10 Life
I. ‘LIFE’ (CONCRETE)
It is for biologists and philosophers to discuss ‘what life is’; we have the less ambitious task of examining what people mean by the word life, or, more strictly, some of the different things they may mean. If it were possible to identify the earliest sense of the word, we should naturally begin with that sense. But we cannot even be sure that there was anything which could be quite unambiguously called ‘the earliest sense’. That very expression suggests that the word must have begun by having a single, rigidly homogeneous meaning. And some words—triangle, say, or knee—may have begun life with such an equipment. It can hardly be so with the greater words. I must therefore be content to start not with what can be shown to be oldest but with what seems to me the simplest and most immediate, the sense which practical and emotional pressures most fully force upon man’s attention.
Life in this sense is the something which a man or any other organism loses at death. It is concrete and individual, the life ‘of’ someone or something. A man’s life is ‘his’ as his beard is ‘his’ and can, like his beard, be removed. In Greek it is often aion. Achilles is afraid that flies and maggots will get at Patroclus now his aion is gone. A man says ‘Let aion leave me’ (let me die). To kill someone is to deprive him of aion. Sometimes it is zoe; we read in Pindar of a ‘death-and-zoe struggle’. Psuche can be used in the same sense. When Achilles was pressing Hector, both on foot, it was a race (literally, ‘they ran’) for Hector’s psuche. But in general psuche has implications which the other two words lack. It can leave the man temporarily. When they drew the spear out of Sarpedon’s wound, ‘his psuche left him but was soon breathed back into him again’. And even when it leaves him for good it apparently makes sense to ask—as it might not have made sense to ask about aion or zoe—where it has gone. It is then ‘a psuche and phantasm (eidolon) in the house of Hades’. But this psuche is not ‘the man himself’ or ‘the real man’. The body is the real man. After a battle the psuchai of the slain go to Hades but ‘the men themselves’ are devoured by dogs and birds. What is even stranger, a demi-god like Herakles is ‘himself’ alive among the gods while his phantasm is in Hades. Such are the earlier usages. Later, the word psuche undergoes two far-reaching developments. By one it becomes soul in the full theological or pneumatological sense of immaterial, intelligent, immortal substance. This, unlike the Homeric psuche, is emphatically the man himself, so that the body is regarded merely as its temporary prison. By the other it achieves the highly technical and biological senses which Aristotle uses.
In Latin, what a man loses at death can be anima, which is often identified with the breath or the blood. ‘You could see the weary anima breathed out’, says Ovid; a wounded man ‘vomited his anima’. It can also be vita. When Turnus was killed his vita ‘fled, full of resentment, to the shadows’. Like psuche, anima and vita can be regarded as something that exists in separation, elsewhere, after the man is dead. Mercury conducts pious animae to the happy dwellings. In another place vitae seem to be incorporeal beings which had never belonged to men.
The Anglo-Saxons, being Christians, believed much more firmly than the ancients in an entity within each man which survived his death, but they did not call it lif: it was gast or sawol. Lif is a property of the body: ‘when my lif goes from my body’—‘separating lif from body’. Or you can put it the other way round; instead of lif leaving the body, the man may ‘depart from lif’. On a strict view this involves a slightly different sense of the word. It is no longer the attribute of an individual; it is a scene of which he has had his share and from which he now makes his exit. But Pope’s larks which, when shot, ‘fall and leave their little lives in air’ are not a true example of it, for their lives, being plural, are individual. The expression is fanciful and unidiomatic because Pope is imitating Virgil’s line about the pigeon that was struck by the arrow, vitamque reliquit in astris, ‘and left its life in the sky’, where Virgil himself is using a kind of conceit.
In Middle English a life can mean ‘a living one’, hence simply a person. Thus Gower says about one of his heroines ‘and every lif hire loveth wel’, everybody likes her very much. The Flood drowned all humanity except eight individuals ‘outake lyves eyhte’. At the beginning of The Kingis Quair the poet fancies for a moment that the bell has said to him ‘Tell on, man quhat the befell’. Then he pulls himself up and says
This is myn awin ymagynacioun;
It is no lyf that spekis unto me.
—nobody was really talking.
II. ‘LIFE’ (CHRONOLOGICAL)
The name for any state or condition inevitably becomes a name for the period during which that state or condition obtained. Presidency is the name of an office, but a man’s presidency is also the period during which he was president. Life is something my body has, but my life is also the period during which my body had it. Thus ‘he had reached the end of transient life’, or ‘Ther loved no wight hotter in his lyve’, or ‘nothing in his life became him like the leaving it’. This quantitative sense is one of the easiest channels by which life passes from the particular to the generalised. It then means the normal span, the number of years for which an organism can be expected to remain alive. If we do not specify what kind of organism—e.g. ‘the life of an oak, of a gnat’—it is assumed to be a human organism. Hence, in Greek, the Hippocratic maxim ‘Bios is short but techne is long’, and the Latin ars longa, vita brevis, and Chaucer’s ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne’.
III. ‘LIFE’ (QUALITATIVE)
Periods, as we noticed in the history of world, have not only length and position, but also quality. A man’s life, meaning the period during which he was alive, can be considered qualitatively in more than one way.
(1) It can be considered ethically. After the death of Augustus, says Tacitus, ‘his vita was diversely praised and censured’. In a medieval jeu d’esprit a cardinal visits a convent vitam inquirere, to examine the life of the inmates. Jeremy Taylor quotes from a Missal printed in 1626 a prayer that a dead man, even if his salvation is out of the question, ‘may enjoy a refrigerium amidst the torments which now, perhaps, he suffers, for we have little confidence in the quality of his vita’. The English Prayer Book has a petition that Bishops and Curates may set forth God’s word ‘both by their life and doctrine’. Traherne, wishing to suggest that example, rather than heredity, explains our corruption, says ‘it is not so much our parents’ loins as our parents’ lives that enthralls and blinds us’. A man’s life in this sense is the general tenor of his conduct or behaviour. Let us call it Life (Ethical).
(2) But a man’s life can also mean his lot or fortunes. ‘We desire a quiet life’, says Latimer. ‘All men desire to lead in this world a happy life’, says Hooker. Masefield speaks of a girl in an unhappy home ‘enduring life however bleak’. For some reason I have found early and literary examples of this usage rather hard to come by, but we meet it every day in conversation—a miserable life, an easy life, a sheltered life. It comes out with sharp clarity if we contrast ‘He lives the life of a beast’ with ‘he has a dog’s life’. In the former we have Life (Ethical): he behaves like a beast. In the latter we are saying not that he behaves but that he is treated like a dog. We may call this Life (Fortunes).
(3) There is a third sense which, though it may shade off into one or other of these two, has a central area distinguishable from both. We use it whenever we speak of an open-air life, or of married, or professional, or civilian, or nomadic life. For any one of these could be either good or bad ethically and any of them could be miserable or happy. This is the sense required when Duke Senior asks ‘Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of painted pomp?’ It is often strengthened by ‘way of’, as in Johnson’s ‘we must think of some other way of life for you’. We label this sense Life (Routine).
Latin vita was used in all three ways. In Tacitus, as already noticed, we have Vita (Ethical). In Ovid, malae taedia vitae, the evils of my wretched life, we have Life (Fortunes). We have Vita (Routine) in Virgil’s rustic life nescia fallere (it never ‘lets you down’) or Horace’s ‘by-way of an unobtrusive life’, fallentis semita vitae.
In Greek, aion is perhaps the most usual word for Life (Fortunes). ‘What sort of aion will you have after this?’ the Chorus ask Peleus in his bereavement. Even the most fortunate heroes, said Pindar, did not have an untroubled aion.
When Odysseus says to Eumaeus ‘you have a good bios’ he clearly means ‘you have a good master and plenty to eat’, so that bios is here Life (Fortunes); but I do not know any other passage where it does so. Most often bios is Life (Routine), so that we have in Aristotle the nomadic, the agricultural, the fisher’s, or the huntsman’s bios. Herodotus uses zoe in the same sense, reached perhaps through the intermediate use of zoe to mean ‘livelihood’.
To some readers these distinctions will seem over-fine, but the truth is that they are not even now fine enough to accommodate all the shades in the meaning of bios. Side by side with the bioi of the nomad, the fisherman, etc., we meet a different classification. The three ‘outstanding’ bioi, according to Aristotle, are those of pleasure, of political activity, and of contemplation (or research). They are partly differences of Routine but also, no doubt, of ethical quality. It would be difficult to assign ancient conceptions of the happy (eudaimon) life either to Life (Fortunes) or to Life (Ethical). The Stoic claim that virtue makes a man happy even on the rack is one extreme. Solon’s warning (‘Call no man happy till he’s dead’), equating happiness with Fortunes, is the other. Aristotle says that a man’s bios will be eudaimon if his activities conform to the standard of excellence (arete). But this is not nearly so ethical as it looks. First, because Aristotle later admits that certain gifts of fortune are required for such a life: secondly, because arete itself is a far less narrowly moral term than English ‘virtue’. Arete involves not simply ‘being good’ but being ‘good at’ a great many things (including morals), and Aristotle’s conception of the happy life comes very close to our conception of the fully civilised life, in which the raw material (such as health, peace, and competence) provided by fortune is used by a master. Happiness is almost a style.
The emphasis of the word bios is nearly always, I think, on behaviour; we have only once found it used to mean Fortunes. This, taken in conjunction with the fact that the written record of a man’s life was itself called a bios, throws some light on the practice of the earlier biographers. All of them, down to and including Walton (with the possible exception of Suetonius) seem to a modern reader somewhat niggardly. There is hardly any attempt to recreate the man’s milieu; we are given no clue as to what it must have felt like to be he. The explanation, I suggest, is that the authors are undertaking to tell us precisely his bios, his behaviour, and no more either of his Routine or of his Fortunes than is needed for that purpose. We are not expected to be much interested in what happened to him, for its own sake; the important thing is how he coped with it, the wise saws he uttered, the shocking or improving example he set—in a word, his style.
IV. ‘LIFE’ (THE ‘COMMON LOT OF MAN’)
As Life (Chronological) can be generalised to mean the normal span, so Life (Qualitative) can be generalised to mean the common character of men’s experience between birth and death—the sort of thing every man must expect. This is nearly always a generalisation of Life (Fortunes) rather than of Life (Ethical). Thus pessimists say that disasters are probable, ‘life being what it is’, but cruelties and treacheries are probable, ‘human nature being what it is’.
In Greek, Life (Common Lot) is bios. ‘Tragedy’, says Aristotle, ‘is an imitation not of personalities but of action and bios and happiness.’ In Latin, vita is used in the same way. ‘The fear of hell disturbs human vita’. ‘Vita is neither a good nor an evil, but the field in which both good and evil occur.’ ‘Menander delineated every image of vita.’
The English word was so used at every period of our language. ‘I can see no reason’, says the Anglo-Saxon poet, ‘why my mind should not grow dark when I consider the whole lif of men.’ Later examples come easily to mind. ‘Life is a tale told by an idiot;’ ‘when I consider life, ’tis all a cheat’; ‘human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed’; ‘Life is real! Life is earnest!’; poetry is ‘a criticism of life’.
These are all plain sailing. But I must now turn to certain modern usages which seem to me difficult.
Henley writes ‘Life! Life! Life! ’Tis the sole great thing this side of death’.
‘Our attitude to life’, says Chesterton, ‘can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval’: and again, suicide ‘is the ultimate and absolute evil . . . the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life’.
An undergraduate periodical praises an author’s work because, ‘like tragedy, it is ultimately for and not against life’.
A female correspondent tells me in a parenthesis that ‘not to love life is blasphemy’.
Fr. Jarrett-Kerr says of Dr Leavis, ‘he is explicit that life is above all to be affirmed’.
Dr Leavis himself says of Lawrence, ‘It was not possible for him to be defeatist. The affirmation of life was always strong in him.’
Mr R. Bolt, in the Magazine Section of the Sunday Times, has the following: ‘If Man destroys himself, it will be because his hatred of life is stronger than his love of life, because his greed, aggression, and fear are stronger than his self-denial, charity, and courage.’
The difficulty is to determine whether in these examples life means the Common Lot at all; and if at all, then with what precision and with what exclusion of other senses.
If Henley means the Common Lot his dictum would appear to be a perfect tautology. But I can think of no other meaning which would make it less tautological. Whether life means the Common Lot, or the Normal Span, or Conduct, or Fortunes, or Routine, or the mere state of being an organism, it is of course not only ‘the sole great thing’ this side of death, but the sole thing (until you die you will always be alive). You might as well tell us that morning is the sole great thing before afternoon or minority the sole great thing till your twenty-first birthday. Obviously Henley means by life some element or state within life (within our tale of years or our fortune or our conduct) on which he sets a high value; but his use of the noun life gives us no clue to what this element or state is.
Mr Bolt, on the other hand, makes it quite clear what he values. He values, as well he may, self-denial, charity, and courage. The problem is why he chooses to describe these virtues as ‘love’, and the opposite vices as ‘hatred’, of Life. To call fear ‘hatred of life’ when death is in fact what most men chiefly fear—to call courage ‘love of life’ when in reality it involves not setting one’s life at a pin’s fee—is surely a monstrous paradox. You may say, no doubt, that acts of courage and charity usually are, and always should be, motivated by love for my neighbour’s life. But this only shows the inutility of talking about a love for life in the abstract. The lives both of individuals and of species are always in potential, and usually in actual, competition. The behaviour Mr Bolt approves and that which he condemns can equally, if you like, be called ‘love of life’, though I would much rather describe them as love of food, freedom, happiness, etc. But, either way, the real question is food (or freedom) for whom. Or does Mr Bolt mean that greed, aggression and the rest will in the long run destroy all (human) life, and therefore may be called ‘inimical’ or ‘hostile’ to it—and if they are hostile they can be called ‘enemies’, and if they are enemies they can be pictured as ‘hating’ it? But this would be to turn a metaphor into a mythology. A man does not at all necessarily hate a state of affairs which his own actions are in fact going to prevent, nor love a state of affairs which they are going to produce. Idleness is not a hatred of passing examinations: lechery is not a love of the pox.
It would, I think, be impossible to take Life in Mr Bolt’s sentence as the Common Lot. Favourable and unfavourable estimates of that lot cannot at all plausibly be linked with degrees of selfishness and altruism. We may therefore eliminate both Henley and Mr Bolt from this list. Both use life as an evaluative term; Mr Bolt for moral virtue, and Henley for nobody knows what. But both, as we shall see, bear valuable witness to a remarkable linguistic situation.
The undergraduate who values work because it is ‘for and not against life’ appears to me to mean by life exactly the Common Lot. The somewhat defiant reference to tragedy—which might be thought by some to be ‘against life’—makes that clear. Apparently good literature must not suggest the Johnsonian, still less the Sophoclean, view of our destiny. Life, ‘the sort of thing that happens’, must be in some sense or other commended. Whether because it is really commendable or because we had better dream it to be so, does not appear.
Chesterton, writing in conscious reaction against fin de siècle pessimism, has raised that question. He means by life the Common Lot. His choice of the word loyalty makes his answer brilliantly clear. He is not expressing an opinion but calling for an attitude. We have no business to form opinions, whether favourable or otherwise, about life. We must plunge into it for all we are worth. We must fight the ship as long as we can keep her afloat.
Fr. Jarrett-Kerr and Dr Leavis use life in the same sense, and I think their view is really the same as Chesterton’s. For of course affirmation cannot mean ‘statement’, and to affirm life cannot mean ‘to state that organisms exist’. The opposite of this affirmation is significantly ‘defeatism’; and the metaphor in that word, as in Chesterton’s ‘loyalty’, calls up military and patriotic associations. The appeal in these two writers, as in Chesterton, is to what Plato would have called ‘the spirited element’ in us.
One step remains to be taken, and my correspondent takes it when she tells me that not to love life is ‘blasphemy’. The Common Lot had been for Seneca the neutral field of good and evil. For Longfellow it was ‘real’ and ‘earnest’. For Chesterton and Dr Leavis it is something like a banner or a ‘cause’. For my correspondent it has become a deity.
All these modern examples alike, including those from Henley and Mr Bolt, bear witness to the steadily rising emotional temperature of the word life. Unless it had acquired a sort of halo, such usages as Henley’s and Mr Bolt’s could hardly have occurred. And even in the other writers, though I think the principal and fully conscious meaning of life is the Common Lot, the influence of the halo is possibly at work.
V. SEMANTIC HALO
What I mean by a semantic halo is well illustrated by the word gentleman. This was once a word without a halo, a designative term like peasant, burgher, or nobleman. It then acquired a quasi-ethical sense and for a while this and the old sense lived in uneasy symbiosis. But the ideal embodied in the ethical sense came to be almost the centre of the mystique by which a whole society lived. The incantatory power of the word when used in that sense was so great that it ‘seeped’ (as Professor Empson would say) into almost every sentence where the word, with whatever intention, was used. Yet at the same time the purely social meaning was never in fact—though often in profession—emptied out. Hence the bewildering nineteenth-century discussions in which speakers define gentleman in purely ethical terms but make it quite clear that at the same moment their idea of a gentleman involves membership of a social class. The emotion derived from one sense of the word can thus disastrously infect all its senses. The whole word is haloed, and finally there is nothing but halo. The word is then, for all accurate uses, dead. My suggestion is that something of this sort may at present be happening to the word life.
The enthusiastic utterances about life which occupied our attention in the last section are, let us note, a great novelty. The older writers know nothing of life as a flag, a cause, or a deity. Sober moralists like Seneca say, unanswerably, that the condition which makes all evil and all good possible can hardly be called good or evil itself (is a chess-board a good or bad move?). Imaginative writers, or their characters, describe life as something to be (at best) endured. Sages, far from exhorting us to ‘affirm’ or ‘love’ life, constantly warn us against a love of life which, they assume, will be excessive and in need of correction. Heroic death is praised by all; martyrdom by Christians; suicide by Stoics. Even the more moderate maxim is summum nec metuas diem nec optes (‘nor dread thy last day nor desire it’): ‘nor love thy life nor hate’. This does not mean that our ancestors had fewer or fainter enthusiasms than we. They were full of enthusiasms and desires: but not for mere life; rather for liberty, wealth, fame, virtue, pleasure, godliness or the like. These things were not valuable for the sake of life; life was valuable, when at all, for the sake of these things. We were specifically warned not ‘to lose for life’s sake what makes the reason for living’, propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.
We may well ask how so radical a change has come about, and two possible explanations will probably occur to everyone. It may be, on the one hand, that for all our talk of crisis and anxiety, the Common Lot has in modern times become very much more agreeable, and men speak better of life because it is really better. On the other hand, it might be that things have grown worse and we are now whistling to keep up our spirits; that the death-wish is now too insistent to be dallied with; that at all costs the cat must not be let out of the bag.
But to explore causes of that order would be to attempt, at the deepest level, the total history of our own time. That is no task for a mere philologist. And I believe that within our own discipline, within language itself, we may find causes which have at any rate contributed to the modern way of talking about life. If Life (Common Lot) now wears a halo this may be partly due to infection or ‘seepage’ from other senses of the word. To these, which of course demand attention for their own sakes as well as for their contribution to the halo, we must now turn.
VI. ‘LIFE’: WHAT I LIKE
When we think that something is a bad specimen of its class we often express this thought by saying that it is not a specimen of that class at all. We say ‘This is not poetry (or tennis)’ when we mean ‘This is bad poetry (or tennis)’. And conversely, when we mean ‘This is good poetry (or tennis)’ we say ‘This is real poetry (or tennis)’. In Greek a similar tendency sometimes changes a- from a negative into a pejorative prefix: gamos agamos, literally ‘marriage un-marriage’, means a shockingly bad marriage. The German un- can be used in the same way. Unwahr means untrue; but Unfall and Untier, literally ‘unchance’ and ‘unbeast’, mean ‘mischance’ and ‘monster’. Compare the Scots unchancy, for ‘ominous’, ‘untoward’, etc.
This treatment can be applied to life. The word may be used to mean the element or elements within life which the speaker values most highly. Living or alive may mean ‘enjoying those experiences or performing those actions which are most worth while’. But people differ very widely as to which experiences and actions these are. Accordingly the word life when used in this evaluative sense has almost as many different contexts as there are speakers.
Life can be amorousness. Farquhar’s Mr Sullen, on discovering that Dorinda ‘can’t think of the man without the bedfellow’, observes, ‘Why, child, you begin to live’.
Life can be emotion in general, as against intellect. ‘From the middle class one gets ideas, and from the common people—life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.’
Life can be intellectual activity and self-consciousness. ‘Vivre, c’est penser et sentir son âme, the essence of life lies in thinking and being conscious of one’s soul.’
Life can mean, as nature sometimes means, whatever in our experience is not specifically human. ‘The vast unexplained morality of life itself, what we call the immorality of nature, surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility, and in its midst goes on the little human morality play.’ (But possibly this should be listed below under Life, Biological.)
But what is vital can also be what is specifically human. ‘Self-control . . . is nothing but a highly developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites.’
Life may apparently be, or be evidenced by, any moral virtue which is for the moment under consideration. In Shaw’s play the two artificial hominoids whom the rash scientific adolescents have made, use lies. We are told, ‘if they were alive they would speak the truth’. A moment later there is a question of destroying the hominoids. The male one desperately pleads that only his mate should be destroyed. Their makers, disgusted at this, say ‘Let us see whether we cannot put a little more life into them’. They do so, with the immediate result that the male hominoid changes his entreaty to ‘Spare her and kill me’. Thus life is willingness to die and an old paradox meets us in a new setting.
In all these examples the use of life to mean whatever the speaker values is serviceable language because, though the writers may value very different and even opposite things, they make it clear what those things are. Life, thus employed, is as useful a word as good or nice. The only danger is lest we should think it somehow more precise or scientific than they.
There are, however, other instances where life is thus approvingly used but the immediate context does not make clear what is being approved. Often a longer context—the tenor of the author’s works as a whole or our knowledge of the sort of circles he is probably addressing—will give us a clue.
Arnold says that real men of genius are ‘capable of emitting a life-giving stimulus’. In isolation ‘life-giving stimulus’ might mean almost anything; something that made one dance like a maenad, or stop telling lies, or practise self-control, or grow extra arms and legs like Shaw’s ‘ancients’. Knowing Arnold, we guess that the life which is stimulated will be urbanity or sweetness and light or something of that sort. As an anonymous quotation his dictum would convey very little.
Lawrence says that ‘in life’ we ‘have got to live or we are nothing’. Taken au pied de la lettre, this is, like Henley’s, an identical proposition, but so to take it would be silly and captious. ‘To live’ means ‘to have or lead (or both) the sort of life that Lawrence values’. What that is we are to find out from our general knowledge of his books and behaviour.
So often in Dr Leavis, we read about the ‘triumph over them (i.e. class-distinctions) of life’, or that ‘the pride of class-superiority . . . appears as the enemy of life’. A ‘true moral sense’ is ‘one that shall minister to life’. Or again: ‘I have spent many years in a university English school, doing what I could to promote a study of literature that should be a discipline of intelligence, fostering life.’ And again: it is ‘more important than ever that places of higher education should be fostering centres of responsibility, intelligence, and courage for life’.
Perhaps my best way of diagnosing this semantic situation will be to say that I too could endorse all these utterances. I also could say that class-distinctions are the enemy of life (they are certainly a great bore). I also wish universities to encourage ‘life’. But the trouble is that the context of the word life, the very pictures it arouses, might be quite different for Dr Leavis and for me. Each would be using the word to mean ‘what I approve’. Until this blank cheque, this purely and therefore unspecifically evaluative term, had been placed on the index, nothing but cross-purposes could result from any discussion between us. And in the examples already quoted, is it not clear that the introduction of life, far from clarifying, inspissates? Do we not understand intelligence better than intelligence fostering life? Are not responsibility and courage clearer than responsibility and courage for life? For we may be sure that by adding ‘for life’ Dr Leavis does not mean to exclude courage for facing death. Where, if not in life, can death be faced?
Those who are in fact using life to mean ‘what I approve’—which, by the way, is usually a very small part of life (the Common Lot)—do not always make quite clear to their readers what they are doing. They are perhaps not always clear themselves. Hence there can be confusion between life (= what I approve) and life (Common Lot), and the base word life can arouse favourable emotions even in those who have not asked themselves what, in the particular context, it means. The halo shines on them.
VII. ‘REAL’ LIFE
Life is sometimes an ellipsis for ‘real life’. The distinction between ‘real life’ on the one hand and, on the other, day-dreams, expectations, theories, or ideals is very familiar, but very difficult to state in watertight form. Since we are not attempting philosophy, we must be content with a very rough and ready approximation.
In the previous section we noticed the use of the word real (‘real poetry’, ‘real tennis’) to mean ‘good in its kind’ or ‘good enough to deserve the name’. But that is not what real usually means when we speak of ‘real life’. The expression still implies disparagement of something else (named or implied) with which ‘real life’ is being contrasted, but it is a special sort of disparagement.
Except for certain metaphysical purposes the question ‘Is this real?’ had generally best be parried by the question ‘Is it a real what?’ This is not a real ghost, but it is a real dummy made out of a turnip and a dust sheet. That is not a real house, but it is a real bit of stage scenery. No real crocodile disturbed me in the night; a real nightmare did. Mr Chadband’s piety was not real piety but real hypocrisy. Is this picture a real Rembrandt or a real forgery?
The statement that something is ‘not real’—more strictly, that it is not a real x but is a real y—implies that it is either less important than we (or someone else) might suppose, or else is important in some quite different way. The turnip-ghost is not a proper object for awe and provides no evidence for the immortality of the soul. The canvas house on the stage is no protection against weather. We must not expect a high price for the forged Rembrandt. Mr Chadband’s hypocrisy has importance, but not the same importance that genuine piety would have had; a different reaction on our part is appropriate.
In the vast majority of contexts, then, ‘the unreal’ is the discounted, what is set aside, what can and should be ignored. We have been deceived; we are now undeceived and can go ahead. If the deception was deliberately induced in us (say, by Mr Chadband or a forger) we feel some indignation: if it was self-induced, we may be angry with ourselves. Either way, these are pressures tending to make unreal a disparaging, and real a laudatory, term.
So, for the most part. But there can also be a recognition of (in some sense) unreality which involves no disparagement. This is in the realm of illusions that are not delusions; in art, or in play. The stage house which is not a real house may be praised as good scenery. Children who make believe they are drinking wine though it is really pepsicola do not scorn it. It must however be noticed that these exceptions have always weighed very little with the vast majority of the human race. And even the small minority who think art more important than play usually hold some theory of art which makes its importance depend on some, subtly defined, sort of ‘reality’. For our present purpose it does not in the least matter whether they are right or not. The point is that the exceptional cases of play and art, thus handled, have hardly any effect on the laudatory quality of the word real or the disparaging quality of unreal.
Real life, then, no less than life in Henley or Lawrence, becomes a name for certain elements in our experience which the speakers value. But not necessarily the same elements nor the same valuation.
‘Johnson’, says Boswell, ‘loved business, loved to have his wisdom actually operate on real life.’ Apparently any petty economic transaction is Real Life; the contrast is with the life of thought. A character in Rose Macaulay says ‘These universities cram learning into our heads but teach us little enough of life’. We read in Lawrence, ‘to us who care more about life than scholarship’. Arnold speaks of ‘an Englishman who reads to live and does not live to read’. Everyone remembers, though not all remember the context, Goethe’s
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldnes Baum.
The Leben which Mephistopheles opposes to theory is the practical life of lucrative charlatanism.
The antithesis in all these between ‘(real) life’ and thought or study is philosophically scandalous, for thought and study, no less than business or practice, are the activities of the living and therefore part of life. The popularity of the antithesis has, I believe, two sources. One of them is respectable. Those things which our thoughts are about are reasonably contrasted with our thoughts about them as ‘real’—the reality the thoughts were trying or claiming to represent. Thus Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior is the man who
when brought
Among the tasks of real life, has wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought.
Heroic action is real, in contrast to his boyish thought, because his boyish thought was about, was an anticipatory representation of, heroic action. But there is another and less respectable source. This is the deeply ingrained conviction of narrow minds that whatever things they themselves are chiefly exercised on are the only important things, the only things worth adult, informed, and thoroughgoing interest. This often means in practice that everything except acquisition and social success is excluded from the category of (real) life and relegated to the realm of play or day-dream.
We noticed a moment ago that the admitted illusions of art had very little influence in moderating the strong approval conveyed by the word real. But we can now go further. Our usual language about one art, literature, actually helps to brighten the halo on life or real life. Literature is admired for representing ‘life as it really is’, and by an easy ellipsis the lifelikeness of persons and characters in fiction is often called simply life; just as in Neo-Classical criticism the likeness to ‘Nature’ was called simply ‘nature’. Thus Raleigh credits Shakespeare with ‘this amazing secret of life’, or Virginia Woolf complains that ‘life escapes’ Arnold Bennett, and adds that ‘perhaps without life nothing else is worth while’. No one, to be sure, misunderstands the expression in such contexts; but one more approving overtone is contributed to the word life.
VIII. ‘LIFE’ (BIOLOGICAL)
We now turn to that usage which, of all others, has contributed most to the rising temperature of the noun Life: the prime source of its magic.
‘I shall assume’, says Eddington (speculating about other planets) ‘that the required conditions of habitability are not unlike those on the earth and that if such conditions obtain life will automatically make its appearance.’ Life in this sentence is, like Life (Common Lot), a high abstraction; but a very different one. Life (Common Lot) abstracts the common, characteristic features of terrestrial, human, and individual experiences, as we learn them directly or (much more) from biography, history, and some kinds of fiction. But life in Eddington’s sense is ‘what is common to all organisms’: if you like, it is organisation, nutrition, growth, and reproduction—something we study in laboratories or learn of from text-books. I shall call it Life (Biological).
From the point of view of formal logic Life (Biological) is in the same position as any other universal: it is abstracted from particulars (from all particular organisms) just as Blue is abstracted from seas, skies, bluebells, kingfishers, and the rest, or Shape from all visible objects, or Virtue from all the actions we approve. On the prevalent modern view it would therefore be an ens rationis or ‘creature of discourse’; that is to say, not a ‘thing’ as the particular organisms are things, but a linguistic gadget, a tool whereby we can conveniently manipulate the subject-matter of biology.
Such, I say, is the modern view of universals; but a very different view was once held. Plato, as everyone remembers, talked as if Justice or Goodness were entities not only as real as particular just acts or good men but incomparably more so. Most emphatically of all, he talked thus about Beauty. The place where he does so is hackneyed, but so germane that I must recall it. The pupil, we are told, should begin by loving beautiful bodies. He must then learn to love beautiful souls; then the beauty embodied in laws and manners; then, that in the sciences. He will then be ready to turn to ‘the main sea of Beauty’. After that comes the vision. He will ‘see’ a wonder; Beauty itself, which neither grows nor decays, which knows nothing of more and less, without body, without discourse of reason, ‘itself in itself eternally existing in pure homogeneity’.
To a transcendent entity of this character Plato gave the name eidos (plural eidé), and we may follow him. An eidos is obviously very unlike the abstract universal of modern logic. Indeed the whole Platonic position has been judged so hopelessly alien to our mode of thought as to be dismissed with the amusing formula ‘Plato thought abstract nouns were proper names’.
In reality, however, the modern usage of one privileged abstract noun often reveals a state of mind—not necessarily the best state of the best minds—which is startlingly close to the Platonic. If we want to know what it felt like to be Plato thinking about Beauty, we can get some inkling by noticing how people use Life (Biological).
C. E. B. Russell writes ‘World-and-Life-Affirmation. This means that man has an inner conviction that life is a real thing’. If life here were an abstract universal like shape or equality, a ‘conviction that life is a real thing’ would seem to mean merely a conviction that organisms exist, which is a conviction hardly worth mentioning. Clearly, the author is envisaging Life (Biological) as an eidos; not as an H.C.F. abstracted from organisms but as a transcendent force or entity which is immanent in them. This is confirmed a page or two later when she says that ‘our guiding principle . . . should be reverence for that life which is the same divine, mysterious force in man or dog or flower or flea’. But no one could reverence as ‘divine’ an abstract common quality.
Mr Speirs, writing of Gawain, says ‘the ultimate source of the poem’s actuality, strength, and coherence, is the knowledge . . . that there is life inexhaustible at the roots of the world even in the dead season, that there is perpetually to be expected the unexpected spring re-birth’. It is beautifully said. But, after all, the poet didn’t know, and Mr Speirs doesn’t know, whether this planet or this universe will always contain organisms. The hyperbole, I suggest, comes naturally to Mr Speirs because he is really thinking of the eidos. The poet’s vigorous delight in youth, feast, revelry, courage, and (above all) in the exuberant ‘boisterousness’ of the Green Knight himself, all become for the critic manifestations of Life (Biological). They arouse in him feelings which cry out for some such transcendent and ultimate object. And in that mood it is naturally—by an act rather of faith than of reason—saluted as ‘inexhaustible’. It is, indeed, very unlikely that the poet even consciously thought about life (in this sense) at all; but Mr Speirs might reply ‘thoughts beyond their thoughts to those high bards were given’.
We feel the presence of the eidos even more strongly when we read of ‘the orgiastic, mystical sense of oneness, of life as indestructibly powerful and pleasurable’. If Life here were an abstract universal, to call it orgiastic or pleasurable would be nonsense. The existence of individual organisms is sometimes orgiastic, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes not, and many organisms (say, lichens) probably know neither orgies nor pleasures. But you must put into your concept of an abstract universal only what is common to all the particulars. To make Life (Biological) ‘pleasurable’ is like putting ‘drawn in chalk’ or ‘equilateral’ into your idea of Triangle. And even if one were determined to make this blunder, why ‘pleasurable’ rather than ‘painful’? To be alive, so far as we know, is the condition which alone makes pains and pleasures possible; so that to call life ‘pleasurable’ is, to use our old example, like calling a chessboard and a box of men a good move. They make all good moves possible; and all bad moves. But things are quite different if Life is an eidos; for the true Platonic eidos is not only a ‘thing’ over and above all the particulars but a better thing than they. Beauty-in-itself is more beautiful than all beautiful objects: they are indeed mere shadows of it. In order that Life (Biological) can be called ‘orgiastic’ and ‘pleasurable’ it must be given the same status as Plato’s Beauty. It must be the plenitude and perfection whereof only dim traces are found in actual living things.
The ‘mystical sense of oneness’ also needs to be pondered. No doubt all particulars which have been classified together in virtue of a common quality have a logical unity if the classification has been properly made. But this oneness hardly requires a ‘mystical sense’ to recognise it. Common sense tells me that if ABC is an isosceles triangle it will, in that respect, be one with all other isosceles triangles. Nietzsche’s ‘mystical sense of oneness’ or Lawrence’s ‘intense apprehension of the unity of life’ must be something quite different. Two passages from Lawrence will help. He speaks of ‘the gladness of a man in contact with the unknown in the female, which gives him a sense of richness and oneness with all life’. And of the young couple copulating in the wood (Sons and Lovers, XIII) we read ‘If so great a magnificent power could overwhelm them, identify them altogether with itself, so that they knew they were only grains in the tremendous heave that lifted every grass-blade its little height, and every tree and living thing, then why fret about themselves? They could let themselves be carried by life.’
We all, I take it, recognise the feeling which Lawrence means to express, and neither moral nor literary criticism has any place in the present inquiry. Our sole concern is with the implied meaning of life which Lawrence uses to express the feeling. Neither passage will ‘work’ if life is an abstract universal. Our merely logical unity with all other living things, our membership of the class ‘organisms’, is nothing to the purpose; nor is it illustrated by copulation any more (or less) than by nutrition, excretion, or death. As for a harmonious and co-operative unity with life in general, this is forever impossible. All organisms live in lethal competition with other organisms: man, with his pesticides and antiseptics and carnivorous diet, most of all. And with his contraceptives. Since the young people in Sons and Lovers never appear either to hope or fear fertility, we may assume that they have prudently taken measures to be ‘carried by life’ just so far as is convenient and no further. But all these cold and, as it were, profane cavils are silenced once you set up Life as the archetype, the eidos. In cold logic the fact that there was a great deal of organic life besides that of the two lovers in the wood is the most absurd argument for not ‘fretting about themselves’; as they would have discovered if that other organic life had included a plentiful supply of adders, mosquitoes, or poison-ivy. But that is really beside the point. The lovers feel their own erotic appetites not as a mere instance of ‘organic activity’ but as something poured into them from a transcendent source. Many lovers in many ages have felt this. The Greeks would have said it was Aphrodite. A Renaissance poet might have said it was the far-travelled reminiscence of supra-mundane Beauty-itself. For Lawrence it is Life (Biological) conceived as a real supra-personal entity. All the other organic activity in the wood is mentioned to exalt that entity. It is as joint servants of Life that the grass-blades and the trees matter. Without that Queen these fellow-courtiers would be mere scenery.
In Lawrence this conception is merely implicit, but we can find it explicit elsewhere. ‘The individual drop of life’, says Mr Findlay, ‘returns after death to the reservoir from which it came.’ There is, then, a reservoir? The actual organisms do not contain all the life there is? ‘A representation of the whole of life cannot consist in a combination of the simple ideas which life herself has deposited in us during the course of her evolution; how could the part be equivalent to the whole, the content to that which contains it, the residuum of the vital operation to the operation itself?’ This is very well if Life is a thing, a ‘force’, or a dæmon. But none of the metaphors will work if it is an abstract universal. Triangles are not related to Triangularity as parts to a whole, or content to container, or residuum to operation.
Though Plato did not personalise Beauty, the religious note in his language about it is unmistakable. That note becomes even louder in some modern utterances about Life (Biological). It—or she—becomes a goddess. Evolutionary biology is ‘the science of the everlasting transmutations of the Holy Ghost in the world’. Creative Evolution is ‘the religion of the Twentieth Century’. This religion has its great commandment: ‘Life must not cease. That comes before everything.’
This commandment is very significant. An intense momentary conviction that one’s own life must not cease and that its preservation ‘comes before everything’ is a familiar experience; the ordinary name for it is terror. The same conviction, steadily maintained and acted upon over a long period so that it becomes habitual, is also familiar. The ordinary name for it is cowardice. But I question whether we have by nature any similar feeling about Life (Biological) as such. Our spontaneous desire is that some lives should be preserved (which means, if we think it out, ‘preserved at the expense of others’). But the proper name for this is love (of our friends, or class, or party, or nation, or species). We wish them to live because we love them: we do not love them because they are specimens of life. In other words, the Shavian religion must begin with a conversion, with new motives. We must turn away from all that instinct or experience has taught us to desire and learn to desire, to love ‘before everything’ an invisible, unimaginable object.
IX. THE ‘TREE’
In the quotation from Eddington at the beginning of the previous section Life (Biological) was envisaged as something which will automatically turn up wherever suitable conditions arise. If life thus turned up on one of the planets of Sirius (supposing Sirius to have planets), that life and the life on Earth would be mutually independent. They would have like causes but no causal link with one another. They would simply be instances of the same thing, as the sphericity of Sirius and the sphericity of Sol are instances of the same shape.
If this had been for the last two centuries or so the way we usually thought about Life (Biological), the semantic situation which I have been trying to describe would probably never have arisen. But it was not. Naturally and inevitably biology has meant for us terrestrial biology. And it has long been held that terrestrial organisms are not merely independent instances of Life (Biological), but are factually, genetically, connected. ‘All species of life upon Earth . . . are descended by slow continuous processes of change from some very simple, ancestral form of life.’ Or again, ‘Life, from its beginnings, is the continuation of a single and identical drive (élan) which has divided itself among the divergent lines of evolution’. This puts a very different complexion on the matter. In addition to the logical unity which organisms would in any case have had as members of a class, they now have unity of another sort.
It is in some degree like the unity of a family. We give the same name, say, to all the Postlethwaite-Joneses. This is not because we have, after inspection, discovered and abstracted a common quality of Postlethwaite-Jonesness (one could do that with some families, not with all), but because they are connected by an intricate web of causality. If they are an ancient and noble family they may speak of ‘the blood of the Postlethwaite-Joneses’. They will set a high value on this ‘blood’. They will indeed hypostatise it, treat it as though it were a thing over and above all the individual members of the family and valuable in itself. For while they may hope and believe that this ‘blood’ will by heredity produce heroic individuals, they will also work it the other way round and say that all Postlethwaite-Joneses ought to be heroic in order to be worthy of their blood. In extreme cases every member of the family may be sacrificed to the Family. The ‘blood’ may become more important than the human beings who have it. Historically, we are rooted in centuries of such feeling. It is often extended to groups whose members are related far more loosely: to nationalities and to (largely imaginary) ‘races’.
As soon as all terrestrial organisms are seen in their genetic unity, made into a kind of family tree, the same feeling which went out to the ‘blood’ of a family can apparently be transferred to Life (Biological). Two pressures, I suggest, encourage the transference.
(1) The popular picture of evolution—which differs in some respects from that of real biologists—is one that must deeply move any generous imagination. Life (Biological) begins as something very weak and humble with all the odds against it. Nevertheless it wins. It becomes Man. It conquers inanimate nature. It aspires to be the ancestor of super-Man. The story thus embodies one of the great archetypal patterns: the Ugly Duckling, the oppressed but finally triumphant Cinderella, the despised seventh son who outshines the six others, Jack the giant-killer. So moving a tale must not be that of a mere abstraction. It invites us first to reify, then to personify, finally to deify, Life (Biological).
(2) We all fear death for ourselves and for those we love, and to that extent (at least) we all value our lives and theirs. When we are thinking of individuals, life is therefore a rich, heart-warming word. It is the opposite of death. By a firm association this rich quality, this halo, continues to cling to the word life even where it means Life (Biological). It is not logically entitled to it. Life (Biological) is the opposite of the inanimate, not the opposite of death. On the contrary the reign of Life (Biological) coincides with the reign of death, for only what lives can die, and nothing lives that won’t die. To say that ‘there is life inexhaustible’ in the universe is equally to say that there is death inexhaustible. The one will keep on occurring as long as the other, and no longer. But under the equivocal enchantment of the noun Life we ignore this. We talk, and therefore feel, as if Life (Biological), the notional thread on which all living things are strung like beads, could itself be desired, enjoyed, or experienced.
And all the while Logic must ask ‘Is Life (Biological) even alive?’ After all, swiftness does not run about, and illness does not get ill, and death does not die.
X. APOLOGY
If anyone in Victoria’s reign had tried to put himself outside the mystique of that society and, from outside, coldly to dissect the word gentleman, we can guess what would have happened to him. Wherever he had found confusion he would have been told ‘But of course you can’t understand. That is because you yourself are not a gentleman.’ I am very well aware that in attempting to unravel the word life I risk a like fate. I have been handling a word which is still perhaps too hot to touch. I have had to put myself outside the mystique of our own age; and all that is said from outside will seem profane to those who are within. It will probably be useless to plead that I am not, in my private capacity, immune to all the appeals of this glowing word; that I am not more discontented than others with the Common Lot or that I feel no grandeur in popular conceptions of the Life Force. I shall probably be regarded as ‘a doctor of death’. But I have thought the risk worth taking. It seems to me of practical importance that the analytical and critical bent of our age should not be expended entirely on our ancestors and that confusions should sometimes be exposed while they are still potent. It is more dangerous to tread on the corns of a live giant than to cut off the head of a dead one: but it is more useful and better fun.