Part 6

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.