“MAN LIVES WITHIN A MYTHOLOGICAL UNIVERSE”

Man lives not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means that our imaginations may recognise elements of it, when presented in art or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we recognise. Practically all that we can see of this body of concern is socially conditioned and culturally inherited
Northrop Frye “The Great Code The Bible and Literature”. Havest Books 1982.

We are creatures of language. In the Bible God brings order into the universe by speaking forth. He creates man as the peak of creation, in his image. In Genesis 2 God gets Adam even before the creation of Eve to name the animals. Naming distinguishes and he finds no animal that might match him or act as a companion for him.

In a sense if we take the two Biblical creation stories together God makes man to have dominion over the animals because that is made possible by his involvement in language : “He sees before and after and pines for what is not”(Shelley). He lives, that is, in a world of language and is shaped differently by that fact. More, he lives within a narrative. We know that on the commonplace everyday routine level. But according to Frye that narrative is shaped or certainly has been shaped in the western world by a Biblical framework, albeit we are frequently unconscious of its extent.

He sees that Biblical framework as myth. This may worry some readers but need not. Myth is not something opposed to the truth; instead it offers a narrative that gives our lives meaning. We do not need to believe the Genesis creation stories are actual description to recognise that it gives us that they gives us a profound understanding of who and what we are.

Of course we also live within a world shaped by scepticism and scientism which has no room for the divine but would see us as purely natural phenomena , just another species of animal. The search for a metaphysical meaning is disregarded: life is simply explained by science; which provides in itself a mythological explanation or, better, an anti- mythological picture of what we are. Taken to an extreme it is such a view that informs the cynicism of a character like Sweeney in T.S. Eliot :

Birth and copulation and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth and copulation and death.
Fragment of an Agon.

While it is true that all life is deeply inter-related and we are animal in origin- the Bible makes us of dust- I like Frye’s distinction. We may, as humans be of nature but the fact- God- given in my mind- that through language we are seekers of meaning and ever have been, as evidenced by such creations as early cave paintings, means that we have life beyond the sphere of all other animals. Frye’s distinction is between being of nature, which we as humans inevitably are, but not living “in” nature “directly or nakedly like the animals” because we all ” live in a mythological universe” . This seems to me to be unanswerable. It is that mythological universe that among other things gives the lie to the reductionists who wish to see us as just another animal: birth, copulation and death are all given rituals and ceremonies shaped by a narrative, in all cultures and largely created historically for us in the West by the Bible. Reductionists reduce the significance the whole great human co-operative enterprise of language, religion, culture and art through which we become “living souls” to quote Genesis (in the King James Version) as not basic reality but as something added to reality.

Animals do not share a mythological universe. They live entirely-unless they are domesticated as pets, or within zoos- within Nature. True many of them have skills in speed , in hunting down, in finding their ways across vast distances that far exceed the natural propensities of the human being. Some have awesome means of communication, whether they be insects like ants or bees or creatures of the sea like dolphins and whales, They can appear to express joy as when birds sing territorially or crows ride the wind in joyous flight:

The birds around me hopped and played,  
Their thoughts I cannot measure- 
But the least motion which they made 
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

It is easy for us to delight in Nature (with a capital) as Wordsworth does here but we do so from a level of consciousness, shaped as here by poetry which makes us live in a different sphere. Among other things they do not live in the consciousness that we have of being morally accountable for their welfare.

So Frye is correct : “We do not live directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe.” We have the responsibility to be as living souls.

(PS . It is only fair to add that Ray Inkster on RAYSVIEWONLINE@ wordpress. com has a radically different take on the Genesis verse than what is argued here.)

SAYING “I BELIEVE IN GOD” IS NOT THE SAME AS SAYING “I BELIEVE THAT GOD EXISTS.”(3)

I remember once hearing a young father tell me that he would not influence his children to believe or to not believe that God exists. When the children reached adolescence or at least the age of rational choice based on rational argument they could make the decision for themselves. Since they had no experience of church or Sunday School it turned out they had no decision to make; they just refrained from doing anything different from what they had always done

The father was not a philosopher but no doubt he would have agreed with the nineteenth century liberal and utilitarian J.S. Mill:

The most important quality of an opinion on any momentous subject is its truth or falsity, which to us resolves itself into the sufficiency of the evidence on which it rests. It is indispensable that the subject of religion should from time to time be reviewed as a strictly scientific question and that its evidences should be tested by the same scientific methods, and on the same principles as those of any of the speculative conclusions drawn by physical science.
J.S.Mill “Theism”

Science may be useful or helpful when considering religious beliefs. Consideration of the world and what it tells us of God has been part of natural theology at least since Aquinas. One-time atheist philosopher Antony Flew has written an interesting work There Is A God (HarperCollins 2007) in which he explains why he changed his mind on God on the basis of recent scientific research. But in what way can science focused on religion make a judgement challenging the truth of God one way or the other? Mill points to “scientific methods” presumably referring to the empirical idea of the detached observer considering evidence impartially. But what evidence? Can God be known by the detached observer?

As Ian Robinson explains:

“Existence” as Mill uses it at once transfers the discussion to the wrong science, and to the kind of evidence we would demand for the existence of the planets or the elements. If the existence of God is the same kind of question as the existence of uranium or Uranos it can be investigated by physics. Scientists do occasionally discover new celestial objects but God has never been spied through a telescope. Therefore, thinks Mill, with what I had to call startling naivety, the existence of God is at best not proven. No, all that follows is God is not a celestial object. The methods of physical science apply to physical things, but we are told that God is spirit.
Ian Robinson The English Prophets Edgeways 2001

Religion does not start from the Mill’s rational viewpoint. As Robinson argues the Creed does not begin “I believe that God exists therefore….” ; it starts from an inside commitment. “I believe in God …”

So that the fact Mill in his essay thinks on balance the existence of God as first cause is more likely than not does not mean he commits to God as the “light of the world or saviour”. He questions whether Mill is speaking about religion at all. For what is religion?

Religion has to do with things like certain practices called sacramental, associated with the divine, with absolutes in morality, with credal belief in revelation, with prayer. It also gives us a picture of human life though not a picture to be contemplated in an art gallery. The central Christian image derived from the Old Testament, is walking in a way. That is how Christians prove the existence of God. “If ye love me keep my commandments”. I do not go as far as Wittgenstein that it makes no difference whether the crucifixion actually happened. What concerns religion is the attitude of the soul to the event, and the consequences for living.
Ian Robinson ibid

Conversion, repentance, a changed life, may have physical effects but strictly the measurement of such is not something science can yield; only a sense, within and perhaps in community, of a changed life. Curiously Mill as he describes in his Autobiography goes through a kind of conversion from the kind of desiccated education he has been subject to as a child by reading Wordsworth’s poetry -but this does not leads him to prioritise the inner life in his philosophy. Nor does he ask in what way Science proves the existence of poetry-though clearly, for him, poetry creates a “momentous” change.

So the young father was as deluded in his idea as he would have been in denying his children the practice of reading poetry, until they were of an age when such a choice could be made rationally. And while natural theology may make interesting reading religion is closer to poetry than it is to science.

FAITH IN THE BIBLE; FAITH IN POETRY.

**Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) by George Frederick Watts.**
**National Portrait Gallery, London**

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. 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. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
Matthew Arnold. Introduction to the first volume of The Hundred Greatest Men 1880 .

As you see this passage by the famous Victorian critic and poet, Matthew Arnold was written 140 years ago. How well does it stand today?

Two large prophetic claims are made. Religion is in decline and poetry- at least “if it is worthy of its high destinies”- has the potential to take its place.

I imagine whereas the prophecy on religion- Arnold is speaking as a member of the Church of England- will meet with some agreement, given the decline in church attendance in recent decades, the positive claim for poetry will be treated with some astonishment. If the claims of religion as the supreme truth are held to be in doubt it is surely because science not poetry has taken its place as the socially regarded supreme arbiter of what is true and what is false.

Matthew Arnold believed both in the “high seriousness” of poetry and the importance of religion. His doubts about religion, even though church attendance in his age and succeeding ages up to the 1950’s remained comparatively high, is based on the rise of scepticism in intellectuals brought about, particularly, by the impact of Darwinism which suggested an evolution of humanity that appeared to set it at odds with the generally accepted Creation story in Genesis; taken as factual description that is and not positively as myth. This, came on top of a climate philosophical scepticism, induced by such as David Hume- from the eighteenth century-for instance , with respect to miracles. Lives of Jesus by writers like Schleiemacher (1832) and Renan( 1863)- translated by George Eliot, the great novelist,- stressed his human qualities and downplayed the possibility of miracles or supernatural powers. Such delimitation has continued of course into our times in which various quests for the historical Jesus have been pursued. Here what Arnold has to say of the fact failing religion given the prominence of scientific reasoning and scepticism throughout society may well seem spot on.

But the consequent rise of poetry! Surely here Arnold is being unrealistic? Actually for many years no!. Matthew Arnold was not an “ivory-tower” critic; ; he worked for over thirty years as a school inspector working to advance the use of great literature in the school curriculum at the crucial stage when education had become compulsory for all children by law. Largely through his inspiration English poetry was seen as a vital element for newly educated children to be introduced to what was best in the language. To teach a child from the slums Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” , for instance, was important for getting a child to love a poem. In his Report for 1880 Arnold writes:

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles in action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.

The language is very much Victorian , to an extent, that in our sceptical age might seem over-exalted. But then Arnold’s sentiments are culturally complentary to the spiritual emphasis St Paul makes in the Letter to the Philippians

Whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, or if there be any praise, think on these things.
Epistle of Paul to the Philippians. Ch4.8

Paul’s verses are part of our culture, inevitably, because when a faith comes to be written down and translated it takes its place within the language’s culture. But how well they fit with Arnold’s expression of the value of poetry! Through reading or hearing poetry one absorbs its values and this is an important part of one’s education relating to the development of who one is. For Arnold’s perceived great poetry would share Paul’s emphasis on virtue as righteousness and beauty.

Arnold’s influence on the development of education was immense. While, inevitably, practice would vary from school to to school it was in general a part of the school’s responsibility to encourage people to know good poetry and to learn passages by heart. The idea continued right into the fifties and early sixties as I myself can report, when it was taken for granted that at secondary level, a variety of Shakespeare’s plays would be read and in poetry we would work through poets from “A Pageant of English Verse”; it was considered essential to give pupils the opportunity to experience a range of great poetry in English.

A future post will seek to show that Arnold’s sense of the significance of the “fact” is not so clear as he believes. But here I want again to point out that Arnold’s prophecy expressed in this quotation is not borne out by an age markedly less religious (I refer to North America and the West) but also less given to Arnold’s high estimate of poetry and very much more prone to an exaggerated identification of truth with science and objectively verifiable fact.

So what then are we to make of Arnold’s judgement that “the strongest part of our religion is its unconscious poetry”? See the follow-up posts.

FAITH IN THE BIBLE; FAITH IN POETRY (1).

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. 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. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
Matthew Arnold. Introduction to the first volume of The Hundred Greatest Men 1880 .

As you see this passage by the famous Victorian critic and poet, Matthew Arnold was written 140 years ago. How well does it stand today?

Two large prophetic claims are made. Religion is in decline and poetry- at least “if it is worthy of its high destinies”- has the potential to take its place.

Whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, or if there be any praise, think on these things.
Epistle of Paul to the Philippians. Ch4.8

So what then are we to make of Arnold’s judgement that “the strongest part of our religion is its unconscious poetry”? See the follow-up posts.

JOHN DONNE CHANGES WHAT IT MEANS TO READ POETRY.

I will never forget the effect of reading John Donne for the first time.

Donne (1572-1631) may have lived three hundred and more years before but he speaks with a living force on love and sex, and to me, a distinctly naive nineteen year old second year university student with little experience of what is called life, his poetry had and continues to have, startling immediacy.

Songs and Sonnets provides an astonishing range of love poetry from sensuous to playful, from platonic to loving and it does so with a direct urgency of voice that makes the poems vitally alive.

You just need to look at some of the opening stanzas :

I wonder , by my troth, what thou, and I 
Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then 
But sucked on country pleasures childishly 
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den? 
'Twas so; but this all pleasures fancies be. 
If ever any beauty I did see 
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

( “Did” and “got”; two of the most common verbs in English speech, but hardly poetic sounding; has ever a poet given them more force than here? Consider the power the enjambment gives to “Did”. Again look at “weaned”, “sucked”,” “snorted”:all strongly physical Anglo-Saxon, Old English verbs considered too unpoetic in times where more euphemistic words would have might have been preferred).

Or:

 Busy old fool ,unruly sun, 
Why dost thou thus 
Through windows and through curtains call on us? 
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? 
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide 
Late school boys and sour prentices 
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride 
Call country ants to harvest offices: 
Love, all alike, no season knows or clime, 
Nor hours, days , months  which are the rags of time.

(Notice the shocking scorn with which the sun, regarded traditionally as splendid, often in Elizabethan times aggrandised by classical references to Phoebus or Apollo. There is a wide view of society that suggests the wide sweep of Jacobean drama; the influence of Shakespeare is hinted at by – “Late school boys and sour prentices” which reminds one of the Seven Ages of Man speech In “As You Like It” -and the dismissive “country ants to harvest offices” suggests the royal indifference of say, a Richard ii.).

Or:

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love, 
Or chide my palsy or my gout,
 My five grey hairs, or ruined fortune flout ,
With wealth your state, your minds with arts improve 
Take you a course, get you a place, 
Observe his honour or his Grace 
Or the King's real, or his stamped  face, 
Contemplate; what you will, approve, 
So you will let me love.

(The influence of the dramatic voice speaking forth is presented here; it is as if the the voice is arguing against the restraining influence of friends, from out of the midst of conversation as if it is an excerpt from a play of voices. Notice , here, and throughout the three examples the command of rhythm that makes the verse flow.).

John Donne (along with other so-called Metaphysical poets) was a shaping influence on T.S. Eliot’s poetry. Eliot saw his poetry, as showing a combination of intellect, wit and feeling at play and it was this combination he sought to recapture in his own verse. John Donne was central to his idea of the “dissociation of sensibility” which shall be discussed in a future post.

F.R. Leavis in his revaluation of English poetry makes Donne central in the “line of wit” and demonstrates how Donne’s language follows the rhythms of the the “speaking voice”: “the subtleties of Donne’s use of the speaking voice and spoken language are inexhaustible ….The art has evident affinities with Shakespeare’s”.

It is little wonder I was so startled by John Donne when I first read him. Reading and appreciating Eliot and Leavis inevitably involved regarding John Donne highly. There is of course much more to Donne than can be attempted in this post; as well as “Songs and Sonnets” he created satires and significant religious poetry. He is a poet I shall come back to.

“SWEET THAMES RUN SOFTLY, TILL I END MY SONG”: TWO KINDS OF POETRY; TWO KINDS OF USE OF ENGLISH?

https://www.pinterest.com/pin556124253977184339

It’s a famous, striking and beautiful line I think! It is also a charming illustration! Charming, however, is not a critical word. It means simply you are attracted by the refrain and the illustration. What changes when we make a critical response?

But let me leave the question in the air while I give more information

The refrain is from the Elizabethan Edmund Spenser’s poem Prothalamion.

Prothalamion is word invented by the poet. It comes from two Greek words: pro -before and thalamion meaning bridal chamber. A forthcoming wedding is being celebrated: the double marriage of twin sisters is being held further downstream in the city . Here, up- river we are made conscious of the charms of Nature and two swans floating downstream represent the brides to be. There is a pastoral element to the poem and plenty of classical allusions but to me the artifice adds to the poem rather than chokes it.

The artifice is, at first, disguised by a curiously personal quality with the poet’s voice and mood introduced in the first stanza. He is pictured, in “sullen” mood needing the refreshment of Nature. However, the picture he paints is purely connected with the forthcoming wedding and here the pastoral element of the poem develops with the description of the nymphs bedecking themselves, and then the swans with flowers

The poet’s stance poet as narrator changes in the first stanza; changes from the personal to one reflecting that of the Muse. This is illustrated by refrain “Sweet Thames run softly while I sing my song” in which the narrator is supposed as Muse to have the authority to command the river while he presents his work.

As I say, this to me gives the poem a charm connected not with its realism but with a ready ( in my case-perhaps not in yours) acceptance of artifice and its skilful arrangement.

But see what you think in reading the first three stanzas:

Calm was the day, and through the trembling air  
Sweet breathing Zephyrus didst softly play 
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay 
Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair:              (glitter)
When I whom sullen care, 
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay 
In Prince's court, and expectation vain 
Of idle hope, which still do fly away 
Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain, 
Walked forth to ease my pain 
Along the shore of silver streaming Thames, 
Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems 
Was painted all with variable flowers, 
And all the meads adorned with dainty gems,
Fit to deck maidens' bowers 
And crown their paramours, 
Against the bridal day which is not long: 
Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.

There in a meadow by the river's side, 
A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy, 
All lovely Daughters of the Flood thereby, 
With goodly greenish locks all loose untied, 
As each had been a bride, 
And each one had a little wicker basket, 
Made of  fine twigs entrailed curiously,                       (entwined)
In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket:   (a shallow basket)
And with fine Fingers, cropped full feateously           ( dexterously)
The tender stalks on hye. 
Of every sort which in that meadow grew, 
They gathered some; the Violet pallid blue, 
The little Daisy, that at evening closes, 
The virgin Lily, and the Primrose true,
With sore of vermeil Roses, 
To deck their Bridegrooms' poesies,
 Against the Bridal day, which was not long: 
Sweet Thames run softly till  I  end my song.

With that, I saw two swans of goodly hew, 
Come softly swimming down along the lee; 
Two fairer birds I yet did never see: 
The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew, 
Did never whiter show, 
Nor Love himself when he a swan would be 
For love of Leda, whiter did appear: 
Yet Leda was they say as white as he, 
Yet not so white as these nor nothing near; 
So purely white they were, 
That even the gentle stream, the which them bare, and bade his billows spare 
To wet their silken feathers, least they might 
Soil their fair plumes with water not so fair 
And mar their beauties bright, 
That shone as light, 
Against their bridal day, which was not long: 
Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.

With Spenser’s verse we associate that strain of music that runs through English verse from Spenser himself through Milton (cf. Lycidas), Keats and Tennyson. The language has a decorative quality (Flasket, feateously, entrayled, posies, meads, maidens, paramours) as opposed to a poetry that emphasises the rhythms of the speaking voice and the physicality of the language; it reflects more the Anglo-Norman French inheritance of English rather than that of Old English (Anglo-Saxon). Spenser sometimes adopts the mode of the Old English alliterative line ( In which they gathered flowers to fill their flaskets /And with fine fingers cropped full feateously.) but the words are chosen for grace rather than for their physical immediacy.

While this I find attractive I find poetry rooted in the physical- sounding more Anglo-Saxon form of English more meaningful as an elucidation or actual enactment though words of thought.

Compare with Spenser this of John Donne, for instance, in The Hill of Truth:

                                         On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will 
Reach her, about must and about must go 
And what the hill's suddenness resists win so 
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight, 
Thy soul can rest, for none can work in that night.

The language is decidedly rooted in Old English. Huge, cragged (two syllables), steep, strive: note the strong physical words; note how the enjambment separating the complete verb “will Reach” enables the enactment of stretching; note the decisive words rhyme words ending lines. The language represents strength rather than grace ; focused thought rather than ornamentation; unexpectedness rather than convention .

What do you think? Do you tend towards one or the other?

“WHAT IS HONOUR? A WORD”

The affections lead us on says Wordsworth. So does language. This is what Falstaff is resisting in connection with the word “honour” . He has landed himself in a battle but, no soldier, he does not want to fight:

..honour pricks me on. Yea but what if honour prick me off when I come on ? How then? can honour set to a leg? No Or an arm? No . Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. “What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? Air-a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it no. Tis insensible then? Yea to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon- and so ends my catechism.
William Shakespeare Henry IV Part 1 1597

(NB “scutcheon” painted shield with coat of arms identifying a dead nobleman. (“Henry iv P1 Signet Classics 1963) )

For Falstaff what comes first is self-preservation. The language of honour, of military and heroic ambition means nothing. Honour is mere air. A word. The speech is a marvellous piece of deflation. In the play we have a character who lives by honour. Hotspur is genuinely heroic, he believes in honour; but he drives himself impetuously on the word to the point of madness. He is made use of by others who encourage him into a risky rebellion. Behind “honour” we still need reason. Falstaff uses reason in this speech to safeguard self; Hotspur in holding to the inspiration of the word avoids thinking.

Nevertheless we do despite Falstaff and notwithstanding Hotspur live on the inspiration of words. They are not mere air. Or if they are air they are the air that stirs us into life. “Honour” is still a great word involving our essential self-respect. So is the closely connected word “troth”.

“And thereto I give thee my troth” are the words of commitment in Cranmer’s great marriage service.

THE THIRD REALM

The Third realm sounds mysterious, perhaps mystical, but is simply like this.

It is English class and a group of students look at a poem, let us say this by Wordsworth.

My heart leaps up when I behold
   A rainbow in the sky,
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old
  Or let me die!.
The Child is father of the man 
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

It is a well focused class. The teacher reads through the poem twice with them and then they discuss it.

Here is the question: ” As they listen and discuss the poem where is the poem?”

Yes simple as that : Where is the poem?

Is it on the page in those black marks? Or written in the past is it a document that belongs to the year 1802 or whenever Wordsworth wrote it?

This does not seem satisfactory.

The poem has been recreated in experience by the reading. It is not just black marks on a page and it is made vividly present not an antiquated document from back there.

Is the poem then in the minds of the teacher and students?. Well yes , that can be said.

Is it purely subjective experience then? Perhaps, but it is a common subjective experience and yet each subjective mind no doubt has a slightly different take on the poem.

In the discussion the teacher asks questions: like why “behold” rather than “see” , “view” “observe”?. What are the connotations, the sound, the meaning, the length of “behold” that makes it appropriate Wordsworth chooses that word.

Why the three lines beginning “So was it” “So is it” “So be it”. What is being done by that format?

How does this development of past, present and future lead to the general statement: “The child is father of the man”.

What does the poignant sounding “Or let me die” suggest?

How does the finale complete the meaning of the poem?

There are loads of questions to explore.

The students seem alive to the poem and what it has to offer. One smart guy points to the opening rhythms of the opening lines “Are they not a wee bit slack the sort of emotive sound and rhythm that can easily be mocked?” You see the point. Wordsworth can be so overly simple and emotional sounding his work can often get parodied. At the same time the teacher sees this possible weakness compensated for by the strong binding rhythm of the centre of the poem.

Lots to discuss; the class remains well focused.

Where in all this interaction is the poem?

The 1802 poem is being recreated, it is a sustained following through the making of the poem making it alive again.

That is the third realm. The poem is there in the exchange of reading listening, discussing, imaginative re-reading.

It is real experience; all have been vividly involved. But the experience is not directed towards objective truth. It is not like a scientific experiment where verification happens when the liquid in the test tube turns colour. Nor is it simply subjective. The teacher is not saying “Take away your own meaning and be satisfied with that.” The focus is all on the meaning achieved by the poem.. One student might say this and you might want to interject “Yes, but..”.

It is a learning experience but you are not just looking for a definite answer to the meaning of the poem, as in the scientific experiment; objectively established. You are seeking to bring together through discussion, what T. S Eliot spoke of as the common pursuit of true judgement. You are looking to establish Wordsworth’s arguable meaning, not propose your own individual one.

The third realm: discussion in which minds meet.

Now read this quotation from F.R. Leavis:

It is in the study of literature, that one comes to recognise the nature and priority of the third realm… the realm of that which is neither merely private and personal nor public in the sense it can be brought into the laboratory or pointed to. Y ou cannot point to the poem; it is “there” only in the re-creative response of individual minds to the black marks on the page. But -a necessary faith- it is something in which minds can meet. The process in which this faith is justified is given fairly enough in the account of the nature of criticism…..The implicit form of a judgement is: This is so, isn’t it? the question is an appeal for confirmation is that the thing is so; implicitly that , though expecting, characteristically, an answer in the form, “yes,but- ” the but standing for qualifications, reserves, corrections. Here we have a diagram of the collaborative creative process in which the poem becomes established as something “out there”, of common access in what is in some sense a public world. It gives us, too, the nature of the existence of English Literature, a living whole, that can have its life only in the living present, in the creative response of individuals, who collaboratively renew and perpetuate what they participate in – a cultural community or consciousness. More it gives us the nature in general of what I have called the “third realm” to which all that makes us human belongs.
F.R. Leavis “Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow.” Richmond Lecture 1962.

This is dense and precisely focused argument. Note how the discussion of say a poem, by which it is placed as something admired (or not) is a paradigm for the way in which the idea of a literature becomes created by criticism ( Shakespeare is supreme where Ben Jonson is simply very good).- though criticism is always open to revaluation and agreement will never be universal. But also, and perhaps especially, note how the “third realm” also stands for the way in which a language is created and the way in which we belong to a particular form of the human world within that language.

Phew!

I’ll come back to this!

EXPANDING SCIENCE AND THE DECLINING CENTRE.

As though the scientific edifice of the modern world were not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful collective work of the mind of man.
C.P. Snow The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Rede Lecture 1959

It is pleasant to think of Snow contemplating, daily perhaps, the intellectual depth, complexity and articulation in all their beauty. But there is a prior human achievement of collaborative creation, a more basic work of the mind of man (and more than the mind), one without which the triumphant erection of the scientific would not have been possible; that is, the creation of a human world, including language. It is one we cannot rest on as something done in the past. It lives in the living creative response to change in the present.
F.R.Leavis .Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow Richmond Lecture 1962

But the religious virtue of knowledge was become a flunkey to the god of material success.
D. H. Lawrence The Rainbow

I was at school in Northern Ireland when the furore over Leavis’ radical dismantling of C.P.Snow’s Rede Lecture (known as the Two Cultures lecture) took place. Not that as a schoolboy I knew much about it. Nevertheless the time was coming when one had to choose between specialising in Science subjects or the Arts. There was no doubt which of the two was considered superior. Science was given an intellectual weight beside which the arts were made to seem to be rather light and flimsy; my interest, however, was in the arts and I concentrated at school and then university on English Literature and History.

This dispute might seem long gone, an academic affair that has become outdated, of interest only to academics. Not so! It is still very much with us.

Ostensibly Snow’s argument seemed attractive. There was a gap and the gap should be narrowed between education in the sciences and education in the arts. It was begun at school and went on into life, making for two groups of educated people who could not share intellectual and cultural interests. If it had been left at that fair enough.

But the thrust was plain. Scientific education should be backed at the expense of the arts because it was the sciences rather than the arts that contributed to the good of society. “Scientists had the future in their bones” whereas the literary representatives of what Snow called “traditional culture” are “natural luddites“. The arts were fine but only as something ornamental, an attractive display that added grace to life. Real knowledge, real progress belonged to Science and to adjusting our education so that more science got taught, there was greater specialisation in science. Ultimately this would lead to greater prosperity and the material improvement of life for all and this is what was primarily needed.

Well the argument is still with us. The other day Sir Patrick Valance involved in the health response against Covid pleaded for more iintegration of science and politics. Government responds by launching a new Office for Science and Technology Strategy declaring its aim to make Britain “a science super-power”.

Leavis’ argument however was concerned less with the need for more Science( which he did not dispute) more for the importance for society to develop critical intelligence rooted in culture. For only a rooted culture could provide us with a centre which materialism could never provide -though it might dissipate such- and Snow’s educational remedies were externalist ( note the image of the “edifice” in the quotation) directed towards science and technology creating the jobs that would give the population sufficient “jam” (yes, that was his term!) to live on.

I won’t go into the “nitty-gritty” of the argument here though I plan to discuss it further in future posts. For me however, as a young man seeking his way in life when I eventually studied the matter in more depth on reading the two sides it was Leavis who stood not only for humanitas but for the human spirit. Snow’s focus was purely materialist. For him it was a question as to what the country needed materially for its advancement and only that,. Leavis’ challenge was :

” what we need and shall continue to need not less, is something with the livingness of the deepest vital instinct for the sake of our humanity, for the sake of a human future … to maintain the full life in the present -and life is growth- of our transmitted culture”

It might be said he understood, as Snow did not show any sign of doing, that Science and material welfare could not provide a country with a centre. He understood, that is, what Yeats meant, when he wrote:

 "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. 
W.B. Yeats The Second Coming.

It was this awareness that drove me as it had done many others influenced by Leavis, perhaps the greatest teacher of English, as well as the greatest critic we have known in the last century, to become a teacher of English, because in English we saw a meeting ground with pupils and students wherever they were at; for the value of absorbing literature is perennial not because of its external benefits but because it develops us in our sympathies and understanding in the common pursuit of true judgement. And without that pursuit strongly pursued society wilts.

It was Snow of course who succeeded Endorsed by Harold Wilson who offered him a place in his government and spoke of the “white heat of the technological revolution” as something the country must embrace. Polytechnics, admirable institutions designed to provide a technical education, became universities. Universities packed with specialisms became multiversities designed to give their paying career savvy- students the vocational preparation they needed. Arts students were poor relations.

University once meant a centre for the gathering of knowledge in an attempt to integrate knowledge: a collocation of specialisms cannot offer that. In the meantime religious faith has dwindled and cultural choice is more and more directed by market values. Political debate is concentrated on economic matters and “culture wars” are responses to bitter divisions over questions of rights- divisions stirred by social media.

The question of restoring the centre is one of urgency; but it cannot be done without faith and rooted intelligence.

HOW DO WE GROW?

We may say that when we use language, or a probe, or a tool, and thus make ourselves aware of these things as we are of our body, we interiorize these things and make ourselves dwell in them. Such extensions of ourselves develop new faculties in us; our whole education operates in this way; each of us interiorizes our cultural heritage, he grows into a person seeing the world and experiences life in terms of this outlook. (from Michael Polyani “The Logic of Tacit Inference” (Knowing and Being)

What do you think of this quotation?

I love it because it challenges the idea that education is an accumulation of facts, of external knowledge, of developing skills detached from who we are.

Education is to do with “indwelling”, within a science, an art, a language, a literature, a history; so that it becomes “interiorised” within our person.

It challenges the idea that education is simply for utility and not for our personal growth.

Let me know what you think.