42. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 913-932

Faith: Poetized Religion (Matthew Arnold, George Santayana); Paganized Christianity (D.H. Lawrence, André Gide); Orthodoxy (Paul Claudel)

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Matthew Arnold: The Finer Spirit of Knowledge 


It was an inevitability that with all the challenges to traditional faith, some would come around to the idea that religion, and particularly Christianity, is a product of the imagination just like poetry -- and in fact that the Bible is a great poem with symbolic import if not factual content. 


I studied Matthew Arnold, whose 1888 "The Study of Poetry" and 1885 "Literature and Science" are excerpted here, in a "Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold" course in graduate school. Of the three, Tennyson was the most skilled poet, Arnold the most philosophical. And philosophy doesn't usually make for great poetry, as the fact that Arnold's "Dover Beach" is the only one of his poems that still attracts many readers demonstrates. It's a poem about the anxiety brought on by the loss of traditional faith, which Arnold also tackles here: 

Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. 

So the solution, given the failure of the factual content of religion, is to treat its emotional content the way we treat that of poetry. "More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." 

Matthew Arnold, date unknown

Not that we read much poetry anymore, but I think Arnold would have to include all artistic products of the imagination. Even the least literate of us today lead lives influenced by pop music and TV shows, which is one reason not to be snobbish and to keep aware of what interpretations of life, consolations and sustenance -- to use the Arnoldian terms -- they provide our fellow humans. 


Arnold looks back to the Age of Faith with some nostalgia: "The mediæval Universities came into being, because the supposed knowledge, delivered by Scripture and the Church, so deeply engages men's hearts, by so simply, easily, and powerfully relating itself to their desire for conduct, their desire for beauty.... The Middle Age could do without humane letters, as it could do without the study of nature, because its supposed knowledge was made to engage its emotions so powerfully." But because of the rise of science, and its challenge to religion, "humane letters," i.e., secular literature, takes a greater role, thanks to its "undeniable power of engaging the emotions." This makes it a partner "to the success of modern science in extirpating what it calls mediæval thinking." 

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George Santayana, date unknown

George Santayana: An Allegory of Human Life


Santayana's "The Poetry of Christian Dogma" (1900) follows Arnold's lead in affirming the role of imaginative creation in finding the way to spiritual truth. St. Paul created "a new poetry, a new ideal, a new God," basing it on "the real experience of humanity." It "was a fable," but "who stopped to question whether its elements were historical, if only its meaning were profound and its inspiration contagious?" Pauline Christianity was "a system complete and consistent within itself." It offered humankind "another world, almost as vast and solid as the real one, in which the soul may develop."

The world of the Christian imagination was eminently a field for moral experience; moral ideas were there objectified into supernatural forces, and instead of being obscured as in the real world by irrational accidents formed an intelligible cosmos, vast, massive, and steadfast.

Christianity transcended the demands for empirical verification by virtue of the fact "that all its parts had some significance and poetic truth." Moreover, it triumphed because "its scheme was historical.... It presented a story, not a cosmology. It was an epic in which there was, of course, superhuman machinery, but of which the subject was man, and, notable circumstance, the Hero was a man as well." 


Does it matter that it was "just" poetry, that it gave us a false picture of the universe with humankind at its center? Santayana suggests "that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values." (See I.A. Richards on "pseudo-statements.") 

While the existence of things must be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their results, in other words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness.

Santayana is setting forth the view, essential to existentialism, that we can see things only in human terms. The human center of Christianity, the view of humanity in history, was key to its success over religions such as that of the Greeks and Romans, which saw humankind only as playthings of the superhuman. But Christianity remained a human imaginative construct: 

The idea of Christ himself had to be constructed by the imagination in response to moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external points of attachment. The facts sere nothing until they became symbols; and nothing could turn them into symbols except an eager imagination on the watch for all that might embody its dreams.

That a god might take human form and die, as Christ did, is "a figure and premonition of the burden of [human] experience." Paul and the Apostles transformed the fact of Jesus's death into "a religious inspiration. The whole of Christian doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry, because only then is it the felt counterpart of personal experience and a genuine expansion of human life." 


Coda: Wallace Stevens wrote beautifully about Santayana and the transforming imagination in the poem "To an Old Philosopher in Rome."

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D.H. Lawrence: The Resurrection of the Body 


Lawrence's "The Risen Lord" (1929) follows Santayana in suggesting that the human element is the most powerful force in the story of Christ: "What we have to remember is that the great religious images are only images of our own experiences, or of our own state of mind and soul." But Lawrence pinpoints the changing attitudes toward the story in the experience of World War I, and not in the assaults on the story by the Enlightenment or the Higher Criticism. The wartime experience, or at least the male wartime experience, dethroned the Virgin Mary: "For the man who went through the war the resultant image inevitably was Christ Crucified. And Christ Crucified is essentially womanless." 


The problem is, Lawrence says, that the churches don't realize that things have changed: "instead of preaching the Risen Lord, [the churches] go on preaching the Christ-Child and Christ Crucified." And although the men who fought the war recognize the pain and suffering of Christ Crucified, the young, those who did not fight the war, are left with no viable images of Christ. 

Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling. And the vision of Christ-Child and Christ Crucified are both untrue to the inner experience and feeling of the young. 

Lawrence insists that for the sake of the young, who find no vision of themselves in the imagery of the church, it should "take the great step onwards, and preach Christ Risen." Lawrence's Christ Risen is Christ in the flesh: "He rises with hands and feet, as Thomas knew for certain: and if with hands and feet, then with lips and stomach and genitals of a man. Christ risen, and risen in the whole of His flesh, not with some left out." 


The traditional risen Christ, "floated up into heaven as flesh-and-blood," is false to human experience. The rest of the Christ-story, "The virgin birth, the baptism, the temptation, the teaching, Gethsemane, the betrayal, the crucifixion, the burial and the resurrection, these are all true according to our inward experience." But this bodily ascension doesn't ring true: "Flesh and blood belong to the earth, and only to the earth. We know it." 


So instead Lawrence posits a Jesus who remained on earth "in full flesh and soul," who married and had children. "And if He remembered his first life, it would neither be teaching nor preaching, but probably carpentering again, with joy, among the shavings." He would take on the "Roman judges and Jewish priests and money-makers of every sort," and tell them, "I am going to destroy all your values, Mammon, all your money values and conceit values, I am going to destroy them all." He would take on "that which is anti-life, Mammon, like you, and money, and machines, and prostitution, and all that tangled mass of self-importance and greediness and self-conscious conceit which adds up to Mammon." 
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André Gide: Salvation on Earth 


In the excerpts here from his Journals for 1937 and 1916-19, Gide reflects on the ways in which he differs from Nietzsche's attacks on Christianity. Nietzsche "resolutely misunderstands Christ," Gide asserts, and misses the "emancipatory power" of his teachings. Gide thinks Nietzsche mistakes the Church for Christ, and argues that the Church, "by annexing, by trying (in vain moreover) to assimilate Christ, instead of assimilating herself to Him, ... cripples Him more -- and it is this crippled Christ that Nietzsche is fighting." 


In his own reading of the Gospels, Gide finds "that it is not so much a question of believing in the words of Christ because Christ is the Son of God as of understanding that he is the Son of God because his word is divine and infinitely above everything that the art of wisdom and man offer us." 


It is "the æsthetic truth of the Gospels" to which Gide responds. And because of this he rejects the idea of a blissful afterlife: "It is right now and immediately that we can share in felicity.... One of the gravest misunderstandings of the spirit of Christ comes from the confusion frequently established in the Christian's mind between future life and eternal life." To be born again, Gide argues, is to recognize joy in this life: "Whoever waits for that hour beyond death waits for it in vain. From the very hour at which you are born again, from the very moment at which you drink of this water, you enter the Kingdom of God, you share in eternal life."  

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Paul Claudel: The Errors of André Gide 

Paul Claudel in 1927

Catholic and ultraconservative, Claudel was bound to differ with Gide's imaginative reinterpretation of Christianity, as he does in this letter to Gide from 1905. In particular he rejects the view of religion as poetry: "As for what people call 'Art' and 'Beauty,' I had rather that they perished a thousand times over than that we should prefer such creatures to their Creator and the futile construction of our imagination to the reality in which alone we may find delight." Claudel's "reality" is orthodox Christianity. 


He also rejects Gide's embrace of nature, which Claudel sees as fallen: "it is in this alone that sanctity consists -- in a filial submission of our will to the Will of our heavenly father. How then can you speak of a pagan sanctity, -- that is to say, of an execrable pride, of the spiritual gormandizing of a creation that has turned in upon itself and revels in its strength and beauty, as if it were itself responsible for their creation?" Paganism is manifested in the decadence of ancient Rome, over which Christianity triumphed. Christianity enjoins "the duties of charity and the duties of justice." And it rejects the power of the wealthy, who on judgment day will be asked, "What have they done with the rare and exceptional gifts which were accorded to them? Were these simply given that they could have a more amusing time? or become artists and dilettantes?" 


As for poets and writers like Gide and Claudel: 

The mere fact of our enlightenment makes us spread light all about us. We are delegated by the rest of the world to the way of knowledge and truth, and there is no other truth but Christ, who is the Way and the Life, and the duty of knowing and serving Him lies more heavily on us than upon others, and lies upon us with a terrible urgency.

32. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 699-723

Self-Consciousness: Self-Realization (André Gide, D.H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky); The Field of Consciousness (Henry James, William James)

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André Gide: The Value of Inconstancy


In these excerpts from Later Fruits of the Earth (1935) and his journals for 1923, Gide embraces the fluidity of the personality as a form of liberation, looking back in particular to the repressiveness of his strict upbringing. "I feel that what is diverse in me is still myself," he asserts, rejecting the ancient command to "know thyself." In his experience, "only rather poor and limited personalities succeeded in finding and understanding themselves." He chooses instead "the perpetual and elusive process of becoming." 


In his childhood, he recalls, "My parents had accustomed me to act, not according to my inner urge, but according to an ethical rule outside of me, which they considered applicable to all men.... Not to have acted, in whatever combination of circumstances, precisely as I was expected to act seemed to me abominable to such a point that all inner peace was immediately compromised, that peace without which I believed that I could not live." Following the rule seemed to them true freedom, while not following it made one "a slave to his passions." As a result, "they have an illusion of acting freely while already their choice has ceased to be free."


But liberating himself from "the rigorous puritan upbringing by which my parents had fashioned my childhood" brought about a recognition that he had achieved a kind of sincerity that replaced the hypocrisy of rule-following: "I never seemed more moral to myself than at the time when I had decided to cease being moral; I mean: to be moral henceforth only in my own way."

Henceforth, acting in any way whatever and not giving myself time to reflect, my least acts seemed to me more significant since they were no longer reasoned out. At the same time I delivered myself from anxiety, perplexity, and remorse.

Finding a historical pretext for the instinctual life, he observes that "The Greeks ... recognized as many gods as there are instinct, and the problem for them was to keep the inner Olympus in equilibrium, not to subjugate and subdue any of the gods." And he observes that for the people "I consider among the best tempered, happiness lies not in comfort and quietude, but in ardor. A sort of magnificent using up is all the more desirable to them since they are constantly being renewed by it and do not so much suffer from the wearing away as they rejoice in their perpetual re-creation." 


This leads him to the assertion that, as this life is all we are given -- he rejects the idea of immortality -- we might as well make the most of it, accepting "that almost perfect satisfaction I enjoy in effort itself and in the immediate realization of happiness and harmony." He turns Christ's command, "Sell all your goods and give them to the poor," into an injunction to liberate himself from moral conformity: "I began then to seek out which, among the thoughts, opinions, and tendencies of my soul and mind that were most familiar to me, were the ones that I most certainly derived from my ancestors, from my upbringing and puritan formation," and to get rid of them. "I soon felt my soul only as a loving will ..., palpitating, open to all comers, like unto everything, impersonal, a naïve confusion of appetites, greeds, desires." 


But once again he finds the words of Christ applicable to his situation: "Why should you be troubled?" 

I surrendered then to this provisional disorder, trusting in a more sincere and natural order that would organize itself, I thought, and believing moreover that the disorder itself was less dangerous for my soul than an arbitrary and necessarily artificial order, since I had not invented it.

He also rejects what he sees as the spiritual pride of the puritan: "Considering ... that nothing separates one more from God than pride and that nothing made me prouder than my virtue, I began to detest that very virtue and everything on which I could pride myself, everything that allowed me to say: I am not like you, common run of men!" By standing puritan-Christian morality on its head, he found his way, or the freedom of lacking a way: "Every step I took forward was a venture into the unknown." 




D.H. Lawrence: The Living Self 


Like Gide, Lawrence finds an affirmation of this life, rather than a narrow moral path leading to the next one, provides true liberation of the spirit. And in the essay "Why the Novel Matters" (1936) he proclaims the novel to be the true holy writ. 


He begins with a rejection of the mind-body dualism: "We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it," but argues that "the tin can business, or vessel of clay, is just bunk. And that's what you learn, when you're a novelist. And that's what you are very liable not to know, if you're a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist, or a stupid person." The body is what matters. 

Every man, philosopher included, ends in his own finger-tips. That's the end of man alive. As for the words and thoughts and sighs and aspirations that fly from him, they are so many tremulations in the ether, and not alive at all. But if the tremulations reach another man alive, he may receive them into his life, and his life may take on a new colour, like a chameleon creeping from a brown rock on to a green leaf.

"Only connect," urged E.M. Forster, and art is a medium for connecting one human being to another, via Lawrence's "tremulations in the ether." 


"Nothing is important but life," Lawrence proclaims. And the artist is the true affirmer of life. "The philosopher, on the other hand, because he can think, decides that nothing but thoughts matter. It is as if a rabbit, because he can make little pills, should decide that nothing but little pills matter." The scientist, he says, works on inert things: "he has absolutely no use for me so long as I am man alive." 

Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the parts.

Earlier in the anthology, Lawrence had rejected the notion that the sun was "a sphere of blazing gas" as a reductionist view of science. It is the novelist, he says, who gets the point, who sees things as a whole. "And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog." Novels, too, "are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do." 


Lawrence naturally has a broad view of what a novel is: He includes the Bible ("but all the Bible"), Homer and Shakespeare as "the supreme old novels," because "They set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life, they do not just stimulate growth in one direction." Like Gide, Lawrence values process, becoming: "All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another." He acknowledges that the individual maintains a kind of integrity, but that it's impossible to isolate: "It is useless to talk about my ego. That only means that I have made up an idea of myself, and that I am trying to cut myself out to pattern." 


The peculiar value of the novel is that its "characters can do nothing but live. If they keep on being good, according to pattern, or bad, according to pattern, or even volatile, according to pattern, they cease to live, and the novel falls dead." This is the great function of the novel, to demonstrate the difference between being alive and being dead. "To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point," and "in the novel you can see, plainly, when the man goes dead, the woman goes inert. You can develop an instinct for life, if you will, instead of a theory of right and wrong, good and bad." For "only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realize that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living." 




Rainer Maria Rilke: The Self and Reality 


Rilke's letter to "L.H.," written in 1915 -- a time of war -- expresses the difficult relationship between an individual and a cosmos that increasingly seems severely alien. In fact, Rilke expresses "astonishment over the fact that men have for thousands of years [dealt] with life (not to mention God)" and yet "remain such helpless novices, so between fright and subterfuge, so miserable." He refers to "God and gods" as a shorthand for the undying sense that humans are dwarfed by their environment. 

Who knows, I ask myself, whether we do not always approach the gods so to speak from behind, separated from their sublimely radiant face through nothing but themselves, quite near to the expression we yearn for, only just standing behind it -- but what does that mean save that our countenance and the divine face are looking out in the same direction, are at one; and this being so, how are we to approach the god from the space that lies in front of him?

Humankind may, in fact, be confronting the same dilemma as the gods -- so rather than a separation, perhaps there is a harmony of purpose between us and ... whatever you want to call it. 

Let us agree that since his earliest beginnings man has shaped gods in whom here and there were contained only the dead and threatening and destructive and frightful, violence, anger, superpersonal stupor, tied up as it were into a tight knot of malice: the alien, if you like, but, already to some extent implied in this alien, the admission that one was aware of it, endured it, yes, acknowledged it for a sure, secret, relationship and connection.

Instead, why not recognize the gods as a projection of humanity, "a part ... of the human mind" and that this "tension" between the individual and the universe is self-defeating, a tension against oneself? Like God, death is not external, not the "other." To treat them as outside oneself is a mistake. 

Nature knew nothing of this removal we had somehow accomplished -- if a tree blossoms, death blossoms in it as well as life, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends out a rich expression of life, and the beasts go patiently from one [to the] other -- and everywhere about us death is still at home and he watches us out of the cracks in things, and a rusty nail, sticking up somewhere out of a plank, does nothing day and night but rejoice over death.

By accepting that the universe is not alien, that in the midst of life we are in death, we liberate ourselves.  




Wassily Kandinsky: An Expressionist Credo 

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

Wassily Kandinsky, c. 1913? 

Kandinsky's 1913 Concerning the Spiritual in Art is one of the intellectual documents of Expressionism, proclaiming the necessity of the subjective element in painting and the other arts. 

The artist is not only justified in using, but is under a moral obligation to use, only those forms which fulfill his own need. Absolute freedom from anatomy or anything else of the kind must be given to the artist in his choice of means. Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.

As such, art's function is "the development and refinement of the human soul," and a reaction against not only materialism but also the doctrine of "art for art's sake." The center of the credo is Kandinsky's proclamation: "The artist must have something to communicate, since mastery over form is not the end but, instead, the adapting of form to internal significance." For Kandinsky, "communicating" certainly does not mean slavishly reproducing external objects, but baring the contents of his soul. Art is a kind of priesthood in which  "the artist has a triple responsibility: 

1. he must return the talent which he has; 
2. his actions, feelings and thoughts, like those of every man, create a spiritual atmosphere which is either pure or infected;
3. his actions and thoughts are the material for his creations, which in turn influence the spiritual atmosphere."

Beauty, in short, "is produced by internal necessity, which springs from the soul."

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition X, 1939

Henry James: Centers of Consciousness 


The preface to The Princess Cassamassima (1908) is late James, which means dense and mannered prose, entwining itself around a topic without clinging to it. In essence, what James is arguing here is that the novel needs a central consciousness expressed through a character who is neither a fool nor someone so intelligent that his awareness prevents him from being detached from the action in which he takes part. 

We care, our curiosity and sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient. Hamlet and Lear are surrounded, amid their complications, by the stupid and the blind, who minister in all sorts of ways to their recorded fate.

It is Hamlet and Lear, of course, whom we care about. Not Regan and Goneril or -- unless one is Tom Stoppard -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. On the other hand, "no 'story' is possible without its fools -- as most of the fine painters of life, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Meredith, George Eliot, Jane Austen, have abundantly felt." But they knew that to put the fool at the forefront, to have the narrative point of view that of the fool is to put it "within the scope of a denser and duller, a more vulgar and more shallow capacity," resulting in "a picture dim and meagre." They know to place "a mind of some sort -- in the sense of a reflecting and colouring medium -- in possession of the general adventure." 


When Scott fails to do so, in The Bride of Lammermoor, the novel fails: "Edgar of Ravenswood ... has a black cloak and a hat and feathers more than he has a mind," whereas Hamlet, "while equally sabled and draped and plumed, while at least equally romantic, has yet a mind still more than he has a costume." In Tom Jones, Fielding falls somewhere in between: Tom "hasn't a grain of imagination," but the novel succeeds because "his sense of bewilderment obtains altogether on the comic, never on the tragic plane." Moreover, he has an author, "handsomely possessed of a mind" so "that we see him through the mellow air of Fielding's fine old moralism, fine old humour and fine old style, which somehow really enlarge, make every one and every thing important." 


The trick is to find the novel's center of consciousness in a character who "may feel enough and 'know' enough -- or be in the way of learning enough -- for his maximum dramatic value, without feeling and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his proper fusion with the fable." George Eliot presents her characters' "emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness," which become "our own very adventure." 




William James: The Stream of Consciousness


Henry's brother William is an expert on consciousness, as these excerpts from The Principles of Psychology (1890) demonstrate. It's a difficult thing to be an expert in: "No one every had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day is a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree." We think, therefore we are, but more importantly, we are always thinking, and not in discrete little packets of thought. And even if we can isolate a thought, or an idea, we find that it mutates over time: "Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive view of the same thing."

A permanently existing "idea" or "Vorstellung" which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

Thought is continuous. "I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature," but there is no breach within the individual mind. Consciousness may be interrupted -- by sleep, by anesthesia, by trauma -- but "within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous. Even after an interruption, "the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another part of the same self." We don't -- except perhaps in exceptional, pathological cases -- awake from an interruption of consciousness feeling as if we are not the same person. And "the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt." If there are gaps, somehow we span them. 

To expect the consciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does not see.

The "common whole" that bridges the gaps "is myself, I, or me." Consequently, "In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life."


Even violent irruptions into the stream are nevertheless part of it. "Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it." Context is everything. "Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know." 


But although the stream of consciousness flows steadily, we don't perceive it that way. "Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings." The parts of it where it seems to perch, James calls the "substantive parts"; the flights are the "transitive parts." But it is difficult to examine the transitive parts because of what Heisenberg would later call the uncertainty principle: 

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 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. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas [i.e., switch on the lights] quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. 

Or trying to measure the position and the velocity of an atomic particle simultaneously. 


The consciousness has its own grammar and syntax: "We ought to say a felling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use."


Yet that every datum in our remembered experience has its own context ought to be obvious when we try to remember a name that's on the tip of our tongue. If someone suggests another name, we know it's not the right one. There is a gap there that only one name will fill, just as only one piece of the jigsaw puzzle fits the gap in the picture: "A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the senses of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term." 


In our use of language, "large tracts ... are nothing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense." We have "rapid premonitory perspective view of schemes of thought not yet articulate," so that we can read aloud a passage that we've never seen before and anticipate the words we should emphasize and the direction that the sentence is taking. 

And this foreboding of the coming grammatical scheme combined with each successive uttered word is so practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression of intelligence.

So although consciousness may seem to be made up of discrete bits of perception, a "halo or penumbra ... surrounds" them and "escorts" them through the stream.  

19. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 408-423

Nature: Organicism (Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, André Gide, D.H. Lawrence)

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Rainer Maria Rilke: Nature, Man, and Art

I have to admit relief at turning from philosophers like Schopenhauer and Whitehead to poet and novelists, even though Rilke can present his own problems. This 1903 essay deals with the attempt of human beings to reconcile themselves through art to the manifest gulf between humanity and nature. In the statement, "It always seems that Nature does not know at all that we cultivate her and timidly put a small part of her forces to our own use," Rilke acknowledges not only the separation but also the implicit superiority of Nature. For "whatever men may have achieved, no man has been great enough to cause her to sympathize with his pain, to share in his rejoicing."

Like Robbe-Grillet, Rilke acknowledges the "pathetic fallacy," but unlike him, he is not ready to embrace the separation as the impetus to a new art. There are those who are

unwilling to leave the Nature they have lost, [who] go in pursuit of her and try now, consciously and by the use of their concentrated will, to come as near to her again as they were in their childhood without knowing it. It will be understood that [these people] are artists: poets or painters, composers or architects, fundamentally lonely spirits, who, in turning to Nature, put the eternal above the transitory, that which is most profoundly based on law above that which is fundamentally ephemeral, and who, since they cannot persuade nature to concern herself with them, see their task to be the understanding of Nature, so that they may take their place somewhere in her great design.

Rilke sees this attempt at a reunion with Nature as "the theme and purpose of all art," that is, "the reconciliation of the Individual and the All, and the moment of exaltation, the artistically important Moment, would seem to be that in which the two scales of the balance counterpoise one another." Thus, "a symphony mingles the voices of a stormy day with the tumult of our blood" and "a building owes its character half to us and half to the forest."


Marcel Proust: The Life of the Hawthorn  

Marcel Proust, date unknown

In this rhapsodic selection from Swann's Way, Proust recounts the narrator's boyhood experience contemplating the beauty of hawthorn blossoms. In the context of the novel, it links up with his first encounter with Gilberte, Swann's daughter, the object of endless fascination throughout much of In Search of Lost Time. It also serves to introduce the narrator's passionate desire to establish some sort of intimacy with nature, "to absorb myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals of music ... like those melodies which one can play over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret." Music once again becomes the touchstone for the aesthetic experience. But he is doomed to failure: 

the sentiment which they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing.

Elsewhere in the Search we will learn that only through "involuntary memory," an experience triggered unbidden by a sound, a tactile sensation, or, most famously, the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea, can contact with the world outside the self offer the enlightenment the narrator seeks here. 

It's also significant that this is a childhood experience of the narrator's, an impression made on the unsophisticated mind. The narrator's grandfather directs his attention to a spectacular pink hawthorn, which makes him think of crushed strawberries mixed in cream cheese: 

And these flowers had chose precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours, inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the dressmaker.

He ascribes their beauty to Nature's attempt to charm: "And indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it."

But there is also something sensuous about the flowers: "a thousand buds where swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain." The language here hints at pubescence, menstruation, and the loss of virginity, at the same time that the flower is "ready for the 'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed already to form a part, ... a Catholic bush indeed." 


André Gide: Natural Joy 

In 1935, when Gide was involved in a flirtation with communism (which would end when he actually visited the Soviet Union), he wrote Later Fruits of the Earth, an addendum of sorts to the original Fruits of the Earth, published forty years earlier. These excerpts capture him in an affirmative mood tempered by realizations of human limitations. "All nature ... teaches that man is born for happiness. It is the effort after pleasure that makes the plant germinate, fills the hive with honey, and the human heart with love." It's worth remembering Schopenhauer's assertion that pleasure is a bodily manifestation of will, and that will is, among other things, "the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant."

But in order to achieve the happiness he seeks, Gide wants to be freed from the past, to which he is "in bondage.... Not a gesture to-day but was determined by what I was yesterday. But I who am at this moment, I, instantaneous, fleeting, irreplaceable, I escape." Or he tries to, halted by fears of the future as well: "Consequence of our acts. Consequence with ourselves. Am I to expect nothing from myself but a sequel?" So he determines to throw caution to the winds: "Winds of the abyss, bear me away!"

He is also trammeled by the things of the world: "the important thing is that we should contemplate God with the clearest possible eyes, and I feel that every object on this earth that I covet becomes opaque by very  reason of my coveting it, and that the whole world then loses its transparence ... so that God ceases to be perceptible to my soul, and by abandoning the Creator for the creature, my soul ceases to live in eternity and loses the kingdom of God." (As we see later, by "God" he means Nature.)

He returns to the original thought, that the pleasure principle is supreme: "With pleasure for a guide, all things aspire to greater thriving, to increased consciousness, to progress.... And this is why I have found more instruction in pleasure than in books; why I have found in books more obfuscation than light." Physical pleasure allows him to transcend himself: "the secret workings of carnal desire drove me out of myself towards an enchanting confusion." And paradoxically, "When I stopped looking for myself it was in love that I found myself again." His desires "alone were capable of instructing me. I yielded to them."

Contemplating the impossibility that a caterpillar should ever turn into something so radically different as a butterfly -- "not only does the shape change, but the habits, the appetites" -- provokes a realization about the trap in which one is caught by clinging too closely to one's identity. The pursuit of self-knowledge is a trap:

Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. To observe oneself is to arrest one's development. The caterpillar that tried "to know itself" would never become a butterfly.

So nature becomes his divinity, "for simplicity's sake and because it irritates the theologians." Among the lessons to be learned from nature is "that everything that is young is tender ... and no growth is possible unless it bursts the sheathes in which at first it was swaddled." Humankind has failed to progress because it is wrapped in the past: "Comrade, you must refuse henceforth to seek your nourishment in the milk of tradition, man-distilled and man-filtered.... Look at the winged seeds of the plane or the sycamore flying off as if they understood that the paternal shade can offer them nothing but a dwindling and atrophied existence."

Understand rightly the Greek fable. It teaches us that Achilles was invulnerable except in that spot of his body which had been made soft by the remembrance of his mother's touch. 

D.H. Lawrence: The Death of Pan

D.H. Lawrence, c. 1920

In the preceding excerpt, Gide asks, "Who was it said that great Pan was dead? I saw him through the mist of my breath. My lips are stretched towards him. Was it not he who whispered in my ear this morning, 'What are you waiting for?'" The legend of Pan's death seems to have started with a tale told by Plutarch that during the reign of Tiberius, a cry was heard by sailors that Pan was dead, which metamorphosed, as Lawrence suggests in "Pan in America" (1926), into a Christian legend that the resurrection of Jesus signaled the death of Pan, and that the figure of Satan is modeled on the goat-horned and -hoofed god.

Like Gide, Lawrence is not quite ready to accept the death of Pan, except insofar as it becomes a metaphor for the detachment of human beings from nature.

Gradually men moved into cities. And they loved the display of people better than the display of a tree. They liked the glory they got of overpowering one another in war. And, above all, they loved the vainglory of their own words, the pomp of argument and the vanity of ideas.

Pan survives, however, in poetic pantheists such as Wordsworth and Whitman, but Lawrence dismisses this as trifling. "All Walt is Pan, but not all Pan is Walt."

We still pretend to believe that there is One mysterious Something-or-other back of Everything, ordaining all things for the ultimate good of humanity. It wasn't back of the Germans in 1914, of course, and whether it's back of the bolshevists is still a grave question. But still, it's back of us, so that's all right. 

But this is all make-believe, Lawrence insists. "In the days before man got too much separated from the universe, he was Pan, along with all the rest."

Still, Lawrence senses the presence of Pan in trees, such as the big pine on the ranch where he lived in New Mexico. He admires the tree as a "magnificent assertion" -- a phallic one -- and says that he has "become conscious of the tree, and of its interpenetration into my life.... I am conscious that  it helps to change me, vitally. I am even conscious that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree, more bristling and turpentiney, in Pan." But then he distances himself from these assertions, keying into the reader's own resistance to such nature-worship:

Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. So much depends on one's attitude. One can shut many, many doors of receptivity in oneself; or one can open many doors that are shut.

And therein lies Lawrence's point, which is very much the point that Wallace Stevens, among others, made: One can choose to engage the imagination, to open the doors and participate in nature, or not. "So much depends on one's attitude," Lawrence puts it, and Lawrence is all about attitude:

Is it truer to life to insulate oneself from the influence of the tree's life, and to walk about in an inanimate forest of standing lumber, marketable in St. Louis, Mo.? Or is it truer to life to know, with a pantheistic sensuality, that the tree has its own life, its own assertive existence, its own living relatedness to me: that my life is added to, or militated against, by the tree's life?... What can a man do with his life but live it? And what does life consist in, save a vivid relatedness between the man and the living universe that surrounds him? Yet man insulates himself more and more into mechanism, and repudiates everything but the machine and the contrivance of which he himself is master, god in the machine.

Pan's death came about not with the arrival of Christianity, Lawrence asserts, but with the scientific revolution, when human beings "discovered the 'idea.' He found that all things were related by certain laws. The moment man learned to abstract, he began to make engines that would do the work of his body." The power of abstraction, of the acceptance of a duality of mind and body, "was the death of the great Pan. The idea and the engine came between man and all things, like a death. The old connexion, the old Allness, was severed, and can never be ideally restored. Great Pan is dead."

So humans became what realists such as Zola, for example, advocated: masters of nature:

With all the mechanism of the human world, man is to a great extent master of all life, and of most phenomena.

And what then? Once you have conquered a thing, you have lost it. Its real relation to you collapses.

A conquered world is no good to man. He sits stupefied with boredom upon his conquest.

Lawrence then gives us a picture of primitive life, when man "lived in a ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe." But just when one thinks that Lawrence is indulging in a sentimental primitivism, he throws some cold water on the scene: "It is useless to glorify the savage. For he will kill Pan with his own hands, for the sake of a motor-car.... And we cannot return to the primitive life, to live in tepees and hunt with bows and arrows." So although "The Pan relationship, which the world of man once had with all the world, was better than anything man has now," it can't be recovered. The best Lawrence has to offer is a recognition that "life itself consists in a live relatedness between man and his universe: sun, moon, stars, earth, trees, flowers, birds, animals, men, everything -- and not in a 'conquest' of anything by anything."

9. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 170-192

Symbolism: The Artist-Hero; The Morality of the Artist (W.B. Yeats, Gustave Flaubert, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry). The Art of Life (Walter Pater, Joris-Karl Huysmans, André Gide, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke)

_____

W.B. Yeats: The Courage of the Artist

In a 1907 speech, referring to the late poet and critic Lionel Johnson, Yeats asserts, "A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather, the better his poetry the more sincere his life." I'm a little unsure how one lives sincerely. One expresses sincerity, of course, and that may be what Yeats means. "Above all it is necessary that the lyric poet's life should be known, that we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower but the speech of a man." Yeats, who was very much a public figure in his day, would of course advocate this kind of openness. "Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself."


Gustave Flaubert: Art as Ascetic Religion

Writing to Louise Colet in 1857, Flaubert claims to have written twenty-five pages of Madame Bovary in six weeks and to be sustained in this snail's pace of composition "only by a kind of permanent rage, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but which never abates." He is definitely not sustained by the indifference and hostility of the society in which he lives:

If everything around us, instead of permanently conspiring to drown us in a slough of mud, contributed rather to keep our spirits healthy, who can tell whether we might not be able to do for aesthetics what stoicism did for morals? Greek art was not an art; it was the very constitution of an entire people, of an entire race, of the country itself.

Humankind, he claims, has no use for beauty at this time. "The more Art develops, the more scientific it will be, just as science will become artistic." The result is, even when he is pleased with his work, he feels "great despair and emptiness -- doubts that taunt me at my moments of naïvest satisfaction. And yet I would not exchange all this for anything, because my conscience tells me that I am fulfilling my duty, obeying a decree of fate -- that I am doing what is Good, that I am in the Right."


Rainer Maria Rilke: The Mission of the Artist

Writing to the novelist Ludwig Ganghofer in 1897, the 21-year-old Rilke chafes against the philistinism of his relatives, whose view is that "Art is something one just cultivates on the side in free hours." Instead, for Rilke,

Whoever does not consecrate himself wholly to art with all his wishes and values can never reach the highest goal. He is not an artist at all.... I feel myself to be an artist, weak and wavering in strength and boldness, yet aware of bright goals, and hence to me every creative activity is serious, glorious, and true. Not as martyrdom do I regard art -- but as a battle the chosen one has to wage with himself and his environment in order to go forward.... But that needs a whole man! Not a few weary leisure hours.

Many 21-year-olds have made such proclamations. Few of them became Rilke.


Paul Valéry: The Artist as Universal Man

For this long philosophical disquisition, centered on Leonardo da Vinci, from 1895, I need to turn again to the introduction by Ellmann and Feidelson for guidance.

Artistic heroism is epitomized by Paul Valéry in his figure of Leonardo da Vinci, a type of the artist as universal man. Exploring the night of consciousness, the artist discovers the reality to which we are accustomed is but one solution out of many possible ones. He is able to divest objects of their peculiarities and, at the same time, to sense what consciousness is apart from its objects, to reach "the deep note of existence itself." Such a man is interested in everything, yet always seems to be thinking of something else, for his mental life is double, a drama of mental images proceeding concurrently with an awareness of the movements of thought itself. He takes responsibility for his perceptions in a way that others do not, and he is concerned not with results but with the exercise of creative power. 

Once again, music is the touchstone for creativity: "the elusive art of music unites the liberties of sleep with the development and consistency of extreme attention" -- the mind is free in dreams, but only with wakeful attention can the things discovered in our dreams become whole and consistent. This "synthesis of intimate things" is impermanent, however. The products of the imagination are varied, and "The wonder is not that such things should be; it is that there should be such things and not such other things." We come "to suspect all accustomed reality of being only one solution amongst many others of universal problems."

So "the perfected consciousness ... has to begin by denying an infinite number of faiths, an infinite number of elements.... It reminds one absurdly of an audience invisible in the darkness of a theater which cannot see itself, which can see only the spectacle before it, and which, yet, all the time, invincibly feels itself the center of a breathlessly interesting evening." Consciousness is "an inexhaustible activity," compounded of "our most intimate feelings" as well as "exterior objects and events." Consciousness chooses what is important to it: "All things are replaceable by all things -- may not this be the definition of things?"

Is there anything that resists the lure of the senses, the dissipation of ideas, the fading of memories, the slow variation in the organism, the incessant and multiform activities of the universe? There is only this consciousness, and this consciousness only at its most abstract. Our personality itself, which, stupidly, we take to be our most intimate and deepest possession, our sovereign good, is only a thing, and mutable and accidental.

The achievement of identity comes from isolating a "substantial permanence from the strife of everyday truths." The ego that results from this effort "is no more sensitive, no less real than the center of gravity of a planetary system or ring, but ... is a result of the whole, whatever that whole may be."

In Leonardo, Valéry finds "a man whose activities seem so distant from each other that if I can find a unifying idea of them it may well seem more comprehensive than all other ideas.... Everything interests him.... He leaves behind him churches and fortresses; he fashions ornaments -- full of sweetness and strength -- and a thousand machines; and he makes calculation along many unsurveyed lines."

Artists, he observes, participate in a "coquetry of silence ... as to the origins of their work." They claim an autonomy for their creations. And "certain works of science, and mathematics in particular, show such clarity in their construction that one would say they were not the work of any one person at all. There is something unhuman about them. And this quality has had the effect of making people suppose so great a difference between certain studies, as, for instance, between the sciences and the arts, that, owing to it, opinion has also assumed a separation between the results of their labors."

But artists and scientists alike reach their results through a power to decide among the possibilities. The process at work is so insusceptible to analysis that "one invokes gods, genius and inspiration." We profess to believe "that something has created itself -- for man adores mystery and the marvelous.... One treats what is logical as if it were a miracle. But the 'inspired' author has been ready to perform his task a year before it was done, had been ripe, had been thinking of it always, perhaps without being conscious of the fact.... The consciousness of the operations of thought, the unrecognized logic of which I have spoken, exists but rarely, even in the most powerful minds."

The task is to maintain the mental flexibility necessary for creation, for "a thought that has become fixed takes on the characteristics of hypnosis and becomes, in the language of logic, an idol; in the domain of poetic construction and art, a sterile monotony." Liberation from that which is fixed, and the ability of "the mind to foresee its own activities, to imagine the structure of what has to be imagined in detail as a whole, and the effect of the sequence thus calculated, this sense is the condition of all generalization. It is that which in certain individuals appears as a veritable passion, and with an energy that is remarkable."

The universal man begins ... by simple contemplation, but he always returns to be impregnated by what he sees, returns to the intoxication of the particular instinct and to the emotion which the least of things real arouses if one keeps in mind the two, thing and instinct, in every way separate from each other and yet combining, in so many ways, so many different qualities.

Walter Pater: The Intensity of the Moment

Walter Pater, date unknown

Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) became central texts for many fin de siècle intellectuals, and his prose influenced writers as various as Proust and Joyce, Pound and Wallace Stevens. He also drew fire from conservatives, who accused him of misleading his young followers. The word "exquisite," which appears early in these selections, is characteristic.

He, too, is aware that consciousness is a fragmentary and impermanent thing, that "That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours," that life is "flame-like" in "that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways." (Compare Apollinaire's flame image in his discourse on painting.) So the trick is not to be swept away in the "flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action."

The result is "that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves," and the challenge is to "be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy." (An objection has been lodged against this image: that the point at which forces unite is the point at which they cancel one another out.) Pater argues for intensity of experience: "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end." And instead of being swept away with the flood, "To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."

While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.

Notice here the absence of hierarchy of experience, that art is but one of the media through which experience may be channeled. It may be something as content-free as a strange smell, or as content-rich as a "contribution to knowledge." It's this lack of value judgment that most troubled Pater's critics. Similarly, Pater, who had given up on Christianity, argues for a kind of perpetual agnosticism: "What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own." 

Finally, however, he comes around to valorizing art:

Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion -- that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

In Marius, set in the second century C.E., Pater does come around to the question of religion, but typically it is regarded as only one avenue of experience:

the products of the imagination must themselves be held to present the most perfect forms of life -- spirit and matter alike under their purest and most perfect conditions -- the most strictly appropriate objects of that impassioned contemplation, which, in the world of intellectual discipline, as in the highest forms of morality and religion, must be held to be the essential function of the "perfect." Such manner of life might come even to seem a kind of religion -- an inward, visionary, mystic piety, or religion.

Joris-Karl Huysmans: Artificial Sensation

Joris-Karl Huysmans, c. 1895

Huysmans's À rebours, the title of which is translated here Against Nature, but has also been translated Against the Grain, is an 1884 novel about the ultimate aesthete, des Esseintes. If Pater is interested in the experiential possibilities of "strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours," he has nothing on des Esseintes.

In the excerpt, des Esseintes has devised elaborate ways of recreating the experience of sea travel without the tedious necessity of actually going to sea, because the pleasure of such an experience "exists only in recollection of the past and hardly ever in experience of the present," and he could enjoy this pleasure "in full and in comfort, without fatigue or worry.... Travel, indeed, struck him as a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience."

Arthur Zaidenberg, illustration for À rebours, 1931

In fact, the character of des Esseintes is the logical extension of all of the arguments that art is superior to nature -- "artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day." Moreover, if all arts aspire to the condition of music, then des Esseintes has found a unique way of having the musical experience and ... drinking it too, with his "mouth organ," providing drops of liqueurs that evoke the sounds of various musical instruments.

These over-the-top excerpts from À rebours suggest that Huysmans was having sly fun, but the book was taken quite seriously. It is generally thought to be the "poisonous French novel" referred to in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.


André Gide: The Reflexive Image

These excerpts from Gide's journals for January 1892 find the 22-year-old writer setting out on his career in some confusion. He has met Oscar Wilde and felt overwhelmed by the force of his personality and intellect: "In his company I had lost the habit of thinking.... A few thoughts from time to time, but my clumsiness in handling them made me give them up." He is longing to find a direction for his life: "I am anxious to know what I shall be.... I am aware of a thousand possibilities in me, but I cannot resign myself to want to be only one of them."

André Gide in 1893

Moreover, he has achieved the self-consciousness of the artist before he has truly figured out what course his art will take: "A man's life is his image," he proclaims, and he hasn't decided what that image is. An encounter with Wilde, the master image-maker, must surely have provoked this dilemma. He is also in the early stages of discovering and exploring his sexual orientation, which may be what provokes his reflections on morality and sincerity:

Morality consists in substituting for the natural creature (the old Adam) a fiction that you prefer. But then you are no longer sincere. The old Adam is the sincere man.

This occurs to me: the old Adam is the poet. The new man, whom you prefer, is the artist. The artist must take the place of the poet. From the struggle between the two is born the work of art.

W.B. Yeats: The Completed Image

If, as Gide asserted, "A man's life is his image," Yeats, in a letter written not long before his death to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, a friend with whom he had considered traveling to India, seems content with his.
It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. "I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions.


Rainer Maria Rilke: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Earth

Writing in 1925 to Witold von Hulewicz, his Polish translator, about the Duino Elegies, Rilke balks at an explanation: "They reach out infinitely beyond me." The poet, he says, becomes part of a collective experience of the world. "We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it; we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us, to our origins and to those who seemingly come after us." In the Elegies, he says the world of immediate experience, "the beloved visible and tangible" is being converted "into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe... The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here."

The angel in the poems is not the angels of Christianity, but more like the angels in Islam: "that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, appears already consummated.... All the worlds of the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next deepest reality."