Were gored without a pang: as if the wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,
Passed off to Heaven translated and not killed;
As though he had no wife to pine for him,
No God to judge him.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
It is a pity that Coleridge’s blank verse should be so very blank indeed. What he had to say was important; but he said it inadequately. The English could have done with a memorable and mind-piercing statement of the dangers of abstraction; alas, they have not got it. These lines contain only the raw materials for such a statement.
Without abstractions and generalizations there could be no scientific knowledge. Why was there light when God said “Let Newton be”? Because Newton did not confine his attention to the particular apple that fell on his head; he thought about all apples, about the earth, the planets, the stars, about matter at large. Abstracting and generalizing, he illumined the entire cosmos.
The particular cases from which Newton generalized were all intrinsically insignificant. That an apple should fall is neither right nor wrong. But when a man falls, the case is altered. True, the falling man is subject to the same natural laws as the falling apple. Both have weight; but the weight that is the man is an intrinsically significant weight. It matters a great deal whether this weight falls by accident, or is pushed, or throws itself.
There are sciences of man as well as of non-human nature. Their method is the method of all the sciences. Where they differ from the other sciences is in the fact that the particular cases from which they abstract, and upon which they base their generalizations, possess intrinsic significance. Each one is a suffering or enjoying human being.
The sciences of men are necessary and valuable. But, like many necessary and valuable things, they easily lend themselves to undesirable uses. We dislike having other people’s sufferings forced on our attention, we find it very often inconvenient to have to feel compassion. To feel compassion is to feel that we are in some sort and to some extent responsible for the pain that is being inflicted, that we ought to do something about it. But most of us have no taste for doing things about anything that is not our own immediate business. To be able to think about human affairs in terms of the bodiless abstractions, the unindividualized and unmoving generalizations invented by men of science, is a real godsend. You cannot feel pity for an abstraction. Abstraction serves, accordingly, as a refuge from emotional discomfort and moral responsibility.
During wars, as Coleridge pointed out and as we all had occasion to observe, every non-combatant is a strategist—in self-defence. War is horrible, and people do not wish to be too vividly aware of the horrors. Strategy is the science of war—that is to say, a system of generalizations and abstractions, which ignores, so far as possible, the particular case. (“As if the soldier died without a wound.”) Phrases like “war of attrition” protect the mind from contact with the particular realities of mangled flesh and putrefying corpses. They are immensely popular. The world of Platonic Ideas is the most comfortable and sanitary of dug-outs.
Hocus Pocus
Plain-pathed experience the unlearnèd’s guide,
Her simple followers evidently shows
Sometimes what schoolmen scarcely can decide,
Nor yet wise reason absolutely knows;
In making trial of a murder wrought,
If the vile actors of the heinous deed
Near the dead body happily be brought,
Oft ’t hath been proved, the breathless corse will bleed.
She coming near, that my poor heart hath slain,
Long since departed, to the world no more,
The ancient wounds no longer can contain,
But fall to bleeding, as they did before.
But what of this? Should she to death be led,
It furthers justice, but helps not the dead.
MICHAEL DRAYTON.
This sonnet is, rhythmically, unusual. Drayton has divided every one of the first seven lines after the fifth syllable. The flow of the words is, in consequence, curiously light and rapid. The eighth line, with its strong caesura after the fourth syllable, falls heavily and decisively—a definite conclusion. The versification has been effectively used to emphasize the sense of the words.
This sense is, of course, pure nonsense—a typical example of plain-pathed experience’s wish-fulfilling speculations about the nature of things. The unlearned have now become vocal; they have a philosophy; they justify their refusal to take the trouble to think scientifically by an appeal to the Subconscious. Here, from a recently published volume, is a typical example of the Higher Unlearning. “When it (the water of a certain spring) was analyzed in Denver, it was said to be ‘highly charged with radium.’ That,” adds Mrs. Mabel Dodge Luhan, “that is what we need more of on this earth, Jeffers. Radium. My instinct tells me so.” What does the instinct of the people who have contracted cancer from working with radium tell them? One wonders. Malgré tout, I still prefer reason and experiment to plain-pathed experience and its wish-fulfilments, to even the most high-class instinct, the most appealingly feminine intuition.
Anti-Clericalism
Sonnet written in disgust of vulgar superstition.
The church bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More hearkening to the sermon’s horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crowned.
Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,—
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp:
That ’tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
Into oblivion;—that fresh flowers will grow
And many glories of immortal stamp.
JOHN KEATS.
Vraiment c’est bête, ces églises de villages,
Où quinze laids marmots encrassant les piliers,
Ecoutent, grasseyant les divins babillages,
Un noir grotesque dont fermentent les souliers;
Mais le soleil éveille, à travers les feuillages,
Les vieilles couleurs des vitraux ensoleillés.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
Clericalism is still a danger—witness the fate of unhappy Ireland; therefore anti-clericalism is still a duty. Vicariously, through the agency of Keats and Rimbaud, I do my bit.
Keats’s sonnet is not of the first order; but it is at least respectable and interesting. True, we must smile rather sadly at his assumption that all those who go to church are tearing themselves away “from Lydian airs and converse high of those with glory crowned.”
In actual fact most of them are tearing themselves away from the murder cases and the football competitions of the Sunday press. It is quite arguable that even the sermon’s horrid sound is better than the drivel which men and women have left in order to hear it. But this does not, of course, excuse clericalism—does not relieve us from the duty of rooting it out in order to plant “fresh flowers, and many glories of immortal stamp.”
As an attack on clericalism, the opening lines of Rimbaud’s Première Communion, here quoted, are incomparably more effective than Keats’s sonnet. “Vraiment c’est bête, ces églises de villages!” This is exactly the right thing said in exactly the right tone. Keats lacked the gift of making the colloquial and the conversational take on the intensity of poetry. To make poetry out of his experience, he had, in his own words, to transform common Wellingtons into Romeo boots. Rimbaud could keep the Wellingtons and make them glow with mysterious fire. This piece of derisive anti-clericalism is genuinely and beautifully poetic. And what admirable propaganda! He makes us actually smell the priest’s fermenting boots—ugh, with what unforgettable disgust!
Money
As I sat in the café I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking,
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
I sit at my table en grand seigneur.
And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;
Not only the pleasure, one’s self, of good living,
But also the pleasure of now and then giving.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
I drive through the streets, and I care not a damn;
The people they stare, and they ask who I am;
And if I should chance to run over a cad,
I can pay for the damage, if ever so bad.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
We stroll to our box and look down on the pit,
And if it weren’t low should be tempted to spit;
We loll and we talk until people look up,
And when it’s half over, we go out to sup.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
The best of the tables and the best of the fare—
And as for the others, the devil may care:
It isn’t our fault if they dare not afford
To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf
And how one ought never to think of one’s self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking:—
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.
I have been in love, and in debt, and in drink,
This many and many a year;
And those three are plagues enough, one would think,
For one poor mortal to bear.
’Twas drink made me fall into love,
And love made me run into debt;
And though I have struggled, and struggled, and strove,
I cannot get out of them yet.
There’s nothing but money can cure me,
And rid me of all my pain;
’Twill pay all my debts
And
