The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (19 page)

This erudition is enjoyable but little more than a jeu d’esprit. Happily, Barfield employs these philological bonbons as a foundation for substantial fare, arguing that words make possible, and the study of words reveals, new avenues of knowledge. For example—this is the first instance in the book—scientists coined the phrase “high tension” in order to signify the relationship between two bodies carrying an electric charge (“I was anxious … to obtain some idea of the conducting power of ice and solid salts by electricity of high tension”—Michael Faraday,
The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, 1833). But in less than a century, the phrase had become a metaphor for emotional stress between two people (“Eugene, strung to the highest tension, does not move a muscle”—George Bernard Shaw,
Candida
, 1898). “The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity,” Barfield contends, “actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.” Similarly, while scrutinizing “absolute,” “actual,” “attribute,” and a score of other words that pertain to the relation between matter and spirit, he observes that medieval thinkers not only drew these words (or their Latin equivalents) from the pagan Greeks but modified them to carry richer and more subtle meanings. “No one who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the Middle Ages.”

Using language in this way, as a device for discovering how people, in any era, thought and felt about the world around them and within them, leads Barfield to remarkable conclusions. The Middle English word “love-longing,” for example, signals a “new element … [in] human relationships, for which perhaps the best name that can be found is ‘tenderness.’” He hastens to add that this statement may oversimplify the situation, as evidence of tenderness can be found as far back as ancient Egypt. And yet “love-longing” and other newly coined terms tell us that during the Middle Ages humanity made a great leap in self-understanding. “Perhaps,” he suggests, laying all his cards on the table, “it can best be expressed as a new consciousness of the individual human soul.” His argument is now in the open: the Middle Ages marks a new epoch in human consciousness; in effect, a new way of being human. Elsewhere he presents in clear stages the unfolding of this evolutionary scheme. At first, “when our earliest ancestors looked up to the blue vault they felt that they saw not merely a place, whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture, as it were, of a living Being.” In the “Dark Ages” (by which he seems to mean the early Middle Ages), “there came for the first time into the consciousness of man the possibility of seeing himself purely as a solid object situated among solid objects.” Change followed upon change, leading to the most astonishing transformation of all, for “self-consciousness, as we know it, seems to have first dawned faintly on Europe at about the time of the Reformation.”

Claims like these, the reader soon realizes, deliver far more than Barfield’s title promises. This is not only history in English words, but the secret history of human nature. In this book, Barfield draws a line between his own thought and that of all the other future Inklings, between himself and almost all his contemporaries, indeed between himself and the self-understanding of Western civilization. For he asserts that through the evolution of consciousness, there has been “a change not only in the ideas people have formed about the world, but a change in the very world they experience.”

A half century earlier, James George Frazer and Edward Burnett Tylor had advanced evolutionary accounts, akin in some ways to Barfield’s, that describe how humankind had progressed from magical to scientific thinking, and Jacob Burckhardt had identified, in
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
, the precise moment (
Augenblick
) in human history when the human being achieved self-awareness of his own individual personhood (
eine auf sich selbst gestellte Pers
ö
nlichkeit
). But Burckhardt, Frazer, and Tylor retail no more than cultural history, not ontological change; they recount how certain ideas and social institutions begin, grow, clash, and give birth to new ideas and institutions within a human consciousness that has remained fundamentally unchanged over millennia. They do not contend that the very nature of consciousness—and therefore of the world with which consciousness interacts and, to some extent, creates—evolves over time, sometimes changing dramatically in the course of a few decades. Barfield would spend the rest of his life attempting to place this revolutionary claim on a solid philosophical, historical, literary, and scientific foundation; and all without reference to Hegel, the master architect of evolutionary schemes, whom Barfield did not read extensively until late in life.

Lewis wrote Barfield a cheerful letter upon receiving a copy of
History in English Words
, assuring the author that although the book lacked “perfect clearness,” it was “completely and certainly
readable
,” a work that sets “windows opening in all directions.” His praise was not widely echoed, however, as the book received little attention upon publication, although it was reviewed favorably in
The Observer
(January 17, 1926).
The Times
(London) didn’t get around to noticing it for twenty-eight years, when Cyril Connolly, assessing a revised edition in the Sunday paper of January 24, 1954, pronounced it “learned, imaginative, moving and felicitously factual.”

Salvation by Poetry

Barfield’s next work,
Poetic Diction
(1928), expands and deepens the argument formulated in
History in English Words.
Moving beyond etymology, he scours the history of poetry to bolster his claims about the evolution of language and consciousness, proposing “not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry: and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge.” This grand undertaking began in humble fashion, as a thesis to fulfill the requirements for an Oxford B.Litt. degree, written at a time when Barfield’s main interests lay elsewhere. He and Maud had started a children’s theater, performing skits based on nursery rhymes (“The frog he would a-wooing go” featured Owen as frog, Maud as mouse); he was dancing in Oxford and Cornwall; he was absorbing Steiner’s doctrines with accelerating admiration; and he was warring with Lewis. Still, he squeezed in enough time to propose a thesis on poetic diction (that is, on the way a poet arranges words for artistic effect), only to discover that his examiners couldn’t find an appropriate supervisor. “They decided it wasn’t at all what they were used to,” he remembered; they preferred “the very scholarly sort of question,” such as “whether Coleridge had an unusual number of toenails.” Finally, however, the examiners agreed to let him write his thesis unsupervised.

By now, Barfield’s evolutionary argument had advanced in complexity and detail. He believed that very early human beings had experienced a profound intimacy with the world, in which thoughts, feelings, and the objects of perception lay in healthy and proper relationship to one another (Barfield would later call this state “original participation”); that over centuries human beings had developed an acute self-awareness in which this primordial unity disappeared, resulting in the philosophical skepticism that afflicts modern times; and that the future (which Barfield had tasted during his Sophia moment) promises a return to our original experience of unity, while retaining the discernment and ability to think abstractly that we have acquired during our evolutionary odyssey.
Poetic Diction
focuses upon the place of language in this scheme. Primordial man, Barfield contends, possessed a poetic language drenched in meaning. He quotes with approval Shelley’s famous line from “In Defence of Poetry”: “in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry.” As consciousness evolved, this poetic language, and the poetic experience of reality that it made possible, faded away. This is the crisis in which we find ourselves today.

Barfield’s most impressive elaboration of his theory comes in his discussion of the Greek word
pneuma
(Latin
spiritus
). To Max M
ü
ller, the celebrated Victorian philologist—and a principal target of Barfield’s argument—
pneuma
originally meant “wind”; when the Greeks required an abstract word for the life principle, they simply appropriated the word
pneuma
and altered its meaning. Not so, counters Barfield;
pneuma
and the words from which it derived “meant neither
breath
, nor
wind
, nor
spirit
, nor yet all three of these things, but … simply had
their own old peculiar meaning
, which has since, in the world of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified—and no doubt into others also.” The history of language is, then, a history of “crystallization,” of rigor mortis, of death and decay.

Or so it appears at first glance. But this is illusory; for there exists in the history of language, and thus in the life of human beings, all of whom employ language to apprehend the world, a second, life-giving force. This salvific force is poetry. The world can and will be saved by poets. The lost meaning of primordial language reappears, under the conscious art of the poet, as metaphor, “a re-creating, registering as
thought,
one of those eternal facts which may already have been experienced in perception.” Poetry induces a “felt change of consciousness” (the “felt” was added at the suggestion of Lewis, who read the work in manuscript). This change is in effect a return, partial though it may be, to the poetic richness of our primordial consciousness, but now in a state of full self-awareness. Metaphor is the catalyst for this felt change of consciousness. Every effective metaphor brings with it a more complete perception of the world and its interrelationships. It reveals more truth, it brightens, expands, clarifies—in effect, it helps to create—our understanding of the world. Through metaphor we receive “in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure in appreciation … a more permanent boon. It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded.” As Barfield promised, his book offers a theory of knowledge. Poetry and its metaphors are means of cognition:

Now my normal everyday experience, as human being, of the world around me depends entirely upon what I bring to the sense-datum from within; and the absorption of this metaphor into my imagination has enabled me to bring more than I could before. It has created something in me, a faculty or a part of a faculty, enabling me to observe what I could not hitherto observe. This ability to recognize significant resemblances and analogies, considered as in action, I shall call
knowledge
; considered as a
state
, and apart from the effort by which it is imparted and acquired, I shall call it
wisdom
.

Lewis admired
Poetic Diction.
Although he never embraced fully Barfield’s view of the imagination as the royal road to truth, he learned to appreciate the power of metaphor, going so far, in his 1939 essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” as to assert that a metaphor may be a means, and even the only means, by which we arrive at new ideas and new understandings. Other friends of Lewis also absorbed some of the book’s arguments with pleasure. His pupil Alan Griffiths (the future monk Bede Griffiths) declared that it “had a permanent effect upon my life.” Tolkien, too, felt its impact. “Your conception of the ancient semantic unity ha[s] modified his whole outlook,” Lewis informed Barfield in 1928. It seems likely, as the Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has proposed, that Barfield’s theories influenced Tolkien’s views on the nature and evolution of language and played a hand in the shaping of his own invented tongues; in
The Hobbit
, for example, Tolkien writes of Bilbo spying the dragon’s treasure that “there are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful,” a very Barfieldian observation. Still, Tolkien’s and Barfield’s views on language diverged in many ways. For Tolkien, “ancient semantic unity” describes the state of language in Eden, before the metaphysical catastrophe of the Fall and its aftermath, expressed mythically in the story of Babel; for Barfield, the same term describes the state of language at the dawn of the evolution of consciousness, which will conclude in the reacquisition by language of its primordial unity and purity. Tolkien, an orthodox Christian, believed that this second golden age will arrive only when time itself vanishes in the “new heaven and new earth” (Revelation 21:1); it is not a part of human history but an aspect of eternity.

Outside the circle of future Inklings and their friends, critical reaction to
Poetic Diction
was lukewarm. This irked Lewis, who wrote to Barfield blasting the
Times Literary Supplement
review of May 17, 1928, as “marvelously absurd” and its anonymous author as “obviously unable to make anything” of the book’s main argument. In fact, the author of the unsigned piece, Edmund Blunden, winner of the Hawthornden Prize and future professor of poetry at Oxford, understood Barfield’s argument well—without, however, perceiving its Anthroposophical underpinnings—and praised his “careful and sensitive critical talent” while objecting to his colorless academic prose and his misuse of the term “minor poet.” As for the rest of the literary and academic world, the book, like its predecessor, was largely ignored, although possible traces of its argument can be discerned in widely scattered works such as Arthur Waley’s masterful study of Taoism,
The Way and Its Power
(1934), in which the author argues, “I see no other way of studying the history of thought except by first studying the history of words, and such a study would seem to me equally necessary if I were dealing with the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, or any other people. For example, in reading the Bible, whether for edification or literary pleasure, we do not trouble … to ask what the different words rendered by ‘soul,’ ‘spirit,’ and so on really meant to the people who used them. But anyone studying the history of Hebrew thought would be bound to ask himself these questions, and I cannot think it is superfluous to ask them with regard to Chinese.” But Waley remains the exception. Perhaps in reaction to the work’s long cold-shouldering by intellectuals and the academy, its scattered fans lean toward hyperbolic praise; thus the poet Howard Nemerov, who tells us that “among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who know
Poetic Diction
it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one.” This assessment, which appeared in Nemerov’s introduction to the 1964 edition of
Poetic Diction
, may have troubled Barfield, for whom sacred books meant the Bible and, in a weaker sense, the writings of Rudolf Steiner.