purity means that magical intelligence, that inspired (rather than primitive, stupid ‘objective’) literalness which may be philosophically defined as the individual-real. Both, moreover, object to art that is magical in the primitive sense as to an anachronism; it is fabricated sensationism, it is the collective-real, it is ideological rather than natural symbolism.[14] They are interested in getting man into proper focus in reality, and in his usefulness as an instrument of measurement: they are interested, that is, in psychology, in the language of criticism, the mathematics of synthesis.

Mr. Richards, too, is primarily interested in the language of criticism. He condemns Beauty-and-Truth terminology--the criticism that treats civilized art as unintelligent magic, in fact. He not only recognizes Reason as man’s participation in the patterns of reality; he insists on Reason as social duty; criticism is to him morality. The mathematics of synthesis by which reality may be accurately apprehended are to be developed by turning the human world into a world of values: making conduct (communication, relation) achieve significant pattern. Conduct is then the training of the community as a whole in traffic in reality, with the artist as band-master--‘the arts are the supreme form of communicative activity.’ Value (the graded necessity of reality) is to be discovered by a ‘systematization of impulses.’ We have here that intelligent, superior, adult instinct which Mr. Lewis believes should supply the civilized substitute for magic--the instinct equally of the collective-real, with only a difference of degree in sophistication, manners. Instinct in the collective-real is always either unconsciously or consciously flamboyant, grossly poetic; in the individual-real always consciously reserved, meticulously poetic (art, Mr. Richards says, deals with ‘minute particulars’). But it is always the same instinct, the nostalgic desire to reconstitute an illusory whole that has no integrity but the integrity of accident.

Respect for this accidental quality of reality (necessity) may be expressed either by the enthusiasm of what Mr. Lewis calls the Revolutionary Simpleton, who is always religiously anticipating accident, or by what I should like to call Mr. Richards’ Moral Simpleton, who observes a reverent plasticity in the development (accidental rearrangement) of custom. And I should like to add Mr. Lewis’s own hero, the Individualistic Simpleton, who is to be forced ‘to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day.’ Why? To become unreal? No, to become more real, to be made into ‘much better people.’ But if they were much better people already (if a kind of criticism of reality prevailed which satisfied Mr. Lewis), then Mr. Lewis, however free he might permit himself to be, would certainly not worry them with individualism.[15] He wants them free now only as a protest, an act of spiteful superiority against the collective-real. The individual-real is not concerned with self but with exposing the stupidity, the hypocrisy of the fanatic mob. Instead of freeing the self to self, it frees it to Reason, to prove merely that intelligent civilized individuals can be in closer touch with reality than a stupid civilized mob: that they can know more, conform more perfectly to customs of more perfect taste, control what is unreal self in them more systematically, respond more respectfully, regularly (classical-poetically) to the stimuli of accidental reality. That they can behave, that is, by finding a civilized substitute for magic, like a perfect primitive mob of philosophy-fed art students.

4

Mr. Richards quotes Dr. Bradley’s definition of poetry as an illustration of the sort of criticism to which he is opposed. In principle, however, I do not think they are opposed. Dr. Bradley’s ‘world by itself’ is fundamentally allied with Mr. Richards’ world of values: the difference is that Dr. Bradley’s world--not ‘a copy of the real world,’ not bound up with human affairs--gets its revelations of reality through the imagination, that is, dreaming, while Mr. Richards’ world gets its revelations of reality through waking. Both worlds are trying to prove how real they are, the one lying down, the other standing up. They are the same world in different attitudes, the æsthetic attitude and the moral attitude. The protagonist of the first says, ‘I cannot do two things at once--apprehend reality and make money or eat my supper at the same time, I must set aside a part of the day sacred to reality, in which I do nothing else, sleep over it, as it were.’ The protagonist of the second says: ‘Pshaw, affected sensitiveness. I can sharpen knives, shave, cook, travel, marry, go to church and apprehend reality at the same time: in fact, whatever I do is all the better done for this, and I apprehend reality all the better for what I do.’ Whether a person apprehends reality from the moral or from the æsthetic point of view is all a matter of energy: what seems easy to one person may seem difficult to another, and _vice versa_. Thus, to Mr. Richards, the moral theory of art ‘has the most great minds behind it,’ ‘the most prominent of these great minds being Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Spenser, Milton, the Eighteenth Century, Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Pater.’ Which leads us to believe that as a ‘moral’ critic Mr. Richards is something of an æsthetician.

5

Modern criticism has supplemented itself with psychology, or rather with its literary version, psycho-analysis. If criticism is primarily interested in the language in which reality is discussed, then it must have a partner to deal with the rough physical side of reality--a field worker in reality. Criticism confines itself to taste; psycho-analysis to substantiating taste with practical data.

‘We are our bodies,’ Mr. Richards says: that is, we should try to be our bodies, to exist psycho-analytically, to provide criticism with data. The view that we are our bodies, Mr. Richards says, should not be described as Materialism--‘it might equally well be called _Idealism_.’ All criticism, he means to say, is an appreciation of reality; criticisms differ in method, never in principle. With the help of psycho-analysis we pay reality the compliment of saying ‘we are our bodies’; and reality, with the help of criticism, returns the compliment, permitting us to say ‘our bodies are us.’

As bodies we are acted upon by reality; this is the psycho-analytic half of the trick. The action of reality on us produces effects which reveal the nature of this reality which acts on us; a description of this nature is the critical half of the trick. It is not suggested that as bodies we may act on reality, for this would reveal the fact that bodies were not like reality a solid lump, but separate and independently acting; it would indicate a break-up of reality, open up the problem of the unreal, and O! What a mess we should be in then. Let us have order while we can.

‘To know anything,’ Mr. Richards says, ‘is to be influenced by it.’ This makes things still more simple and comfortable: we do not have to worry about anything which is not _here_, which does not affect us, which is not reality. We are what we know, and what we know is also what we know. The echo of matter in mind proves that there is matter, and also that mind is matter. The mind need have no fear of becoming lost in itself so long as it continues to know, to be affected. It need not be afraid to produce art so long as art remains a knowing of reality; knowing of reality is reality: as echo of sound is also sound. Mr. Read quotes sympathetically Professor Sonnenschein’s learned expression of this echo-theory as applied to poetry: ‘Rhythm is that property of a sequence of events in time which produces on the mind of the observer the impression of proportion between the duration of several events or groups of events of which the sequence is composed.’ ‘A good artist,’ Mr. Read says, ‘is firstly a good critic.’ He predisposes his mind materially to apprehend reality, to receive echoes: ‘The work of art emerges within a radiation of critical perceptions.’

If every one began systematically treating himself as mind, we should all quickly become separate individuals and know ourselves, and the symbols we used would not be echoes of reality but themselves, and then indeed we should be in deep water. To prevent this possibility psycho-analysis is called on to supplement ‘the narrowness of criticism’ (Mr. Read’s phrase). Criticism is presumably narrow because it deals with forms, while psycho-analysis can roll up its sleeves, poke around in the stuff from which the symbol is derived, and ‘help us test its social validity’ (Mr. Read)--‘social’ meaning pro-matter, anti-mind: mind can only be pro-matter when it is collective mind.

Psycho-analysis divides people into two types--introverted and extraverted. Introversion represents error in man, a straying away from reality into self, a going of the mind into mind. Both psycho-analysis and criticism agree that this process cannot, or rather _should not_ produce art. Both processes, _or their possibility_, exist in each individual (psycho-analysis is forced to admit that introversion always exists; extraversion exists if the individual is ‘successful’). They may, it is held, be combined in _phantasy_, and phantasy produces ‘living reality,’ art. But what is this phantasy but the whole introversive world of man behaving extraversively--the collective-real? Unless it is introversion actually transformed in the individual into extraversion, individual mind into matter of ‘more than individual use’ (as Mr. Read defines creative phantasies)--the individual real? The opposition between collective-real and individual-real disappears in the general agreement between all parties that, by no matter what method, introversion must be extraverted. Likewise the opposition between romanticism and classicism: romanticism is acceptable if it has an extraverted, classical touch; classicism is not necessarily damaged by an introverted, romantic touch, so long as it does not lose complete hold of extraversion.

Extraversion, it is clear, is intelligent body-being. What introversion is it seems difficult to say, since it is always defined by defamatory comparison with extraversion. ‘Jung,’ Mr. Read says, ‘further differentiates _active_ and _passive_ phantasy--the latter a morbid state which we do not need to stop to consider here.’ Complete introversion is presumably not intelligent mind-being, but a pathological condition. Individual mind-being is not intelligent, pathological, because it does not make for unanimity. And both psycho-analysis and criticism want some unanimous, collective mind in contemporary man like the collective mind in primitive man, with the distinction--made in consideration of the grown-up, individualized character of modern man--that this must be an intelligent collective mind, inspired with Reason, a refined version of brutish objectivity. ‘We need some unanimity,’ Mr. Read says, ‘to focus the vague desires that exist in the collective mind.’

But what is the collective mind? A herd of deer clinging together may be said to have unanimity, but it can scarcely be said to have a mind: it has unanimity because to the extent to which it clings together it _is_ brutish, natural reality. And the same is true of primitive man up to the point where individual works of art occur; at this point the hold on reality has been lost, unanimity can only be maintained by force, and by the force of a few masterful but pathological, introversive, mind-being individuals. Collective mind is a contradiction in terms: what is meant is intelligent (self-enslaving) collective matter.

And here psycho-analysis is more consistent than criticism because it is frankly interested in extraversion rather than in extraversive works: it would not seriously worry psycho-analysis if works and their authors were discontinued: it would still have Case B, in which Mr. X and Miss Y.... Criticism, on the other hand, cannot get along without famous works by famous authors, which are, moreover, a continual source of discord since they are all introversive in origin and cannot be allowed to take their place in literature until they have been rigorously extraversified.

6

Psychoanalytic criticism makes the emotion with which a work is experienced merely a more complicated, appreciative kind of sensation. In sensation the cause of sensation, a real object (experience), attacks the individual; he is helpless _not_ to respond, he can only classify his response according to whether he does or does not enjoy it. Every sensory experience is a destruction of his originality. The work of art presented to him on this response-basis is a deliberately aggressive real object intended to usurp his originality in a more constructive way than ordinary sensation. Even the freedom of classifying sensation according to its enjoyableness is denied him: a forced classification is contained in the object-work, representing not a principle of personal preference, but of social preference, expressing the criticism, or Reason, of the time. The ordinary object has generally only an immediate, disorganized sensory effect; the object-work reaches back into the whole past of the individual, re-adapting it to itself by means of memory. All image-making involved in so-called appreciative, reactive experience is a perversion of originality, of the independent power of acting upon initiative, to the derived power of acting upon incentive: the critical bias, first interpreting works as object-works, then inspiring works to be object-works means ‘imitation’.

So little does pure, original action seem possible or desirable that we have no word for an impulse contrary in its nature to the nature of reaction, for dissociative rather than associative conduct--disaction. To the psycho-analyst all activity is interpretable only as reaction to sensation; to the professional critic (Mr. Richards, for example) all critical conduct is imaginary re-activity: we have the individual’s originality not momentarily eclipsed, but actually engaged in destroying itself, enriching sensation with the complicated depth of personality.

Art so conceived thus becomes a skilful thwarting of originality. The immediate shock to the consciousness which a work brings, which might be expected to encourage an independence in the consciousness, a dissociation from reality (influences) and a development of its differences from reality, is utilized to possess the consciousness for reality, to force it to organize itself according to its resemblances (responses) to the particular object-work by which it is attacked. Art is an exaggeration of the hostile operation of reality on the individual consciousness, an exaggeration proportioned to overcome the originality which offers a casual, disorganized resistance to ordinary objects. Between object and object there is a complete hypnotic interaction by which reality is maintained and which exists only partially between man and object because man is possessed of originality. The object-work is therefore an object especially designed to correct this originality in man by ensnaring him in a more than ordinarily intense field of hypnotic action.

A poem, then, in the critical scheme, is only a work in the sense that it achieves a value equal to an exceptionally ‘good’ experience; it is an especially high-class object, one that makes use of all man’s powers for reconstructing reality: a model object, as the poet is supposed to be a model man. But man’s powers for reconstructing reality are really a misuse of his powers for constructing himself out of the wreckage which is reality. The only true entity possible to man is an analytic entity: the synthetic entities of art are all parodies of self. An original poem is only seemingly synthetic; the words of which it is made are both the instrument of the analysis and the substance of the pure self of the poem which emerges from the analysis. Every poem of this kind is an instance of fulfilled originality, a model, to the reader, of constructive dissociation: an incentive not to response but to initiative. Poetry is properly an art of individualization as opposed to the other arts, which are arts of communication. To compare a poem with a picture or with a piece of music or sculpture, is to treat analytic entities and synthetic entities as if they were objects of similar reality. Synthetic entities are imitative, communicative, provocative of association: their keynote is organized social sanity. Analytic entities are original, dissociative, and provocative of dissociation: their keynote is organized personal insanity. This is why, in hurried scientific fear, the shamen of psycho-analysis and criticism explain as pure introversion only obviously morbid conditions, making out art to be, wherever possible, redeemed introversion. If criticism of this sort persists there is no doubt that art will in time produce only synthetic entities: that is, poetry will disappear. Indeed it may be the prevalence of such criticism that is responsible for the present situation of poetry; why, in Mr. Read’s words, there is ‘no adequate literary equivalent in England for the impressive organization and intellectual content of the modern movement in painting.’ For poems as synthetic entities must obviously always run a very poor second to pictures.

7

As to the problem of rhythm and the point of view I have been applying. Rhythm in the decorative poetic sense in which it is generally used is, I believe, a strictly prose property. Prose is an inclusive medium, its merit depends on its fullness. The more rich in illustration, detail, rhythmic intricacies it is, the better prose it is, the more effective as an instrument of synthesis. It is poetry, on the other hand, which is properly harsh, bare, matter-of-fact. Punctuation, the notation of rhythm, is essentially a prose development, a means of managing the intricate language-flow. Prose is the social, civilized instrument of communication. The restraints put on it are like the complicated conventions that govern an apparently free-and-easy but actually rigidly prescribed drawing-room atmosphere.

The purpose of poetry is to destroy all that prose formally represents. It is an exclusive medium, and its merit depends on the economy with which it can remove the social rhythmic clutter of communicative language. The savage _tom-tom_ is poetry of a brutally specialized kind used to eliminate everything in the listeners but the purpose with which it has been argumentatively overloaded. Non-purposive poetry has all the eliminating force of the _tom-tom_ without the grotesque effects of special pleading. A suppression of all associative obligations that might hinder analysis takes place in the poet: by this narrowness he is free as by the synthetic broadness of prose the prose-writer is bound. And it is this narrowness that is the only rhythm proper to poetry. Metre is an attempt to soften the economy and narrowness requisite in poetry; and it is likely to cause, and in the main has caused, only a more fancy, mannered prose than prose; to misrepresent the nature of restraint and limitation in poetry. The end of poetry is to leave everything as pure and bare as possible after its operation. It is therefore important that its tools of destruction should be as frugal, economical as possible. When the destruction or analysis is accomplished they shall have to account for their necessity; they are the survivors, the result as well as the means of the elimination. They are the pure residue, and the meaning if there is any; and they vary in each poem only according to the amount of destruction they have done and the clutter with which they began. The greater the clutter attacked and the smaller, the purer, the residue to which it is reduced (the more destructive the tools), the better the poem.

Rhythm in poetry is therefore a deadly hammer, hammer away in which each word demonstrates its necessity and in which each word is accented. In prose there is accenting, then a long period of relaxation, the harshness of the important words is absorbed in the unimportant words: it is rhythmic. Prose is skilful manipulation of the whole standing vocabulary, and a great deal of poetry merely competes with prose in vocabularistic manipulation. Poetry is a selection of a few words from this inert mass, which justify, quicken themselves, in its destruction. The abruptness of poetry, commonly softened into prosaic musicalness, is due to the implied omission at every point of rhythmic prose language. Poetry is narrow (like the poem on the page), broken, quick; prose is broad, rhythmic, slow. Poetry is personal, prosaic. Prose is social, dressed out in verbal amenities, poetic.

8

As to the application of the kind of point of view that I have outlined to an individual’s relations with his fellows and, beyond that, to the relations of a poem with reality. As to fellows: the unsocial, ascetic concentration of self on self, the analytic intensification of personality to a state of unreality, makes personality a pure, not diffuse, a restrained and completely private activity. Where personality was of this nature, all synthetic, public, real life would be impersonal and formal--it would have manners for the sake of communicative ease, not for the sake of concealing or discovering, or suppressing or standardizing personality. Real life, I mean, as an abstract, general life would be happier so than as a concrete synthesis of personalities. It would not be a source of physical nourishment for personality. The unreal person would not feed on or be absorbed in the pattern; he would sharpen and try his asceticism in it. A view of this kind, making society an artificial pattern based on accident instead of a ‘real’ pattern based on necessity, is the only possible clue to the reconciliation of freedom and formality. To attempt to discover and form personality in the social pattern is to make social life dull, vulgar and aggressive, and life with self, dull, morbid and trivial. To treat social life as an impersonal pattern is to give it the theatrical vitality of humour and to make life with self strong and serious. The social problem is for each individual how to reach the proper degree of humorous formality in his communicative language, his clothes, his home; not how to acquire a vicarious personal life which has no content but a gross synthetic personality-desire. Social life (life with others) as opposed to personal life (life with self) should be as dancing opposed to walking--formal meaningless gesture as opposed to eccentric significant character. Certain strictly social arts such as music would become immediately tolerable and desirable if treated as arts of gesture rather than of character.

Now as to poems and reality. A poem is an advanced degree of self, as reality is an advanced degree of social life. The poem dances the dance of reality, but with such perfect artificiality that the dance, from very perfection, cancels itself and leaves, as far as reality is concerned, Nothing. But as far as the poem is concerned, Nothing is a dancer walking the ruins; character, by the ascetic nature of its energy, surviving gesture. This asceticism is the creative formality of the poem. Its critical formality is its original deadly participation in the dance. Where we find no critical formality the poem represents diffusion of self in the literary, synthetic self of reality; wantonness of gesture; sentimental corruption of character; tedious extension of reality beyond decent limits of sociality; instead of the dance, an orgy of improprieties. Where we find only critical formality, there is the same moral laxity, but concealed under a squeamish disciplinary veneer; the difference between ‘romantic’ and ‘classical,’ merely.

9

Mr. Lewis’s ambitious offensive against wrongness makes a nice point of conclusion, as it made a nice starting-point, for this exercise. Most of Mr. Lewis’s confusions are due to his attempt to correlate his political system with his taste. His political system is consistent with itself; we agree with it unreservedly or we agree with it not at all. His taste is inconsistent with itself wherever it has been made to conform with his political system: it becomes a nagging, expedient right, lacking the proper indifference of taste and the proper consistency of a political attitude. It is therefore obviously futile to treat with Mr. Lewis on matters of taste; while, on the other hand, it may be helpful to consider certain clear features of his political system.

(_a_) To the popularist progress is socially continuous; culture is the large-scale, accumulative participation of everyman in progress; conduct is behaviourism, perfect social automatism. To the individualist progress is political rather than social--aristocratically hereditary through that bluest blood, Reason; culture is eclectic, conduct is anarchistic, the perfection of the individualism of the few who are in this system responsible for the social conformity of the rest. They differ in their opinion of the size of a potent political group: the former believes that the entire social group may form the political group, the latter that the political group is an independent minority representative of the social group. But both support the idea of a progressive tradition; to the one it is mystical and collective, to the other rationally and personally maintained. And to both the idea of a non-social self outside the tradition and without reference to a cultural line of succession (a self, rather, ‘beginning again and again and again’) would be equally foreign and repulsive. Mr. Lewis’s concrete, ‘stable’ person is only an upper-class version of the hysterical, hypnotic, mass social self--more realistic, steady, decorous, common-sensible. The suppression of individual will by mass-will of which Mr. Lewis complains refers only to checks on political opportunism: what he is really interested in is power not individuality. He appreciates the fact that sociality means loss of personal consciousness. His solution is that the few strong individuals who object to loss of consciousness should benefit by an anarchistic dispensation that leaves them their consciousness intact in order that they may politically administer sociality to the unconscious.

(_b_) Mr. Lewis’s individualistic compromises come from his unwillingness to face the dualistic character of the individual--his real, social effect, his unreal, more-than-anarchistic self-subtraction from the social group for purposes of identity. For various reasons Mr. Lewis has not been able to shake himself free of the academic, philosophical force of the language that he uses; the problem is in any case too fine for his rough argumentative methods. He would have first to overcome his prejudice against dualistic concepts arising from their shady association with romantic ventures in philosophy, a task of patience not in harmony with his temperament. In any case, his political sense is too strong, too orthodox, to permit of his admitting that the identity of the individual may be established outside the social group. We may find the clue to his dogmatism in this respect in the accent of philosophical awe with which he pronounces ‘reality.’ Reality’s the thing; the individual is only (in a few individuals specializing in individualism) an honourable second. Even unreality may not be a thing by itself: it is (and this seems to be Mr. Lewis’s general conclusion) the queer slant at which reality is seen. To say that reality is unreal, from Mr. Lewis’s viewpoint, is like saying that sugar is sweet: the queer slant is in reality, not in the individual, as the sweetness is in the sugar, not in the tongue. ‘Unreal’ is in this usage merely a more philosophic-sounding word than ‘pretty,’ ‘spiritual,’ ‘mysterious’ or ‘queer.’ ‘The reality,’ Mr. Lewis complains, ‘has definitely installed itself inside the contemporary mind’--it has become what I have called the fairy-tale of the collective-real. Mr. Lewis, that is, is more interested in the prestige of reality than in the general integrity of the individual mind. His implication being that if the contemporary mind had definitely installed itself in ‘the reality’ all would be well. We should have a social group psycho-physically imbedded in reality, the individual consciousness being in this case the fairy-tale--with a few independent individual consciousnesses wagging themselves wisely and anarchistically in political appreciation of the situation. Farther than this Mr. Lewis is unable to go. He contents himself with establishing the concreteness, the social security of the wiseacres. His brand of individualism depends on the social setting for authentication; he does not dare to separate the fact of individuality from the fact of sociality and reveal how they maintain themselves in one person through a contradiction, not through ‘reason.’ The contradiction is difficult to grasp, as is the dualism from which it proceeds, and difficult to persevere in clearly and equitably once it is grasped; demanding infinite precision and much active distress and conferring few brilliant occasions on those who do grasp it. And Mr. Lewis’s brand of individualism is more immediately ambitious, more impatient, more realistic. He does not trust himself to wait upon successes or brilliant occasions. He skilfully glozes over the fine distinctions, makes politic compromises with the reality sufficient to assure the more astute members of the social group of a few ready individualistic privileges, and sneers down with aristocratic scorn the political idealism of the mob. He is willing to go all the way back to wipe out the effects of historical romancing; he is unwilling to come all the way forward again and risk doing the job thoroughly (the job, that is, of thinking through to the fine distinctions), as it might be now done. And so he remains, for all his intellectual swagger, a mere reactionary and anarchist. Another hero who, having fought just hard enough to permit him to celebrate a triumph, but not hard enough to force a conclusive battle, has claimed his laurels in Rome and retired to live upon them; the fine distinctions still untaken. ‘For the former generals, as soon as they believed their exploits had entitled them to the honour of triumphal distinctions, always abandoned the enemy. Insomuch that there were already in Rome three statues adorned with laurel; but still Tacfarinas was ravaging Africa....’

(_c_) Mr. Lewis’s world of reality is what we see plus what we know: what we know is the queer slant in what we see, not the queer slant in us. Our knowledge is the poetic touch in reality. The world of reality for the collective-real is what we see, alone; the fact itself of reality is poetic. But the differences are fundamentally slight. Knowing is the individualistic comprehension of seeing; conscious, literal perception versus crude, mystical mass-sensation; private ownership of reality versus the vulgar, public, figurative participation in reality of the impoverished working-class mob--that is, anarchistic, personal seizure of reality made possible by the philosophical vagueness of the mob. (For example, Mr. Lewis could not argue his position either with success or impunity in Russia.) I repeat, then, that the differences between the collective-real and the individual-real are fundamentally slight. Both defer to the snobbism of reality: it is reality and not the individual that matters. And both are poetic, a sentimental fusion of two contradictory categories, a wilful blurring by the intelligence of the dualism upon which it is based. Both, for example, have difficulty in defining ‘the object,’ due to their unwillingness to admit this duality; so that the same fusion and blurring that takes place in the individual takes place in the object as well. The romantic inwardness of the one inflates its faults and delusions to a degree of obviousness that invites and facilitates attack. The common-sense outwardness of the other is more aggressive, but more discreet, hiding under its well-bred anarchism and upper-class self-deprecation an enormous greed of possession. The one is childishly content with a fairy-tale of possession; the other insists haughtily upon a true story. But for both the problem, whether as seeing or seeing and knowing, is essentially the same: to have or not to have. As for being, it is not a proper poetic, not a proper philosophical and therefore not a proper political question, and therefore out of order.

(_d_) The evasion of both of these two systems of the dualism that I have attempted to suggest without romantic prejudice is reflected in their respective treatment of time and space. Recognizing the antinomy of time and space, they dismiss the possibility of enforcing it practically as too frightening: if what is is made to be what is, then we have nothing but what is; we cannot fool ourselves; therefore evasion and philosophy. The antinomian pie is cut. Mr. Lewis’s side takes space; the other side takes time; and both sides now devote their energies to proving that each has the better piece. And certainly both have very good pieces. In space occurs a disintegration that may prove space, through its particulars; in time, an assemblage of particulars that need not however develop particularity, but merely prove time, through the standardizing of its particulars. Good pieces. But only pieces. Space suffering from excessive definiteness; time from excessive indefiniteness. Each trying to pretend it is the whole pie, but each remaining just a self-infatuated piece. Space-synthesis, time-synthesis--philosophical impostures with different political methods, one conservative, old-fashioned, the other revolutionary, modernist. Time a sort of negative space, space a sort of positive time. Space-ist philosophy belied by its individualism, time-ist philosophy by its generalism. To the time-men the wholeness, the reality, is administered by a democratic Self; a Self not sufficiently self-ish, nothing-ish, unreal, small, instantly conceived, to be real in a time-scheme; therefore mystical, poetic. To the space-men, the wholeness, the reality, is administrated by an anarchistic, aristocratic God; a God too personal, too concretely particular, too specially knowable, too real, in fact, to be real in a space-scheme; therefore rationalistic, poetic. The time-men re-inforce the democratic Self with Everybody. The space-men re-inforce God with Art, which is a few superior minds capable of animating the material world ‘with some degree of mental existence.’ For by itself--and this is Mr. Lewis’s astounding conclusion--the material world is unreal. And we, too, are unreal--we should regard ourselves, he thinks, as surface creatures. But his conclusion is less astounding if we understand it as the debater’s final shock that clinches the argument: the material world is unreal and we too are unreal _if_ we do not believe in reality. If we believe in reality ‘God becomes the supreme symbol of our separation and of our limited transcendence.’ God is the queer slant which through faith (the proper geometric point of view) may be conceived as ultimately (that is, in the absolute sense) straight. And faith is reason. In the time-scheme the democratic Self is the queer slant; it is a sceptical, an ultimate queer slant. And scepticism is romanticism: vague, insincere, sweeping transcendence of the material world. Mr. Lewis, then, is not, as it at first seemed, against transcendence, but only against temporal transcendence. He does not object to evasion and philosophy, but rather wishes them to be more zealous, individualistic, spatial; more evasive and philosophical; to be Art. The temporal what-may-be comes too carelessly close to the what-is. Art, backed up by God, begs the question more efficiently; anarchistic but timid instead of socialistic but bold. It now only remains to be decided whether Mr. Lewis’s stand-by is Art or God; and since God was a late-comer in his scheme we can decide in favour of Art--and Mr. Lewis.

(_e_) But Art. Art is artists. And what is artists? Artists is a few superior minds. Artist is short for artists. Mr. Lewis is not short for artists but long for himself. As between artists and himself, Mr. Lewis decides in favour of himself; it is therefore still easier for us to decide in favour of Mr. Lewis. Against artists. What is artists? For example, Mr. E. M. Forster is artists, as is to be seen in his book _Aspects of the Novel_. The novel is a ‘spongy tract.’ It is ‘bounded by two chains of mountains ... Poetry and History....’ The novel tells a story. The characters are either flat or round. The ‘element of surprise’ ... is of great importance in a plot. Then Fantasy. (Here compare Mr. Lewis’s treatment of _Ulysses_ with Mr. Forster’s and you will understand perhaps why Mr. Lewis is not artists.) Then prophecy: ‘In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them; one can apply to them the saying of St. Catherine of Sienna, that God is in the soul and the soul is in God as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea.’ D. H. Lawrence is ‘the only prophetic novelist writing to-day ... the only living novelist in whom the song predominates, who has the rapt bardic quality, and whom it is idle to criticize.’ (Compare Mr. Lewis’s criticism of Lawrence with Mr. Forster’s, and you will understand further why Mr. Lewis is not artists.) Then Pattern and Rhythm. _Thais_ is the shape of an hour-glass. _Roman Pictures_, by Percy Lubbock, is shaped like a grand chain. Also Henry James. But a pattern must not be too rigid. If it is, ‘beauty has arrived, but in too tyrannous a guise.’ For ‘the novel is not capable of as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness of its material hinder it.... Still, this is not the end of our quest. We will not give up the hope of beauty yet. Cannot it be introduced into fiction by some other method than pattern? Let us edge rather nervously towards the idea of “rhythm.”’ We then learn that ‘rhythm is sometimes quite easy.’ And so to bed and pleasant dreams about the development of the novel mixed up with the development of humanity (‘the interminable tape-worm,’ as Mr. Forster had called it earlier in the day when it was ‘wriggling on the forceps’). No, Mr. Lewis is not artists. He is not an aristocrat, but a distracted and disaffected rough-neck. He has no more real connection with aspects of the novel than Nietzsche with any of the numerous ‘æsthetic revivals’ of his time. Like Nietzsche his politics and philosophy are æsthetic only in the sense that they are personal. His few ‘superior minds’ are himself. If he had made this clear in the very beginning he would have saved himself and those who have been good enough to follow him a great deal of unnecessary distraction. Politeness, God, reality--these are all Mr. Lewis in kid gloves embracing himself. His rightness consists in his embracing himself, his wrongness in his wearing kid gloves. For anarchism is not enough. It is obviously not enough for Mr. Lewis. The kid gloves which enabled him to rush into society confused the dualism on which selfhood certainly depends. When he takes them off (as it is probable he will in time, for he does not seem happy in them) and shakes himself by the bare hand, his enthusiasm over his own unreal individuality will have a bare-handed social concomitant more like Bolshevism than anarchism. Or rather, Mr. Lewis will find that not even Bolshevism is enough. What is enough? Nothing is enough. And until Mr. Lewis finds this out he will go on celebrating more and more ferociously his ferocious pangs of hunger, seconded by dozens of famished æsthetic revivalists.

How Came It About?

How came it about that Mrs. Paradise the dressmaker is here to dress me, and Mr. Babcock the bootmaker to boot me and a whole science of service to serve me, and that I am precisely here to be served? Do not speak to me of economics: that is merely a question of how we arrange matters between us. And do not speak to me of genesis: I am discussing the question of Mrs. Paradise and Mr. Babcock and myself and the others as immediate causes of one another, I am not discussing creation. Personally, I do not believe in creation. Creation is stealing one thing to turn it into another. What I _am_ discussing is existence, uncorrupted by art--how came it about, and so forth. Do not speak to me of love: Mrs. Paradise and Mr. Babcock and myself and all the others do not like each other, in fact, we dislike each other because each of us is most certainly the cause of the other. I am the reason for Mrs. Paradise’s making frocks and Mrs. Paradise is the reason for my wearing frocks. If it were not for each other we should be occupied only with ourselves; we should not exist. How then came we to exist? I ask this question. Mrs. Paradise asks this question. I am Mrs. Paradise’s answer. Mrs. Paradise is my answer. As for Mr. Babcock, he has hair on his nose and I never look at him. As for all the others, I must put up a notice asking them to ring the bell gently.

* * * * *

There is a woman in this city who loathes me. There are people everywhere who loathe me. I could name them; if they were in a book I could turn to the exact page. People who loathe me do so for one of two reasons: because I have frightened them because I have loathed them (that is, made my death-face at them, which I shall not describe as it might in this way lose some of its virtue) or because they are interested in me and there seems no practical way of (or excuse for) satisfying their interest. As to love, that is another matter--it has nothing to do with either interest or fear. Love is simply a matter of history, beginning like cancer from small incidents. There is nothing further to be said about it.

But as to loathing: I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more full of passion than incest.

To continue about this woman. What is to her irritation is to me myself. She has therefore a very direct sense of me, as I have a very direct sense of her, from being a kind of focus of her nervous system. There is no sentiment, no irony between us, nothing but feeling: it is an utterly serious relationship.

For if one eat my meat, though it be known The meat was mine, the excrement is his own.

I forget in what context these words were used by Donne--but they express very accurately how organic I feel this relationship to be. The tie between us is as positive as the tie between twins is negative. I think of her often. She is a painter--not a very good painter. I understand this too: it is difficult to explain, but quite clear to myself that one of the reasons I am attached to her is that she is not a good painter. Also her clothes, which do not fit her well: this again makes me even more attached to her. If she knew this she would be exasperated against me all the more, and I should like it; not because I want to annoy her but because this would make our relationship still more intense. It would be terrible to me if we ever became friends; like a divorce.

Hungry To Hear

Hungry to hear (like Jew-faces, kind but anticipating pain) they sit, their ears raw. The conversation remains genteel, of motor cars: her brother bought a car, he was having a six months’ vacation from an Indian post, he should have known better than to buy an American car, the value depreciates so, and _she_ (his sister) should not have lent it to _her_ (her friend) even though it wasn’t her fault that the car only did fifteen miles to the gallon after she returned it. A clear situation like this, in which life is easy to understand, is cruel to them. It leaves no scratches in the mind around which opinions, sympathies, silly repetitions can fester and breed dreams and other remote infections--too remote always to give serious pain. They long to be fumbled, to have confusion and uncertainty make a confused and uncertain end of them. There they sit, having pins-and-needles of obscurity which they mistake for sensation. They open their newspapers: ‘I suppose it is foolish to spend all this time reading newspapers? They are lying and dishonest and devoted to keeping a certain portion of the population in ignorance and intellectual slavery? Or is it foolish to take it so seriously? I shall go on reading them out of sophistication?...’ Oh, go to hell.

In A Café

This is the second time I have seen that girl here. What makes me suspicious is that her manner has not changed. From her ears I should say she is Polish. If this is so, is it not dangerous to drink coffee here? Does anyone else think of this, I wonder? Yet why should I be suspicious? And why should her manner not remain unchanged? She has probably been cold, unhappy, unsuccessful or simply not alive ever since I saw her last. Quite honestly I wish her success. The man who is making sketches from pictures in the Art Magazine may find her little Polish ears not repulsive. For good luck I turn away and do not look at her again. I, who am neither sluttish nor genteel, like this place because it has brown curtains of a shade I do not like. Everything, even my position, which is not against the wall, is unsatisfactory and pleasing: the men coming too hurriedly, the