V

THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION: A STUDY OF

ROMANTIC THOUGHT IN THE CRITICAL

WRITINGS OP J. R. R. TOLKIEN

by

DON DEAN ELGIN, B.A.

A THESIS

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Technological College

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Ad

No, izo

I am deeply indebted to

Dr. W. D. Norwood for his direction

of this thesis and to Dr. Jac Tharpe

and Dr. Kenneth Davis for their

helpful advice and criticism.

ii

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. TOLKIEN AND THE ROMANTIC CONCEPT

OF THE IMAGINATION 5

III. TOLKIEN AND THE ROMANTIC

EPISTEMOLOGY OF IMAGINATION 31

IV. TOLKIEN AND THE ROMANTIC

AXIOLOGY OF IMAGINATION 58

V. CONCLUSION 78

A LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED 81

iii

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The works of J. R. R. Tolkien have, within the last

ten years/ become one of the most pervasive and long-lasting

of the literary fads. His Lord of the Rings, with its-

antecedent and lesser companion/ The Hobbit, has captured

the fancy of people of many different kinds. It has/ how­

ever/ differed from other fads by standing in the spotlight

of first popular and finally critical examination with an

adamant refusal to become trite or escapist—in the usual

sense of those terms—as the nevmess wears off. Rather,

the more it has been considered by critics and scholars/

the greater has been their interest in and admiration for

this three-volume fairy tale. Edmund Fuller has described

it as "a work of great significance/ possibly the major

work of the twentieth century/" and/ though it has had its

critics (such as Edmund Wilson in "00/ Those Awful Orcsl")/

it has already inspired such serious studies as those of

Patricia Meyer Spacks ("Ethical Pattern in Lord of the

Rings")/ Robert J. Reilly ("Tolkien and the Fairy Story"

and Romantic Religion in the Works of Ov/en Barfield,

£• §.• Lev7is, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien) ,

and Marjorie Wright (The Cosmic Kingdom of Myth; A

study in the Myth-Philosophy of C. S , LewiS/ Charles Williams/

and J. R. R. Tolkien)/ as well as receiving quite favorable

critical reviews from men of the stature of W. H. Auden.

The story itself is a chronicle of the great War of

the Ring/ which occurred in the Third Age of Middle-earth.

At that time/ the One Ring/ the Master of all the Rings

of Power/ had been held for many years by the hobbits/ but

was eagerly sought by the Enemy who made it. To its wearer

the One Ring gave mastery over every living creature/ but

since it was devised by an evil power, in the end it inevi­

tably corrupted anyone who attempted to use it. Out of the

struggle to possess and control the One Ring/ with all of

its ominous power/ there arose a war comparable both in

magnitude and in the issues involved to the great wars of

our own time. And in that war, the Third Age of Middle-

earth came to an end.

In addition to being an imaginative writer/ Tolkien

is also an acknowledged scholar and teacher, linguist,

philologist, and an authority on Anglo-Saxon, Middle

English, and Chaucer. Among the most important and widely

knovm of his scholarly works are A Middle English Vocabulary,

BeovTUlf; The Monster and the Critics, "On Fairy Stories,"

and a new edition (with E. V- Gordon) of Sir Gawain and the

Green Knight. Evidence of his respect within the scholarly

community is given in his being invited to speak before the

British Academy several times, his being Andrew Lang lecturer

at the University of Glasgow in 1953, by the honorary degrees

conferred by University College (Dublin) and the University

of Leige/ and by his having been since 1945 a Merton professor

of English Language and Literature arid a Fellow of Merton

College of Oxford University.

Since this study will be concerned with his critical

opinions and theories/ Beowulf; The Monsters and the Critics

and "On Fairy Stories" will be our principal concern/ and

indeed they merit a vast amount of critical study/ for they

provide a definite insight into the tremendously complex

world Tolkien has constructed in his fairy tale. As a

matter of fact/ this study is even more important for the

understanding of such an imaginative work than it might be

in the works of those authors who are more overtly didactic

and/or philosophical/ for it provides a definite vantage

point from which to analyze and relate images/ metaphors/

and even objects themselves which have no definite corre­

spondence in the world we usually term as real.

It should be obvious, even to those with only a

superficial knov/ledge of him/ that Tolkien is Romantic to

some extent. His association with the self-styled

"Romantic theologians" consisting of Lewis, Williams, and

Barfield, connects him with Romantic thought in a definite

fashion, and his obvious preferences for monsters and myths.

4

his emphasis on the appeal of the "long ago and far away/"

his belief in the necessity of organic wholeness/ and his

love of the mystical are all essentially Romantic

characteristics.

The purpose of this study is to determine to what

extent Tolkien is Romantic/ to note the points at which he

diverges from the traditional Romantic viewpoint/ and

discover what additions to Romantic thought he has made.

To accomplish this end we shall investigate what seems to

be the core concept of any critical theory/ that of

imagination, in its three main aspects. Chapter II is a

discussion of the Romantic concept of the nature of the

imagination and a comparison and contrast of it to

Tolkien's ideas. Following this same general approach.

Chapters III and IV consider the functions of the imagi­

nation, first turning to the function of imagination in

the knowledge process and finally to the function of the

imagination in a human value system. Finally, the study

concludes with a brief summary and statement of the nature

of Tolkien's critical theory.

CHAPTER II

TOLKIEN AND THE ROMANTIC CONCEPT

OF THE IMAGINATION

Imagination, a matter of prime concern in any critical

theory, is certainly the central characteristic of Romantic

critical theory. At once breaking from tradition and still

utilizing all that had come before it, the Romantic concept

of imagination owes its clearest statement to an Englishman,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge/ and to a German, Immanuel Kant.

By first examining briefly the history of this concept and

by looking at its specific development in the ideas of

these two major figures/ we can gain some idea of what the

term Romantic imagination means. Then/ by seeing what has

happened to the concept since its Romantic expression and

by analyzing the critical statements of Tolkien, it will

be possible to demonstrate clearly the extent to v/hich

Tolkien is a participant in and an heir to this Romantic

concept of the imagination.

I^ The Ion, Plato expresses an idea of poetic inspira­

tion which relates closely to the later Romantic idea of

the "truth of the imagination." He discusses the component

faculties of the human mind and their comparative rank and

importance, including the delicate relations between VJill

and Reason as well as developing the concept of it as the

"true music of the dialectic."

6

After Plato, Philostratus' v/as the next important

concept of imagination. His concept, later taken up and

developed by Plotinus, dealt with the question of a pro­

jective outlook/ in which imagination's products are fiction/

and a realistic outlook/ in which imagination is seen as a

means of apprehending reality. Longinus/ toO/ made signi­

ficant comments concerning imagination and imitation/

imitation being understood to be little more than copying

and imagination going beyond reproduction to present to the

mind what has not been and cannot be known. Thus, imagi­

nation is the extrapolation of the knovm in the interests

of admiration:

Wherefore/ not even the whole universe can suffice the reaches of man's thought and contemplation/ but oftentimes his imagination oversteps the bounds of space/ so that if we survey our life on every side, how greatness and beauty and eminence have everywhere the perogative, we shall straightway perceive the end for which we were created. •'•

Dryden and Addison took up the second view of

Philostratus and Plotinus almost completely, and indeed

the first (Plato's view that it is the "true music of the

dialectic") was not to be revived until the Romantic Age

began to rise in revolt against the mechanistic views of

the "Age of Reason." Dryden said that imagination was a

Longinus, "On the Sublime," XXV, cited by I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (New York, 1950), p. 24.

means of invention^ no more than the finding of material to

be put into a work. Addison, reducing the word to imaging,

declared it to be the formation of pictures in the mind's

eye for any kind of thinking of absent or unreal things.

Meanwhile, in Italy Muratori went even farther in removing

the imagination from the creative by declaring that it

accorded only to perception and that it had no relation

whatsoever to either knowledge or understanding. And

finally, in England at this time were a host of philos­

ophers and psychologists/ Berkeley and Hartley among them,

who saw the imagination as little more than a tool in

the mechanical process of association/ and who conceived

of it as nothing more than a vastly inferior brother to

the logical and perceptible thought which the new concept

called empiricism demanded.

Kant's idea of the imagination is one of the most

important and most complex in the entire Romantic canon.

J. H, Muirhead/ in Coleridge as Philosopher, explains

Kant's idea of the imagination in this way:

The imagination is the power which operates on the sense manifold and the categories of the understanding. It has two functions: as reproductive it is an active power for the synthesis of the sense manifold, which it apprehends according to laws received from the understanding, enabling the phenomena to be reproduced in the understanding— as such it is empirical only. As productive or transcendental it is the power of synthesis a priori, providing

8

the necessary unity, through the laws of the understanding, which makes possible the synthesis of the manifold of phenomena. The whole of our expe­rience is ultimately possible because of the transcendental function of imagination/ without which no concepts of objects could ever come together in one experience.^

Thus/ the imagination/ as a productive faculty of cognition/

is powerful in creating another nature out of the material

that actual nature gives us. With it we remould experience

by the law of association so that material can be worked"

up into something different which surpasses nature. The

imagination/ then, attempts to go beyond the limits of

experience and to present them to sense with a completeness

of which there is no example in nature. In Kant's own

words: " . . .. the imagination is here creative/ and it

brings the faculty of intellectual ideas into movement;

a movement occasioned by a representation towards more

thought than can be grasped in the representation or made

clear."

Speaking more specifically of the aesthetic concept

and of the imagination, Kant uses these terms:

If now, imagination must in the judgment of taste be regarded in its aesthetic.

2 J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher (London,

1930)/ pp. 201-202. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critigue of Aesthetic Judgment in

Kant Selections, ed. T. M. Greene (Nev7 York, 1929), p. 427.

then/ to begin with, it is not taken as reproductive, as in the subjection to the laws of association/ but productive and exerting an activity of its own (as originator of arbitrary forms of possible intuitions).^

In so doing, he limits the aesthetic concept to the third

function alone of the three capacities he envisioned for

the imagination: (1) It is reproductive in assisting the

intake of sensory manifold at the initial perceptual level.

(2) It is productive/ though not really free, in the sense

that it creates concepts from the raw material of these

data/ but it is subservient to the understanding. (3) It

is aesthetic/ and in this capacity only is it productive/

free/ •and in the fullest sense of the word creative. SO/

the aesthetic imagination is a fuller and higher form of

the productive imagination, contemplated in its freedom

from the laws of understanding and as the originator of

arbitrary forms of possible intuitions a priori, the

conformity to which constitutes taste and results in

beauty.

In a word, the aesthetical idea is a representation of the imagination associated with a given concept, which is bound up with such a multiplicity of partial representations in its free employment, that for it no expression i arking a definite concept can be found; and such a representation.

Immanuel Kant, Critigue of Aesthetic Judgment, trans James Creed (Oxford, 1911), p. 86.

10

therefore, adds to a concept much ineffable thought, the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties, and with language, which is the mere letter, binds up the spirit also.^

Since Coleridge was ever something of an eclectic,

borrowing any ideas which he liked, it is not surprising

to note many of Kant^s concepts taken, used, and incorporated

into Coleridge^s own theory of the imagination and its

function, thus making it an almost direct descendant of

German Transcendentalism. I. A. Richards gives three

reasons for saying that Coleridge was the first man in the

history of English criticism to have an adequate theory of

imagination: (1) He was first to show how the active and

passive powers of mind collaborate in the creative act;

(2) his concept of the creative imagination is more

satisfying than Addison's or Hume's; (3) Ine, for the first

time (and this is the most important reason) made imagi­

nation the creator of symbols, not merely the creator of

figures of speech or metaphor.

Though Coleridge deals with imagination at various

points throughout Biographia Literaria, the famous defi­

nition of imagination and the distinction between it and

5 Kant, Critigue of Aesthetic Judgment m Kant

Selections, pp. 428-429. I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (Nev/ York,

1950), p. 68.

11

fancy in a remarkably concise fashion in Chapter XIII of

Volume I:

The Imagination then, I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Per­ception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former/ co-existing with the primary in the kind of its agency-/ and differing only in degree/ and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essen­tially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.'

The three essential terms here are primary imagination,

secondary imagination, and fancy, and it is in these three

terms that Coleridge has constructed a theory of the

imagination which is a Romantic view of how the mind v7orks

in the creative act.

7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed.

J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), I, p. 202.

12

The imaginative process in Coleridge's theory begins

with the primary imagination, which works to present the

primary world, the world our senses perceive. Operating on

the first perceptual level, it works on all objects perceived

by our consciousness; that is to say, it is the agent of

perception by which the external world is made known, but

it is far more than a type of camera which photographs

"reality." Richards defines it by declaring that it is the

"normal perception that produces the usual world of the

8 senses." This perception, however, relates the idea of

the object and the feeling toward that object so that it

organizes these perceptions into images which reflect both

the object and the attitude toward it, thereby making these

images more than just simple pictures.

At this point Fancy comes "into operation. Taken

directly from the Hartleyan tradition of association. Fancy

aggregates these elements of perception in a loose mixture,

or a solution, so that the expression of our awareness of

the external world is made in formal, similes. It in no

way modifies these perceptions. Instead it merely rearranges

them in what could be, were it not for Coleridge's organic

theory (which emphasizes the active and rational choice

of the mind), little more than a type of mechanical

Q

Richards, p. 58.

13

association. At this stage, time, place/ and resemblances

are factors which must come into play/ with the commonest

characteristic of Fancy still remaining the coolness and

disengagement with which we attend to what is taking place.

I. A. Richards lists the following four points as being the

chief characteristics of Fancy: (1). It is the faculty

of bringing together images similar in the main, but by

some one point or more of likeness distinguished; (2) these

images are fixities and definites; they remain when put

together the same as when apart; (3) the images have no

connexion, natural or moral, but are yoked together by the

poet by some means of accidental coincidence; (4) the

activity of putting them together is that of choice, which

is an empirical phenomenon of the will—that is, an exercise

of selection from objects already supplied by association,

a selection made for purposes which are not then and therein

9 being shaped but have already been fixed.

The secondary imagination, the last and the highest

of the levels of perception, has the task of reforming the

world perceived and identified by the primary imagination

and rearranged and associated by Fancy. In so doing, it

gives not only poetry but every aspect of the routine

world in which it is invested other values than those

^Ibid., p. 77.

14

necessary for our bare continuance as living beings. Thus,

we have as of prime importance the coalescence of subject

and object; that is, of perceiving their unity within the

process of perception and of acknowledging that the products

of the knowing may be such that subject and object themselves

become separated. And this coalescence or coadunation

constitutes the modifying power of the secondary imagination,

in which Coleridge says that the entire process resembles

that "sense in which it is a dim analogue of Creation, not

all that we can believe but all that we conceive of

10 creation." What is suggested, then/ is that imagination

is akin to divine creation and that a new kind of existence

is brought into being. Thus, we see that the secondary

imagination is very similar in its agency to that of the

primary/ the main difference arising from the time interval

between the two which leads to the transmutations which take

place in the secondary imagination.

In a Coleridgean sense, then, there are two prime

distinctions between imagination and fancy: (1) Fancy

collects and rearranges without re-making units of meaning

already constituted by the imagination/ while in imagina­

tion the mind is grov/ing. In short, fancy is merely re­

assembling products of its (the imagination's) past creation.

(2) In fancy, the parts of the meaning are apprehended as

Coleridge, p. 98.

15

though independent of their fellow members, while in imagi­

nation the parts of the meaning mutually modify one another.

In summation of Coleridge's theories of the imagina­

tion, we see that in the fully developed theory the primary

and secondary imagination are in effect one power, working

first to create the external^ world in its totality and then

to create, from that material, fresh creations which would

have in them the same life and truth. As such, the creative

imagination elevates the imagination above the reason and

all other faculties by its hidden claim that this mental

process is re-enacting God's work. This imagination is/

in fact, a dim analogue of creation, and to it Coleridge

has added the mind in perception; the result is a triple

parallel. At its base is the ceaseless self-proliferation

of God into the sensible universe. This creative process

is then reflected in the primary imagination, by which all

individual minds develop out into their perception of this

universe, and it is echoed again in the secondary or re­

creative imagination, which is possessed only by the poet

of genius.

Coleridge and Kant parallel each other and differ from

each other in several ways- First, vie may see a direct

parallel among the three types of imagination catalogued

by each. Coleridge's fancy is very similar to Kant's

re-productive imagination, his primary imagination to Kant's

16

productive imagination, and his secondary imagination to

Kant's aesthetic imagination. In regard to this last point,

Kant declares that the aesthetic imagination is another form

of the productiye imagination, contemplated in its freedom

from the laws of understanding and as originator of arbi­

trary forms of possible intuitions priori, the same

disinterestedness regarding the real existence of the object

existing here as it does in Coleridge's aesthetic.

Thus, the two concepts are in agreement in that imagination

is a mediating faculty between phenomena and understanding

and in the idea of imagination as a universal element of

the knowledge system. The chief difference between the

two lies in the fact that Kant's concept possesses neither

a contact with materiality nor a power of idealizing the

sensible by means of the ideas of the mind. Coleridge,

then, took the ideality of space and time, the a. priori

ideas/ and the creativity of mind in opposition to mechani­

cal laws of association and incorporated them into his o\'7n

system of poetic knowledge and imagination.

One of the most prominent general features of English

Romantic thought is the belief that the universe is a

living unity which can be kno\Am through imagination.

Coleridge and his contemporaries felt it their duty to

Coleridge, p. 98.

17

make all—to make the world in all its aspects—come to

life under the power of imagination. Some of the other

Romantic figures who had specific comments to make con­

cerning this concept of the imagination were Lamb/ Hazlitt/

Hunt, Wordsworth/ Shelley/ and Blake. Lamb used the idea

of imagination to justify his artistic preferences, however/

rather than in an attempt to form a specific concept of

criticism:

There is more of imagination in i t — that power vThich draws all things to one—which makes things animate and inanimate/ beings with their attri­butes/ subjects and their accessories/ take one colour, and serve to one effect . . . The very houses seem drunk—seem absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of phrensy which goes forth over the v/hole composition .•'•

Hazlitt/ who considered himself a philosopher as well

as a poet/ made comments which closely resemble those later

ones of Coleridge, while Hunt, taking his cue from

Coleridge's distinction between fancy and imagination,

wrote that "poetry embodies and illustrates its impressions

by imagination, or images of the objects of which it

treats . . . in order that it may enjoy and impart the

• Charles Lamb, "On the Genius and Character of Hogarth," The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1903), I, pp. 73-74.

18

feeling of their truth in its utmost conviction and

affluence."

Wordsworth declared that imagination means the power

to apprehend the moral properties and face of things and

hence to see the whole life and spirit of nature. More­

over, imagination itself produces deep feeling in the form

of a sympathetic understanding and love of nature and of

14

man.

Shelley and Blake defined imagination in terms of an

exalted contribution to understanding. Shelley declared 15

that "the imagination is reason in her most exalted mood." Blake, however, went even farther, by linking imagination

to the eternal and the spiritual:

The world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite and Temporal. There exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this•Vegetable Glass of Nature. All Things are comprehended in their Eternal

"^\eigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy (New York, 1848) , p. 2.

H. W. Piper, The Active Universe (London, 1962), p. 128.

15 Percy Bysse Shelley, cited by John Bayley, The

Romantic Survival (London, 1957), p. 9.

19

Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, the Human Imagination. •'•

Thus, despite a variety of specific approaches, there

is a general agreement that the synthetic imagination is

the most common characteristic of Romanticism; universality,

reconciliation of opposites, and the finite and infinite

eternity and temporality being the major ingredients of

that imagination. Each of them seems to feel that imagi­

nation reveals an important and special truth, one to which

ordinary intelligence is blind and in which truth and

imagination are combined. The essence of the Romantic

imagination, then, is that it fashions shapes which display

these unseen truths at work in a way in which no other

faculty could act, since they resist analysis and descrip­

tion and cannot be presented except in particular instances.

Following the Romantic Age interest began to shift

once again toward reason as the sole means of knowledge.

The most obvious evidence of this shift can be seen in the

differences in the prose and the poetry of leading figures

of the time. As John Bayley put it in his book. The

Romantic Survival; "Before ugliness and Philistinism

(Arnold's new-coined word) the Romantic Imagination was in

William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judc ment in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1939), I, p. 639.

20

retreat. It found itself unable to contain and absorb

17 such things."

Walter Pater typifies the almost complete reversal

of the idea that the imagination has a unifying power over

external phenomena:

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of o\irselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflection begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture,— in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished without consciousness of them, it contracts still further:— the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind . . . Every one of those impressions is the impression of an individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its ov/n dream of a world.IS

We can see, however, that Pater is still heir to the

Coleridgean idea of the imagination in the sense in which

the poet becomes the isolated "I."

17 John Bayley, The Romantic Survival (London, 1957),

p. 13. 18 Walter Pater, "Epilogue," The Renaissance, cited

by John Bayley, The Romantic Survival (London, 1957), pp. 45-46.

21

In the twentieth century, the Romantic concept of

imagination has been vilified and reviled by almost all of

the leading figures of literature and criticism. Hulme

and the Imagists revived Coleridge's categories of Fancy

and Imagination, but only to so invert them that Fancy

occupies the prime position. The generally held idea at

present is that the external and the internal merge so

that awareness and perception are isolated and then presented

in imaginative terms. Probably the best example of this is

Virginia Woolf's The Waves, in which—by stream of conscious­

ness—each character and his thoughts are isolated and

described in a curious combination of symbolic and mythical

devices and realistic objectification.

Turning to Tolkien, \je must first examine his two

most important essays in general terms. The first of these

two essays, entitled "Beowulf: the Monsters and the

Critics," was originally a paper read before the British

Academy on November 25, 1936. Beginning with an attack on

the critics of the poem, Tolkien indirectly states the

thesis of the entire article:

. . . Beowulfiana is, while rich in many departments specially poor in one. It is poor in criticism, criticism that is directed to the understanding of a poem as a poem. It has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the centre and the important on the outer edges. This is one of the opinions I wish specially to consider.

22

I think it profoundly untrue of the ^ poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it. Beowulf has been used as a quarry of fact and fancy far more assiduously than it has been studied as a work of art.^"

From this point he goes on to defend the non-human monsters

in the tale as being necessary both structurally and

thematically and as actually embodying the central idea of

the poem, man's essential defeat in time and victory out­

side time. In so doing, Tolkien attacks rather sharply

close textual analysis and partial scholarship, preferring

to emphasize instead the study of the poem and its monsters

in relation to its fully developed organic unity.

The second of the two essays, "On Fairy Stories,"

was written shortly after the first. Originally composed

as an Andrew Lang Lecture, it was delivered in a shortened

foinn at the University of St. Andrews in 1938, but it was

not printed until 1947, when it appeared in a collection

entitled Essays Presented to Charles WilliaiTis. The essay

itself is precisely what its title suggests, for it is

concerned v/ith the nature of the fairy story, its origins,

and its values. Beginning V7ith a brief introduction and

after rejecting such commonly held ideas of fairies and

the fairy story as partaking of diminutive size, partaking

^^J. R. R. Tolkien, "Beo\ ulf: The Monster and the Critics," Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII (1936), pp. 245-246.

23

of the supernatural/ and partaking of the tradition of the

beast fable, Tolkien turns to a specific definition of the

fairy story. He then concludes this section of the essay

by defining/ in rather vague terms/ a fairy story as the

result of an act of sub-creation which is presented as

essentially true. In "Origins/" the next section of the

essay, we see the differeinces and similarities in myth and

the fairy stoiy and even the manner by which fairy stories

are preserved and handed down. Following this section is

one which deals with children and their relation in fact

and fiction to the fairy story, while the final two sections

of the essay proper deal first with fantasy, Tolkien's

rather unusual term for the imaginative process; and

recovery, escape, and consolation, the three values vThich

fantasy presents as a result of its activity. Tolkien

then concludes the essay with an epilogue, in which he

elaborates upon the idea of joy—the essential product of

the fairy story—and synthesizes his diverse statements,

and a series of notes upon various points raised in the

essay itself.

Concluding his "Fantasy" section of "On Fairy Stories,"

Tolkien establishes quite clearly the precise nature of

fantasy: "Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our

measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made:

and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of

24 20 a Maker." In this statement, which bears a striking

resemblance to Coleridge's idea of the secondary imagina­

tion as a dim analogue of creation, fantasy's function is

made abundantly clear. It is to create in exactly the same

sense that its possessors were created, in order to afford

them the opportunity of perceiving beyond their physical

reality to a world of permance which can be reached only

by this act of creativity. As we have already noted,

fantasy is the term Tolkien chose to represent the imagina­

tive process/ and thus the beginning of any understanding

of his critical theory is an understanding of this term and

its relation to traditional Romantic concepts.

With the possible exception of Plato, until the time

of the Romantics, imagination was held to be nothing more

than the faculty of conceiving images, but with them

imagination became a higher power, and image-making was

ascribed to the idea of fancy. Tolkien begins his

discussion of fantasy by attacking the Romantics on this

point, with a particular barb directed at Coleridge for

his distinction between imagination and fancy and his

concept of imagination being the "power of giving to ideal

creations the inner consistency of reality." He insists

that imagination deals with nothing more than the perception

^^J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories," Essays Presented to Charles vailiams (London, 1947), p. 72.

^.l^Ssa..

25

of the image, the grasp of its implications, and the control

which is necessary for successful expression, and that it is

art which gives the inner consistency of reality to the

end result, sub-creation. Thus we first have the image

operated on by imagination to produce its implications and

control. This is followed by a granting of reality. Art,

to the already formed image in order to achieve the new

vision and perspective of sub-creation, and the entire

process, from image to sub-creation/ is referred to as

Fantasy.

At this point there are several things which are

important to note. First/ and most important/ Fantasy has

become synonymous with the entirety of the creative process.

That is/ it is the one large phyla under which the various

classes must take their individual characteristics.

Second/ this concept in no way is a rejection of Coleridge

or of the Romantic concept, though at first glance it may

seem exactly that. Tolkien has merely replaced the word

Imagination by the word Fantasy, for reasons V7e shall discuss

shortly. However, Fantasy still embodies the creative

act, still performs the same process for arrival at this

creativity, and still serves as a source of knowledge in

man's perception of Creation as does imagination. This

means, of course, that it is related to and an acceptance

of Kant's aesthetic judgment in precisely the same way as

it is related to and an acceptance of Coleridge's.

26

What reason, the reader may ask/ is there for switching

the terms at all, and why should Tolkien attempt to give

the impression of a significant difference arising from

that sv^itching? The answers to these questions are quite

simple/ but in them are found additions to the Romantic

concept. As to the first of these questions/ the answer

may be found in the etymology of the word fantasy itself,

for, as Tolkien notes, it is thus intimately connected to

fantastic/ whose meaning connotes an unrestrained extrav­

agance in conception. Thus fairies and their stories/

ores, demons, and Balrogs are granted a more specific value

than the traditional Romantic imagination would give them,

for they need not and are even bettered by not having a

direct correspondence to objects or creatures in the primary

world. Furthermore/ by this etymological connection/ the

idea of arresting strangeness is brought within the fold

of the imaginative process itself. Thus the Romantic

concern for the "far away and long ago," the exotic, and

mystical is inexorably wed to imagination. The second

question, involving Tolkien's reasons for "attacking" that

very thing which he was in essence confirming, is more

difficult to answer. Considering the anti-Romantic trend

in literary criticism begun by Pater and continued by

Hulme and the Imagists, we may only speculate (and it is

pure speculation) that perhaps by so doing he hoped to

27

gain a wider and less critical acceptance of the fairy

story itself by making it seem something other than Romantic

(We must remember, after all, that Tolkien was primarily

concerned with justifying the fairy story rather than with

advancing the cause of Romantic critical theory.).

In connection with this broad concept of fantasy and

its almost exact parallels to the Romantic imagination/

there are several related points which note even more

clearly the Romantic nature of Tolkien's thought. One

of the principal of these points is the idea of fantasy's

complete dissociation from dreaming. Tolkien contrasts

the unconscious activity involved in dreaming with the

very definite rational choice which he declares to be so

much a part of fantasy/ this choice presumably taking place

at the level of art/ the second step in the imaginative

process. It is interesting to note here that Coleridge,

in an attempt to escape Harteley's associationism, did

exactly the same thing at exactly the same level by making

fancy the step at which association of images by free and

rational choice took place.

A second idea arising from this broad concept of

fantasy is that of the distinction between drama and

literature. The fairy story, at least as Tolkien conceives

it, could never succeed in the world of drama, for it could

not participate in drama and still possess the inner

28

consistency of reality which is a necessary component of

successful sub-creation. That is, drama is too closely

tied/ by its very nature, to the world of the senses, for

it attempts the realistic and visible presentation of

imaginary men in a story. This, in itself/ is a form of

sub-creation/ and any attempt to place a further sub-

creation (such as that of the fairy story) within the

framework of the first would require, as Tolkien puts it/

disbelief not so much to be suspended as to be "hanged/

drawn/ and quartered." Thus/ Tolkien is emphasizing that

the necessary inner consistency of reality must come on the

conceptual rather than the perceptual level; that is/ it

relates to an essential truth or permanence in the primary

world (the world of the senses) without necessarily being

connected with the objects thereof. This concept relates/

of course/ to one of the primary contentions of the

Romantics/ that the imaginative process serves as a link

between the world of the senses and the understanding and

conception of that world. Kant's idea that the aesthetic

imagination, freed from the laws of understanding, is a

higher force than the productive imagination and Coleridge's

insistence that the world of the senses could be perceived

only through the agency of the primary imagination are two

clear examples of this concept. However, there is one

significant difference between Tolkien's concept and the

29

traditional concept that should be noted. It is simply

this: for Tolkien this perception of the primary world

takes place only within the total scope of fantasy, the

entire imaginative process, while for Coleridge and Kant

this perception must take place at the first and lowest

level of imagination if the primary world is to be perceived

at all. Thus, for Tolkien the world may be perceived

(though not understood) outside the creative act (a

perception of objects and events may occur), but for the

traditional Romantic even simple perception must take place

at least at the inception of the creative act (any per­

ception whatsoever must utilize to some extent the imagina­

tive process).

Tolkien, then, may indeed be said to have revived

the Romantic theory of imagination in the twentieth century,

but he has done so with certain additions and reservations.

He has seen (even though his term for it has changed) the

imagination, which necessarily includes rational choice,

as a complex creative act which is involved in the under­

standing and perception of the primary world. Moreover,

he sees it as a process of creation similar to that by

which he himself came into being, and thereby he sees it

as a way of glimpsing into that world which lies beyond

the primary one. However, he augments the general Romantic

concept of the imagination by reducing still further the

30

necessity of direct correspondences and analogues between

the primary world and the world of fantasy. Finally,

influenced perhaps by the idea of empirical knowledge as

the only valid means of perception, he does indicate that

a limited perception may take place without ever engaging

the processes of the creative act, though the understanding

of them must also be correspondingly limited. Thus, his

letter to a disbelieving skeptic effectively sums up his

essential agreement, additions, and reservations to the

Romantic concept of the imagination:

"Dear Sir," I said—^"Although now long estranged Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet he is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he ov/ned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light through whom is splintered from a single VThite to many hues and end­lessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world are filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build and sowed the seed of dragons—'twas our right (used or misused). That right has not decayed we make still by the law in which we * re made."21

^4bid., pp. 71-72.

CHAPTER III

TOLKIEN AND THE ROMANTIC EPISTEMOLOGY

OF IMAGINATION

In speaking of the functions of the imagination, the

first and most important question to be considered is its

role in the over-all perception of reality. By discussing

the attitude of Kant and Coleridge on this question and

then by examining the general Romantic view of it, we shall

be able to lay the groundwork for a discussion of Tolkien's

attitude on this point and to see the degree to which his

view is Romantic.

To look for the role Kant designated for the imagina­

tive or the aesthetic in the knowledge process involves

mainly an examination of his Critigue of Pure Reason and his

Critigue of Judgment. In the Critigue of Pure Reason Kant' s

primary purpose is to define pure reason and to show what

conditions must be postulated if knowledge of the a priori

is to be possible. Thus, his prime question is "How is

experience possible?", and the answer is found in the

a priori forms of time and space and in the a priori

forms or categories of the understanding.

Kant conceives time and space to be the only two

pure forms of sensory intuition. Beginning with the

31

m^:'.

32

establishment of space as time's antithesis (space—-external;

time—internal), he declares that "Since it is impossible

to conceive of no space, space is regarded as a condition

of the possibility of phenomena, not as a determinant

produced by them" Space, then/ is nothing but the form

of all phenomena of the external senses; it is the subjective

condition of man's sensibility/ without which no external

intuition is possible. This argument for the a. priori

existence of space is carried on further then by noting

that the subject's receptivity must precede a knowledge of

the objects/ thereby making clear the idea that the form of

a phenomenon is given before the perception/ a priori in

the soul, and contains, prior to all experience, principles

regulating its relations. In other words, a faculty for

perception must exist and precede the object itself- So

space/ unlike color or taste, is essential to the appearance

or intuition of a thing. It is a transcendental conception

declaring that nothing which is seen in space is a thing

to itself and apart from its perceiver. Rather, those

things which are called external objects are nothing more

than the representations of the senses, the forms of which

are in space, and the true correlations of which are not

and cannot be known concretely by man.

Immanuel Kant, Critigue of Pure Reason, translated with an introduction and notes by Max Muller (New York, 1925), p. 16.

m^^M^,

33

Time, the second of the pure intuitions, is also a

priori. In Kant's view, it alone makes the reality of

phenomena possible, for it is nothing more than the form

of the internal sense, man's intuition of himself and of

his external condition. Thus it is the antithesis of space

in determining the relation of representations in the

internal state. Further, although he is somewhat vague

on this point, Kant claims empirical reality for time,

though he denies that it possesses either absolute or

transcendental reality: "Time is real, not so far as it

is an object, but so far as it is the representation of

man himself as an object."

Now, it is clear that these conceptions of space and

time refer to objects only insofar as they are considered

as phenomena, but they emphasize that nothing can represent

things as they are by themselves. What objects may be

apart from the receptivity of the senses is unknown, for

man knows only his manner of perceiving them. A. H. Smith

comments upon this union of object and receptor in this

way:

The consciousness of an object is consciousness of a systematic complex of presentations, perpetual and imaginary, and without the idea of causality we cannot be conscious of an object because a complex of presentations

2 Ibid., p. 32.

34

perpetual and imaginary, is not to be taken to be systematic unless it is governed by rules or necessary principles of connection.

Having set up as ideal these two pure intuitions,

Kant then makes another point relevant to our subject. He

notes that the inner and outer worlds, in the same sense

as space and time, become twin aspects of one reality:

mind is the world's lawgiver and the world is realized mind.

Thus, essential to knowledge is the knower, and implicit

in our knowledge of the object is our experience of the

knower, thereby bringing about a necessary sort of harmony

or union between the perceiver and the perceived. Kant

goes on, then, to divide the world into two realms; that

of appearance, accessible to our senses and the categories

of our understanding, and that of moral freedom, accessible

only in action.

We must nov7 understand this division of our senses

into two categories before we can consider Kant's aesthetic

properly. The first of these divisions is understanding,

which may be defined as the faculty which reduces its object

to a concept in order to classify it. The second, imagina­

tion, is then the faculty which maintains its object in a

presentation in order to know it as it is, undistorted by

logical reduction.

\ . H. Smith, "Kant's Theory of Knowledge," A Treatise of Knowledge (Oxford, 1947), p. 72.

Mlifeii

35

Now art, the natural product of the aesthetic imagi­

nation, has as its central function the possibility of

bridging the gulf between necessity and freedom, between

the world of deterministic nature and the world of moral

action; between the abstraction of the understanding and

the particularity of the imaginative. Thus, art accom­

plishes a union of the general and the particular, of

intuition and thought, and of imagination and reason.

Looking more closely at Kant's strictly aesthetic

concerns, we see that he isolates the aesthetic realm

from the realm of science, morality, and utility by

declaring that the perception of it differs from the per­

ception of the true, the good, the pleasurable, the moving,

and the useful. As already mentioned in Chapter I, the

aesthetic state of mind is contemplative, disinterested,

indifferent to the reality of the object, and free from

any representation of its utility. The aesthetic realm

is that of the imagination represented, symbolized,

distanced, and contemplated, and thus it creates in a

sense an autonomy of art related and at the same time

opposed to Pater's later idea of "art for art's sake."

Rene Wellek in his History of Modern Criticism declares

that Kant's aesthetic idea is a representation of the

imagination for which no definite thought of the under­

standing can be adequate, and that therefore what happens

36

in art is that the rational ideas are made sensuous by

the poet.

Kant makes at this point a vital distinction between

the aesthetic and the logical in his Critique of Judgment;

The Imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is very power­ful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience proves too commonplace, and by it we remould experience, always in accordance with principles which occupy a higher place in reason (laws too which are just as natural to us as those by which Understanding comprehends empirical nature). Thus we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical employment of Imagination), so that the material which we borrow from nature in accordance with this law can be worked up into something different which surpasses nature.^

Thus we see that the aesthetic acts as a mediator between

the various categories of the mind in the totality of the

knowledge process. Further, the two basic axioms of Kant's

aesthetic are at least implied here: (1) The subject

matter of literary art is man's q[ualitative experience;

(2) the perception and formulation of qualitative experience

are the functions of the imagination. Finally, evident in

this passage is the clear distinction between artistic

Immanuel Kant, Critigue of Judgment, translated with an introduction and notes by J. H. Bernard (London, 1914), p. 198.

37

consciousness and rational consciousness, that being that

logic seeks to formulate the universal in experience while

art seeks to formulate the particular in terms of its

universal nature. Kant gives further support to this last

view and to its logical result—the insufficiency of reason

as a total way of knowing—in his discussion of the soul,

where he shows that since the soul cannot be substance and

since reason deals only with substance, reason is therefore

insufficient to account for all knowledge or existence.

Further, since the soul cannot be justified or explained by

reason, a unified and unassailable theory of the universe

cannot be provided by reason alone.

To conclude Kant's aesthetic, then, we note that he

sees the significance of the artist's judgment as being a

function of the work's "achieved content" rather than of

its content alone. What constitutes this achieved content

is an aesthetic qnestion involving the peculiar semantic

transformation that occurs when ordinary language symbols

are employe'd in the distinctive syntactical arrangement of

literary form, thus causing the particular to become

astonishingly universal. Thus the totality of his system

may be summed up in his tv70 contributions to the history

of aesthetics: (1) He sees in beauty not an inherent

and fixed quality of things, but a particular form of the

reaction of the human mind upon impressions received from

38

within or without; (2) it is thus a matter of irrelevance

whether the object which arouses the feeling of the beauti­

ful exists in reality or not. We may summarize, then, by

saying that Kant sees the realm of the aesthetic and the

aesthetic imagination as acting as mediating devices

between the world of sense perception, understanding, and

the highest function of reason. In this sense, it attempts

to go beyond nature to create something at once surviving

and yet transcending it. As Kant himself puts it:

The synthesis of apprehension is there­fore inseparably connected with the synthesis of reproduction, and as the former constitutes the transcendental ground of the possibility of all knowledge in general (not only of empirical, but also of a. priori knowledge), it follows that a repro­ductive synthesis of imagination belongs to the transcendental acts of the soul. We may, therefore, call this faculty ^ the transcendental faculty of imagination.

Coleridge, in one of his letters, gives us the basic

tool for the understanding of his system of the aesthetic:

. . . but yet you V7ill agree that a great poet must be, implicite if not explicite, a profound Metaphysician. He may not have it in logical coherence, in his Brain and Tongue, but he must have it by Tact/for all sounds and forms of human nature he must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent Desart, and the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an

5 •-»£-

Critigue of Pure Reason, p. 75.

39

enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest—; The Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child."

In this statement we have clear evidence of the depth of

perception which Coleridge felt to be the province of the

^poet. J. A. Appleyard makes this significant comment about

Coleridge's statement:

This last sentence is, I think, possibly the most astute and persuasive observa­tion on the kind of knowing proper to the artist that can be found in all of Coleridge's writings. The tactile mode of sense knowledge is proposed as a metaphor for the operation of poetic intuition and illustrated by three images which convey three elements requisite to this insight: the exquisite attention that must be given to the exact conditions of the experience, a distant sound in the stillness; the value that it is to be placed on the lightest particle of significance, as the Indian searches for the least sign of the enemy's presence; and the total subordination to the limitations and the possibilities of the mode of knov7ing as the blind man exhausts the power of touch in his desire to know and yet 3cnows only according to touch. The result is a kind of knowing which calls Art into existence in order to embody it.^

Thus Coleridge comments on and Appleyard amplifies the

autonomous nature of poetic knowledge and its relationship

to both the existing world and to the abstracting mind.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters, cited by J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge, 1965), p. 141.

" J. A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge, 1965), p. 141.

40

Turning more specifically to Coleridge's philosophy

of poetry, we see that for him the terms poetry and poet

were often^used interchangeably. Thus, in his discussions

of the genius and the workings of the mind of a genius, he

was describing the nature of poetry itself. But, he also

spoke specifically of poetry, and one of his statements

delineates clearly what he feels the nature of poetry to be:

A poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by pro­posing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species having this object in common with it—it is distinguished by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.8

From this statement we can see at least one difference

between the knowledge provided by science and that provided

by poetry, at least in the way Coleridge viev7ed it. First,

the poem is opposed to works of science by being principally

aimed at pleasure, and then it is further differentiated

from other works of pleasure by the fact that this mode

emphasizes the parts of the whole as relating to the whole

and as thus making the whole, in effect, more than the sum

of its parts. Thus, the analytical power of the mind could not

operate here, for it endeavors to understand the whole by

p Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed.

J. Shawcross (London, 1907), II, p. 10.

41

examining each of its parts and then equating the totality

of the parts to the work as a whole.

From this example and from what we have said earlier,

it is clear that perception for Coleridge is immediate,

meaningful and integral. He sees imagination operating in

perception and assigns to it a function other than that of

producing what is not actually present, because he recognizes

that perception is a unifying factor, and in that important

detail it exhibits the distinctive character of imagination.

Furthermore, this imaginative perception gives the poet

the power of changing the possible into the real, the

potential into the actual, the essence into the existence.

Thus it mediates between reason and understanding and is,

like reason, independent of space and time. Commenting on

the mediating function and on the difference between simple

perception and the perception of imagination, Coleridge

says:

Of the discursive understanding, which forms for itself general notions and terms of classification for the purpose of comparing and arranging phenomena, the characteristic is clearness without depth. It contemplates the unity of things in their limits only, and is consequently a knowledge of superficies v7ithout substance. The completing power which unites clearness with depth, the plentitude of the sense with the comprehensibility of the understanding, is the imagination, impregnated with

m^:

42

which the understanding itself becomes ' an intuitive and a living power.^

So, in Coleridge's idea of perception, the role of the imagi-

nation is to re-create the world of the senses, to make

objects other than abstractions. Obviously, then, for

Coleridge objects do exist, but they do so only in their

vivid aliveness and in their perception by the perceiver.

He re-creates objects which already exist, but V7hich exist

only as dead and lifeless things until the imagination takes

hold. As Nicholas Brooke puts it: "We must know words in

poetry as echoing the objects of living perception, or we

shall remain characters in The Dunciad, kept within the

pale of words till death."

A final facet of Coleridge's theory of literature as

knowledge is his idea that art is the mediator between

nature and man, while beauty is the mediator betv7een truth

and feeling. In this sense, beauty is a means rather than

an end. It offers in symbols which are apprehensible and

persuasive to man a faithful abridgement of nature, a

"shorthand hieroglyphic of truth," and thus, in its function

of mediating between nature and man, beauty is at once a

transcriber and conveyor or admitter. Linked in this sense

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, cited by James V. Baker, The Sacred River (Baton Rouge, 1957), p. 82.

10 Nicholas Brooke, "Coleridge's True and Original

Realism," Durham University Journal, LIII (March, 1961), p. 69

43

to Coleridge's general idea of perception, this concept

makes the imagination not only the creative and synthesizing

insight into truth, but, as a corollary to that insight,

that which also transmutes that insight into beauty, the

"mediator between truth and feeling."

In summation then, we may say that for Coleridge the

kind of language which comes closest to transmitting the

truths of experience undistorted is the language of the

imagination, for understanding must be impregnated with

the imagination to be transformed into an intuitive and

living power. The world of art itself represents the world

of reality and projects its own fictional world. Art is

imitation, in Coleridge, but it is also symbolization.

What is imitated, however, is not nature, but general nature, »

universal nature in the particular, so that Coleridge 12

can say that "the essence of poetry is universality."

Finally, the aesthetic process in its totality is seen as

one complete act. The v7hole mind creates the work of art

by an operation that is integral and essentially synthetic:

an imagination it shapes what it perceives in the fragments

of its sense perception according to the ideas which it

Walter Jackson Bate, "Coleridge on the Function of Art," Perspectives in Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 141-142.

12 Biographia Literaria, II, p. 105.

iii^.

44

has contemplated as universal and necessary—or alternatively

13 it employs these ideas in sensible shapes.

Turning to the general Romantic point of view, we see

that Joseph Beach, in describing Shelley's view, begins

his consideration of imagination's relation to knowledge

by observing the manner in which speech functions for the

Romantic:

Speech enables us to measure the universe in other ways than those of Newton or Kant/ or John Stuart Mill. It enables us to take stock of the universe and assay its values for us as feeling beings. Its first function is to identify the objects and experiences which . make up our universe/ both for their practical uses and for their aesthetic qualities. •'•

Here we see emphasized that idea of the necessity of the

subject's perception of the object being an important part

in our knowledge of the world of reality/ of the necessity

of a union of perceiver and perceived if the world is

truly to be known; and indeed this union is the first step

in poetry's function as a part of the knov7ledge process.

The Romantic poets believe that the mind projects

life/ physiognomy, and passion into the universe. They

repeatedly formulate the outer life as a contribution of

13 Appleyard, p. 245. " Joseph Warren Beach, A Romantic View of Poetry

(Gloucester, 1963), p. 5.

45

or in constant reciprocation with the life and soul of man

the observer. This is, of course, an attempt to revitalize

the material and mechanical universe and at the same time

an attempt to re-establish man^ s place in the world by

healing the cleavage between subject and object, between

the vital world of private experience and the dead world

of extension, quantity, and motion. The idea is to find

through the imagination some transcendental order which

explains the world of experience and accounts both for the

existence and the effect of visible things. Thus, the

imagination means a full response to and implication with

the living qualities of natural objects.

In almost all Romantic theories, poetry is defined

in terms of the imaginative process which modifies and

synthesizes the images, thoughts, and feelings of the poet.

His art is beautiful insofar as it expresses a transcendent

reality, which "strips the veil of familiarity from the

world and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is

15 the spirit of its forms," thereby exhibiting the two

powers of poetry: (1) the power to enlarge and ennoble

the being of man; (2) the power of communicating the

knowledge of spiritual reality.

•'• E. R. Dodds, The Romantic Theory of Poetry (New York, 1962), p. 13.

46

In regard to this latter power of poetry, we find

that the English Romantics believed that the imagination

stands in some essential relation to truth and reality,

and they were at pains to make their poetry pay attention

to the expression of this truth. So far from thinking

that the imagination deals with the non-existent or the

impossibly ideal, they insist that it reveals an important

kind of truth, a kind to which the ordinary intelligence

is blind and which is intimately connected with a special

insight or perception or intuition. Coleridge notes this

in one of his criticisms of Wordsworth:

It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imagina­tive faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops.-'•'

It is important to note that this reality of which

the Romantics were so fond of speaking involved both the

perception of the physical universe and an insight into the

true nature of things. William Blake probably best described

the reality which the Romantic poets saw imagination as

possessing when he declared:

16^. Biographia Literaria, I, p. 59.

I f ^ * ' '

47

Mental Things are alone Real; what is call» d Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, and its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the mind of a Fool? '

Though rather over-stated, perhaps this does emphasize the

Romantic belief in the necessity of using the imagination

in knowing the world. It simply could not be known in

its reality without the employment of this vital faculty.

Thus, the Romantics insisted that their creations must

be real, not in.the narrow sense of physical reality, but

in the wide sense that they are examples and embodiments

of eternal things which cannot be presented other than in

individual instances.

C. M. Bowra sums up the Romantic s attitude toward

truth and poetic reality when he says:

The Romantic poet wishes to be not a passive observer but an active agent in a world which exists by a perpetual process of creation. He takes his part in this process by making men aware of the reality which sustains the changing visible scene and it is the cause and explanation of everything that matters in it.^8

' William Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1939), I, p. 639.

18 C. M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (Cambridge,

1949), p. 292.

48

The fairy story, the highest and purest form of

literature for Tolkien, creates one of the three worlds

which Tolkien sees as making up the totality of all existence

and perception. As he so plainly notes throughout both

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and "On Fairy

Stories," Tolkien sees in essence three worlds: the

primary world, the secondary world, and a third world

beyond either. The primary world he notes as the world of

sense perception, the world of phenomena which Coleridge

called the primary imagination and Kant the reproductive

agination. That is, it is the physical world to which

we gfsnerally refer as reality. The secondary world he

'Glares to be the world of artistic creation, a world

iHr J some relationship to the primary world but

1 no sense a direct analogue to that world,

le third v7orld is the one he sees beyond both

l«X-^i

/

"it two, and it is the only one which holds a

rj-nal or ultimate reality. This is the world beyond which

consolation gives a fleeting glance.

Next, a look at the distinction Tolkien makes between

reason and fantasy will make it possible to judge the correct

sense in which he discusses the secondary world. Reason,

for Tolkien, relates to the logical faculties of the mind

and their operation, the most prominent of these faculties

being analysis, abstraction, and comprehension. Thus this

Ili4k.

49

faculty tends to withdraw objects from their particularity

in order to establish and maintain their universal nature.

Fantasy, Tolkien's term for the totality of the imaginative

process, is related to the poetic faculties of the mind,

the most prominent of these being synthesis, image-making,

and creation. Thus, this faculty tends to emphasize the

particularity of objects in order to make that particularity

of universal value. Now, these two divisions are comple­

mentary, for they have for their consideration different

but related types of objects, but they unite in their

perception of them to present a unified and whole picture

of the universe. Tolkien puts it this way:

Fantasy is not antithetical to reason, but rather is complementary and in fact could not exist without perception of truth, for creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact but not a slavery to it.^^

Thus, we have the same emphasis on a perception of actu­

ality in the physical sense as in both Coleridge and Kant,

but we also have a recognition that that actuality must

be combined with its perceiver if it is to have any sort

of meaning.

• J R R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories," Essays Presented to Charles Williams (London, 1947), p. 72

Uife^..,

50

Finally, before looking at the fairy story itself we

must look at the idea Tolkien has of "faerie." He first

is careful to distinguish his concept of fairies from the

generally held one of supernatural beings of diminutive

size. He goes on then to state that "it is man who is,

in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of

diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more

20 natural than he," this greater naturalness being derived

from their closer relation to ultimate reality. Though

he does not fully discuss this idea of fairies being more

natural, it seems reasonable to assume (in light of the

rest of his essay) that he is referring to the essential

unity which exists between the fairies and nature itself,

a unity which man has long since thrown off along with his

"naturalness." Regardless of his precise meaning here,

however, he then goes on to make this comment concerning

the relation of fairies to the nature of truth and the

perception of it: "This is true also, even if they are

only creations of man's mind, 'true' only as reflecting 21

in a particular way one of Man's visions of Truth."

Thus it is that we see clearly that Tolkien is in essence

declaring that fairies are indeed one form of a multi-

faceted truth which it is possible for man to perceive.

^^Ibid., p. 39.

21 Ibid., p. 42.

m^-^

51

"To ask what is the origin of stories (however

qualified) is to ask what is the origin of language and of

22

the mind." With this flat statement Tolkien indicates

the place in which he holds the imaginative work in general,

as being at the base of all knowledge and communication

of it. In this sense he approaches the idea advanced by

Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction that the question of poetic

diction is nothing less than the question of primary per­

ception of imagination itself, of how thought ever emerged 23

out of a world of things. The emphasis, then, rests on

the correspondences which exist between speech and the

imagination, those correspondences resting largely on the

similarity between speech and the process of image-making,

and, if the relationship be a direct one, then the

correspondences which further tie the entire group of

ideas to an essentially mythic perception of reality.

Thus, stories in general and fairy stories in particular

have, throughout the ages, related and preserved the central

and most important aspects of man' s perception of his

universe.

The fairy story has, according to Tolkien, three

characteristic faces or general facets, the mystical, the

^^Ibid., p. 47.

23owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (New York, 1964),

p. 3.

52

magical, and the mirror of scorn. The first of these, the

mystical, is turned toward the supernatural, and in this

sense it may deal with ghosts and demons. The second,

the magical, is turned toward nature, and it is this face

which is the essential one, for faerie (the terrii Tolkien

uses to designate the nature of that mysterious realm)

is most nearly translated by the term magic. It is, of

course, not the magic of the "laborious, scientific magician,"

but rather the realm of the imagination' s creation. The

third and final of these tiirns toward man himself in pity

and scorn, for the world of faerie must indeed pity man

in his separation from nature and scorn him for his pride

in refusing adamantly to return to it. The values of

these faces are several, but one of the principal ones is

the appeal which the old has in itself. By it we are able

to lift ourselves above time for a while and observe the

transience of its nature in opposition to the timeless

world created by these three faces of faerie. Just as in

Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" the figures on the vase in

the world of art are the only things of permanence, so

too is the fairy story—in its perception of an unending

reality the- thing which may lift us out of the para­

doxically transient world of physical reality.

To this point we have implied that within the

structure of the fairy story is contained a special kind of

53

truth and perception. The exact nature of this truth we

will consider in a moment in connection with the idea of

sub-creation, but for the moment it will be sufficient to

consider the relation of structure to the overall concern

of the story. Though the formula may vary from one tale to

another, there is one constant which must be kept in mind;

that the fairy must, at all costs, be presented as true.

Now, this seemingly simple statement carries great weight

with it, for it removes from our consideration many stories

which are ordinarily considered fairy tales. Alice in

Wonderland, to cite just one example, may not be considered

a fairy story under this dictum because it sets up the

structure of a dream, and to do so violates the idea of a

true presentation. Thus is emphasized once again the idea

discussed in Chapter II relating to the functioning of

rational choice in the process of the association of images.

The essential idea, then, is that the framework of the

structure must in no way interfere with the secondary belief

which the story must inspire if it is to successfully

create that special kind of truth.

Sub-creation cannot be considered without a look at

the idea of joy and its relation to reality. Related

directly to the idea of joy to be discussed in Chapter IV,

this concept is central, since for Tolkien the mark of a

true fairy story is joy. The eucatastrophe or good

54

catastrophe is in itself the best description of the third

world which Tolkien sees in the process of perception, for

the sudden glimpse of that world comes about only in the

joy of the happy ending. This sudden perception is, of

course, nothing new in the history of criticism. Wordsworth

noted almost exactly the same thing when he described his

perceptions in his "spots of time," and James Joyce's

epiphanies bear a similar if not identical function.

However, this joy is in a sense an evangelium, a glimpse

into both the ordinariness of the primary world and the

extraordinariness of the world which lies both above and

beyond it.

Sub-creation, as already noted in Chapter II, is the

end result of art, the operative link between imagination

and sub-creation itself- Furthermore, it is the secondary

world which we discussed earlier in this chapter, and as

such it is then the physical creation, the art work itself.

A look at the ways in which it relates to the primary world

and the effect of its operations should give us the meaning

of that special truth which Tolkien says emerges from the

fairy story.

V7ithin a structure V7hich does not of itself give the

idea of illusion, sub-creation is nothing more than the

complete and true creation of a secondary world; that is,

of a world which bears V7ithin itself the truth of its ov.-n

55

existence. It relates what is true insofar as the actions

of that secondary world conform to the laws of it. That

is to say, all things are possible in the world of sub-

creation, but whichever of the possibilities is chosen

must be in accord with the laws which are inherent in that

world. Perhaps the clearest example of this point is

Tolkien's own fairy story. The Lord of the Rings. Within

the world of this story, ores and elves roam, birds talk

and do their masters' bidding with intelligence and per­

ception, and trees become walking, talking, thinking

creatures. However, all of these events and creatures are

real and believable within the pages of the book because

they are in perfect harmony with the laws of that world.

With a careful attention to language, history, and customs,

Tolkien makes each of these creatures and each of their

actions seem not only plausible but actually inevitable.

This, then, is what he means by the truth of the world of

sub-creation. Tolkien, in speaking of a somewhat different

matter, declares that "the incarnate mind, the tongue, and 24

the tale are in our world coeval." However, the statement

could apply equally to this aspect of sub-creation, for in

it the creative mind of the artist becomes imbued in the

language of the world he creates to produce a world V7hich

inspires secondary belief.

94 "On Fairy Stories," p. 50.

miuiu)

56

And what is the relation of this secondary world to

the primary world? The answer to this question depends

upon the success of the artist in creating that world. In

the successful creation, as Tolkien says, the peculiar

quality of the secondary world is either derived from or

flows into the primary. Thus the two are coexistent and

closely related, though one may be governed by a green sun

and inhabited by dragons while the other may be governed

by a prosaic yellow sun and inhabited by dull and dreary

human bipeds. The essential point is that the two are

related by both being referent points to the third world

which lies beyond both, and neither of the two possesses

ultimate reality. However, the secondary world of artistic

creation may and probably will (if successfully done)

give a glimpse into that world, that world which really

has primary reality, and thereby aid in the understanding

and perception of this primary world in v7hich we must live

and act. As Tolkien puts it in describing the role of

fantasy in creating a secondary world:

In fantasy, perhaps man himself may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that V7e know. 25

^^Ibid., p. 84.

57

Having examined Tolkien in the light of the Romantic

beliefs concerning the imagination as a means of knowledge,

it is clear that Tolkien is closely allied with Romantic

thought. As he asks the question "Why should motor-cars

be considered more * alive' than centaurs or dragons, and

why should they be considered more real than horses?" his

reader is brought face to face with the arch-Romantic

point of view. [Reality lies, for Tolkien, not in the

prosaic world of physical reality, but rather in the world

into which we need a special insight into which to peer,

a special insight which is provided by fantasy. Founded

upon a definite recognition of physical reality and the

necessity to operate within its scope, Tolkien's theory

of fantasy affirms the essentially idealistic nature of

reality and the inevitable victory of man, and in so doing

it places Tolkien perfectly in the line of Romantic poets

and philosophers for whom the imagination is a source of

divine inspiration in the understanding, perception, and

contemplation of this world.

''4

CHAPTER IV

TOLKIEN AND THE ROMANTIC AXIOLOGY

OF IMAGINATION

Having already seen that Tolkien's concept of the

imagination and his view of its function in the knowledge

process is Romantic, it will now be necessary to see what

values he holds it to have if his theory of imagination is

to be called Romantic. Therefore, after examining the

three human values of recovery, escape, and consolation

which he declares every story must have, it should be

clear that in this respect, too, he is clearly Romantic. "

Recovery, the first of the three virtues Tolkien

sees literature in general and the fairy story in partic­

ular as possessing, is defined as a "regaining—regaining

of a clear view;" that is, not "seeing things as they are

and thus involving ourselves with the philosophers, but

rather 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see ^^

them'—as things apart from ourselves."

Recovery, to Tolkien, is nothing more than a regain- /

ing of a clear view. Old objects must be made new, not

by any alteration in those objects themselves, but rather \

J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories," Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. Dorothy Sayers (London, 1947), p. 74.

58

59

by an altered way of looking at and perceiving them. Indeed^

men have talked of leaves and trees and colors and emotions

for thousands of years, and virtually everything which

exists has been seen in one form or another many times,

thus making (as those who have not "recovered" would say)

everything dull and old, with nothing new and/or exciting.

However, just as spring is not the less beautiful because

it has come every year, neither is the love sonnet out of

date because that form has been utilized before with

exactly the same type of subject. Further, the fact that

men have known of the three primary colors almost since

the beginning of time does not prevent the artist today

from taking these colors and combining them into new and

different shades and subtleties. That is, neither the

painting nor the love sonnet is prevented from being a

new and beautiful experience, as long as the observer does

not allov7 himself to become bored, as long as he escapes

from the weariness of a jaded knowledge. As Tolkien notes:

But the true read of escape from such weariness is not.to be found in the wilfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen, not in making all things dark or unremittingly violent; nor in the mixing of colours on through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complica­tion of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium. Before we reach such states we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should

IbUr.

60

meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves.^

The essence> then, of recovery is that it is a new

way of looking at things, or better, perhaps, a process of

seeing things rather than just looking at them. As an

example of what a slightly changed perspective can do,

Tolkien uses the example of Chestertonian Fantasy.

mooreeffoc, as Chesterton notes, is surely a strange and

exotic word which few, if any, have ever observed before.

And yet, it has been observed by practically every person

at one time or another, for it is nothing more than the

word coffeeroom seen from the inside looking out through

a glass door. This example demonstrates quite clearly

the exotic and exciting qualities into which even the most /

trite and everyday object may be transformed when looked

at from a new point of view./ If, then, merely a new

perspective may change so greatly our appreciation and

outlook, surely a Romantic imagination (or fantasy, as

Tolkien prefers to call it) must indeed have some v7onderful

function:

Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away

^Ibid., pp. 73-74.

^.

61

like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.^

Joseph Beach comments on one aspect of this subject

in his Romantic View of Poetry when he says that the central

characteristic of the Romantic is that he seeks life; that

is, he seeks the satisfactions that accompany every act,

every state of being, the sense he has of the quality of

these acts, and the process of which they are a part.

Romantic poetry, then, he goes on to say, is the means by

which man identifies the objects and experiences that make

up his universe; it is the means of identifying and

dwelling on experience and making much of it. Thus it is

that through the power of imagination, which is the creator

of poetry (in both its full and restricted sense) , objects

are identified and made of value, for Romantic art must

take on some moral value, and it can never be separated

from profound belief. As George Whalley describes art

from a Romantic point of view: "Art, being an integrated

activity of the person, cannot be separated from the most

serious and persistent crises that man in his angelic

4 obtuseness is called upon to survive with honor." And

3 Ibid., p. 75. ^George Whalley, The Poetic Process (London, 1953),

p. XXXVIII.

' 62

:,.k. thus, as'^n involvement with life is of ultimate value

to the Romantic, since it means to be engaged with reality,

it is the perception of this reality which is of prime

importance, becaiuse it must embody the new inclusion of

feeling that makes up at least a part of the new perception.

^ Arv ' i J! aspect of this new outlook is hinted at by

Northrop Frye in his essay "The Drunken Boat":

The Romantic is rejecting associationism and Newtonian detemtiinism. He is indeed looking at old things in a new way, for he has a hard time finding a place to put God, though he speaks of him quite as much as did earlier man.^

What is of interest to us here is the idea of a new view

arising from a different conception of order in which not

all things have yet found their place. Thus, the Romantic

does indeed look at things in a new way, for he uses self-

intuition to bring order to a world which has ceased to

afford ready-made images of order. This order, however,

is not one of society, but a transcendental order which

the individual can attain only through communion with fit

symbols, with what is beautiful and permanent, finding

religious meanings in the forms of nature. And it is in

the forms of nature and art that the Romantic does effect

his new vision and reconciliation. As Coleridge defines it:

Northrop Frye, "The Drunken Boat," Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1963), p. 5.

Art is the mediatress between and reconciler of nature to man. It is, therefore, the power of harmonizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation; color, form, motion, sound are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.^

63

/

One of the most important of the Romantic character­

istics is the idea that any subject is fit for art, but

it is fit only in the sense in which it is approached by

a new vision. Thus, Wordsworth can praise the common folk

and the common speech, Robert Bruns can write such things

as "To a Mouse," and Shelley can write of grand morals

found in the broken statues of long-forgotten kings.

Tolkien has taken this characteristic, combined it V7ith

the desire to unite this new vision with nature as a source

of order ("For the story-maker who allows himself to be

free with Nature can be her lover, not her slave." ), and

set forth the whole in his concept of recovery. It is a

new perception, connected with both reality and the emotions

so that the world which emerges is itself a new world,

whether it be coffeeroom spelled backv/ards or whether it

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, cited by V7alter Jackson Bates, "Coleridge on the Function of Art," Perspectives in Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, 1950), p. 128,

Tolkien, p. 75.

64

be the world of Middle Earth inhabited by Ores, goblins/

hobbitS/ and Tolkien's own peculiar flavor of imaginative

reality.

The second of the three virtues of imaginative litera­

ture is escape, and this is certainly one of his most

interesting and controversial points. In the twentieth

centui^, the word "escape" has come to describe an inferior

and somewhat vulgar type of literature. Few people seem

disturbed by the implications of such an outlook. Tolkien,

however, is one of those few, for to him escape becomes

not only excusable but actually a positive virtue which

may and indeed should be present in significant art.

Escape, in the usual modern sense, has come to mean

an escape from reality, an attempt to live and act in

some dream world of idealism, and those who read escape

fiction are those who are not brave or clever or wise

enough to stand up to the forces of actuality. Hov7ever,

as Tolkien points out, it is an interesting paradox to

consider that in this "real" life escape is not only condoned

but even urged as a matter of practical reality. Further­

more, Tolkien goes on to ask, if life is a prison, why

should a prisoner not try to escape, or, failing in that,

why should he not try to think and talk of things other

than his existence within the hated trap of the prison?

The only possible answer, he goes on to declare, is that

MML

65

society has confused the idea of the escape of the prisoner

with the flight of the deserter, thereby making a funda­

mental logical error, for as Christopher Dawson declares:

"The rawness and ugliness of modern European life-r-that

real life whose contact we should welcome—is the sign of

a biological inferiority, of an insufficient or false Q

reaction to environment." Thus, the desire to escape

may be not from life itself, but rather from the present

time of self-made misery, and even here escape is actually

closer to a full recognition of reality, of things of

permanence, than is the perverted view which condemns it.

A second aspect of escape is the relationship it

effects between men and things. If fiction does not talk

about computers and street lamps and robot-factories, it

may well be because it has more important things to talk

about, things of permanence. And thus, the escapist is

not so subservient as the so-called realist to the passing

whims of the time. He does not regard computers and street

lamps as inevitable and inexorable, for he knows that they

are but transient servants of himself, rather than the

reverse, which would have him the transient servant of

them. The things of permanence he finds are his own nature

o Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion, cited by

J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories," Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. Dorothy Sayers (London, 1947), p. 78.

66

and the visible nature he sees about him. No, computers

and street lamps are not permanent, but lightning and love

are. So, he chooses these things to form the basis of his

fiction, at the same time perhaps implying a criticism or

condemnation by his failure to include the ugliness of

modern life.

It is here interesting to note that Tolkien defines

escape as having four companions, disgust, anger, con­

demnation, and revolt/ and in light of the presently

accepted ideas of escape these companions certainly seem

strange bedfellows. But/ if escape does indeed lead to

an idea that things are the servants of man and that man

must concern himself about things of permanence/ then is

it not inevitable that when he sees things which are not

as they should be that he should become disgusted and

angry/ that he should condemn them for being less than

they might have been/ and that he should revolt in an

attempt to change them?

And finally, Tolkien notes escapes which transcend

even this present time: "There are other things more

grim and terrible to fly from than the noise, stench,

ruthlessness, and extravagance of the internal-combustion

engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, 9

injustice, death." These and more can be escaped by the

"On Fairy Stories," p. 79.

67

use of the creative imagination, for with it man may fulfill

at least two primordial human desires, to survey the depths

of space and time and to hold communion with other living

things. Thus are noted man's severance from the animal

kingdom and his own physical transcience in the totality

of time, which leads to what Tolkien calls the oldest and

deepest desire, the Great Escape, the escape from death.

But at the same time, it may teach the futility of a

particular kind of immortality while it reaffirms the

importance of keeping promises/ speaking truths, and

acting with kindness.

In this aspect/ Tolkien has followed the Romantic

line of thought almost exclusively. The confusion which

arises in criticism/ from the use of this term/ escape,

is one of syntax rather than one of real distinction in

meaning. Note how in the following passage, M. H. Abrams,

though declaring the Romantics not to be escapists, is in

reality affirming them to be escapists in exactly the

same sense that Tolkien uses the term:

First/ these were all centrally political and social poets. It is by a peculiar injustice that Roman­ticism is often described as a mode of escapism/ an evasion of the shocking changes, violence, and ugliness attending the emergence of the modern industrial and political world. The fact is that to a degree v7ithout parallel, even among major Victorian poets, these writers were obsessed with the realities of the era.

68

Blake^s wife mildly complained that her husband was always in Paradise; but from this vantage point he managed to keep so thoroughly in touch with mundane reality that, as David Erdman has demonstrated/ his epics are hardly less steeped in the scenes and events of the day than is that latter-day epic, the Ulysses of James Joyce.^^

Thus Abrams in effect declares that the Romantic poets

were commenting very fully on their time and on its

problems, but that they did so by escaping from the bondage \

of the time itself and from its creations./ Clear examples

of this tendency can be found in almost all of the prominent

figures of the age, but perhaps the most obvious are in

Keats and Coleridge. In his "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"

Keats plainly notes and condemns the materialism he finds

around him by referring to the timeless world of art which

he can perceive on an old Grecian vase. He does escape

from the overtly didactic and condemnatory, but only to

make his point more vital by its implied contrast between

the world of the vase and the world which is in its still-

transient state. Coleridge does much the same thing in

the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but his is an even

more subtle treatment than Keats's. In the figure of the

Ancient Mariner, we see clearly the contrast between the

••• M. H. Abrams, "English Romanticism: of the Age," Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. (New York, 1963), pp. 43-44.

The Spirit Northrop Frye

69

Wedding Guest who would hurry on and the sad tale of one

member of the race who has learned what must still be

considered as primary. Once again merely by implication

we can see the socially conscious poet at work, but one who

will not make himself a slave to things, for he knows him­

self to be both a part of and yet greater than those things.

Among the four companions Tolkien declared to go

hand in hand with escape, it is well to note that the first

three lead directly to the fourth, revolt, and that revolt

is one of the prime features of the Romantic era. Northrop

Frye calls it the central feature of the entire age, and

indeed it may be seen in the poetry of virtually every

figure of that age. Imbued with a revolt against the

forms of the eighteenth century in literature, against

the restrictions of spirit which the French and American

Revolutions asserted in politics, and against the mechanism

and associationism of eighteenth century philosophy and

psychology, the Romantic Age sought to escape indeed, to

escape in order to revolt, to declare its independence

not only from the forms and theories themselves but even

more from the idea of a degraded or determined mankind.

Recognizing the ugliness of man, nevertheless the Romantic

chose to escape to the ideal which he could attain, all

the while knowing that he must work with the present and

the actual. Thus, Romantic poetry was not escape, but

70

rather inscape, at once a discovery and fashioning of some

aspect of reality and of the self. In the words of Frye:

"We should not look for precision where vagueness is

wanted; not extol the virtues of constipation when the

Romantics were exuberant; not insist on visual values when

11 the poet listens darkling to a nightingale."

Thus we see that escape is indeed one of the major

characteristics of Romanticism, not an escape in the

derogatory sense in which it is presently used, but escape

in the sense that Tolkien has used it. It provides freedom

from the dominance of an age or a thing and makes the

creator himself the master, all the while being intimately

concerned with the nature of reality and keenly attuned

to it.

The third of the virtues (recovery, escape, and

consolation) Tolkien ascribes to imaginative fiction is

that of consolation, and he further divides this category

into the consolation of the imaginative satisfaction of

ancient desires' and the consolation of the happy ending.

The first of these has already been touched upon in the

discussion of escape, but here it takes on an added air

of importance. When referring to the satisfaction of

ancient desires, Tolkien refers to such things as the

Frye, "The Drunken Boat," pp. 24-25

71

desire to talk with animals, the urge to fly like the birds,

and the desire to visit in a completely free sense the

depths of the sea. Thus, this consolation is a very

definite form of escape, but it brings to escape the fulfill­

ment of wishes through the creative imagination.

The second type of consolation, that of the happy

ending, pertains almost solely to the fairy story, and in

this sense.it is more restricted than any of the other

values Tolkien attributes to the imagination. Further, at

least in the degree of emphasis, it is on this point that

Tolkien comes to a slight divergence with the traditional

Romantic view. He begins by defining the happy ending as

the precise opposite of tragedy, whose true form is drama.

Comedy not being a precise enough term, he goes on then to

invent a word, eucata strophe, in which he finds the complete

sense of his meaning, and it is eucatastrophe or at least

the eucatastrophic which is the "true form of fairy-tale,

12 and its highest function."

^ Now, it is of supreme importance to note the primary

difference which exists between the consolation of the

satisfaction of ancient desires and the consolation of

the happy ending, this difference being quite simply that

the consolation of the happy ending is in no way escapist.

•'• "On Fairy Stories," p. 81.

72

not even in the broadened sense in which Tolkien utilizes

the term. The euc ata strophe, or good catastrophe, is a

marvelous moment in which, through a miraculous change of

fortune, the happy ending unexpectedly occurs, but it is

not escapist because both reader and characters know

intuitively and rationally that the change is a miracle

that can never be counted on to recur. Thus, it is not

escapist because it in no way relates to or alludes to

anything in the world we usually consider as "real." What

it does do, however, is to deny the possibility of final

defeat, thereby affirming at least by implication the

ultimate success of man himself. A further thing of

importance to note about the eucatastrophe is that it is

not a substitute for looking at the world through a pair

of rose-colored glasses, for neither does it deny that

pain, suffering, hurt, and himiliation (all of which

Tolkien chooses to combine in the word dy scat a strophe)

exist and are possible in the world. It simply affirms

that theirs will not be the ultimate victory.

The value of such consolation for Tolkien is that

it offers a joy beyond the bounds of the present. That

iS/ when at the end of the story the reader experiences

the lift of heart or the catch of breath which the art

work provides/ it gives him a fleeting vision of something

beyond the primary world, something which has more primary

73

truth and reality than the primary world itself. Tolkien

puts it this way: "In such stories when the sudden 'turn'

comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire,

that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed

the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through."

So, in essence, we have a consolation for the sorrow of

this world and an ansv7er to the question "Is it true?",

all coming from that sudden glimpse of the underlying

reality or truth. And, as evidence, Tolkien utilizes the

story of the Gospels, pointing out particularly in the

story of the resurrection how it conforms completely to

the idea of eucatastrophe.

Romanticism, too, is traditionally committed to a

vision involving the happy ending. As R. A. Foakes puts

it in his book. The Romantic Assertion, the Romantic is

committed to a vision involving the assertion of a universe

of society resolved into concord, of "one life within us

and abroad," and of man as the just, gentle, and wise 14

King over himself. However, this romantic commitment

is made in a somewhat different sense than Tolkien's idea

of the happy ending.

^^Ibid., p. 82.

14 R. A. Foakes, The Romantic Assertion (New Haven, 1958), p. 18.

74

In the first place, the Romantic Age was one of

idealism. With the enduring intellectual influences coming

from the German philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel,

and most important, Kant, it was inevitable that the

Romantics would take up transcendental values, and they

did exactly that. Through goodness and beauty, they

believed the real and the ideal could be made one, and art

itself could bring men deliverance by carrying out the

ideal. Still more influential than this general concept,

however, was Kant's idea that the will of man could master

destiny and achieve true freedom for even the most degraded

and enslaved of men. The concern for the individual man

followed this same general tendency also, for it is the

individual who could find and make himself worthy by the

sustenance and fulfillment of desires from an internal

life. All of the Romantic poets embodied these ideas to

some extent, but they are particularly evident in such

poems as Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode," Byron's "Don

Juan," Keats' "Hyperion," and Shelley's "Prometheus

Unbound."

In speaking more specifically of the idea of joy,

we have Shelley's comment on the nature of poetry:

"Poetry is the best and happiest moments of the best and

75

^happiest minds." However, it is necessary to qualify

this exuberant expression by noting precisely from what

source this happiness arose. George Whalley in Poetic

Process describes Romantic poetry as being "catharsis,

integration, and discovery. Catharsis occurs when the

paradeigmatic feeling has been successfully realized; it

presents itself as a stasis, a 'momentary peace, > as the

termination of an activity which has achieved integration 16

at several levels of consciousness." In this sense, then,

we have the picture of the Ancient Mariner, who in his

humble self-realization brings us to a moment of peace by

Ithe knowledge that his own end is indeed a happy one. But

::he real joy which the Romantics were wont to consider was

:hat of the artist, the creative artist. Coleridge in

his essay on aesthetics and in "Dejection: An Ode,"

speaks of joy as being the privilege of all artists,

though the pov7er of joy is possible only to those of a

profound "organic sensibility." In commenting on this

aspect of Coleridge's view, Frank Kermode declares that

"Joy is what the Romantic poet has to communicate. The

• Percy Bysse Shelley, cited by Joseph V7arren Beach, A Romantic View of Poetry (Gloucester, 1963), p. 29.

• ^ -malley, pp. 222-223.

76

work of art is the victory, is the product of the pain and

17 joy of the creativity."

From what we have said of both Tolkien and the

general Romantic viewpoint, it is clear that both a

similarity and a difference of opinions is here involved.

The Romantic, insofar as he holds to the individualism

and idealism, sees life as having a "happy ending." That

is, he sees man as being ultimately perfectible, though

that perfectability may indeed lie beyond the walls of

this, his primary world. In this sense, then, Tolkien is

fully Romantic in his viewpoint. However, Tolkien's con­

cern is far more with the reader and the effect of the

story on him than he is with the creative artist. The

story must have a happy ending for the reader's consolation,

for his joy, while for the Romantic the joy evolved from

and was primarily due to the creative artist. Thus

Romantic melancholy could be blended without contradiction

with idealism and individualism.

Thus we see that Tolkien is indeed as much a Romantic

in his idea of the value of imaginative literature as he

is in his concept of the creative imagination. Seeing

recovery, escape, and consolation as being the three

''•' Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London, 1957), p. 5.

pr

77 ¥)4 *

primary values to imaginative literature, Tolkien is once

again in the mainstream of Romantic critical theory.

1 .

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

There can be little doubt that Tolkien's critical

theory is Romantic. In relation to the general concept,

Tolkien uses the term fantasy to cover the entirety of the

creative action. Beginning with the process of image-

making, the mind proceeds through the medium of art to the

end result, sub-creation. This activity, of which definite

rational choice is a prime factor, is a process of creation

similar to the one by which man himself came into being

and, therefore, is a means of glimpsing beyond the bonds

of physical reality to that ultimate reality which can be

perceived only through the fleeting glimpses offered by

the joy of the happy ending. Thus far his concept is

quite traditionally Romantic. However, he adds to this

traditional concept the idea of arresting strangeness

suggested by "fantasy," thereby reducing still further the

necessity of direct correspondence between the primary

and the secondary world. Moreover, he departs from the

concept slightly by acknowledging the possibility of a

limited perception and an even more limited understanding

occurring without any participation of fantasy in that

perception.

78

79

With regard to the function of imagination in the

process of knowing reality/ Tolkien certainly adheres to

the traditional Romantic viewpoint. Viewing fantasy as a

necessary human right and activity/ he declares that it

gives the mind a glimpse of a world beyond itself. That

is, it creates a new and different world, one in which

everything is true, true in the sense that all creatures

and events are consistent with the laws of that world.

Thus it points out the transient nature of the "real"

things in the primary world and affords us a chance to

perceive the ultimate reality which can be seen or com­

prehended in no other way. Thus it is an essential part

of the knowledge process.

Finally, Tolkien probably adds most to the Romantic

idea of imagination by his specific consideration of the

human values arising from its effective functioning. In

emphasizing recovery as the regaining of a new view and

as looking at old things with the "veil of familiarity

removed/" he offers little more than a clear statement

of traditional beliefs, but when he turns to escape and

consolation he introduces slightly modified aspects of

Romantic thought. Escape, a positive good, is linked with

revolt to indicate a perception of the faults of this

universe and a desire to escape by changing them. Thus

Tolkien adds a new sense to a familiar and usually derogatory

80

term. Consolation, the last of the three virtues the fairy-

story offers, is probably the most important, for it assures

man of his ultimate victory over the forces of evil and

disruption. Further, this consolation of the happy ending

is the thing which affords us a glance into that v7orld

beyond, that world in which fairies exist, order prevails,

and man is no longer the fallen creature we now perceive.

J. R. R. Tolkien is significantly Romantic in both

his critical theory and his own imaginative works. As

such, he is perhaps the herald of a change. Naturalism

and realism have ruled supreme for almost one hundred

years now, and they have combined with the myth of science

to condemn Romanticism as shallow and unrealistic, but as

our knowledge increases, so too does our knowledge of its

limitations and our growing awareness that the Romantic

imagination can and perhaps even should play a vital part

in our perception and understanding of the world.

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81

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m