12. Who gaf me drink?: Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age
Lewis and Owen Barfield became friends in 1919, and all went well until Barfield became an Anthroposophist in 1923. Anthroposophy is ‘a system of theosophy evolved by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), based on the premise that the human soul can, of its own power, contact the spiritual world. The concepts of karma and reincarnation are central to it. It acknowledges Christ as a cosmic being, but its understanding of Him is very different from that of orthodox Christianity’.
‘Barfield's conversion to Anthroposophy’, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy (1954), , ‘marked the beginning of what I can only describe as the Great War between him and me. It was never, thank God, a quarrel . . . But it was an almost incessant disputation, sometimes by letter and sometimes face to face, which lasted for years.’ While the ‘Great War’ had ended years before, the problem Lewis faced in reviewing Romanticism Comes of Age is that it contains in the Introduction and other places Barfield's ‘case’ for Anthroposophy.
Seventeen years (years chronicled with an admirable stern humour in the preface) separate this book from the same author's Poetic Diction. During those years the most important work in the same field has been Professor James's Scepticism and Poetry – at least, if you agree with the present reviewer that Professor James in that great book was really writing about scepticism and romantic poetry. Like Professor James, Mr Barfield considers the doctrine and discipline of romantic imagination worthy of a serious critique. The difference is that whereas Professor James finds that the ship of (romantic) poetry must ‘shipwreck in the harbour’, Mr Barfield holds that, though it did so, it need not have done so.
‘In the legend of Parsifal’, he writes, ‘tragic consequences follow the failure of the hero to ask the crucial question at the crucial moment.’ This tragedy was repeated in the Romantic Movement when Coleridge, in the Biographia, in obedience to the ‘very injudicious’ letter of his unknown friend, omitted that full account of the Imagination which was the real raison d’être of the whole book. The same uncertainty or pusillanimity runs through all Wordsworth's utterances on the subject. The Romantics make huge claims for the Imagination as an organ of truth; but they never have the courage either to withdraw those claims or to support them quite seriously and face their implications. Unless the claims were wholly illusory, it looks as if some real enlargement of human consciouness were, at that moment, offered – and refused; as if the Romantic fell per null'altro rio che per non aver fé.
This, according to Mr Barfield, is what happened. The full force of his position cannot be understood except in the context he gives it; a context provided by the ‘history of thinking’, which he distinguishes sharply from the history of thought. It is this conception which links the present work to Poetic Diction, for while the history of thought is to be found in men's opinions, the history of thinking is embodied in their language. Hence,
The Greek youth of Homer's day, as he approached manhood, did not ‘have a beard’, he did not even ‘grow a beard’; he did not require a substantive at all to express what was happening – he ‘foamed’! And again, in order to attribute youth, the Greek language did not require, as we do, the static, logical mode of copula and predicate ‘So-and-so-is-young’; it could say ‘So and so “blossoms” or “blooms”,’ using the same word as it used for the flowers of the field. It cannot be too often insisted that this was not a poetical metaphor, but a bedrock element in the Greek language; it is we, when we use such expressions to-day, who are trying to get back, via poetic metaphor, into the kind of consciousness which the Greek had and could express quite naturally and straightforwardly. (p. 40.)
The point which Mr Barfield is making is not one about the Greeks in particular, but about a phase in the evolution of consciousness in general of which the Greeks are the most convenient example. A later phase began to appear, but has miscarried, in English Romanticism. What might and should have happened is, for the author, hinted in the scientific works of Goethe and fully developed in the thought of Dr Steiner. About the latter he has had the same sort of experience which Chesterton had about the Church of Rome; when he had put the finishing touches to his own private ‘doxy’ he found that it was almost identical with the orthodoxy of a system that already existed.
And with Dr Steiner we are, of course, landed in a whole world of thought which will be alien, and even disquieting, to most English readers – not least to the reviewer.
But there is one curious fact about it which renders these spontaneous reactions more than usually relevant. One is not asked to believe. ‘Think these thoughts’, said Steiner, ‘without believing them.’ This is not a trick. It is a rule which might, with advantage, be at least temporarily applied to all thoughts whatever: for it is easy (and fatal) to be so pre-occupied with proving or disproving a thought that one never actually thinks it at all. The principle is also rooted in Steiner's whole system: for the whole labour is to pass from one kind of thinking to another. And in this book the results of this kind of thinking, as applied to Coleridge, Hamlet, and above all, to England itself (notice pp. 73–77) are sufficiently tonic and illuminating to justify the procedure.
This is not a perfect book. The author's wit, which is ever present, sometimes borders on petulance. The word Nature is never analysed: if it had been we should understand better whether, in the very last resort, the background is theistic, pantheistic, or agnostic. (I do not add ‘or idealist’ for that is precisely one of the antitheses the ‘history of thinking’ claims to undercut.) But it is a book which cannot be safely neglected, and which no one will read without feeling that windows have been opened and that strange airs are stirring in the room – perhaps without murmuring like Criseyde ‘Who gaf me drink?’
While Barfield and Lewis were to remain close friends for the rest of their lives it continued to disappoint Barfield that Lewis would not read the works of Rudolf Steiner. When he revised the Introduction to a new impression of Romanticism Comes of Age (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan, 1966) he said:
It has been the deepest of disappointments to me to find that, when one refers to Steiner, people do not listen. Or rather I have not merely been disappointed, I have been shocked and puzzled to have it borne in on me over and over again that even those who are prepared to lend a very sympathetic ear indeed to my own observations, whether on language and poetry or on the wider issue of the whole evolution of human consciousness, are not in the least interested in the news about Steiner which it has been one of my main objects in life to set before the educated public with all the earnestness and sobriety at my disposal . . . As an example that will serve a fortiori for all the rest, even the late C. S. Lewis, who was meticulous, if ever a man was, about passing on hearsay judgments, who would never, for instance, express an opinion even on a minor but all too prolix poet of the sixteenth century without first having read the great bulk of what the man himself had actually written – that even he, on more than one occasion, broke his rule in the case of Steiner? (pp. 16–17).
Review published in The Spectator, vol. 184 (9 March 1945), p. 224.