The Personal Heresy Page 5

  A friend of mine once described himself as being ‘hungry for rational opposition’. The words seemed to me to hit off very happily the state of a man who has published doctrines which he knows to be controversial, and yet finds no one to voice the general disagreement that he looked for. It was with just such a hunger that I sat down to read your formidable Rejoinder to my essay on the Personal Heresy. In such matters to find an opponent is almost to find a friend; and I have to thank you very heartily for your kind and candid contribution to the problem.

  In order to narrow the controversy as much as possible I will begin by recanting all that I can recant. If I have attributed any positions wrongly either to yourself or to Mr T. S. Eliot, I withdraw the attribution at once. My defence for choosing from your works and his what were, after all, but obiter dicta, is that my enemy was much less a fully fledged theory than a half-conscious assumption which I saw creeping into our critical tradition under the protection of its very vagueness. That I should choose my examples from the works of celebrated contemporaries was but reason. The heresy, if it be a heresy, which had deceived you, Sir, could not be regarded as contemptible. Nor do I defend my belief that this heresy is a new one. You may be right in considering it ‘shop-soiled’: and certainly our business is with its credentials, not its chronology. I will even give up my interpretation of the passage in Isaiah, and admit—if this seems to you to be the truth—that my reactions to it are private, partial, and idiosyncratic: that the good reader will find burning indignation where my romantic bias turned all ‘to favour and to prettiness’. Whether my attack on the personal heresy is really a belittling of the individual or has any affinity with the ‘totalitarian’ position will best appear in what follows.

  But while I gladly make these admissions, I cannot conceal the fact that there is a residuum of still unshaken disagreement; and to this I will now proceed. Your case against me, if I have read it aright, falls under four main heads. In the first place you meet my implied conception of personality with a distinguo. Personality, you point out, does not mean such trivial accidents as I suggest but rather ‘some mental pattern which makes Keats Keats and not Mr Smith or Mr Jones’,1 and which you conceive as ‘underlying the accidents of quotidian existence’2 and displaying itself to us by style. In the second place you call my attention to what you describe as the ‘Paradox’ of poetic creation whereby the poet is ipsissimus cum minime ipse.3 Thirdly, you accuse me of confusing the means of communication with that which is communicated;4 and finally you are (in the old sense of the word) scandalized by my apparent preference of things to people.

  You will observe that this list excludes some important passages in your Rejoinder, which I do not consider it my business to answer. I was much interested in your distinction between fluid and rigid personalities; but since, as you most candidly admit, the fluid cannot be ‘deciphered’ in their literary productions,5 their existence need not concern us at the moment, and if I can make good my case for the rigid I shall have made it good a fortiori for the fluid. Nor do I propose to make clear the supposed bases of my position in doctrines ‘about racial perception, and about God’. To be sure, there is no denying that I consider my theory to be inconsistent with a thoroughgoing materialism—like every other theory, including materialism itself. But I do not in the least wish to argue the matter on that level or postulate anything that would not be granted by ‘common sense’—and if the conclusion of my essay has darkened counsel by awaking the uneasy theophobia of any of our contemporaries, I regret my blunder. I do not intend to relate my views to any ‘vaguely mystical or Platonic notion (common enough in the late nineteenth century)’.6 I will indeed confess that some desultory investigation of the problem of the Universal has left me with a certain respect for the solution (I would hardly call it vague) which Plato inclined to in the dialogues of his middle period; and my respect is not diminished by the popularity which Plato enjoyed in the nineteenth century any more than by that which he enjoyed in the seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, third, second, or first. But I base nothing on Plato. If there is anything Platonic in my position, I trust I shall argue to it and act from it. There is, indeed, only one philosophical presupposition which I think I ought to make plain before I proceed. It is one with which you seem to disagree when you contrast the Personal with ‘the abstract’.7 You must excuse me, Sir, if I ask you whether you really intend to identify the terms Personal and Concrete. If so, then the debate must indeed move on to quite different levels. I never intended to suggest that what poetry presented to us was the abstract; and I took it for granted that many things besides personality—things like apples—were concrete. Nay, if I thought personality the only concrete, I should also think it the ‘subject of all verse’: I should be a more radical ‘personalist’ than you. For me a person is neither less nor more concrete than a piece of silk (or felt!). Both are concrete, and of both it is fatally easy to think abstractly.

  With this we reach the first main head—your contention that a just conception of personality can ignore trivial things, and rise above ‘practical or everyday personality’ to some ‘mental pattern which makes Keats Keats’, and which ‘underlies’ the ‘accidents of quotidian existence’.8 This doctrine has an old and honourable descent. Even without the word underlie (and its correlative accidents) it would be apparent that we have reached something very like the traditional definition of substance: and if we stress the distinction, implicit in your language, between the superior dignity of the true personality and the ‘triviality’ of its ‘quotidian’ ‘accidents’, we shall find ourselves in agreement with that doctrine of the Noumenal and Phenomenal selves which some would call vague and mystical and which was certainly popular in the nineteenth century. For my own part, Sir, I have not the least objection to finding myself on the same side as Kant, or even the Schoolmen, in a matter of logic. But while I am anxious to exclude personality from what I believe to be its wrong place, I am much too fond of personality in its right place to accept this purified, underlying, expurgated version of it. The thing may exist (or subsist?) in some hyperuranian realm: but is it what we mean by personality? ‘Nothing’, said Johnson, ‘is too little for so little a creature as man’; and I submit that beings purged, as you suggest, of all that is little, would not be men. The smell of boiled beef, and presumably Keats’s reactions to the smell, you exclude from ‘that which makes him Keats’. What, then, of wine and his reaction to wine? Must the blushful Hippocrene be left behind with the beef, or have drinks some privilege of soaring into the realms that food cannot enter? What of women, whom Keats confessedly classed with confectionery? Do they drag up the sweetmeats to the Noumenal, or do the sweetmeats keep them down to the Phenomenal? In a word, what resemblance would your very Keats bear to the man who wrote the poems and is now dead? Take a man’s mistress, or his daughter, and give her back to him attenuated to some such ‘mental pattern’, so freed from trivialities, and he will exclaim that he might as well have followed her coffin to the grave. ‘Personality’, in the sense suggested, is not the object of affection: it is not the subject of legal rights or moral obligations: it has not, since the pattern changes, the continuity claimed for the ‘soul’ in other systems: in a word it does not seem to me to deserve the name ‘personality’ in any respect. A man whom I know dreamed that he was at Falstaff’s funeral; and as the mourners were saying that they had lost only the mortal husk of Sir John and that the real man awaited them in a better world, my friend awoke crying out, ‘But we’ve lost his fatness!’ I am not sure about the theology of this, but I approve the sentiment. Where personality is in question I will not give up a wrinkle or a stammer. I am offended when a man whom I heartily love or hate starts wearing a new kind of hat.

  It may be replied that this is a dispute about a word. If you choose to call this purged ‘mental pattern’ by the name of Personality, why should I protest? I think, Sir, for a good reason. The name suggests warmth and humanity, intimacy, the real rough and tumble o
f human life: it is by that suggestion that the personal heresy gains adherents. Would any one have embraced it—would you yourself, Sir, have embarked on its defence—if it were clear from the outset that the only personality in question was personal in so very Pickwickian a sense? But I will not press the point. Let us suppose that such ‘mental patterns’ exist, and that they are properly called personalities. The question still remains whether our apprehension of them is valuable because they are such and such patterns, or because the things seen through them are interesting or valuable. I do not think the discussion has left that question just where it found it. When once such mental patterns have been detached from the quotidian selves which they underlie, what other value can they possibly have than the value I suggest—that of being glasses or windows through which we see what is worth seeing? For certainly you can no longer talk with them, fight with them, drink with them, or dele drwry.

  Let us turn to the second point—the paradox of art, whereby the artist never expresses himself so clearly as when he has suppressed his personality. You will remember that you illustrated this doctrine by a reference to the Delphic Charioteer. The sculptor, you assumed, had no thought of self-expression: ‘yet’ (you continue) ‘the statue is like no other statue on earth’.9 What then? I never dreamed of denying that a great work of art was unique. That, Sir, is not the question between us. The question is whether the experience which we have of such uniqueness is an experience of the artist’s personality: or, more simply, whether a great (and therefore, doubtless, a unique) work expresses the maker. This being so, to argue ‘The statue is unlike all others: therefore it has expressed the sculptor’s personality’ would be a glaring petitio, and one which you have abstained from. (Your sentence runs on: ‘I believe this unlikeness . . . to be connected with the sculptor’s personality.’)10 But then it is not easy to see how the Delphic Charioteer will help us. Doubtless he is unique, sui generis, unpredictable and irrepeatable; but how can we thence infer the personality of the carver when it is clear that other things—things which are not works of art at all—are equally unique? It is not only poems or statues which seem to say, ‘I am myself alone’. A sunset, a flight of birds past the window, the gesture of an athlete, or the sudden onset of rain—any of these, at a favoured moment, may come over us with just that sense of unity and individuality which you describe and extort from us a verweile doch. It need not even be a ‘thing’, in any ordinary sense, that produces this experience: it is often a contingent bundle of the most heterogeneous data. The sun comes out—a cock crows in the yard—at the same moment I finish reading the Orlando Furioso for the first time; and all this becomes for me a unique whole, memorable and unified as a sonata, singular and definite in flavour as a sonnet, an apple, or a kiss. I am sure I should be answered pretty quickly if I tried to argue directly from such experiences to some highly personal form of theism; but my inference would be neither more nor less valid than that from the felt individuality of a statue to the belief that we are apprehending the personality of a sculptor. It is true, of course, that we start by knowing that a man made the statue as we do not start by knowing that a god made my sun-cockcrow-Ariosto complex. But does this really help? The experience occurs both when there is no known artist in question and when there is. It is simply bad logic to devise for one phenomenon an explanation that will not cover the other. If we allowed the artist’s personality to cover the instance of the charioteer, we should still have the sunsets on our hands, and when we had found a new explanation for them (theological, daemonological, psychoanalytical, physiological, or what not) then, clearly, this new explanation could be used to cover the charioteer as well, and by the law of Occam’s razor ought to be so used. The first hypothesis would now be otiose—an entitas ficta praeter necessitatem.

  I cannot help thinking that the common, but invalid, inference from the uniqueness of the work to the personality of the worker is an unconscious pun. When we claim individuality for the statue, we are using the word in its philosophical sense. Every concrete, everything that occupies space or time or both, is in this sense an individual: and it is the privilege of art (as also, more mysteriously, of certain moments outside art) to make us vividly aware of the fact. But when we pass from this real individuality in the work to a belief that we are in contact with a personality, are we not possibly misled by the fact that the word individual has another meaning in colloquial language? Because the work is individual we conclude that it displays to us ‘an individual’ in the popular sense—that is, a mind or soul or person.

  To you, Sir, it seems that I am choosing to see only one half of the paradox11—viz. the artist’s self-suppression. I reply that the other half of the paradox (his self-expression) can be granted only if we are already agreed that great and unique work expresses personality. But this, unfortunately, is the very thing we are debating.

  The third charge against me is that I have confused communication with the thing communicated. You hold that my analysis of the lines from Hyperion, while it may show that the instruments which Keats uses are common and impersonal, by no means shows that the same is true of the experience which he records. But then this analysis was meant to show only the one, and not the other. Having established, as I thought, the impersonality of the means, I then proceeded12 to work out an independent proof of the impersonality of the content: in the form, what’s more, of a dilemma with two horns and everything handsome about it. Since you, Sir, have not here perfectly followed my argument, I have little doubt that the passage is culpably obscure; and I am confirmed in this unwelcome conclusion by the fact that I am now approaching a part of the question which has certainly been darkened by my carelessness.

  You find me ‘too rigidly concerned with things and too little heedful of states of mind’.13 You cannot understand ‘the value I put on “things” ’.14 You have the impression that silk, or even felt, interest me more than the fair bodies or wise heads which they adorn. The impression is false—but I have only myself to blame. What follows must be taken as words spoken from the stool of penance.

  When I talked of ‘things’ I meant to contrast them not with ‘people’ in general but with that particular person whom we call the poet. Silk was preferred not to Julia, but to Herrick: trees not to Saturn and Thea, but to Keats. In fact, I was including ‘people’ as a species of ‘things’—though how I supposed that the reader would divine this is not easy to see. Let me now make a fresh start: and if it prove a better one, I shall owe it all to you. I freely admit that the ‘things’ most commonly presented to us in great literature are precisely those highly specialized things which we call men and women. To think of literature is to think first and foremost not of silks or forests but of Patroclus or Sancho Panza, of Roland or Micawber or Macbeth. When I selected the silk from Herrick’s poem, I did so merely for the sake of simplicity. If I had dealt with the whole poem, with Julia-in-silk, the result would have been just the same. To me, the end attained by reading the poem is a heightened perception of the charm of a beautiful woman beautifully dressed. Now I admit that this charm is conveyed to me by an account of the effect which it had (or is feigned to have had) on Herrick. But, to speak the bare truth, it never occurred to me before I read your rejoinder that either the poet or any of his readers was in the least interested in this effect at all except in so far as it is the necessary medium through which its cause (the attractiveness of Julia) appears. Let us suppose for the moment that the poem is autobiographical. Surely you will grant that Herrick, in the article of his love-liking, was interested in Julia, not in his own reactions to Julia—nay, those reactions consisted in the fact that Julia, not Herrick, absorbed him. To attend to Herrick, therefore, is to cut ourselves off from the experience that Herrick is trying to convey. To be sure, the epistemologists will tell us that Julia’s attractiveness is not a quality inherent in Julia but an effect she produces on observers. But unhappily they will tell us the same of her colour, warmth, fragrance, softness—and even, in a
sense, of her size. But certainly poetry can make nothing of this way of thinking. Poetry, like unreflective experience, must attribute not only secondary but even tertiary qualities to the object: it must give the green to the tree not to our eyes, the scent to the flowers not to our noses, the attractiveness to the woman not to our sexual nature. Julia can be described in poetry, only by her effects; but the same holds (in poetry) of sun and moon and God Almighty. Herrick has awakened to the miracle that Julia is: but it is the miracle, not the fact of his awakening, that interests both him and us—though, admittedly, we should not be interested unless he had so awaked.

  The same desire for simplicity which confused my treatment of Herrick’s poem led me, in general, to illustrate my position by passages of natural description. I see now that this has inevitably made it appear that I set some peculiar value on the inanimate. But I do not. Among the objects presented to us by imaginative literature, people or ‘personalities’ hold the chief place. I wish to exclude none of them—only the poet himself. I want all the people whom Shakespeare invented; but not Shakespeare. And the reason for this seemingly fantastic distinction is really a very simple one.

  But before I proceed to state it, I would remind you that I am theorizing not about art in general but about literature; and not even about all literature, but about imaginative literature—about poetry, drama, and the novel. I am prepared to grant that there are writings, and writings properly called literature, whose value consists in the impression they give us of the writer’s personality. Private letters are obviously in this class: and many essays are also in it. I should not be greatly disturbed if we found, now and then, a piece of such writing which, by a ‘sport’, had put on the disguise of verse. Nor do I deny that there are borderline cases—things which might plausibly be reckoned either as imaginative literature or as instances of that truly personal writing which is but talking at a distance. The distinctions between animal and vegetable or day and night remain just and profitable although they are blurred at the frontiers. And within the realm of imaginative literature there is, I maintain, a good reason for putting the poet out of sight while we read.