236
PARTISAN REVIEW
state its complexities; let alone pretend to solve them. But the
problem with its difficulties should be admitted and simplicity of
solution should always be regarded as a sign of failure.
2. A very important forward step in the complication of
history was made when Professor Whitehead and after him Pro·
fessor Lovejoy taught us to look not for the expressed but the
assumed ideas of an age, what Whitehead describes as the "as·
sumptions [which] appear so obvious that people do not know
they are assuming them because no other way of putting things
has ever occurred to them."
3. But a great regression was made when Professor Lovejoy
in that influential book of his assured us that "the ideas in serious
reflective literature are, of course, in great part philosophical ideas
in dilution." I have not time to go into the error of this common
belief. It is part of our suspiciousness of poetry that we under·
take to justify it by making it a dependent art. Certainly we must
question the assumption that gives the priority in ideas to the
philosopher and sees the movement of thought always from the
systematic thinker who
thinks up
the ideas to the poet who
"uses
them [what does that mean?] in dilution [not in concentration?]"
We must question this even if it means a reconstruction of what
we mean by "ideas."
4. Then another thing about which we may not be simple is
the relation of the poet to his environment. The poet, it is true, is
an effect of environment, but we must remember that he is himself
no less a cause. He may be used as the barometer, but let us not
forget that he is also part of the weather. We 'have been too simple
in our notion of what an environment is; we have been too literal
in our use of the word and too quantitative: we take a large and
literally environing thing to be always the environment of a smaller
thing. In a concert room the audience is of course the environ·
ment of the
perform~r;
but also the performer is the environment
of the audience. In a family the parents are no doubt the chief
factors in the environment of the child; but the child is to a large
degree a factor in the environment of the parents and himself
conditions the action of his parents to him.
5. Corollary to this question of environment is the question
of influence. In its historical meaning from which we take our
present use, influence was a word used to express a mystery. It
