The difference between the higher and lower social levels, and the explanation of the confused states of the grades between, is this: at the lower levels people are obsessed by a generalised vanity, of class, species, town, or whatever; and the further you progress up the social tree the more individualised the vanity becomes. This is one reason that the lower ranks are obsessed with morality, and the upper with genius. – And both with breaches of their absolutes.

Once these generalities are observed, it is important to add that the situation is complicated for the observer by the way in which economic stratifications run at ninety degrees to those which I have already mentioned. These financial considerations are largely the result of historical accident; or to put it another way, not enough time has passed since the beginning of the game to make its results an accurate guide to the processing power and general capability of the individuals concerned. – Many more dice throws are needed Now, this processing power is one of the most remarkable means of distinguishing between human individuals, but it is not the only one. However, it provides a reliable guide to human character in spite of the other forces involved, and also in spite of the differences established by the roulette of wealth allocation. The higher orders are individualistic and the lower social. But this is unimportant unless you see that both are forms of self-admiration, each merely taking a different route.

While on my way through Midsummer Common to fish I passed three young men sitting on a bench. They had stayed up all night, and were now enjoying the sensation of being the last men left alive. (He who walks the streets of his town in the first light believes himself its conqueror for the rest of the day.) They passed judgment:

A. Funny old life, fishin'.

B. Fishin', who's fishin'?

C. He's fishin'!

B. Fishin'? At five in the morning! The Evil Bastard!

1. If we could in fact talk to the animals, the garden would be unbearably noisy.

2. Britannia's heart was broken by the First War, and her back by the Second.

3. If this be art, then god bless philistia.

4. Be not too officious with the truth.

5. If you are not well-respected, keep silent when discovering a great truth, lest you dishonour it.

6. That intellectual progress is dialectical, one could accept, but why must it be so mean-spirited? 

Our joy in artefacts is always vain, but there are, if not degrees of narcissism, more or less direct paths by which the reflection may reach us. Arts which take the roundabout way, such as music as non-representational painting, appear to gesture in the direction of transcendent objectivity, and their admirers, Schopenhauer and his remarks on music are an example, claim that they are free of human self-obsession altogether. But the applauding audience at any concert, the great prices paid for a picture, are conclusive proof that they are very far from that. Once detected, these arts become all the more distasteful for their failed deception, and their persistent apologists little better than those who take their whisky from a teapot.

People say that Walter de la Mare is the last of the romantics, and it is easy to see what they mean in a general and imprecise sense, but it is so misleading as to be quite unacceptable as a description. He is nothing like a romantic. There is none of the aggressive foregrounding of the poetic personality, or the asserted identity between that construction and the actual author. De la Mare fades away into the distance behind his fables, behind his observations even. This cultivation of impersonality is very notable in itself, and even more so because it is strikingly successful and extreme in character. Think what another impersonal poet, T. S. Eliot, made of this attempt when working within a position authentically descended from that of the romantics. He hides or rather shows himself in a multiplicity of assumed identities. For all this evasiveness, the self is paramount, is always firmly present, whereas De la Mare is just nowhere to be found, and in this respect he is certainly not a typical romantic poet, if we define that poet by describing the area thus, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth. De la Mare is more like Keats if anything, but with an even stronger negátive capability (accent supplied; the capability is not negative, but negative).

It is true that some of the romantics, as defined above, have mysticism in common with De la mare, but this equivalence teaches us little, so vague is the term. De la Mare’s mysticism is elusive and undemonstrative, it intimates without describing the presence of a parallel world, but says nothing about the transcendence of this further realm. It is simply additional. From the other side of the filmy layer separating us from this strange land, our everyday earth perhaps seems as curious and dreamlike; we are imaginative fantasies for them. The romantics, on the other hand, are nothing if not transcendentalists. They see in a vision, or inhabit through imagination and their own incantations a layer of existence that is not only higher but is asserted to be infinitely superior in every way to the present world, though this can only be gestured towards rather than fully communicated, since the reader is neither welcome nor invited to be anything else than a spectator, a member of the congregation supervised by the initiated priest. Again the contrast with De la Mare is obvious; the reader is complicit and drawn into the vacuum left by the deliberate withdrawal of the authorial personality.

Indeed, there is nothing definite in his writing except the style, a fact that explains his fading reputation at the present time, and would in other cases make him only a writer’s writer, but De la Mare is certainly a reader’s writer too, a view that can be verified, I think, by cutting his work at any random point. No study is required, a page will serve.

Though it is painful to grant, even for a disenchanted literate, there is a strong possibility that in our time one might be better off knowing nothing of the any of the arts or the interpretation of the arts of previous periods. A little commonplace morality, and a lot of mathematics might be much better. I am for the generous sceptic as against the cultured dogmatist.

Historians long for solitude, and find it in the dead calm of diachronic retrospection, a zone in which there is movement but no will (and perhaps even the movement is but a series of pictures).

The conclusion that I draw from this speculation is that a tyrant is not so much of a misanthrope as is a scholar; which is, perhaps, something that we already knew, for is it not obvious that in exercising the human will to power the tyrant is communing with those he subjects; whereas the scholar wishes only to have business with the marks that living people leave behind. To the tyrant, a person is just a "mark" in the sense used by criminals, the man is a target, a source of income of whatever kind; but to the historical mind a man is only a mark in a still more depleted sense.

The point is simple: a scholar of history who writes in loathing of the cruelties of the past may have less in common with the oppressed of his own time than does the oppressor, but only where the oppressor is one person. Perhaps that is why historians and not only historians are so prone to nostalgia for the warm humanity of an individual tyrant. – The bureaucratic dictator is altogether too much like the historian himself.

"For there is in fact no direct communication with God, the Creator God. One cannot speak to Him, that is pray to Him. 'The pot doesn't know the woman who made it. The field of millet doesn't know the sower. The cloth forgets its weaver'." Jack Goody, The Interface Between Written and the Oral (CUP: Cambridge, 1987), 153. (Goody is apparently quoting Alfred Erbs, Approche de la religion des Birifior (Paris, 1975), 9.)

This remark struck me with great precision. Here, well in advance of Richards or Barthes, an African tribe announced the death of the author. But in truth, if we were to research this matter carefully there can be few cultures in which this point would not be found to be a truism; but one that cohabits with the strictest intentionalism, since in regard to speech we must presume a living, thinking, person like ourselves (it is only courteous to do so), otherwise one slides into solipsism. With writing, of course, it is different, and there is a choice to be made:

a) This is a stand-in for the face to face speech, so it is essential, again out of politeness, to invoke the intention of the writer. Of this kind are most letters, bills, and such similar documents; but it should benoted that with time such documents may, as far as a reader is concerned, be allowed to slip into the second category,

b) Writings which are cast in the written form, and are meant to be read. Just as one might write someone a poem, although they live in the room above you. Here writer has implicitly accepted the possible drift.– The poet who writes for posterity must be resigned to the irrelevance of his intention.

All the fuss about intent is due to an oddity of reader response. When we go through a poem, or any text, we are very likely to think of it as a substitute for speech; it is a form of arrogance, as if Shakespeare were speaking to me, hard something particular to tell you. But when the audience is unpredictable (in name, or merely in mood) no intention can be broad enough to circumscribe the flux, even when we are able, via historical research to discover something of the wishes of the author, and in such a case it is important to to see that evidence of that kind is only adequate to expand the reference, not constrict it. I can show that author A's text a was alluding to author B's b to make the point Ac, but I cannot with the same material rule out the possibility that a also makes the point 'Ac (not Ac). – Ambiguity, then, can be seen as a feature of writing, especially, though present in speech, but controlled there by tone, pitch, gesture, facial expression, each of which exerts a truly enormous semantic pressure; so great in fact that it is not even necessary to know the language of an angry or an unhappy man. Writing is, by comparison, quite undetermined, except in those cases when, out of politeness, as I have already noted, we pretend that many of the contextual clues are present. The truth is that poems are valuable, if they are, because of their elusive profundity, suggesting but never delivering extreme significance. It is only the timid who try to turn them into business letters.

There is a sense in which the writer has something to say, but by putting it into written form, with so indefinite an application, he has committed it to the logic of written language. A potter may design an orange glaze, but there is a tint of green as a result of an irregularity in the kiln, or, even more clearly, what comes out as he planned, ages unexpectedly and uncontrollably to an even more pleasing colour. (To proceed with their work, what faith the cleaners of the Sistine Chapel must have had.) So the writer, like the sower of millett, resigns control. – But it is essential to add that for every reader there are limits: it is almost as if the intention of the author must be replaced by that of the poem or the drift becomes intolerable. When we read we must be honest and say that it produced in us, unambiguously (though containing many ambiguous precessions), an affective response, and not some other response.

Then how is it that some poets more reliably turn out work that we value? – Some play into the hands of the ambiguity. They start their poems off in a state of rolling amnesia, they sense productive avenues of development in the words just written and push their poems in that direction. This produces texts that seem strangely impersonal. It is not the only means of production. Time also works. It may take a thousand years to clean a poem that is not scoured before birth, and by then there may be nobody to read it. Many of the most beautiful things in English are fragments of popular and even nursery verse that are now sinking into and on the verge of oblivion. The pot, the millett, the cloth are themselves sometimes completely forgotten.

The "common reader" is not so common now; we are all horrifically and self-consciously academic. Here and there small groups of people talk about books in the pagan manner, just as if the Gospel had never been; but even such quaint and isolated populations are somehow touched by the suspicion that to read is to sin.

Invocation of the supernatural is emphatically not an attempt to anticipate and prepare ourselves for ideas beyond our day to day experience, but rather an attempt to neutralize the horrors of the natural and the commonplace by casting the aspersion of non-reality upon them. Elements in the manifest world that disturb us are undermined by the invention of a supernatural correlate or substitute, which much less worrying to us, because it is supernatural and implausible, even if we still find it very frightening. Indeed the process of being frightened may be an important part of the reassurance it gives.

Ghosts, for example, do not address the question of survival, but rather the fear of the near approach of individuals whom we have failed to detect. By suggesting that the only way we can be approached in the security of our locked rooms is by walking supernaturally through a wall we are somehow reassured, even if we think we believe in the possibility. Similarly, the vampire may be a way of suggesting that human predation is not a normal but a supernatural event, whereas in fact it is all too commonplace. Indeed, in tales of the supernatural the everyday world is unusually benevolent, whereas the supernatural is usually very hostile to man. The function of the supernatural, then, is to make the natural seem by comparison at worst indifferent and at best positively charitable.