IX. The Doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart
‘Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages and neglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms.’
TRAHERNE.
We have hitherto been concerned almost exclusively with the form of Paradise Lost and it is now time to turn to its matter. Here also the modern reader finds difficulties. Mr. Brian Hone, the cricketer and schoolmaster, once told me that he had reconciled his boys to the need we find for notes in reading Milton by pointing out how many notes Milton would need if he read a modern book. The device is a happy one. If Milton returned from the dead and did a week’s reading in the literature of our own day, consider what a crop of questions he might bring you. It would carry you far afield to make him understand how liberal, sentimental, and complacent had become terms of disapproval, and before you had finished you would find that you had embarked on the exposition of a philosophy rather than on merely lexical questions. Now when we read Paradise Lost the positions are reversed. Milton is on his own ground, and it is we who must be the learners.
How are these gulfs between the ages to be dealt with by the student of poetry? A method often recommended may be called the method of The Unchanging Human Heart. According to this method the things which separate one age from another are superficial. Just as, if we stripped the armour off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate. I held this theory myself for many years, but I have now abandoned it. I continue, of course, to admit that if you remove from people the things that make them different, what is left must be the same, and that the Human Heart will certainly appear as Unchanging if you ignore its changes. But I have come to doubt whether the study of this mere L.C.M. is the best end the student of old poetry can set before himself. If we are in search of the L.C.M. then, in every poem, we are tempted to treat as the most important those elements which belong to the L.C.M. which remain when we have finished the stripping-off process. But how if these are not really the most important elements in the actual balance of the poem we are reading? Our whole study of the poem will then become a battle between us and the author in which we are trying to twist his work into a shape he never gave it, to make him use the loud pedal where he really used the soft, to force into false prominence what he took in his stride, and to slur over what he actually threw into bold relief. The older modern reading of Dante, with its disproportionate emphasis on the Inferno, and, within the Inferno, on the episode of Paolo and Francesca, is an example of this. The common concentration on the satiric elements in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Romance of the Rose is another. Sometimes, too, the features to which we give this false prominence are not really manifestations of some specially Unchanging element in humanity at all, but merely those in which the long process of change has thrown up a similarity between the old author and the modern mood. We find not the Unchanging, but a fortunate resemblance to our own modification—like the Scotchman who thought the Greek infantry must be sound Presbyterians at heart because they wore kilts. Under this delusion we may be led to suppose that Virgil is specially expressive of the Unchanging Human Heart in the Dido episode or that the death of Absalom is more ‘central’ than the death of Abel. I do not say that even on these terms we shall not get some value out of our reading; but we must not imagine that we are appreciating the works the old writers actually wrote.
Fortunately there is a better way. Instead of stripping the knight of his armour you can try to put his armour on yourself; instead of seeing how the courtier would look without his lace, you can try to see how you would feel with his lace; that is, with his honour, his wit, his royalism, and his gallantries out of the Grand Cyrus. I had much rather know what I should feel like if I adopted the beliefs of Lucretius than how Lucretius would have felt if he had never entertained them. The possible Lucretius in myself interests me more than the possible C. S. Lewis in Lucretius. There is in G. K. Chesterton’s Avowals and Denials a wholly admirable essay called On Man: Heir of All the Ages. An heir is one who inherits and ‘any man who is cut off from the past . . . is a man most unjustly disinherited’. To enjoy our full humanity we ought, so far as is possible, to contain within us potentially at all times, and on occasion to actualize, all the modes of feeling and thinking through which man has passed. You must, so far as in you lies, become an Achaean chief while reading Homer, a medieval knight while reading Malory, and an eighteenth century Londoner while reading Johnson. Only thus will you be able to judge the work ‘in the same spirit that its author writ’ and to avoid chimerical criticism. It is better to study the changes in which the being of the Human Heart largely consists than to amuse ourselves with fictions about its immutability. For the truth is that when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being. To take an example from a simple matter, human eating, when you have abstracted all that is peculiar to the social and culinary practice of different times and places, resolves itself into the merely physical. Human love, abstracted from all the varying taboos, sentiments, and ethical discriminations which have accompanied it, resolves itself into something capable only of medical treatment, not of poetical.
Logicians will perceive that the fallacy of the Unchanging Human Heart is one more instance of the L.C.M. view of the universal—the idea that an engine is most truly an engine if it it neither driven by steam nor gas nor electricity, neither stationary nor locomotive, neither big nor small. But in reality you understand enginehood or humanity or any other universal precisely by studying all the different things it can become—by following the branches of the tree, not by cutting them off.
We must therefore turn a deaf ear to Professor Saurat when he invites us ‘to study what there is of lasting originality in Milton’s thought and especially to disentangle from theological rubbish the permanent and human interest’ (Milton, p. III). This is like asking us to study Hamlet after the ‘rubbish’ of the revenge code has been removed, or centipedes when free of their irrelevant legs, or Gothic architecture without the pointed arches. Milton’s thought, when purged of its theology, does not exist. Our plan must be very different—to plunge right into the ‘rubbish’, to see the world as if we believed it, and then, while we still hold that position in our imagination, to see what sort of a poem results.
In order to take no unfair advantage I should warn the reader that I myself am a Christian, and that some (by no means all) of the things which the atheist reader must ‘try to feel as if he believed’ I actually, in cold prose, do believe. But for the student of Milton my Christianity is an advantage. What would you not give to have a real, live Epicurean at your elbow while reading Lucretius?