CHAPTER IVCommunication and the ArtistPoetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiestand best minds.—The Defence of Poetry.Thetwo pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are an account of value and an account of communication. We do not sufficiently realise how great a part of our experience takes the form it does, because we are social beings and accustomed to communication from infancy. That we acquire many of our ways of thinking and feeling from parents and others is, of course, a commonplace.But the effects of communication go much deeper than this. The very structure of our minds largely determined by the fact that man has been engaged in communicating for so many hundreds of thousands of years, throughout the course of his human development and beyond even that. A large part of the distinctive features of the mind are due to its being an instrument for communication. An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated. The emphasis which natural selection has put upon communicative ability is overwhelming.There are very many problems of psychology, from those with which some of the exponents ofGestalt theorieare grappling to those by which psycho-analysts are bewildered, for which this neglected, this almost overlooked aspect of the mind may provide a key, but it is pre-eminently in regard to the arts that it is of service. For the arts are the supreme form of the communicative activity. As we shall see, most of the difficult and obscure points about the structures of the arts, for example the priority of formal elements to content,*or the impersonality and detachment so much stressed by æstheticians, become easily intelligible as soon as we consider them from this angle. But a possible misunderstanding must be guarded against. Although it is as a communicator that it is most profitable to consider the artist, it is by no means true that he commonly looks upon himself in this light. In the course of his work he is not as a rule deliberately and consciously engaged in a communicative endeavour. When asked, he is more likely than not to reply that communication is an irrelevant or at best a minor issue, and that what he is making is something which is beautiful in itself, or satisfying to him personally, or something expressive, in a more or less vague sense, of his emotions, or of himself, something personal and individual. That other people are going to study it, and to receive experiences from it may seem to him a merely accidental, inessential circumstance. More modestly still, he may say that when he works he is merely amusing himself.That the artist is not as a mule consciously concerned with communication, but with getting the work, the poem or play or statue or painting or whatever it is, ‘right’, apparently regardless of its communicative efficacy, is easily explained. To make the work ‘embody’, accord with, and represent the precise experience upon which its value depends is his major preoccupation, in difficult cases an overmastering preoccupation, and the dissipation of attention which would be involved if he considered the communicative side as a separate issue would be fatal in most serious work. He cannot stop to consider how the public or even how especially well qualified sections of the public may like it or respond to it. He is wise, therefore, to keep all such considerations out of mind altogether. Those artists and poets who can be suspected of close separate attention to the communicative aspect tend (there are exceptions to this, of which Shakespeare might be one) to fall into a subordinate rank.But this conscious neglect of communication does not in the least diminish the importance of the communicative aspect. It would only do so if we were prepared to admit that only our conscious activities matter. The very process of getting the work ‘right’ has itself, so far as the artist is normal,*immense communicative consequences. Apart from certain special cases, to be discussed later, it will, when ‘right’, have much greater communicative power than it would have had if ‘wrong’. The degree to which it accords with the relevant experience of the artist is a measure of the degree to which it will arouse similar experiences in others.But more narrowly the reluctance of the artist to consider communication as one of his main aims, and his denial that he is at all influenced in his’ work by a desire to affect other people, is no evidence that communication is not actually his principal object. On a simple view of psychology, which overlooked unconscious motives, it would be, but not on any view of human behaviour which is in the least adequate. When we find the artist constantly struggling towards impersonality, towards a structure for his work which excludes his private, eccentric, momentary idiosyncrasies, and using always as its basis those elements which are most uniform in their effects upon impulses; when we find private works of art, works which satisfy the artist,*but are incomprehensible to everybody else, so rare, and the publicity of the work so constantly and so intimately bound up with its appeal to the artist himself, it is difficult to believe that efficacy for communication is not a main part of the ‘rightness’*which the artist may suppose to be something quite different.How far desire actually to communicate, as distinguished from desire to produce something with communicative efficacy (however disguised), is an ‘unconscious motive’ in the artist is a question to which we need not hazard an answer. Doubtless individual artists vary enormously. To some the lure of ‘immortality’ of enduring fame, of a permanent place in the influences which govern the human mind, appears to be very strong. To others it is often negligible. The degree to which such notions are avowed certainly varies with current social and intellectual fashions. At present the appeal to posterity, the ‘nurslings of immortality’ attitude to works of art appears to be much out of favour. “How do we know what posterity will be like? They may be awful people!” a contemporary is likely to remark, thus confusing the issue. For the appeal is not to posterity merely as living at a certain date, but as especially qualified to judge, a qualification most posterities have lacked.What concerns criticism is not the avowed or unavowed motives of the artist, however interesting these may be to psychology, but the fact that his procedure does, in the majority of instances, make the communicative efficacy of his work correspond with his own satisfaction and sense of its rightness. This may be due merely to his normality, or it may be due to unavowed motives. The first suggestion is the more plausible. In any case it is certain that no mere careful study of communicative possibilities, together with any desire to communicate, however intense, is ever sufficient without close natural correspondence between the poet’s impulses and possible impulses in his reader. All supremely successful communication involves this correspondence, and no planning can take its place. Nor is the deliberate conscious attempt directed to communication so successful as the unconscious indirect method.Thus the artist is entirely justified in his apparent neglect of the main purpose of his work. And when in what follows he is alluded to without qualification as being primarily concerned with communication, the reservations here made should be recalled.Since the poet’s unconscious motives have been alluded to, it may be well at this point to make a few additional remarks. Whatever psycho-analysts may aver, the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable field for investigation. They offer far too happy a hunting-ground for uncontrollable conjecture. Much that goes to produce a poem is, of course, unconscious. Very likely the unconscious processes are more important than the conscious, but even if we knew far more than we do about how the mind works, the attempt to display the inner working of the artist’s mind by the evidence of his work alone must be subject to the gravest dangers. And to judge by the published work of Freud upon Leonardo da Vinci or of Jung upon Goethe (e.g.The Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 305), psycho-analysts tend to be peculiarly inept as critics.The difficulty is that nearly all speculations as to what went on in the artist’s mind are unverifiable, even more unverifiable than the similar speculations as to the dreamer’s mind. The most plausible explanations are apt to depend upon features whose actual causation is otherwise. I do not know whether anyone but Mr Graves has attempted to analyseKubla Khan, a poem which by its mode of composition and by its subject suggests itself as well fitted for analysis. The reader acquainted with current methods of analysis can imagine the results of a thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught.If he will then openParadise Lost, Book IV at line 223, and read onwards: for sixty lines, he will encounter the actual sources of not a few of the images and phrases of the poem. In spite of—Southward throughEdenwent a River large,Nor changed his course, but through the shaggie hillPass’d underneath ingulft . . .in spite of—Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rillWaterd the Garden; thence united fellDown the steep glade, and met the neather Flood . . .in spite of—Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of GoldWith mazie error under pendant shadesRan Nectar . . .in spite of—Meanwhile murmuring waters fallDown the slope hills, disperst . . .his doubts may still linger until he reachesNor whereAbassinKings thir issue Guard,Mount Amara.and one of the most cryptic points in Coleridge’s poem, the Abyssinian maid, singing of Mount Abora, finds its simple explanation. The closing line of the poem perhaps hardly needs this kind of derivation.From one source or another almost all the matter ofKubla Khancame to Coleridge in a similar fashion. I do not know whether this particular indebtedness has been remarked before, butPurchas his Pilgrimage, Bartram’sTravels in North and South Carolina, and Maurice’sHistory of Hindostanare well-known sources, some of them indicated by Coleridge himself.This very representative instance of the unconscious working of a poet’s mind may serve as a not inapposite warning against one kind at least of possible applications of psychology in criticism.The extent to which the arts and their place in the whole scheme of human affairs have been misunderstood, by Critics, Moralists, Educators, Æstheticians . . . is somewhat difficult to explain. Often those who most misunderstood have been perfect in their taste and ability to respond, Ruskin for example. Those who both knew what to do with a work of art and also understood what they were doing, have been for the most part artists and little inclined for, or capable of, the rather special task of explaining. It may have seemed to them too obvious to need explanation. Those who have tried have as a rule been foiled by language. For the difficulty which has always prevented the arts from being explained as well as ‘enjoyed’ (to use an inadequate word in default of an adequate) is language.“Happy who canAppease this virtuous enemy of man!”It was perhaps never so necessary as now that we should know why the arts are important and avoid inadequate answers. It will probably become increasingly more important in the future. Remarks such as these, it is true, are often uttered by enthusiastic persons, and are apt to be greeted with the same smile as the assertion that the future of England is bound up with Hunting. Yet their full substantiation will be found to involve issues which are nowhere lightly regarded.The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest, hours when the varying possibilities of existence are most clearly seen and the different activities which may arise are most exquisitely reconciled, hours when habitual narrowness of interests or confused bewilderment are replaced by an intricately wrought composure. Both in the genesis of a work of art, in the creative moment, and in its aspect as a vehicle of communication, reasons can be found for giving to the arts a very important place in the theory of Value. They record the most important judgments we possess as to the values of experience. They form a body of evidence which, for lack of a serviceable psychology by which to interpret it, and through the desiccating influence of abstract Ethics, has been left almost untouched by professed students of value. An odd omission, for without the assistance of the arts we could compare very few of our experiences, and without such comparison we could hardly hope to agree as to which are to be preferred. Very simple experiences—a cold bath in an enamelled tin, or running for a train—may to some extent be compared without elaborate vehicles; and friends exceptionally well acquainted with one another may manage some rough comparisons in ordinary conversation. But subtle or recondite experiences are for most men incommunicable and indescribable, though social conventions or terror of the loneliness of the human situation may make us pretend the contrary. In the arts we find the record in the only form in which these things can be recorded of the experiences which have seemed worth having to the most sensitive and discriminating persons. Through the obscure perception of this fact the poet has been regarded as a seer and the artist as a priest, suffering from usurpations. The arts, if rightly approached, supply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others. The qualifying clause is all-important however. Happily there is no lack of glaring examples to remind us of the difficulty of approaching them rightly.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiestand best minds.—The Defence of Poetry.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiestand best minds.—The Defence of Poetry.
Thetwo pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are an account of value and an account of communication. We do not sufficiently realise how great a part of our experience takes the form it does, because we are social beings and accustomed to communication from infancy. That we acquire many of our ways of thinking and feeling from parents and others is, of course, a commonplace.
But the effects of communication go much deeper than this. The very structure of our minds largely determined by the fact that man has been engaged in communicating for so many hundreds of thousands of years, throughout the course of his human development and beyond even that. A large part of the distinctive features of the mind are due to its being an instrument for communication. An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated. The emphasis which natural selection has put upon communicative ability is overwhelming.
There are very many problems of psychology, from those with which some of the exponents ofGestalt theorieare grappling to those by which psycho-analysts are bewildered, for which this neglected, this almost overlooked aspect of the mind may provide a key, but it is pre-eminently in regard to the arts that it is of service. For the arts are the supreme form of the communicative activity. As we shall see, most of the difficult and obscure points about the structures of the arts, for example the priority of formal elements to content,*or the impersonality and detachment so much stressed by æstheticians, become easily intelligible as soon as we consider them from this angle. But a possible misunderstanding must be guarded against. Although it is as a communicator that it is most profitable to consider the artist, it is by no means true that he commonly looks upon himself in this light. In the course of his work he is not as a rule deliberately and consciously engaged in a communicative endeavour. When asked, he is more likely than not to reply that communication is an irrelevant or at best a minor issue, and that what he is making is something which is beautiful in itself, or satisfying to him personally, or something expressive, in a more or less vague sense, of his emotions, or of himself, something personal and individual. That other people are going to study it, and to receive experiences from it may seem to him a merely accidental, inessential circumstance. More modestly still, he may say that when he works he is merely amusing himself.
That the artist is not as a mule consciously concerned with communication, but with getting the work, the poem or play or statue or painting or whatever it is, ‘right’, apparently regardless of its communicative efficacy, is easily explained. To make the work ‘embody’, accord with, and represent the precise experience upon which its value depends is his major preoccupation, in difficult cases an overmastering preoccupation, and the dissipation of attention which would be involved if he considered the communicative side as a separate issue would be fatal in most serious work. He cannot stop to consider how the public or even how especially well qualified sections of the public may like it or respond to it. He is wise, therefore, to keep all such considerations out of mind altogether. Those artists and poets who can be suspected of close separate attention to the communicative aspect tend (there are exceptions to this, of which Shakespeare might be one) to fall into a subordinate rank.
But this conscious neglect of communication does not in the least diminish the importance of the communicative aspect. It would only do so if we were prepared to admit that only our conscious activities matter. The very process of getting the work ‘right’ has itself, so far as the artist is normal,*immense communicative consequences. Apart from certain special cases, to be discussed later, it will, when ‘right’, have much greater communicative power than it would have had if ‘wrong’. The degree to which it accords with the relevant experience of the artist is a measure of the degree to which it will arouse similar experiences in others.
But more narrowly the reluctance of the artist to consider communication as one of his main aims, and his denial that he is at all influenced in his’ work by a desire to affect other people, is no evidence that communication is not actually his principal object. On a simple view of psychology, which overlooked unconscious motives, it would be, but not on any view of human behaviour which is in the least adequate. When we find the artist constantly struggling towards impersonality, towards a structure for his work which excludes his private, eccentric, momentary idiosyncrasies, and using always as its basis those elements which are most uniform in their effects upon impulses; when we find private works of art, works which satisfy the artist,*but are incomprehensible to everybody else, so rare, and the publicity of the work so constantly and so intimately bound up with its appeal to the artist himself, it is difficult to believe that efficacy for communication is not a main part of the ‘rightness’*which the artist may suppose to be something quite different.
How far desire actually to communicate, as distinguished from desire to produce something with communicative efficacy (however disguised), is an ‘unconscious motive’ in the artist is a question to which we need not hazard an answer. Doubtless individual artists vary enormously. To some the lure of ‘immortality’ of enduring fame, of a permanent place in the influences which govern the human mind, appears to be very strong. To others it is often negligible. The degree to which such notions are avowed certainly varies with current social and intellectual fashions. At present the appeal to posterity, the ‘nurslings of immortality’ attitude to works of art appears to be much out of favour. “How do we know what posterity will be like? They may be awful people!” a contemporary is likely to remark, thus confusing the issue. For the appeal is not to posterity merely as living at a certain date, but as especially qualified to judge, a qualification most posterities have lacked.
What concerns criticism is not the avowed or unavowed motives of the artist, however interesting these may be to psychology, but the fact that his procedure does, in the majority of instances, make the communicative efficacy of his work correspond with his own satisfaction and sense of its rightness. This may be due merely to his normality, or it may be due to unavowed motives. The first suggestion is the more plausible. In any case it is certain that no mere careful study of communicative possibilities, together with any desire to communicate, however intense, is ever sufficient without close natural correspondence between the poet’s impulses and possible impulses in his reader. All supremely successful communication involves this correspondence, and no planning can take its place. Nor is the deliberate conscious attempt directed to communication so successful as the unconscious indirect method.
Thus the artist is entirely justified in his apparent neglect of the main purpose of his work. And when in what follows he is alluded to without qualification as being primarily concerned with communication, the reservations here made should be recalled.
Since the poet’s unconscious motives have been alluded to, it may be well at this point to make a few additional remarks. Whatever psycho-analysts may aver, the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable field for investigation. They offer far too happy a hunting-ground for uncontrollable conjecture. Much that goes to produce a poem is, of course, unconscious. Very likely the unconscious processes are more important than the conscious, but even if we knew far more than we do about how the mind works, the attempt to display the inner working of the artist’s mind by the evidence of his work alone must be subject to the gravest dangers. And to judge by the published work of Freud upon Leonardo da Vinci or of Jung upon Goethe (e.g.The Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 305), psycho-analysts tend to be peculiarly inept as critics.
The difficulty is that nearly all speculations as to what went on in the artist’s mind are unverifiable, even more unverifiable than the similar speculations as to the dreamer’s mind. The most plausible explanations are apt to depend upon features whose actual causation is otherwise. I do not know whether anyone but Mr Graves has attempted to analyseKubla Khan, a poem which by its mode of composition and by its subject suggests itself as well fitted for analysis. The reader acquainted with current methods of analysis can imagine the results of a thoroughgoing Freudian onslaught.
If he will then openParadise Lost, Book IV at line 223, and read onwards: for sixty lines, he will encounter the actual sources of not a few of the images and phrases of the poem. In spite of—
Southward throughEdenwent a River large,Nor changed his course, but through the shaggie hillPass’d underneath ingulft . . .
Southward throughEdenwent a River large,Nor changed his course, but through the shaggie hillPass’d underneath ingulft . . .
in spite of—
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rillWaterd the Garden; thence united fellDown the steep glade, and met the neather Flood . . .
Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rillWaterd the Garden; thence united fellDown the steep glade, and met the neather Flood . . .
in spite of—
Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of GoldWith mazie error under pendant shadesRan Nectar . . .
Rowling on Orient Pearl and sands of GoldWith mazie error under pendant shadesRan Nectar . . .
in spite of—
Meanwhile murmuring waters fallDown the slope hills, disperst . . .
Meanwhile murmuring waters fallDown the slope hills, disperst . . .
his doubts may still linger until he reaches
Nor whereAbassinKings thir issue Guard,Mount Amara.
Nor whereAbassinKings thir issue Guard,Mount Amara.
and one of the most cryptic points in Coleridge’s poem, the Abyssinian maid, singing of Mount Abora, finds its simple explanation. The closing line of the poem perhaps hardly needs this kind of derivation.
From one source or another almost all the matter ofKubla Khancame to Coleridge in a similar fashion. I do not know whether this particular indebtedness has been remarked before, butPurchas his Pilgrimage, Bartram’sTravels in North and South Carolina, and Maurice’sHistory of Hindostanare well-known sources, some of them indicated by Coleridge himself.
This very representative instance of the unconscious working of a poet’s mind may serve as a not inapposite warning against one kind at least of possible applications of psychology in criticism.
The extent to which the arts and their place in the whole scheme of human affairs have been misunderstood, by Critics, Moralists, Educators, Æstheticians . . . is somewhat difficult to explain. Often those who most misunderstood have been perfect in their taste and ability to respond, Ruskin for example. Those who both knew what to do with a work of art and also understood what they were doing, have been for the most part artists and little inclined for, or capable of, the rather special task of explaining. It may have seemed to them too obvious to need explanation. Those who have tried have as a rule been foiled by language. For the difficulty which has always prevented the arts from being explained as well as ‘enjoyed’ (to use an inadequate word in default of an adequate) is language.
“Happy who canAppease this virtuous enemy of man!”
“Happy who canAppease this virtuous enemy of man!”
It was perhaps never so necessary as now that we should know why the arts are important and avoid inadequate answers. It will probably become increasingly more important in the future. Remarks such as these, it is true, are often uttered by enthusiastic persons, and are apt to be greeted with the same smile as the assertion that the future of England is bound up with Hunting. Yet their full substantiation will be found to involve issues which are nowhere lightly regarded.
The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest, hours when the varying possibilities of existence are most clearly seen and the different activities which may arise are most exquisitely reconciled, hours when habitual narrowness of interests or confused bewilderment are replaced by an intricately wrought composure. Both in the genesis of a work of art, in the creative moment, and in its aspect as a vehicle of communication, reasons can be found for giving to the arts a very important place in the theory of Value. They record the most important judgments we possess as to the values of experience. They form a body of evidence which, for lack of a serviceable psychology by which to interpret it, and through the desiccating influence of abstract Ethics, has been left almost untouched by professed students of value. An odd omission, for without the assistance of the arts we could compare very few of our experiences, and without such comparison we could hardly hope to agree as to which are to be preferred. Very simple experiences—a cold bath in an enamelled tin, or running for a train—may to some extent be compared without elaborate vehicles; and friends exceptionally well acquainted with one another may manage some rough comparisons in ordinary conversation. But subtle or recondite experiences are for most men incommunicable and indescribable, though social conventions or terror of the loneliness of the human situation may make us pretend the contrary. In the arts we find the record in the only form in which these things can be recorded of the experiences which have seemed worth having to the most sensitive and discriminating persons. Through the obscure perception of this fact the poet has been regarded as a seer and the artist as a priest, suffering from usurpations. The arts, if rightly approached, supply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others. The qualifying clause is all-important however. Happily there is no lack of glaring examples to remind us of the difficulty of approaching them rightly.