BY JAMES H. COUSINS, D.LIT.

If we accept the verdict of English literary criticism on what it has decided to remember as relatively immortal in English poetry, and make a curve of the latter since its Anglo-Saxon beginnings, we shall draw a line resembling a series of waves growing higher and higher until the ascent in our time flies over our heads towards an incalculable future.

Whatever bend that future may add to the curve, the achievement up to our point on it constitutes a mass of literary material which is quite beyond the capacity of any individual to give it complete study. Much of it has become literary archeology, despite its retention in academical syllabuses. Its language and environment are largely obsolete. Its annotations, whereby life is sought to be injected into it, are in reality its epitaphs.

The process of denudation in poetry which is indicated by explanatory annotation is not sufficient to preserve a manageable area of tillable poetical land. The emergence at our end of literary history is at a much higher ratio than the submergence at the other end. An American girl not yet sixteen (1929) has wrought more of the stuff of eternity into poetry than did the first two centuries of English literary history.

This increase of poetical quantity and quality creates a problem for the literary education of the future. Selection is necessary; and the inter-relations of comprehension and enjoyment of poetry, making varied calls on the mental and emotional endowment of editors and anthologists, makes personal predilection at present the main law of syllabuses and texts.

Reliance on the sifting capacity of time may be suggested. But the matter is so pressing that we have not time now to wait on Time. We have also lost assurance in its infallibility. Two centuries of burial under Samuel Johnson's epithet ‘metaphysical’ have not prevented the spirits of Donne and his confederates from finding incarnation in editions beyond their longest dreams. If their idea of a best seller was a book that, because its quality was of the best, sold least in quantity, they must wonder what is wrong with posterity. And he who buried them has taken a place among the forgettable shades in the literary Valhalla, and may or may not storm ghostily at the peculiar perversion of speech that has turned his term of opprobrium into one of merit.

In modern criticism, too, exploring feet strike disconcerting snags. Explanatory annotation is not its test, for footnotes on fact remain much the same as they pass from one generation of editors to another. But the exposition of interior significances is another matter, and calls for an interpretative endowment which is not always in the possession of those who undertake the responsibility of selection for students or judgment for the general public.

For example In an annotated edition of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode for schools, we find a curious obscuration of the meaning of the concluding quatrain. The lines are:

"In these beautiful lines," says the annotator, "Wordsworth insists once more that it is by the heart that we truly live: that to love is to believe." But the annotator is not satisfied with this doctrine, and asks the question: "Is not knowledge necessary for belief? for love itself.?" But if we read the lines attentively we shall see that, while the poet does give the larger share of the four lines to the emotional aspect of the matter, he places himself behind the feeling and thinking aspects of his life. Through feeling he makes contact with Nature, thus establishing the sympathetic relationship (which is the real burden of the lines) without which true understanding (not merely feeling) of the significances of life is unattainable. But the emotional element is not an end. It is a means. Thanks to it the mental mode of the poet's life receives a richer contribution of thoughts; and these thoughts, evoked by sympathetic relationship, take on a profundity beyond emotion. He reaches inner understanding. And this is the whole temperamental character of Wordsworth. He is of the reflective order, and makes the experience of "the human heart" the means towards the illumination of "the philosophic mind."

Take an example from American criticism. A recent anthology of modern American poetry impresses one accustomed "to the richness of English poetry with its spiritual and intellectual poverty. But one is halted on the verge of a judgment of American poetry when, near the end of the book, one comes upon the phrase, in regard to one poet, "a too determined

Mysticism" and, in regard to another, a criticism of his first book as "a strange mystical affair." There is here an obvious intrusion of barriers and personal limitations; a lowering of criticism, from its function of balancing, to the mere weighting of scales against mysticism in poetry. The darkening effect of predilection is seen in the same critic's disposal of The Builder by Willard Wattles as being like "scraps of Scripture rendered by Mother Goose." The limitations of the little lyric are obvious. But the dramatic interpretation involved in it has escaped the critic. An anti-theological prejudice has prevented his seeing its purely spiritual significance, which belongs to no special Scripture, but is written on the open page of every introspective imagination.

The poetry of laughter seems to be in no better case with modern criticism. The compiler of an alleged humorous anthology recently published in London tells us, in his preface, that he had included nothing that had made him not merely smile but laugh. He includes Byron's Vision of Judgment which he describes as "a masterpiece of humour." There is surely some perversion of literary values when Byron's outpourings of bitter and brutal sarcasm on George III are regarded as humorous, and when sarcasm and bad manners in verses on other nations than his own and in epigrams on the dead, are esteemed by the anthologist as matters for laughter. The anthologist gives the book the sub-tittle A Book of Buffoonery; but balanced criticism will hardly accept this as excusing an attitude which is destructive of literary sanity by presenting, as comic, subjects that are essentially tragic. Murder, suicide, and sudden death put on horse-collars for a jape. The name and location of a dead chieftain in India are punned on in a "threnody." A screed in the same manner on the death of a king of England by a poet of India would be regarded as something else than comic. A poem by a clergyman, The Female Friend, an innocent and sincere expression of the quiet joy of comradeship between a good man and an accomplished woman, is included because it is "unintentionally comic." From which it would appear that verses jeering at relationships between men and women are eligible for the comic laurel in their own right, while verses of transparent purity are only eligible if they can be leered at with the aphrodisian suggestion which is so disastrous a portent in the modern literary (and artistic) atmosphere of the occident.

Literary evaluation of the kind thus exemplified has been defended on the ground that art must be judged solely as art. But the dogma of literary irresponsibility is rapidly becoming untenable before the test of life that is reaching towards the sceptre of all human endeavour. A rising literary pragmatism begins to feel that literary critisism which is merely literary is not criticism. Creative literature, serious or comic, speaks out of life; and true criticism must look at literature not out of literature but out of life. And it must do so not merely in service to individual writers, but in service to those groupings of writers in eras and movements which take their place with labels, such as classical, romantic or metaphysical, labe1s that assume an air of finality and compel approach through fixed assumptions that paralyse contemporary understanding and enjoyment by obscuring the eternal under the terminology of the temporal.

Only by the test of life, not his private life, not the life of his time, but of life today, and life in its fullness, are we now getting a glimpse of, for example, the reality of Shelley's poetry. Any student of English literature can tell us that he was one of the poets of the third romantic era in English poetry at the opening of the nineteenth century. But to Matthew Arnold he was an "ineffectual angel" to Stopford Brooke "the least comprehensible of all the poets of England" to Lafcadio Hearn "a very great fool" with "less solid matter in him than any other English poet who has reached the first rank." A newer criticism, born into the era of analytical psychology, begins to regard these utterances less as final judgments on Shelley than as self-disclosures of dark areas in critical vision, Today we regard solidity with less respect than we regard the radio-activity that William Watson saw in Shelley as his "flush of rose on peaks divine"; we have left Brooke's critical domesticity at the Victorian fireside. The "ineffectual angel" has become a regenerating power; his poetry becomes increasingly comprehensible as the capacity of humanity to comprehend it increases; his wisdom is patent to the wise; his matter becomes the most significant in English poetry. And his literary criticism begins to be regarded as the finest guide to the understanding and enjoyment not only of his own poetry but of all poetry, because it seeks to penetrate beyond personal vagary into eternal verity.

"All high poetry is infinite," wrote Shelley in A Defence of Poetry; "it is as the first acorn which contains all oaks potentially. Veil after veil will be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight."

It is a fact of literary history that, while empires have survived quite a large number of poets, there are certain poets of the "infinite" order who have managed to survive empires: and the poet who, in the general subsidence of the past, has managed to sustain his peak above the horizon, has set less store on the expanse of his base than on the altitude of his summit. Take care of the summit and the base will take care of itself is a law of the poetical life. The base may cover a vast number of finitudes, like so much of the alleged poetry of today. But, as Vasishta, a wise man of the East, said many centuries ago, "the mere addition of the finite to the finite cannot produce the infinite." The summit reaches towards the One Infinite from which the finitudes descend. We know more about Homer today than Homer did. That part of him (or them) that is incarnate in the Homer of words responds to our deepening and expanding question because the height of his genius gave his vision a deeper depth and wider horizon. His mouth uttered more than his words because his inner ears heard the vast significances that whisper from star to star, significances that ultimately elaborate themselves into the codes and calendars of mortal life. The Word is made flesh, and the flesh is rumourous of its parentage. The obiter dictum of God is atomised into the obiter dicta of the poets.

This quality of spiritual involution in poetry, and of consequent evolutionary response to those who can give the true evocative touch, is due, as Shelley points out, to the fact that poetry (and we are thinking only of ‘high’ poetry) "acts in a divine and unapprehended manner beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union."

In this affirmation we have the foundation of a true psychological estimate of the nature and function of poetry: psychological in being founded on the psyche, or soul of humanity, not on a sex-complex or neural reactions or emotional fluctuations. Poetry is thus seen as a river whose source is on the hidden peaks of the inner nature of the poet, which breaks at its source into two cascades, one mental, the other emotional. These cascades reunite where they merge into expression. They take on local appearance from environment; but their animating principle is the flowing water from the living spring.

Emerson in his Ode to Beauty gives us the phrase for the first poetical manifestation of this descending creative stream. He calls the ‘high’ poets

The first item in a qualitative estimate of poetry is the proportion of ‘divine ideas’ that it contains; that is to say, those intuitional assumptions, those basic attitudes and directions towards ultimate reality, that are the core and inspiration of the poet's creative life. These ‘divine ideas’ (the immortal ejaculations of the poet) may be an instant's flash from the heaven of his spirit; but the clouds of his imagination will give the lightning of the idea a shape and its thunder a rhythm, and both will bring the ‘ecstasy of rain’. In other words, the creative activity of the intuition will proceed to intelligible formulation which will be accompanied by aesthetical responsiveness; or may move towards emotional expression in intelligible form.

These elements constitute the full ‘soul’ of a poem; the psychological trinity-in-unity of intuitive impulse, cognitive mode and aesthetical mood. But the soul will remain discarnate

unless it finds an instrument capable of imparting to it the outgoing energy and rhythmical quality which we may call its life, and the localisation of substance, in words and arrangement, which we may call form.

We have now before us a complete conspectus of the whole nature of a poem; its soul and body; its inner psychological content its intermediate biological element, its external physiological and anatomical constituents. But we have something more than this. We have the whole nature of the poet himself. We have moreover, the whole nature of the Cosmic Life so far as we can contact it. The ancients of India saw this category millennia ago, and called them the tattwas and tanmatras of the universe, or the structures and orbits of the atomic bases of life.

The poets themselves have at times expressed their sense of personal and creative affiliation with a deeper process than merely emotional reaction to external stimuli; and it is interesting to note how the creative imagination lays out its pattern of process on the four corners of reality–creative impulse, thought, feeling, and external presentation. A few indications must here suffice.

A Hindu poet of the seventh century, Appar, singing in the Tamil language, figures the paraphernalia for the calling forth of inner reality as a churning-rod of love operated by the cord of intelligence, each imparting something of itself to the other, and thus removing the obstruction of either mental or emotional exaggeration from the way of the inner Being. Shelley anticipated the evolutionists in the forty-third stanza of Adonais by a generation, and leaped so heartily forward that he has passed over the heads of the Freudians on his trajectory of poetical prophecy towards the point in psychological history when "the One Spirit's plastic stress" will be discovered as the master ‘complex’. In the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, in the Chorus of Spirits beginning "Our spoil is won," he gives us a complete category of psychological process. The freed Spirits call to their service the powers of "Love, Thought and Breath" in order to build" a world for the Spirit of Wisdom to wield." The pattern here may be perfectly superimposed on that of the Katha Upanishad, the ancient Hindu scripture of cosmic and human psychology, which declares that there are two beings, the cosmic soul (Shelley's ‘Spirit of Wisdom’) and the individual soul (Shelley's ‘Spirits of the Human Mind’), who jointly in the exercise of intelligence (Shelley's ‘Thought’) experience enjoyment (the emotional experience which Shelley calls ‘Love’) in their good deeds (the vital activity which Shelley calls ‘Breath’). It will be noted also that the purpose of creative expression is here inferred. The Spirits of the Human Mind serve the Spirit of Wisdom; deeds are for the enjoyment of the Soul.

Even Swinburne, who is not usually credited with philosophical acumen, shows the stigmata of reality on his creative imagination. His sonnet To George Frederick Watts opens thus:

Faith is his equivalent for the Spirit of Wisdom; the activity here is art. The adjectives ‘high’ and ‘hallowed’ give altitude to the creative spring.

Rabindranath Tagore, the lineal descendant of the oriental singers who are also seers, in an essay on The Principles of Literature writes:

Our soul has her hunger for . . . immediateness of realisation, whereby she is enabled to know herself. The love, the contemplation, the vision, that alone can satisfy this hunger finds its place in Literature, in Art.

Again the "Square Deific" appears, –vision, which is the creative exercise of the intuition; contemplation, which is thought as the oriental mind thinks it; love, and art; and again the declaration that the purpose of art is the service of the Soul, not the service of art itself, not the service of sense.

Now this, that we may call the spiritual view of the arts, is very different from the hedonistic view which, from the days of Aristotle to our own, has held that the purpose of art is only to impart pleasure. "The Master of Those who Know" had, however, a more dignified idea of the purpose of art than the production of that kind of pleasure which is experienced in the practice and appreciation of such kinds of art as Herbert Spencer stigmatised as "alternating between the sensual and the sanguinary." Aristotle's idea of happiness was that of the thinker. It was not a matter of sensuousness or sentiment merely, but of moral and intellectual experience. It came out of the discovery of the individual's own true expression and the control of the lower nature by the higher in order to preserve a true and healthy instrument of expression.

When the creative impulse is set free in art, it gives the double happiness of release from inner pressure (a spiritual complex) and of tangible realisation, in permanent art-forms, of intangible and impermanent impulses. By the exercise of his art the artist projects his share of eternity into temporal and spatial limitations, and at the same time imparts to his external expressions the sense of inner largeness. Others share in the artist's experience, through his art-forms; for the creative impulse is common to all, though as yet starved in the multitude, and its achievement gives, with variations caused by varied temperamental endowment, a common happiness. This is the true hedonism of art. But it has gradations of shadow, from the lofty response to "divine ideas’ to the guffaw at pruriency in rhyme or shape.

The general hedonistic syllogism that, because art gives pleasure, therefore pleasure is the purpose of art, has passed into another with the temporary passing of life into the laboratory namely, that, since sex is the subject-matter of art (a premise which is not fully true of occidental art and almost completely false of oriental art), art is therefore the expression of a sex-complex. ‘In the view which we are here enunciating, art is the expression of the cosmic creative impulse which, is universal and inescapable. This impulse, which may be termed a creation-complex, fulfils itself not only in physical forms, but in emotional and mental forms, and for the same purpose, namely the carrying on of the inter-related phases of the universal life, the cognitive, the aesthetical and the substantial. Over-emphasis on anyone of these phases leads to monstrosity, though the process of expression even in exaggeration has its accompaniment of pleasure in some degree. The liberation of the pent-up life is the ultimate end of expression; but the pleasures of the ‘sensual and sanguinary’ order which dominate occidental art today do not release; they put chains of habit on the expansive nature of humanity, and lead to satiety, degradation and disintegration. The high pleasure of high art, on the contrary, is the purifying and exalting reward given by the Universal Soul to the soul of humanity for providing fit ways for the release of its super-abundant energy.

That poetry is not yet certain of its own reality, its true nature and function, is seen in its oscillations between the domination of thought which marks its classical eras, and the domination of feeling which marks its romantic eras. This is a sign of spiritual timidity; of fear, on the one hand, of yielding itself to the higher; of a bad conscience, on the other hand, when it turns its back on the light and walks in its own shadow. In the work of artistic redemption, particularly in poetical criticism, the fundamental need is a revision of values based on a true understanding of the realities out of which poetry arises. The foregoing considerations indicate a ground-plan on which the structure of a literary criticism may be reared with a larger measure of adequacy and stability than belongs to the criticism now current.