Thought and Emotion

“I thought . . . that an artist’s instinct may sometimes be worth the brains of a scientist, that both have the same purpose, the same nature, and that perhaps in time, as their methods become perfect, they are destined to become one vast prodigious force which now it is difficult even to imagine.” (Tchehov to Grigorovitch, 1887, Tchehov’s Letters, translated by Constance Garnett, 1920, p. 76.) I have already pointed out (p. 98) that the Intimation of a coming thought may be “coloured” by an “emotion” or “feeling,” or, to use a more technical and more inclusive term, an “affect.” One of the most difficult problems in the voluntary control of the thought-process arises from this fact. A poet who desires to retain an emotionally-coloured Intimation for a period long enough to enable it to turn into a fully developed and verbally expressed thought, will find that it is extraordinarily hard to do so. If he makes a direct effort to retain his emotion, the emotion may flit away. As Blake says:

“He who bends to himself a Joy

Doth the winged life destroy.”

On this point the laboratory psychologists have carried out certain introspective experiments whose results may help us. They have compared the influence of voluntary attention upon a sensation with its influence upon an affect; and they have found that under laboratory conditions, it is easier to retain an affect indirectly by concentrating attention on the sensation which may have stimulated it than by attending directly to the affect itself. E.B. Titchener (Feeling and Attention, 1908, p. 69) says that “affections lack what all sensations possess, the attribute of clearness. Attention to a sensation means always that the sensation becomes clear; attention to an affection is impossible. If it is attempted, the pleasantness or unpleasantness eludes us and disappears,” and quotes Külpe’s statements: “It is a familiar fact that contemplation of the feelings, the devotion of special attention to them, lessens their intensity, and prevents their natural expression,” and “While pleasure and pain are brought far more vividly to consciousness by the concentration of attention upon their concomitant sensations, they disappear entirely when we succeed (and we can succeed only for a moment) in making the feeling as such the object of attentive observation” (ibid., pp. 70 and 71). Külpe and Titchener are both thinking mainly of the particular kinds of “affect” which are called pleasure and pain, or pleasantness and unpleasantness; but what they say is to a large extent true of all those other affective types of consciousness, which are so easy to distinguish from each other in a text-book, and so difficult to distinguish while watching one’s own mind.

A new thought may not only be preceded or accompanied by an affect, but may also be accompanied by, or may consist of, a visual or audile “image.” Instances may then occur where the affect is clearer and more lasting than the “image” associated with it. This may happen when the association between the two has taken place in actual sleep—as when we awake from a dream with a feeling of terror, but having forgotten what frightened us. Or the image may be a picture that has only incompletely and with difficulty been made visible to the mind by a severe effort of concentration, but which is accompanied by an unusually intense and vivid emotion. The emotional effect of Dante’s poetry upon his readers is largely due to the amazing clearness of his power of sensory imagination, but even Dante found it easier to retain the passion of the final Beatific Vision in Paradise than the Vision itself. In the last canto of the Commedia he writes: “As is he who dreaming sees, and when the dream is gone the passion stamped remains, and nought else comes to the mind again; even such am I, for almost wholly fails me my vision, yet does the sweetness that was born of it still drip within my heart. So does the snow unstamp itself to the sun, so to the wind on the light leaves was lost the Sibyl’s wisdom.” The general testimony, however, of poets and imaginative thinkers is that the retention by the thinker of his emotion and its effective communication to others is most likely to take place when it is associated with a vivid and easily retained image—when, that is to say, the psychological events follow the primitive cycle of sensation, emotion, thought.[1] Milton, in his famous description of poetry as “simple, sensuous and passionate,” puts the simple clearness of the associated sensory image before the passion. Tchehov wrote to Gorky: “You are an artist . . . you feel superbly. You are plastic; that is, when you describe a thing you see and touch it with your hands. That is real writing.” ”

For ten years, from the age of nine to nineteen, I spent a quite considerable number of hours in each week in the composition of Latin and Greek verses. For four of those years I was in the Sixth Form of Shrewsbury School, which then had something like a monopoly of the Cambridge University prizes in classical versification. We were told that if we were to succeed in gaining these prizes, or the college classical scholarships, we must use in our verses particular instead of general terms. We must say “Tuscan” or ‘Adriatic’ Sea, instead of “sea,” “ilex” instead of “tree,” and “nightingale” or ‘dove’ instead of “bird.’ We did so, choosing sometimes, when our memory failed us, some word in the “Gradus” containing the right number of short and long syllables. Why we were to do so, neither we nor our Headmaster (who had won more verse-prizes with, it seemed to me, less poetic sensibility than any one else in the long history of Cambridge scholarship) had the least idea. Because Catullus in the Troad could shut his eyes, and feel his heart stir as he saw again the view from his villa at Sirmio, because Horace was best inspired with the snows of Soracte before him, and Virgil when he remembered the kindly smoke-pillars of the Mantuan farms, therefore we were to write down syllables indicating places on the map which we have never seen, and the names of trees and flowers which we would not have recognized at Kew Gardens.

It is this emotional factor which constitutes a large part of the difficulty in choosing, when choice is possible, the language we should use in thought. One language, or nuance of language, may enable our problems to be more exactly stated, and our Verification to be more successful; but another may possess for us emotional associations which are more likely to lead to new and vivid thoughts. When I was giving, some months ago, a short course in London University based on the material of this book, a very intelligent American graduate student reproached me for attempting to state psychological problems in “vernacular” language. I could only answer that the enormous technical vocabulary used in many American psychological laboratories may (providing one recognizes that the vocabulary of one laboratory often differs from that of another) lead to greater exactness of thought; but that in this particular case, where my purpose was the exploring of a rather new problem, I believed that for me that advantage was less than the advantage of the more vernacular language, with its greater range of emotional, and, therefore, of intellectual associations. For in the “telephone-exchange” of our brain, just as an idea may call up an emotion, so an emotion may call up an idea.

Besides the problem of the relation between “vernacular” and technical vocabularies, thinkers and writers have sometimes to choose between a “literary” language which has acquired exact meaning and wide intellectual associations, but which is tending to lose its emotional associations, and a less exact unliterary language with vivid emotional associations. Those countries are, indeed, extraordinarily fortunate, where, as in Russia and Norway, literary and popular speech keep close together. Sometimes the two forms of speech end by becoming two languages. Dante had to choose between the scholastic thought of his Latin De Monarchia, and the richer thought of his Italian Commedia. Petrarch never realized that his Latin epic Africa, on which, rather than his Canzoniere, he rested his own claim to immortality, illustrated every possible bad effect of language upon thought.

A more difficult case is presented when a people with a larger literature has conquered but not absorbed a people with a smaller literature in its own vernacular, especially if that vernacular has two forms, an older literary, and a newer popular form. At this moment, in Ireland, Czecho-Slovakia, and other parts of Europe, peoples whose technical and even literary language has for long been that of their conquerors, are deciding whether they should continue to use that language, with its advantages for exact thought and wide intercommunication, or should develop a more or less submerged vernacular. Each case must be decided on its merits, and the only point on which I myself feel sure is that when an old language is no longer in any true sense a vernacular, but has become a mere field for school-culture and literary study, like Sanscrit in India, and Gaelic in Brittany and in most parts of Ireland, the balance of advantage is against its revival for the general purposes of thought and communication. Not only do such revivals add new obstacles to intellectual intercourse between nations and races and offer new temptations to the oppression of minorities, but the obvious defects of such a revived language in fulness and exactness are not compensated for by its sometimes forced emotional associations. Perhaps, if ever the hatreds of Versailles die away, the League of Nations may find itself discussing seriously whether a deliberately invented international language, with its obvious advantages in exactness and universal intelligibility, and its obvious disadvantages in emotional associations, may be worth the trouble involved in inducing the schools of the civilized world to teach it, in addition to the local vernaculars, to students likely to be engaged in commerce, scientific study, and the interpretation of legal and diplomatic documents. If it were decided to adopt such a language, new poems might after a generation be written in it, and after a century or two it might acquire such wide emotional association as to be suitable for general use.

In considering the emotional-intellectual influence of language, it has been convenient to think of all kinds of emotion as constituting together a single species. But there are certain emotions whose influence on thought can only be understood if we examine them separately. Take, for instance, that curious psychological fact (existing, apparently, only in mankind) called the sense of Humour, or of the Ridiculous. It begins with the uproarious laughter of a little child who has just discovered that he can do a new trick or can recognize a new likeness between words and things. At this point it is exactly described by Hobbes’s definition of laughter as “sudden glory” (Leviathan, Chap. VI). It always retains this quality of representing a sudden burst into a new train of association; but in later life the feeling of release which accompanies the sense of Humour is closely connected with the fact that our thought has burst through some “censorship,” some barrier, often unknown to ourselves, of custom, or morals, or self-esteem. Galileo found that his sense of humour was invaluable in clearing away for himself and his readers the mental and emotional obstacles which medieval tradition had built up across that path of logical inference which led to the Copernican astronomy.

Now that the Inquisition has passed, the need of a trained and courageous sense of Humour in the students of natural science is not so obvious as it was in the seventeenth century; but Humour is still a powerful instrument for clearing out what Carlyle called “the dead pedantries, unveracities, indolent somnolent impotences, and accumulated dung-mountains”[1] of scientific as well as social, political, and religious thought. A watchful awareness, indeed, of all Intimation that is coloured by Humour is an invaluable acquirement for any thinker who, whether as writer or organizer or teacher, has to deal with mankind, and with all the instincts and habits which arise from the fact that mankind are a semigregarious species prone to follow loyalties and solemnities even when the loyalties and solemnities have lost their original usefulness. I have before me a volume of caricatures from the Munich journal Simplicissimus during the years 1903 to 1914; and it is astonishing to see with what precise accuracy the young humourists were able to observe and communicate facts about the personalities and policies of the Kaiser and his son which every German would now recognize, but which were then hidden from almost every responsible German statesman. Mr. William Nicholson, in the New Review of June, 1897, guided by a delicate and kindly sense of Humour, published that charming woodcut of Queen Victoria walking with her Scotch terrier, which began the process, since carried on by Mr. Lytton Strachey, of freeing us from the enormous unrealities of the Jubilees of 1887 and 1897. One sometimes feels that if mankind were deprived of the sense of Humour (which is not the same thing as the habit of repeating funny stories) and were reduced in that respect to the condition of the late Mr. W. J. Bryan, all progress in social, political, or religious thought might become impossible in America.

We generally assume that Humour requires only an inborn faculty combined with the encouragement of a free-speaking and free-thinking group of friends. But every humourist, if he is to develop, and still more if he is to retain after middle life his sense of Humour, requires a long succession of little acts of personal daring. He has not only to recognize in himself what W. K. Clifford called “the still small voice that whispers fiddlesticks,” but also to insist on letting it speak out in spite of the forces within him that would silence it. He has to acquire the habit of treating every Intimation which comes to him with the colour of Humour as a challenge to his courage. Think, for instance, of the quiet heroism which enabled Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith to bring into full consciousness the following little mental experience, which most of us would have instantly huddled away from the fringe of subconsciousness into complete forgetfulness. He calls it “The Goat,” and says: “In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me—had I told them about this Goat before? And then, as I talked, there gaped on me—abyss opening beneath abyss—a darker speculation: when goats are mentioned do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat at Portsmouth ?”

Mr. Winston Churchill, in his World Crisis—1915 (1923), p- 21, has a sentence which admirably indicates the importance in war of the courageous following of Humour: “Nearly all the battles which are regarded as masterpieces of the military art, from which have been derived the foundation of states and the fame of commanders, have been battles of maneuvre, in which very often the enemy has found himself defeated by some novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unexpected thrust or stratagem.” The whole peace-training of the typical British officer is apt to prevent him from attempting to overcome in time of war his subconscious shrinking from any of those “queer” things (like the tanks) which are felt as somehow part of the “bad form” that may in the end destroy all the decent solemnities of military life. But the sense of Humour, like every other element in thought, requires for its effective use not the following of a mechanically uniform rule but the delicate manipulation of a varied art. Perhaps no English writer has so fine a natural gift of Humour as Mr. G. K. Chesterton, and his readers are often thankful to him for breaking his way by that gift towards new truth. Yet his books sometimes force one to realize that Humour without the patient effort of systematic exploration may be as misleading as patient effort without Humour.

And Humour is not the only emotion which we should learn to recognize habitually as a hint of truth, to be used skilfully rather than followed blindly. I have already (p. 75) referred to the part played in Henri Poincaré’s mathematical thinking by the æsthetic emotion of beauty. When one reads A Passage to India by Mr. E. M. Forster (1924), who has developed his natural sensitiveness by habitually watching all the emotionally coloured fringes of his consciousness, one realizes that the history of British administration in India might have been different if a larger proportion of our Anglo-Indian officials and soldiers had submitted themselves to the same form of self-training. In the tense atmosphere which is so finely indicated by his description of the garden-party given by the English Club at Chandrapore to their native fellow-subjects, one seems to detect the terrific effort of habitual suppression, by which alone the hosts in that uncomfortable ceremony are enabled to drive beneath the level of their full consciousness a score of “still small voices,” that would whisper, if they were allowed to do so, of the shortness of human life, the evanescence of empires, and the intellectual possibilities of unbuttoned sympathy.

Indeed, now that psychologists are abandoning the simplified conceptions of reason as “the slave of passion,” or instinct as a force which mechanically drives the otherwise inert thinking brain, it is becoming more and more necessary that we should reconsider in detail the relation, in the processes of intellectual inference and practical decision, of emotion and associative thought. An emotionally coloured Intimation may be the first indication, not merely that we attach this or that “Value” to an intellectual conclusion formed without the help of emotion, but that our intellectual and emotional being has, by a process of which we are only partially conscious, come as a whole to that conclusion, and that the final stage of conscious Verification may now begin. When I once asked the best administrator whom I knew how he formed his decisions, he laughed, and, with the air of letting out for the first time a guilty secret, said: “Oh, I always decide by feeling. So and so always decides by calculation, and that is no good.” When, again, I asked an American judge, who is widely admired both for his skill and for his impartiality, how he and his fellows formed their conclusions, he also laughed, and said that he should be stoned in the street if it were known that, after listening with full consciousness to all the evidence, and following as carefully as he could all the arguments, he waited until he “felt” one way or the other. Such a “feeling” will not, however, give rise to an effective new thought unless it is something deeper than an intellectual opinion that one ought to feel. I remember that a small nephew of mine said of the rather ill-tempered family dog: “Of course I love Pilot, but I don’t like him.” If my nephew had become a poet, or a naturalist, or an Under-Secretary of State, that feeling which he called “liking” might have helped to form his style or drive his thoughts to their conclusion; while the “love” which he merely knew that he ought to feel might have been a functionless ornament of his mind.

There is one emotionally-coloured Intimation which is so important in poetry that sensitiveness to it almost constitutes the special poetic gift. It is a feeling of the universal significance of some clearly-realized sensory image. Professor F. C. Prescott, the author of The Poetic Mind (1922), describes this feeling in the case of a poetically-minded man who is not a poet. He says that we “suddenly find the scene before us, fields, trees, and sky, clothed in a strange appearance, coloured by a strange light, taking us back to childhood or forward to another world, we hardly know which” (p.13). Baudelaire says: “In certain states of the soul the profound significance of life is revealed completely in the spectacle, however commonplace, that is before one’s eyes; it becomes the symbol of this significance.’ The force and depth of this Intimation may be due to its close relation to one of the most fundamental processes of life. A living organism—from the simplest protozoon to the most complex mammal—can only exist in the world on condition that it recognizes likenesses in its environment, the likeness of one scrap of food to another, or of one enemy to another of the same or a similar species.? That recognition must have preceded by long ages the dominance and even the first appearance either of the upper brain or of that continuous consciousness which the upper brain made possible. The Intimation, therefore, that we are about to make a new vast recognition of likeness—that we are about, as Plato would say, to behold the eternal pattern of which the confused likenesses between individual phenomena are clumsy copies—moves our whole being. Aristotle goes far to explain the special emotion which much of the finest poetry excites, when he says that “Metaphor is the special mark of genius, for the power of making a good metaphor is the power of recognizing likeness.”

This Intimation of significance may either appear as a feeling of the relation of some material object before us to the whole universe, Blake’s power

“To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.” Or it may be a sudden sense that some commonplace fact or saying has a new and intenser individual meaning, as when Hamlet cries:

“My tables—meet it is I set it down,

That one may smile and smile and be a villain.

At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.” But strong and deep as this feeling is, our consciousness of it is often curiously evanescent. Hamlet may find himself staring at the scribbled words on his tables, while the emotion which accompanied the writing of them a moment ago has already sunk beneath consciousness. William James (who might have been a great poet) in that chapter of his Principles which I have already quoted, speaks of our awareness of “a passage, a relation, a transition” in our thought. “If,” he says, “our purpose is nimble enough, and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find that we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated.”

Sometimes a poet strives to retain this special Intimation of significance long enough to allow it to develop into the formation and expression of a new thought, and does so by concentrating his attention upon the “sensuous” image that evokes it. Mr. Drinkwater, for instance, in his “Petition” prays:

. “that I may see the spurge upon the wall

And hear the nesting birds give call for call

Keeping my wonder new.”

Poets, indeed, spend their lives in capturing for themselves and making permanent for their readers emotionally coloured Intimations which most of us no more notice than we notice the shifting clouds in the strip of sky above our street. Sometimes the poet so describes the Intimation itself as to communicate the emotional colour of it to his hearers or readers, and leaves the emerging thought to develop in their minds. Shakespeare, in the great tragedies of his later period, showed an amazing power of doing this. If we read or hear Macbeth’s speech, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—” on being told of his wife’s death, or Hamlet’s ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world,” an emotion stimulating a new thought is started in ourselves, and is deepened and maintained both by the music of Shakespeare’s words, and by the intense reality of his images—the “poor player,” the “brief candle,” the “tale told by an idiot.”

If, however, we substitute a conscious and mechanical theory of symbolism for this spontaneous experience of Intimation, the true feeling of significance, and its power to stimulate creative thought, at once depart. I remember a conversation with Dr. Tsai, the head of the Government University in Pekin, and a leading authority on Chinese esthetics. An English friend and I had been asking him whether a new great period of Chinese art might be approaching, and in particular whether a revival of the Buddhist faith might not lend a new significance to Chinese pictures of mountains and pilgrims. “No,” he answered, if I may interpret his interpreter, “the whole tradition of Chinese art depends on the fact that the significance of the thing seen arises from the intensity of its individual reality. If the artist consciously draws his mountain as a Buddhist heaven, it will lose its essential mountaineity; and the old man who is painted as a Buddhist saint will lose the intensity, and, therefore, the significance of his ‘old-mannedness.’ ”

In the history of literary criticism all forms of Intimation and Illumination are usually indicated by the single vague word Imagination; and during the hundred years from the publication of Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition in 1759, to that of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Imagination was sharply contrasted with Reasoning or Reason. If a modern psychologist compares Imagination with Reason, he will do so in order to indicate different stages and purposes in associative thought, emphasizing, by the word Imagination, the stage of Illumination, and that awareness of the less-conscious fringe of thought which I have called Intimation, combined with the purpose of artistic creation; and by the word Reason emphasizing the stages which I have called Preparation and Verification, and the purpose of arriving at conclusions on which it is safe to act. But in the confused controversy, a century ago, in Germany, England, and France, between the “classicists” and the Romanticists,[1] the words Imagination and Reason were used to mean an opposition between two mutually exclusive processes. Imagination was, to the writers of that time, an outburst of the uncontrollable forces which in some mysterious way produced beauty and significance in poetry. Reason was a fully conscious and fully voluntary process either of discovering the logical implications of accepted truth, or of so arranging the results of observation as to lead directly and inevitably to new truth. This opposition is admirably illustrated by a comparison of Shelley’s letters in 1811 with his essay on “The Defence of Poetry” written in 1821. We should now say that Shelley in those ten years made an enormous advance in his practice of the art of thought by recognizing and emphasizing Intimation and Illumination as a necessary stage in the process of thought; Shelley himself described the change as the abandonment of Reason and the adoption of Imagination.

Shelley was expelled from Oxford on March 25, 1811, on the delation of Edward Coplestone (then Oxford Professor of Poetry,’ and later Bishop of Llandaff), for publishing anonymously certain objections, which no one at Oxford had answered for him, to the current apologetics of orthodox Christianity. It had, therefore, fallen to him as a boy of eighteen to be a standard-bearer and martyr of Reason. He had studied during his few months at Oxford the grim syllogisms of Godwin’s Political Justice. On June 11, 1811, he wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener, the first new friend he had made since his expulsion, “I am now an undivided votary of reason.” He believed, however, that in following reason he was giving up for ever both imagination and joy. ‘Towards the end of his letter to Miss Hitchener he wrote: “I recommend reason. Why? Is it because, since I have devoted myself unreservedly to its influencing I have never felt happiness? I have rejected all fancy, all imagination; I find that all pleasure resulting to self is thereby annihilated” (Campbell, p. 94).

Part of his mental suffering during that spring was due to the fact that when he looked into his mind the clear-cut distinctions of Godwin’s logic were constantly obscured by vague emotional Intimations. He wrote to Miss Hitchener (June 20, 1811): “We find ourselves reasoning upon the mystery which involves our being . . . we see virtue and vice, we see light and darkness, each is separate, distinct; the line which divides them is glaringly perceptible; yet how racking it is to the soul, when inquiring into its own operations, to find that perfect virtue is very far from being attainable, to find reason tainted by feeling, to see the mind when analysed exhibit a picture of irreconcilable inconsistences, even when perhaps a moment before, it imagined that it had grasped the fleeting Phantom of virtue.’ In July he went for a holiday to Rhayader in South Wales, and wrote to Miss Hitchener: “Nature is here marked with the most impressive character of loveliness and grandeur; once I was tremendously alive to tones and scenes .. . the habit of analysing feelings I fear does not agree with this. It [i.e., feeling] is spontaneous, and, when it becomes subject to consideration, ceases to exist. . . . But you do right to indulge feeling where it does not militate with reason. I wish I could too.”

In Shelley’s letters we can also see some of the steps that led to the change from what he called Reason to what he called Imagination. In the winter of 1814-15 he began to produce real poetry. On December 11, 1817, he wrote to Godwin: “I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole.” In 1812 he went to Italy, where, in addition to writing poetry of rapidly increasing power and beauty, he translated the Symposium of Plato and studied the Phædrus. In August, 1818, he wrote to Peacock, under the influence of Plato’s theory of poetry as the supreme form of intellectual creation, and quotes Tasso: “There is no one in the world who deserves the name of Creator but God and the Poet.’ (Ingpen, Vol. II, p. 615.)

In 1821 he wrote his Defence of Poetry, which ought to be read and re-read by every student of the psychology of thought. He still thinks of Imagination (or Poetry), with its quality of involuntary inspiration, as something to be distinguished from the completely voluntary but mechanical process of Reasoning. “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say ‘I will compose poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.’ (Shelley’s Works, H. B. Forman, 1880, Vol. III, p. 137.) Reason is now to him a mechanical process of calculation, which if it cooperates with Imagination must do so as a subordinate instrument. “Reason,” he writes in the opening of his essay, “is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance” (Ibid., p. 100).

As the essay proceeds, he comes constantly nearer to Plato’s claim that Poetry includes in itself all the necessary elements of thought, that Poetry, in the large sense in which he uses the word, is a harmony of those elements, and that if rightly used it offers to mankind guidance both for individual and for social life.* “Poetry,” he says, “compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blasted by reiteration” (p.140). “It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred” (p. 136).

Shelley wrote his Defence of Poetry at a moment in the history of the world curiously like the present. The great Napoleonic War had been concluded, five years before, by a victorious Peace. There had been during the preceding generation an immense increase of human knowledge and particularly of the sciences applicable to the production of wealth. But victory in war and the possession of new power over nature had been accompanied by an actual diminution of the happiness and worth of human life. The cause of this is, says Shelley, that statesmen and manufacturers have not learnt from the poets the art of recognizing and retaining the significance of that which they see: “The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal law of human nature” (p. 136). “Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, ‘To him that hath, more shall be given, and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away.’ The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism” (p. 132). “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life’ (p. 135). “We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies” (p. 134).

As one reads the last pages of the Defence of Poetry one begins to see light on the dark saying of Aristotle, “Poetry, therefore, is more philosophic and a higher thing than history, for poetry tends to express the universal and history the particular.” Shelley himself ends his essay with the words “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (p. 144) *; and the historians who know most of the struggle which saved England from the worst consequences of the Industrial Revolution know that that struggle represented a victory of those who could imagine its results in terms of human life over those who could only calculate percentages of commercial profit and loss. And, in our time, if Europe escapes the worst consequences of the Congress of Versailles, that fact will be ascribed by future historians not so much to the innumerable professional calculators who accompanied each national delegation, as to Mr. J. M. Keynes, who could “imagine what he knew,” and who in his Economic Consequences of the Peace dared to quote Shelley.

Notes

1 Paradiso, Canto XXIII, 55-67.

1 See above, pp. 30 and 41. 2 Quoted by J. M. Murry, The Problem of Style, p. 14.

1 Latter Day Pamphlets (edition of 1885), Downing Street, p. 113.

1 Trivia, 1918, p. 90.

1 Quoted by J. Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style, pp. 27 and 28. 2See my Human Nature in Politics, Chap. II. 3 Aristotle, Poetics (Butcher’s translation, p. 87).

1W. James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 244. 2 J. Drinkwater, Olton Pools (1912), p. 42.

1 See the admirable Tract XVII (by Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith) of the Society for Pure English (Clarendon Press, 1924) on the history of the four words, Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius.

See Shelley’s letter to Godwin, Jan. 10, 1812: “Mr. Coplestone at Oxford, among others, had the pamphlet; he showed it to the Master and the Fellows of University College, and I was sent for” (Ingpen, Letters of P. B. Shelley, 1915, Vol. I, p. 220). Coplestone was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 1802-12. He published in 1813 the Latin lectures which he had given, at the rate of one a term, during his professorship. The lecture which he must have given in the term when he caused Shelley to be expelled is entitled “Fabulæ Mythologicæ,” and he explains (p. 410) that he refers to “those fables, handed down from extreme antiquity, which a too credulous age used to receive from their parents and held to be sacred” (trans.)—which is very like a passage in Shelley’s pamphlet. * See Mrs. Olwen Campbell’s admirable psychological study, Shelley and the Unromantics (1924), p. 122.

1Ingpen, Letters of P. B. Shelley (1915), Vol. I, p. 88, and Campbell, loc. cit., p. 95.

1 Ingpen, loc. cit. Vol. I, p. 122. Ingpen points out (Ibid., p. 91) that in Shelley’s letters to Miss Hitchener “the dots are not to be taken as signs of omission, but as Shelley’s mode of punctuation.” 2 Ingpen, loc. cit., Vol. II, p. 574.

1 In “Hellas,” written a few months later than the Defence of Poetry, he definitely speaks of imagination and reason as well as will and passion as elements in the whole process of thought:

“Thought Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion, Reason, Imagination, cannot die; They are, what that which they regard appears, The stuff whence mutability can weave All that it has dominion o’er, worlds, worms, Empires and superstitions.” (Hellas, ll. 795–801).

1 Butcher’s translation of the Poetics, p. 35.

1 It is an indication of the sense in which Shelley uses the word Poetry in his Defence of Poetry that this sentence forms part of a passage taken almost verbatim from his Philosophical View of Reform (written in 1820, but left unfinished, and not published till 1920), and that he had originally written ‘Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (A Philosophical View of Reform, edited by T. W. Rolleston, 1920, p. 30).