Post on 30-Dec-2021
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.
A LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York, 1958.
Appleyard, J. A. Coleridge*s Philosophy of Literature.
Cambridge, 1965.
Baker, James V. The Sacred River. Baton Rouge, 1957.
Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction. New York, 1964.
Bayley, John. Romantic Survival. London, 1957. Beach, Joseph Warren. A Romantic View of Poetry.
Gloucester, 1963.
Beer, J. B. Coleridge the Visionary. London, 1959.
Benziger, James. "Organic Unity: Leibznig to Coleridge," Modern Language Association Publications, LXVI (March/ 1951), 24-28.
Blake/ William. A Vision of the Last Judgment in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Volume I. London/ 1939.
Boulger/ James P. Coleridge as Religious Thinker. New Haven, 1961.
Bowra/ C. M. The Romantic Imagination. Cambridge, 1949.
Brooke, Nicholas. "Coleridge's True and Original Realism," Durham University Journal, LIII (March, 1961), 64-69.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge, 1941.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. ed. J. W. Shawcross.' Volumes I and II. Oxford, 1907.
Creed, Howard H. "Coleridge on Taste," Journal of English Literary History, XIII (June, 1946), 143-155.
81
82
• "Coleridge's Metacriticism," Modern Language Association Publications, LXIX (December, 1954), 1160-1180.
Dodds, E. R. The Romantic Theory of Poetry. New York, 1962.
Foakes, R. A. The Romantic Assertion. New Haven, 1958.
Frye, Northrop (ed.) . Romanticism Reconsidered. New York, 1963.
Fuller, Edmund. "The Lord of the Hobbits: J. R. R. Tolkien/ " Books With Men Behind Them. New York/ 1959/ 169-197.
Gerard/ Albert. "Counterfeiting Infinity: The Eolian Harp and the Growth of Coleridge's Mind/" Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LX (July,•1961), 411-423.
Greene, T. M. The Arts and the Art of Criticism. Princeton, 1947.
(ed.). Kant Selections. New York, 1929.
Handy/ William J. Kant and the Southern New Critics. Austin/ 1963.
Haven/ Richard. "Coleridge, Hartley, and the Mystics/" Journal of the Hi story of Ideas, XX (Oct.-Dec, 1959), 477-494.
Hendel, Charles W. (ed.) . The Philosophy of Kant and Our Modern World. Nev7 York, 1957.
House, Humphrey. Coleridge. London, 1953.
Hunt, Leigh. Imagination and Fancy. New York, 1848.
Irwin, W. R. "There and Back Again: The Romances of Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien," Sewanee Reviev7, LXIX (Autumn, 1961), 566-578.
Kant, Immanuel. Critigue of Judgment. Translated with an introduction and notes by J. H. Bernard. London, 1904.
83
. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated with an introduction and notes by F. Max Muller. New York, 1925.
Kennedy, Wilma L. The English Heritage of Coleridge of Bristol. New Haven, 1947.
Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London, 1957.
Lamb, Charles. "On the Genius and Character of Hogarth/" The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. ed. E. V. Lucas. Volume I. London, 1903, 68-79.
Levin/ Harry (ed.). Perspectives of Criticism. Cambridge/ 1950.
Love joy/ Arthur. "Coleridge and Kant's Two Worlds," Journal of English Literary History, VII (December, 1940), 341-362.
Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu. Boston, 1927.
Muirhead, John H. Coleridge a_s Philosopher. New York, 1930.
Noyes/ Russell (ed.). English Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York/ 1956.
Piper/ H. W. The Active Universe. London/ 1962.
Ransom/ John Crowe. Tlie World's Body. New York, 1938.
Reilly/ Robert J. "Romantic Religion in the Work of Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien," Dissertation Abstracts, XXI (1961), 3461-3462.
. "Tolkien and the Fairy Story," Thought, XXXVIII (1963), 89-106.
Richards, I. A. Coleridge on Imagination. New York, 1950.
Rugg, Harold. Imagination. New York, 1963.
Sale, Roger. "England's Parnassus: C. S. Lev7is, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien," Hudson Review, XVII (Summer, 1964), 203-225.
84
Shairp, J. c. Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. New York/ 1878.
Sherwood/ Margaret. Undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry. Cambridge/ 1934.
Smith, A. H. "Kant's Theory of Knowledge," A Treatise of Knowledge. Oxford, 1947, 38-90.
Spacks/ Patricia Meyer. "Ethical Pattern in Lord of the Rings," Critigue, 111,1(1959), 30-42.
Suther, Marshall. Visions of Xanadu. New York, 1965.
Tate, Allen. Reason in Madness. New York, 1935.
(ed.). The Language of Poetry. Princeton, 1942<
Tolkien, J. R. R. "Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics," Proceedings of the British Academy, (1936), 245-290.
. "On Fairy Stories," Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. Dorothy Sayers. London, 1947, 38-90.
. The Hobbit. New York, 1965.
. The Lord of the Rings. New York, 1965.
Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1900. Volume II. The Romantic Age. New Haven, 1955
. Confrontations. Princeton, 1965.
. Immanuel Kant in England. Princeton, 1931.
and Warren, Austin. Theory of Literature.
New York, 1942.
Whalley, George. Poetic Process. London, 1953.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Symbolism. New York, 1927. Wiley, Margaret L. "Coleridge and the Wheels of Intellect,"
Modern Language Association Publications, LXVII (March, 1952), 101-112.
85
Wilm/ E. C. (ed.). Immanuel Kant: 1724-1924. New Haven/ 1925.
Wilson/ Edmond. "OO/ Those Awful Orcsl/" Nation, 182 (April 14, 1956), 312-313.
Wimsatt, William K. Jr. and Brooks, Cleanth. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York, 1957.
Wright; Mar jorie Evelyn. "The Cosmic Kingdom of Myth: A Study in the Myth-Philosophy of Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien," Dissertation Abstracts, XXI (1961), 3464-3465.
m