OXFORD IN THB TWENTIES
4.37
Because I had lost my religion and had not yet had a sex-life
my approach to ideas was very emotional. Even when it came to
metaphysics. Metaphysics for me was not something cold and
abstract; it was an account of reality but an artistic account, not a
scientific one. I did not believe that one system of philosophy was
truer than another and thought philosophers themselves were fools
in so far as they fancied they were getting to the bottom of any–
thing; on the contrary their work was always superstructure,
largely a matter of phrases, and these phrases were employed not
as the physicist employs them but as the poet employs them; the
philosopher's job-to use our favourite word-was stylisation,
building a symphony which should sanction his emotional reac–
tions to the universe. When you boil them down they are all alike.
I found it amusing to collate a sceptic like Hume with one of the
downright idealists. Hume denies the latter's Universals but he
brings them back with an 'as if.' That was just eighteenth century
good manners-there's no such thing as blue blood but the world
must go on
as
if
there was.
I tried to orchestrate my philosophical reading not only with
other literature but with the random details of life. My favourite
writers were the acolytes of flux or destruction; I had come up to
Oxford with a belief in the Practical Joke as a principle of ethics
and in the Enfant Terrible as an unacknowledged legislator. It
puzzled our elders that young men who obviously had a keen sense
of logic should occupy themselves so much with the byways of the
Unconscious, with idiosyncrasies of manners and dress, blind
alleys and baubles, rhyme without reason. Other generations of
undergraduates had been silly spontaneously or by accident
whereas we were silly of a set purpose-mortifying the mind as the
early Christians had mortified the flesh.
We reflected a paradox in certain contemporary novelists.
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf-they give you the flux but
they serve it on golden platters. I suspect it was the gold that
fetched us rather than the flux, as we pretended. In Lawrence we
found belief and enthusiasm, in Joyce the solid ground against
which he kicked, in Woolf at least a precision of picture and
cadence. In spite of our anxiety to be realist-mimesis of flux–
we still fell back upon Form. What you do does not matter but how
you do it; Picasso can make a picture out of anything.
