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On Poetic Truth1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

H. D. Lewis
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Extract

Poetry has to do with reality in its most individual aspect. It is thus at the opposite pole to science, and out of its reach. Studies like The Road to Xanadu, highly valuable though they may be in one way, do not help us in any measure to understand what poetry in itself is; nor do they heighten substantially our appreciation of poetry. This may seem rather obvious, but it is not in fact idle to say it. For our thought is apt to be unduly coloured to-day by the progress of science, and some of the votaries of science are prone to regard it, in the Biblical phrase, as ‘profitable unto all things.’ These are less naïve to-day than their prototypes a century ago, and they have a subtler psychology at their disposal when they turn to art. But their view is no less pernicious for that reason. Science has very certain limits, and we only bring it into contempt by forcing upon it a forlorn and unnatural enterprise beyond its own terrain. Some scientists, and they include eminent persons like Julian Huxley, have made that mistake in regard to our ideas of right and wrong, and have endeavoured to develop a science of ethics. It is not to the purpose here to expose the confusions involved in this particular act of aggression on the part of science. Science has nothing to do, in the final analysis, with our ideas of right and wrong. And it is also true, quite apart from ultimate questions about the meaning of value, that we cannot give a scientific analysis of art. Science may indeed help us to understand matters incidental to the pursuit of artistic activities.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 79 , July 1946 , pp. 147 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1946

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Footnotes

1

A lecture delivered to the Poetry Society at University College, Bangor.

References

page 147 note 2 A detailed study of Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” in terms of the poet's experience and reading.—J. Livingstone Lawes.

page 147 note 3 The matter is very fully discussed by Broad, C. D. in Mind, 10 1944, pp. 344–357Google Scholar.

page 149 note 1 Republic, 611.

page 149 note 2 It makes little difference here that they are also thought of as entities or things.

page 150 note 1 Republic 529, Lindsay's translation, Everyman Edition, p. 255. The student who is introduced to the Republic mainly through Nettleship's Lectures on the Republic of Plato—a work that is little likely to lose its value for the purpose—is apt to be misled at this point. For Nettleship represents Plato as merely insisting on the need for an “interpretation of sense” (p. 276). On this view all that Plato wishes to deny is that “we ever get at the truth of astronomy by simply looking” (page 272). But this is only one of many cases where exponents of Plato have endeavoured to make his view more acceptable by representing him as exaggerating for effect. If we blur the dualism of Plato we miss his intention entirely and fail to appreciate the precise nature, and the importance for Plato, of logical considerations upon which his view was based quite as much as upon the analysis of perception. The more we study the movement of Plato's thought as a whole the more evident also will be the completer rationalism of his final views. Nettleship, as is usual with ‘idealist’ expounders of great philosophers, is somewhat prone to interpret Plato in the light of his own idealism.

page 151 note 1 We have to remember, of course, that there was little else for the Greek to be educated upon.

page 152 note 1 Phaedrus 248.

page 153 note 1 Republic 607–608, Everyman Edition, page 353.

page 153 note 2 Among the most interesting and scholarly attempts to substantiate this view is that of Collingwood, R. G. (“Plato's Philosophy of Art,” Mind, 04 1925)Google Scholar. He does not ascribe to Plato “the puritanical moralist's objection to art as such” (p. 169). The purpose of Plato, according to Collingwood, is to show, on the one hand, “that art is not knowledge” and “cannot be praised for its truth,” but that, on the other, it is “symbolic of philosophical truth” (p. 163). Plato, it is urged, is in this way bringing out the true function of art. And that is where I cannot accept Collingwood's view. For while it is contended in the present paper (see below, Section IV.) that art does express truth symbolically, what it does symbolize, on our view, is an aspect of reality other than that which can be comprehended intellectually. (Is not this the only kind of symbolism that has importance?) On the view that is, rightly I believe, ascribed to Plato by Collingwood, art would have only very low value. It would do imperfectly what is done better by the strictly intellectual operations of mind. And this, as I take it, is just what Plato does say. Art is a propaedeutic to knowledge; and it is to be encouraged only within the strictest limits and dispensed with on reaching intellectual maturity. One finds it hard to see how this could yield the conclusion that Collingwood expects of it, namely that the quarrel between philosophy and poetry is that of “rivals for the supreme allegiance of mankind” (p. 170). It may be true that Plato “felt within himself a real conflict between the claims of his literary genius and those of his philosophical” (p. 170), but that is not how he himself understood the incompatibility of art and philosophy. The quarrel originates precisely where art makes a claim, quite preposterous on Plato's view of it, to be a serious rival to philosophy for our allegiance, and hinders the work of philosophy. The very tone of the relevant passages in the Republic fully bears this out, and I am sure we cannot get a true view of Plato's thought as a whole unless we take his condemnation of poetry and the arts quite seriously. The student who wishes to pursue this matter closely will find a valuable guide to the relevant passages of Plato's Dialogues in “Plato and the Poets,” Hight, G. A., Mind, 1922Google Scholar.

page 155 note 1 I believe that this is what Gerard Manley Hopkins really means by ‘inscape’ notwithstanding the Platonism that colours his account of it. For an excellent discussion of the ‘topic’ see Gerard Manley Hopkins—John Pick.

page 156 note 1 The general question of the objectivity of value does not come within the scope of this paper.

page 156 note 2 If I understand aright this is what Berdyaev means when he urges that “Unity in reality does not resemble unity in thought” (Slavery and Freedom, p. 75).

page 158 note 1 Brumana, James Elroy Flecker.

page 158 note 1 It is also very misleading to identify the form with the sounds of the words alone. Artistic relations of sounds that do not depend in any measure on overt meaning are music and not poetry. There is some early poetry which has no syntactical form that we can recognize to-day. If it has no such form it must come very near being music rather than poetry. In some poetry, on the other hand, overt meaning plays much the most important part. Browning provides an obvious example, but it has to be stressed again that Browning succeeds as a poet, not because of the truth or impressiveness of his thoughts in themselves, but because—to draw a distinction that must not be pressed too closely—he is doing with thoughts what Tennyson does with words. Whether there can be poetry of thought alone, a bringing together of thoughts that stirs the peculiar awareness which is art independently of the sounds of words is an interesting but extremely difficult question.

page 159 note 1 The supreme example in recent times is Bridges in the Testament of Beauty.

page 159 note 2 “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” Elizabethan Essays, p. 47.

page 162 note 1 It may be objected here that there are good pictures which seem to be nothing but a riot of colours (e.g. some of S. J. Peploe's work). But then the presentation of these colours is deeply significant although they have no obviously recognizable pattern.

page 162 note 2 See Republic 386–391.

page 163 note 1 E.g. by Carritt in Theory of Beauty. See especially Chapter 10, p. 272; also What is Beauty, Chapter 6.

page 163 note 2 This goes also for Housman's celebrated dictum: “To transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought, but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer–is the peculiar function of poetry.” The Name and Nature of Poetry, page 12. In view of the very close affinity of this theory with Expressionism generally it is rather odd that Listowel, after trouncing the latter very thoroughly (in “The Present State of Aesthetics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1934–1935, p. 119Google Scholar) should approve so heartily of Housman's theory (op. cit., p. 203).

page 163 note 3 See Ayer, , Language, Truth and Logic, Chapter VIGoogle Scholar.

page 165 note 1 For a brief but most penetrating discussion of these confusions see “The Features and Factors of the World Crisis,” by Garvie, A. E., Hibbert Journal, Vol. XXXIXGoogle Scholar.