Part 5

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.