Chapter III: Part 3

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 women too comfortably from the lavatories, which are in an unnecessarily prominent position--all this is disgusting; it puts me in a sordid good-humour. This attitude I find to be the only way in which I can defy my own intelligence. Otherwise I should become barbaric and be a modern artist and intelligently mind everything, or I should become civilized and be a Christian Scientist and intelligently mind nothing. Plainly the only problem is to avoid that love of lost identity which drives so many clever people to hold difficult points of view--by _difficult_ I mean big, hungry, religious points of view which absorb their personality. I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold themselves away when I do not wish to think. If I fold them away now, then I am sitting here all this time (without ordering a second cup) because other people go on sitting here, not because I am thinking. It is all indeed, I admit, rather horrible. But if I remain a person instead of becoming a point of view, I have no contact with horror. If I become a point of view, I become a force and am brought into direct contact with horror, another force. As well set one plague of cats loose upon another and expect peace of it. As a force I have power, as a person virtue. All forces eventually commit suicide with their power, while virtue in a person merely gives him a small though constant pain from being continuously touched, looked at, mentally handled; a pain by which he learns to recognize himself. Poems, being more like persons, probably only squirm every time they are read and wrap themselves round more tightly. Pictures and pieces of music, being more like forces, are soon worn out by the power that holds them together. To me pictures and music are always like stories told backwards: or like this I read in the newspaper: ‘Up to the last she retained all her faculties and was able to sign cheques.’

It is surely time for me to go and yet I do not in the least feel like going. I have been through certain intimacies and small talk with everything here, when I go out I shall have to begin all over again in the street, in addition to wondering how many people are being run over behind me; when I get home I shall turn on the light and say to myself how glad I am it is winter, with no moths to kill. And I shall look behind the curtain where my clothes hang and think that I have done this ever since the homicidal red-haired boy confided his fear to me and I was sorry for him and went to his room and did it for him. And my first look round will be a Wuthering-Heights look; after that I shall settle down to work and forget about myself.

I am well aware that we form, all together, one monster. But I refuse to giggle and I refuse to be frightened and I refuse to be fierce. Nor will I feed or be fed on. I will simply think of other things. I will go now. Let them stare. I am well though eccentrically dressed.

FRAGMENT OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL

What could I do but treat my secret as if it did not exist, that is, as my mother did hers until she confided it to me? which was not confiding, but a necessary explanation of the curious gift or curse (you will decide which for yourself before many pages) that I had from her (the flesh only knows how) when she put me into this world fifty-four years ago in a carved bed made of an old sea-chest that she had of her father (together with many other things) who was a Dutch Jew of a family that had fled from Spain and made its fortune as merchants and traders and in African mines and which disinherited him when he ran away to sea from school and saw things in China which neither white man nor Jew might see without death, but which long afterwards recalled him when he was in America and too proud to accept the portion denied him in his youth, which my mother never forgave him but continually during her lifetime besought me to apply for in my own person, which was pleasing and persuasive.

My mother, I say, broke her secret to no one, excepting me, and this was not breaking it, since I had the same secret, and I broke my secret to no one, which was either wise or foolish (I can’t say which) but not wicked, for had I wished it was a thing that could go against no one but myself (as you shall see). How my mother had it, she did not know, although she was of the opinion that she caught it from a travelling bookseller who secretly sold romances to the pupils of the French convent in New Orleans where her father kept her--over the garden wall. It could not be the books, she said, for they were as innocent as the Bible, with no more rapes and indeed fewer mysteries. The contamination, if it was such, must have been from his eyes, if at all, which were long-lasting ones, she remembering them many days after each visit and for a long time seeing through them, as it were. She knew nothing about him but that he was Mexican, of a poor breed but of such charm (he dressed in the Mexican manner) that she would have run away with him had not her strange possession come over her at about this time and changed the whole course of her life.

‘Perhaps,’ I suggested, when she told me this, ‘he used a charm against you. It is known there are certain herbs to be found in Mexico which may be used to cunning ends.’

‘That may indeed be so,’ my mother said, ‘for I remember he once gave me a fine gold chain to wear on which was suspended an image of a pale blue stone, and I could never make out what it represented, as it was all twisted and seemed a different thing each time I looked at it, now like a snake, now like a clenched hand or like a troll’s face.’

‘Surely,’ I cried, ‘it was this charm that brought the thing upon us.’ For I thought, if it was a charm that brought this thing on my mother, it might be a charm that would take this thing from me; and for this reason I have ever been one easily affected by superstitions of all kinds and ready to put my faith in what is but circus farce to others, a weakness that has been as great a source of misfortune to me as my possession.

‘It might indeed have been so,’ replied my mother, ‘but I cannot be sure. At about the same time Sister Mathilde began praying for me, as if God had sent her against this journeyman for my sake. She prayed in my room and soon she slept in my bed the better to protect me, and I began strongly to dislike it for she sweated powerfully and loved me more tenderly than is good for girlish sleep. Wherever I was between these two I shall never know. If one was of God and the other of the Devil, then there is a third power which exists to save the human soul from both, I hesitate to say with what intentions or effects. For as I was one morning sitting on my pot and enjoying innocent conversation with myself, suddenly I looked up, feeling myself not alone. Think how my modesty fainted to behold the room full of people all looking intently (and kindly) at me. I covered my face with my hands. I dared not rise.

‘“Never mind, child,” said a shrill voice at my ear that sounded like an aunt’s, “it will soon be happily over.”

‘“Happily over!” I tried to shriek but could not, trying to rise and button myself.

‘“Leave your dress alone, chicken, you could not look better,” said another voice at my nose, a third cousin’s by its sound. Nor could I have--I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror just then, and I was a bride! This is how I found myself married to Mr. Pink, whose calling was jobs for which no name could be found, and could ask no questions for shame, since the last I knew of myself was on a chamber-pot, but only pretend to be possessed, as seemed reasonable in the principal party of the event, of full knowledge of what was going on about me.’

This martyr’s discretion in my mother has ever been a noble example to me in my own endurance of that cruel idiosyncrasy which she, to her everlasting grief, passed on to me. ‘Never lose self-possession,’ she continually besought me, ‘or contradict circumstances, which cannot lie and which know you better than yourself.’ Dearest Mother! Shall I blame her for that inheritance she gave me against her heart and will and by which I had the blessing of her eternal (so long as she lived) solicitude? Not to mention (petty recompense and enjoyment) the liberty she gave me beyond all reasonable expectation I could have had of remorseful indulgence from her, which included the privacy of her papers which I could not read since she wrote always in bed and upon brown paper, from sombreness of spirit, and the treasures her father gave her out of spite to her mother, for bearing him a black child by perfidy of blood or whoring, it exasperated him not to know which, and of which, though all were mine from childhood, I loved and attached to me but one shabby trifle, a totem six inches long that did me for a doll while I remained a child and for a child when I became a woman and dared not breed, confide, form honourable attachments or soften my heart save to that which, being wooden, could not soften its heart to me.

My mother, as I said, having once grasped her unspeakable peril, resolved to protect herself with the means at hand, that is, to remain Mrs. Pink, if she could, until she found herself something else. And to further her security in this she formed a second painful resolve, never while she could help it to leave her bed, thinking that she might thus restrain her visitations or at least govern the place in which they seized her. Alas! restrain them she could not, and alas! a bed (as she learned too late) was more ungovernable than a chamber-pot, for in this bed she got me, in a cruel lapse when Mr. Pink her husband was in the Argentine collecting the names of common tropical plants for the Secretary of State known in private life as a gifted maker of South American tales, and when she must undoubtedly have been visited by hundreds of Mr. Pink’s friends and relatives, Mr. Pink, who understood my mother’s infirmity and never blamed it except as such, insisting that it was his uncle the Chicago photographer who had nearly an artist’s appreciation of the human form, of which my mother being half Jew and perhaps a dash negro, was an exotic and irresistible example.