282
JASON EPSTEIN
which have made an artIstic vocation more difficult than it used to
be." These are: "The loss of belief in the eternity of the physical
universe"; "The loss of belief In the significance and reality of sensory
phenomena"; "The loss of belief in a norm of human nature which
will always require the same kind of man-fabricated world to
be
at
home in"; and "The disappearance of the Public Realm as the sphere
of revelatory personal deeds." Thus there is neither the likelihood of an
enduring world to celebrate the poet's work, nor a nature out there
to be imitated, nor a poetic tradition to
be
maintained and enlarged nor
public men and events to be praised.
The burden therefore on poets is to make worlds of their own
which can
be
shared, hopefully, by their readers, here and now; which
is not at all to say that Auden imagines himself to be addressing a
public meeting or even that he is effectively communicating with you
and me. "To have a million readers, unaware of each other's existence,
to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream surely
of every author." This is not, however, to advocate solipsism. Rather
one must, as a critic, if not necessarily as a poet, spell out the contents
of one's dreams so that there will
be
no mistaking at least the primitive
shapes of one's feelings. Thus at an early point in this very carefully
arranged book Auden describes his own characteristic Eden.
It
in–
cludes a landscape of "Limestone uplands, like the Pennines, plus a
small region of igneous rocks with at least one extinct volcano," but
its climate is British and the ethnic origins of its inhabitants are
"highly varied, as in the United States, but with a slight Nordic pre–
dominance." Its weights and measures are irregular and complicated
with no decimal system and its religion is "Roman Catholic in an easy
going Mediterranean sort of way. Lots of local saints."
To say that such a country exists only in Auden's mind is hardly
to say that it exists nowhere at all. It exists for Auden at his point of
departure--or an approximation of it-from which he sets out, as he
does in
The Dyer's Hand,
into the open world of reality. These two
worlds, the Eden within and the real world outside, are not however
in
conflict so much as they are the measure of each other's validity in a
state of endless mutual appraisal or like a pair of lovers in a process of
mutual creation. So
The Dyer's Hand
is, among other things, about
the imagination and its limits: in some ways it may be read (though
it should not be) as a theory of the imagination and finally it turns
out to
be
something like an assertion that whatever cannot be ex–
perienced in art cannot
be
experienced at all.
The subject of
The Dyer's Hand
is, of course, literature, and
