Under his pen, two islands grow where only one grew before. He is perpetually recognizing new states, emphasizing the distinction between those already known. In the modern novel psychological analysis has been carried to a point never reached before. With what results? That “characters,” in the accepted sense of the word, have disappeared, to be replaced by a succession of states. We know each state very well; but what precisely is the sum of the states? what, finally, is the character of the man under analysis? Of that, as analysis goes further and further, we become less and less certain.
Writing of Stendhal, Professor Saintsbury speaks of “that psychological realism, which is perhaps a more different thing from psychological reality than our clever ones for two generations have been willing to admit or, perhaps, able to perceive.” Joyce, Proust and a host of minor writers have carried the realistic analysis many stages further than it was taken in Le Rouge et le Noir. And the “psychological reality” of individualized characters has correspondingly grown dimmer.
What has happened in the realm of psychology is analogous to what has happened in the realm of physics. The physicist who analyses any common object of sensuous experience comes at last to a sub-atomic universe not merely quantitatively, but even qualitatively different from the macroscopic world of daily life. The laws of nature which hold good when we are dealing with billions of atoms do not apply when we are dealing with thousands or unities. A table is radically different from the atoms of which it is composed.
Some such difference seems to hold between characters and the individual states into which they can be analysed. We can look at human beings macroscopically or microscopically, with the eye of Shakespeare or the eye of Lawrence. Thanks to the psychological research-workers, it is possible for us to see ourselves and our fellows as individuals or as successive states—and therefore as morally responsible for what we do, or as morally irresponsible.
Man and Nature
For, oh! is it you, is it you,
Moonlight, and shadow, and lake,
And mountains, that fill us with joy,
Or the poet who sings you so well?
Is it you, O beauty, O grace,
O charm, O romance, that we feel,
Or the voice which reveals what you are?
Are ye, like daylight and sun,
Shared and rejoiced in by all?
Or are ye immersed in the mass
Of matter, and hard to extract,
Or sunk at the core of the world,
Too deep for the most to discern?
Like stars in the deep of the sky,
Which arise on the glass of the sage,
But are lost when their watcher is gone.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
The world, like an ore-bearing mountain, is veined with every possible kind of significance. We are all miners and quarrymen, tunnelling, cutting, extracting. An artist is a man equipped with better tools than those of common men—sometimes, too, with a divining rod by whose aid he discovers, in the dark chaotic mass, veins of hitherto unsuspected treasure—new meanings and values. He opens our eyes for us, and we follow in a kind of gold rush. The whole world seems all at once to glitter with the nuggets which he first taught us to see. What was empty of significance becomes, after his passage, suddenly full—and full of his significance. Nature, as Wilde insists in one of the best of his essays, is always imitating art, is perpetually creating men and things in art’s image. How imperfectly did mountains exist before Wordsworth! How dim, before Constable, was English pastoral landscape! Yes, and how dim, for that matter, before the epoch-making discoveries of Falstaff and the Wife of Bath, were even English men and women!
Nations are to a very large extent invented by their poets and novelists. The inadequacy of German drama and the German novel perhaps explains the curious uncertainty and artificiality of character displayed by so many of the Germans whom one meets in daily life.
Thanks to a long succession of admirable dramatists and novelists, Frenchmen and Englishmen know exactly how they ought to behave. Lacking these, the Germans are at a loss. It is good art that makes us natural.
Nature has no outline, but Imagination has.
Nature has no tune, but Imagination has.
Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves.
Imagination is eternity.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
At Altamira and in the painted caves of the Dordogne there are palaeolithic bisons that might have been drawn by Degas. On the walls of the rock shelters of a later age there are neolithic figures of men and animals that might have been drawn by a child of seven. And yet all the evidence conclusively shows that the men of the New Stone Age were incomparably more intelligent and accomplished than their Magdalenian ancestors. The seeming degeneration of neolithic art is in fact an advance. For it marks an increase in the power of generalization. When he drew his bisons, the palaeolithic medicine man was simply putting an outline round his visual memories. The neolithic artist worked in a different way. What he set down was a set of hieroglyphical symbols, each representing an intellectual abstraction. A circle—that stood for Head; an egg for Body; four lines for Arms and Legs.
Neolithic man, it is evident, had learned to think mainly in words—real conceptual words, not mere noises expressive of emotional states. Apes have emotional noises, but no names for classes of objects. The language of palaeolithic man was probably not very unlike the language of apes. He must have found it difficult to make noises when emotionally calm. (An unexcited dog cannot bark.) Noises that were intellectual abstractions—these he was only just learning to make. His power of generalization was therefore extremely feeble. He thought in terms of particular images. Hence the snapshot realism of his bisons—a realism which is only recaptured when men, grown very highly civilized, discover a technique for forgetting that art of abstraction, which made civilization possible, and learn to look at the world once again with the unprejudiced eyes of beings who do not yet know how to speak. Nature, then, does not change; but the outlines that man sees in Nature, the tunes he hears, the eternities he imaginatively apprehends—these, within certain limits, are continuously changing.
Of thee, kind boy, I ask no red and white
To make up my delight,
No odd becoming graces,
Black eyes, or know-not-whats in faces;
Make me but mad enough, give me good store
Of love for her I court,
I ask no more;
’Tis love in love that makes the sport.
There’s no such thing as that we beauty call;
It is mere cozenage all;
For though some long ago
Liked certain colours mingled so and so,
That doth not tie me now from choosing new;
If I a fancy take
To black and blue,
That fancy doth it beauty make.
’Tis not the meat, but ’tis the appetite
Makes eating a delight;
And if I like one dish
More than another, that a pheasant is.
What in our watches, that in us is found,
So to the height and nick
We up be wound,
No matter by what hand or trick.
SIR JOHN SUCKLING.
How admirable is the colloquial ease of the seventeenth century! These high-spirited gentlemen talked in their natural voices, and it was poetry. The art died with them and has never since been recovered.
’Tis not the meat, but ’tis the appetite
Makes eating a delight.
This is true. But it is also true that, our physiology being what it is, there are some foods which we simply cannot relish.
If I a fancy take
To black and blue,
That fancy doth it beauty make.
Suckling puts his argument in the conditional. If. But in point of actual fact it is almost infinitely improbable that he will take a fancy to black and blue. Nature and second nature have limited him to white and gold, to olive and black, to sunburn and chestnut. Arguments based on conditional clauses lose their persuasive force when we discover that the conditions are never likely to be fulfilled. There are values which persist, because there is a physiology which persists and, along with a physiology, a mental structure.
Hector
Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost
The holding.
Troilus
What is aught but as ’tis valued?
Hector
But value dwells not in particular will;
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein ’tis precious in itself
As in the prizer. ’Tis mad idolatry
To make the service greater than the god;
And the will dotes that is inclinable
To what infectiously itself affects,
Without some image of the affected merit.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Things may be said to be “precious in themselves” in so far as all men have similar bodies, together with minds that, for all their immense variety, still preserve certain common characteristics. To any class of objects, like valuers will tend to attribute like values. For practical purposes, these persistent values may be regarded as “absolute” and the valued things as “precious in themselves.”
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with the flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life; and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things
