Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/143

Rh Dreams can be interpreted only in terms of the conscious; scientific description is therefore compelled to work by inference and not by observation; and inference is an unstable foundation for a poetic theory. If we adopt the view that the perceptive attitudes remain, for the most part, unchanged in dream-states—this opinion has received eminent confirmation—then it is foolish to attach great importance to the crumbling and spectacular manifestations of unconscious phenomena. On page 168 we find this statement: "The imaginative process in poetry is analagous to that in dreams." This is the old-fashioned doctrine of the associationist, the outcome of the inspirational fallacy which would have us believe that the poem emerges full-blown from the mind of man. The making of a poem, as Shelley and Poe have so richly informed us, involves a vast amount of cold planning and deliberate prosaic energy: if the author construes process to denote the incubation and coalescence of sense-impressions, then art becomes a shallow and hypnotic affair. Consider the tissue of the dream, its ephemeral thinness and its habitual ineffectiveness, and then turn to the complex and ordered harmonies of the Ode to the West Wind or Atalanta in Calydon.

The psychology of art has to do with form and composition—a big territory, but one that lends itself to definite treatment—the spiritual elements rest with the philosopher and the metaphysician. The psychology of Professor Prescott is inexact: he speaks of "the two modes of thought," meaning the two forms of knowledge immortalized by Croce; he confuses images with stimuli, and processes with meanings; he subscribes to the fetish of primitivism, and looks upon a poem as a preconceived expression executed spontaneously. The evolution of a work of art—the slow, constructive growth from the diversified materials of experience to the unity of the finished poem—escapes him completely. He fails to grasp the relation of the laborious processes of selection to the chaotic store of images accumulated by the mind; to see how each immediate sense-impression is conditioned by all the physical impresses of the past. Let him read Shelley's famous utterance: "Poetical abstractions are beautiful and new, not because the portions of which they are composed had no previous existence in the mind of man, or in nature, but because the whole produced by their combination has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them."