Magic and wonder in literature
Part 1 of John Erskine's essay by the same name from *The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent*
Dear readers,
We are returning to John Erskine’s The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent for the final essay, “Magic and Wonder in Literature.”
Widely as we all differ in knowledge and in opinions, one general account of life we are supposed as educated men to accept. We are supposed to agree that we live in a universe of order; that every effect, though to us unexplained, has proceeded from a cause, and that the same causes operate faithfully at all times. If it is the outward world that engages us, we are supposed to perceive that the stars which seem to wander, nevertheless are true to their courses; that no wind bloweth where it listeth, for we do know whence it comes and whither it goes; that the flood and the earthquake, once monsters of caprice, are now phenomena of obedience; that even chance has its law. If we look inward upon our reason, our emotions, our instincts, we are supposed to see that the mind, like other instruments, can be controlled, and that its relation to the outer world is so much the same in all men that we can speak of colors or of sounds, can frame a syllogism, express a desire, distinguish between the abstract and the concrete, and be understood. Finally, if our concern is with morals, we are supposed to conclude that since ideas and emotions are an established currency among men, personality must be something constant and reliable. Knowing a man's mind and his character, we can predict that in a given situation he will think thus and behave so and so; and conversely, from the opinions uttered or the conduct adopted in a given situation, we can infer the character of a stranger. It seems that law of one kind or another is the condition on which we live, and that we illustrate as superb a logic as do the planets above us.
Whether or not there are dissenters from this account of the universe, at least we may fairly say that their account is the basis of most thinking to-day. It is accepted, of course, with humility. Even within the limits of our powers, we have as yet gained far less control of experience than our intellectual self-respect demands. We still blunder through life as though we did not know that the great game must be played according to the rules. But at least we admit that there are rules, and that when man has learned them, he will find the game much easier and happier to play. Having made this admission, however, it is to be feared that we forget our humility and become self-satisfied. This orderly definition of the universe, we reflect, is something of an achievement, and we assume that it is peculiarly our own. The Greeks, to be sure, and a few others, seem to have had the idea, but this only shows, as we say, how modern the Greeks were. Primitive man in general, we are quite certain, preferred mystery to order, refused to recognize the most obvious causes, and rarely did a thing directly if by indirection he could get it done more awkwardly. Here again we are somewhat checked when the archaeologist comes upon some primitive implement strangely effective —that is, strangely like our implements,—or discovers on forgotten cave-walls drawings which indicate a remarkable eye for things as they still are. Yet the mass impression remains, that this life was once a matter of chance or luck, and experience was unforeseeable; that the race-mind cleared very slowly; and that we are the first to imagine a universe of complete and unalterable law.
Our complacent attitude toward primitive man has of late been fostered by certain gifted classical scholars, chief among them Professor Gilbert Murray and Miss Jane Harrison, who with the help of anthropology have recreated that dim world which lay behind Greek letters. The beautiful logic by which these scholars reach their results increases our conceit that reason is a modern instrument, while the world they picture, a hopeless tangle of religion and superstition, of necromancy and the arts, reassures us as to what we have risen from. Against that sombre background Homer, once thought primitive, seems recent and enlightened. Professor J. A. K. Thompson, in his Studies in the Odyssey, published in 1914, provides us with numerous examples. The Homeric epics are full of what are called "expurgations" of earlier legend. Those stories of bodily transformation which Ovid gathered up as fairy tales in his Metamorphoses, the primitive Greek took quite literally; but since the Homeric way of seeing life would not countenance this make-believe, the transformations were "expurgated" by being turned into similes. When we read in the Odyssey, "So spake she and departed, the grey-eyed Athena and like an eagle of the sea she flew away," we surmise that in an older story the goddess turned herself into the sea-eagle. The Homeric conscience is reluctant to transmit this account of the outer world; the most that can be conceded is a resemblance between Athena and the sea-eagle. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the concession is more startling than the original transformation. When Hera and Athena came to the plains of Troy to aid the Greeks, we are told that "the goddesses went their way" into battle "with step like unto turtle-doves." The explanation is that as attendants on Zeus, the goddesses had originally been imagined in the form of his sacred doves. The most helpful example, however, of the Homeric expurgation is the story of Dolon, in the tenth book of the Iliad. When Dolon set out to spy on the Greeks, he "cast on his shoulders his crooked bow, and put on thereover the skin of a grey wolf, and on his head a helm of ferret-skin, and took a sharp javelin, and went on his way to the ships." In the Iliad that grey wolf-skin is only a garment. But in the Rhesus of Euripides, which appears to follow the earlier legends, Dolon explains his device to the chorus:
"Over my back a wolf-skin will I draw.
And the brute's gaping jaws shall frame my head:
Its forefeet will I fasten to my hands.
Its legs to mine; the wolf's four-footed gait
I'll mimic, baffling so our enemies.
While near the trench and pale of ships I am;
But whenso to a lone spot come my feet.
Two-footed will I walk."
Here the wolf-skin is a disguise, which, though not in itself magical, carries us nearer to that primitive age when stealthy men, for their own purposes, changed into were-wolves, and when every wild beast, therefore, implied a fearful possibility that it was a man transformed.
From such illuminating glimpses into the early world we make the conclusion that primitive man dwelt in mystery, that he was fond of make-believe, that he had a highly developed sense of magic—in other words, that he looked for delightful shortcuts and escapes from the facts of life, whereas we look for the law which explains and controls the facts. But the truth probably is that primitive man had no sense of magic whatever; when he busied himself with his incantations and his hocus-pocus, he probably had a quite modern sense of cause and effect. To us he seems a magician, because his method of getting at the cause or at the effect was not ours; but he had no measure by which to judge himself. He consulted the medicine-man as we consult the doctor, and his faith was no more shaken than ours is by a failure to cure. It is the conception of magic, not the conception of cause and effect, which has grown with time and enlightenment. Now, and only now, can we realize how much of primitive science was really magic; but in the essential desire to have a science—^that is, to control and ameliorate our destiny by calculated means, it is not clear that we differ from our ultimate ancestors.
In one respect, however, we ought to differ from them. If time has provided us with a criticism of magic, of illegitimate and ineffective attempts at power, it should have taught us also to admire what is lawful, effective, and true. If primitive literature, recording an incomprehensible world, yearned after magic, our records, of a world understood, should be full of wonder—that is, full of idealizing joy in the truth and in the beauty before our eyes. Time should have distinguished us so from earlier man, because the ability to wonder comes late. To be sure, the Rousseau sentimentalists imagined the savage as contemplating the heavens and the earth beneath with astonishment and awe, and they drew substance for their fancy from the supposed exaltation of spirit with which young children make their acquaintance with this planet. But nothing in our observation of children or in the anthropologist's observation of primitive men, would allow much truth in this old doctrine; the very contrary seems to be the fact—that only the sophisticated can appreciate the miracles that are actually before our eyes. Children take their world for granted; when we disclose some amazement at life, some awe of facts, it is a sign that we are no longer children. Moreover, we wonder only at what lies on the border of our experience; what is totally beyond us we still take for granted. The unclothed savage of Borneo is brought to the settlements and treated to a ride in a motorcar. Knowing nothing of such things, he is neither surprised nor interested, but lets the car, like gravitation, do its work. But he gapes for hours at a steel hammer or a serviceable saw.
Our pity, then, for primitive man's defective science, hardly covers the situation. Surely we can forgive the first comers for taking hold by the wrong handles; we still revise our methods. But what if we, who think of the universe as a realm of law, feel toward it no great wonder, not even a hearty approval, but still yearn after a magic, after an escape of some kind from the inexorable logic of life; what if we, who know the majestic fidelity wherewith nature keeps her elements true to themselves, still desire, in the most spiritual things, an outworn alchemy! I wish to raise the question whether the literature even of modern times, far from expressing wonder, does not express a certain unwillingness to face the world we know; whether it does not display a tendency to make use—a more subtle use—of those primitive transformations which Homer rejected; whether it does not show a perverse delight in substituting the miraculous for the normal—preferring, that is, to give such an account of the outer and inner world as we know to be false, instead of the account which we know to be true.
I ask your attention, then, to the inconsistency between our faith that the universe is orderly and wonderful, and our pleasure in that literature which represents life as miraculous and magical—between, that is, our conviction that miracles are the measure of wonder, and our disposition to treat them as the products of magic. The difference is great. If we love the poetry of life, there is a sense in which we cannot get along without miracles; without them as a language to talk with, we cannot express that profound wonder at common facts which is the sign of enlightened manhood. For this reason we are unwilling to give up fairy stories or the legend of Santa Claus, until some other language is provided for dreams and aspirations. We boldly make use of miracles to express or interpret life. But to account for life by miracles is stupid and unnecessary. Plutarch says that on the farm of Pericles a ram was found having a single horn. Lampon the soothsayer declared that Pericles, by this omen, would become sole ruler in Athens. But an annoying person named Anaxagoras split the ram's skull in two, and showed that by a peculiar formation the horn had to grow single. So Anaxagoras confuted the soothsayer. But later Pericles did become ruler, and the soothsayer recovered his authority. Plutarch's comment is that they were both right, for one explained how the horn grew, and the other explained what it meant just as, when the dinner-bell rings, we know how the sound is produced, and we know what it means. It would be stupid, however—though I believe some philosophers have been guilty—to confuse the interpretation with the cause, to say it is the significance of the dinner-bell that is ringing it. The quarrel with the miraculous in literature, therefore, is only the miraculous when used as magic:—as a wilful substitute for that continuity of cause and effect which outside of literature we believe in.
Education, Serialized, a section of EduThirdSpace: The Newsletter, features retellings of how education has been viewed over the course of history from books, reports, letters, and so forth. The posts in this section are the words of the authors and not editorialized by me, Samantha, or anyone else. However, interpretation or commentary on the texts may be published in other sections of EduThirdSpace.