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Readers and Writers
(1917–1921)
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My most confident prediction, however, remains
to be confirmed: it is that the perfect English style is still to be written. That it may be in
our own time is both the goal and the guiding-star of all literary criticism that is not idle
chatter.
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Preface
UNDER the title of "Readers and Writers" and over the initials "R. H. C."—the "C" occasionally becoming "Congreve" for other purposes—I contributed to the New Age,
during a period of seven or eight years, a weekly literary causerie of which the present
volume, covering the years 1918–1921, is a partial reprint. My original design was to
treat literary events from week to week with the continuity, consistency and policy
ordinarily applied to comments on current political events; that is to say, with equal
seriousness and from a similarly more or less fixed point of view as regards both means
and end. This design involved of necessity a freedom of expression distinctly out of
fashion, though it was the convention of the greatest period of English literature, namely,
the Eighteenth Century; and its pursuits in consequence brought the comments
themselves and the journal in which they appeared into somewhat lively disrepute. That,
however, proved not to be the greatest difficulty. Indeed, within the last few years an
almost general demand for more serious, more outspoken and even more "savage"
criticism has been heard, and is perhaps on the way to being satisfied, though literary
susceptibilities are still far from being as well-mannered as political susceptibilities. The
greatest difficulty is encountered in the fact that literary events, unlike political events,
occur with little apparent order, and are subject to no easily discoverable or demonstrable
direction. In a single week every literary form and tendency may find itself illustrated,
with the consequence that any attempt to set the week's doings in a relation of significant
development is bound to fall under the suspicion of impressionism or arbitrariness. I
have no other defence against these charges than Plato's appeal to good judges, of whom
the best because the last is Time. Time, if ever it should condescend to re-consider the
judgments contained herein, will pronounce upon them as only those living critics can
whose present judgments are an anticipation of Time's. Time will show what has been
right and what wrong. Already, moreover, a certain amount of winnowing and sifting has
taken place. Some literary values of this moment are not what they were yesterday or the
day before. A few are greater; many of them are less. And I think I can afford to look on
most of the changes with equanimity. My most confident prediction, however, remains
to be confirmed: it is that the perfect English style is still to be written. That it may be in
our own time is both the goal and the guiding-star of all literary criticism that is not idle
chatter.
A. R. Orage.
The New Age,
38 Cursitor Street, E. C. 4.
December 1921.
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I venture to say that whoever has understood the meaning of "disinterestedness" is
not far off understanding the goal of human culture.
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The Criteria of Culture
The suppression of the display of feeling, or, better, the control of the display of
feeling, is the first condition of thought, and only those who have aimed at writing with
studied simplicity, studied lucidity, and studied detachment realize the amount of feeling
that has to be trained to run quietly in harness. The modern failure (as compared with the
success of the Greeks) to recognize feeling as an essential element of lucidity and the rest
of the virtues of literary form is due to an excess of fiction. Just because fiction expresses
everything it really impresses nothing. Its feeling evaporates as fast as it exudes. The
sensation, nevertheless, is pleasant, for the reader appears to be witnessing genuine
feeling genuinely expressing itself; and he fails to remember that what is true of a person
is likely to be true of a book, that the more apparent, obvious, and demonstrated the
feelings, the more superficial, unreal, and transient they probably are. As a matter of
cold-blooded fact, it has been clearly shown during the course of the war that precisely
our most "passionate" novelists have been our least patriotic citizens. I name no names, since they are known to everybody.
Culture I define as being, amongst other things, a capacity for subtle
discrimination of words and ideas. Epictetus made the discrimination of words the
foundation of moral training, and it is true enough that every stage of moral progress is
indicated by the degree of our perception of the meaning of words. Tell me what words
have a particular interest for you, and I will tell you what class of the world-school you
are in. Tell me what certain words mean for you and I will tell you what you mean for
the world of thought. One of the most subtle words, and one of the keywords of culture,
is simplicity. Can you discriminate between natural simplicity and studied simplicity,
between Nature and Art? In appearance they are indistinguishable, but in reality they are
æons apart; and whoever has learned to distinguish between them is entitled to regard
himself as on the way to culture. Originality is another key-word, and its subtlety may be
suggested by a paradox which was a common-place among the Greeks; namely, that the
most original minds strive to conceal their originality, and that the master-minds succeed.
Contrast this counsel of perfect originality with the counsels given in our own day, in
which the aim of originality is directed to appearing original—you will be brought,
thereby, face to face with still another key-idea of Culture, the relation of Appearance to
Reality. All these exercises in culture are elementary, however, in comparison with the
master-problem of disinterestedness. No word in the English language is more difficult
to define or better worth attempting to define. Somewhere or other in its capacious folds
it contains all the ideas of ethics, and even, I should say, of religion. The Bhagavad Gita (to name only one classic) can be summed up in the word. Duty is only a pale equivalent of it. I venture to say that whoever has understood the meaning of "disinterestedness" is not far off understanding the goal of human culture.
[dis.in.ter.est.ed, adj. 1. unbiased by personal interest or advantage; not influenced by selfish motives: a disinterested decision. —disinterestedness, n.—See fair—Ant. partial, biased.]
from the Random House Dictionary (Unabridged Edition), Ed.
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The "subconscious" of every great book is vastly greater
than its conscious element, as the "subconscious" of each of us is many times richer in
content than our conscious minds.
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How to Read
The greatest books are only to be grasped by the total understanding which is
called intuition. As an aid to realization of the truth, we may fall back upon the final
proofs of idiom and experience. Idiom is the fruit of wisdom on the tree of language; and
experience is both the end and the beginning of idiom. What more familiar idiom is there
than that which expresses the idea and the experience of reading a book "between the
lines," reading, in fact, what is not there in the perception of our merely logical
understanding? And what, again, is more familiar than the experience of "having been
done good" by reading a great, particularly a great mystical or poetical work, like the
Bible or Milton; still more, by reading such works as the Mahabharata? Idiom and
experience do not deceive us. The "subconscious" of every great book is vastly greater than its conscious element, as the "subconscious" of each of us is many times richer in content than our conscious minds. Reading between the lines, resulting often and usually in a sense of illuminated bewilderment, difficult to put into words, is in reality intuitional reading; the subconscious in the reader is put into relation with the subconscious of the writer. Deep communicates with deep. No "interpretation" of an allegorical kind need result from it. We may be unable at once to put into words any of the ideas we have
gathered. Patience! The truths thus grasped will find their way to the conscious mind,
and one day, perhaps, to our lips.
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The
Elizabethan age was a strange age. It had very little of the passion for self-advertisement
that distinguishes our own.
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"Shakespeare" Simplified
English literary criticism lies under the disgrace of accepting Shakespeare, the
tenth-rate player, as Shakespeare the divine author, and so long as a mistake of this
magnitude is admitted into the canon, nobody of any conception can treat the canon with
respect. My theory of authorship is simple, rational, and within the support of common
experience. All it requires is that we should assume that Shakespeare the theatre-manager had on his literary staff or within call a wonderful dramatic genius whose name
we do not yet know; that this genius was as modest as he was wonderful, and as
adaptable as he was original; and that, of the plays passed to him for licking into shape
(plays drawn from Shakespeare, the actor-manager's store), some he scarcely touched,
others he changed only here and there, while a few, the few that appealed to his "fancy," he completely transformed and re-created in his own likeness. There is nothing incredible, nothing even requiring much subtlety to accept, in this hypothesis. The
Elizabethan age was a strange age. It had very little of the passion for self-advertisement
that distinguishes our own. It contained many anonymous geniuses of whom the obscure
translators of the Bible were only one handful. The author of the plays may well have
been one of the number—a quiet, modest, retiring sort of man, thankful to be able to find
congenial work in re-shaping plays to his own liking. That, at any rate, is my surmise,
and so far from thinking the theory unimportant, I believe it throws a beam of light on the
psychology of genius during the Elizabethan age.
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…after all, it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the
colloquial Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English the
meaning of the Gospel writers…
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The Newest Testament
Various attempts have been made from time to time to "render" the New
Testament into colloquial English in order to bring it "up-to-date." None of these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far been more than a nine days' sensation, and even
less than that length of life is destined for the latest attempts, Sayings and Stories, a translation into "colloquial English" of the Sermon on the Mount and some Parables.
The Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College gives
us his assurance that however "startlingly unlike the familiar versions" these translations by Mr. Hoare may be, they are nevertheless "actual translations and not mere
paraphrases," and he commends the "style" to the "candid judgment of the reader." The prose sections, in particular, he says, are "curiously reminiscent" of the "homely speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ have been preserved." It may be so, but then, again, it may not; since, after all, it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the colloquial Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English the meaning of the Gospel writers; and this may very well require, not colloquial English, but the English vernacular in its highest degree of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the popular Greek in which much of the New Testament was
written to pass a candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but if the aim of the
original writers was the grand style simple—as it must have been—whether they
achieved it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the English of the authorized translation.
Assuming the original, in fact, to be "faithfully" represented in the colloquial English of Mr. Hoare, I unhesitatingly say that the English of the authorized translation is nearer the spirit of the original than the present translation, and, in that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions of the original authors.
It would be tedious to cite more than one example, and I will take it in the very
first sentence of Mr. Hoare's translation. "What joy," he says, "for those with the poor man's feelings! Heaven's Empire is for them," the authorized translation of which is too familiar to need quotation. I do not see what is gained, setting aside the cost by the
substitution of the exclamatory "What joy…" for the ecstatic affirmation, "Blessed are the poor." Why again, "the poor man," and, after that, the "poor man's feelings"? Why also "Heaven's Empire" instead of "the Kingdom of Heaven" and why "is for them" instead of "theirs is"? The gain, even literally, is imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has been sacrificed. "Blessed" is an incomparably more spiritual word than
"joy"—in English, at any rate, whatever their respective originals may indicate; and there is a plane of difference between an incontinent ejaculation such as "What joy," which resembles "What fun," and has in view rather a prospect than a fact—and the serene and confident utterance of an assured truth. Further, and again without regard to the literal original, "a poor man's feelings" must be miles away from the intention of the original authors, since it definitely conveys to us associations derived from social surroundings, social reform, and what not. Was this the intention of the Sermon on the Mount, the very location of which symbolized a state of mind above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? Was it a socialist or communist discourse? If not, the "poor man's feelings," in our English colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and the original must have meant something symbolically different. The substitution, again, of "Heaven's Empire" for the "Kingdom of Heaven" may be, as Professor Dodd assures us, a mere correct literal translation of the original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can contemplate it without grieving over the lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect of an "Empire," even Heaven's Empire, to us today? As certainly as the phrase "Kingdom of Heaven" has come to mean, in English, a state of beatitude, the reversion to an "Empire" marks the decline of that state to one of outward pomp and circumstance. The spiritual meaning which must have characterized the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. The volume
is published by the "Congregational Union of England and Wales," and it serves to
indicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can sink. We only need now this
"colloquial English" version in the "nu speling" to touch bottom.
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It is from an appreciation of the many-sided nature of truth, and, consequently from an
appreciation of the many faculties required to grasp it, that the value set by the world on
common sense is derived.
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Psycho-Analysis and the Mysteries
It would be unwise to make a dogma of any of the present conclusions of psycho-analysis. As a means of examining the contents of the subconscious, psycho-analysis is
an instrument of the highest value, but in the interpretation of what it finds there, and in
the conclusions it draws as to their origin—how the apple got into the dumpling, in fact—psycho-analysis requires to be checked by all the knowledge we have at our command.
Mr. Mead has raised the question of origins, but it is just as easy to raise the question of
interpretation. I am not satisfied that the interpretation placed by Jung on myths is any
more than correct as far as it goes, and I am disposed to think that it does not go far
enough. His reduction, for example, of a whole group of myths to the "incest" motive,
appears to me, even in the light of the definition of incest as the "backward urge into
childhood," to give us only a partial truth, an aspect of truth. For there is a sense in
which an "urge into childhood" is not backward but forward, not a regression into an old, but a progression into a new childhood. "Unless ye become as little children, ye can in non wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven." "Incest" is a strictly improper term to apply to such a transformation; the new birth might suit the case better. Mr. Mead takes the same view. The interpretations of psycho-analysis carry us back, he suggests, to the lesser
mysteries; but they need to be "elevated" in the Thomist sense in order to carry us back to the greater. So long as it confines itself to the "body" psycho-analysis must plainly be confined to the lesser mysteries, for the lesser mysteries are all concerned with
generation. The greater mysteries are concerned with regeneration, and, hence, with the
"soul" and even if we assume the "soul" to require a body, we are outside the region of ordinary generation if that body is not the physical body. The psycho-analytic
interpretation suffers from this confinement of its text to the physical body, since "the
genuine myth has first and foremost to do with the life of the soul."
Another caution to remember is that reality cannot be grasped with one faculty or
with several; it requires them all. Only the whole can grasp the whole. For this reason it
is impossible to "think" reality; for though the object of thought may be reality, all reality is not to be thought. Similarly, it is impossible to "feel" or to "will" or to "sense" reality completely. Each of these modes of experiencing reality reports us only a mode of reality, and not the whole of it. Before we can say certainly that a thing is true—before, that is, we can affirm a reality—it must not only think true, but feel true, sense true, and do true. The pragmatic criterion that reports a thing to be true because it works may be contradicted by the intellectual criterion that reports a thing to be true because it "thinks" true; and when these both agree in their report, their common conclusion may fail to be confirmed by the criterion of feeling that reports a thing to be true when it "feels" true. It
is from an appreciation of the many-sided nature of truth, and, consequently from an
appreciation of the many faculties required to grasp it, that the value set by the world on
common sense is derived. For common sense is the community of the senses or faculties;
in its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense
when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion, and all the senses; when, in fact, it
satisfies all our various criteria of reality. Otherwise a statement may be logical, it may
be pleasing, it may be practical, it may be obvious; but only when it is all is it common sense.
But can we, with only our present faculties, however developed and harmonized,
ever arrive at reality? It may be that in the natural order of things, humanity implies by
definition a certain state of ignorance, and that this state is only to be transcended by the
over-passing of the "human" condition. Psycho-analysis is still only at the beginning of its discoveries, but on the very threshold we are met by the problem of the nascent or
germinal faculties of the mind. Are there in the subconscious "yearning to mix
themselves with life," faculties for which "humanity" has not yet developed end-organs? If this be so, as our fathers have told us, the next step in evolution is to develop them.
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