Owen’s burgeoning interest in classical studies and in the power of words might have presaged a career as an orator or rhetorician—his mother, a feminist, attended women’s gatherings at Hyde Park, which may have demonstrated to him how well-wrought words mold minds—but a formidable problem with language itself soon undercut all ambition in this direction. He developed a stutter. It proved a devastating affliction—not an occasional disruption in the flow of words but an intense, pervasive disability that he called “a great shadow in my life.” For a time, he found that he “couldn’t say anything.”
Psychologists and medical researchers remain uncertain about the cause of stuttering; both genes and environment seem to play a part. There is no known cure. In Owen’s case, it is not difficult to see this speech defect as an expression of his struggle, common among adolescents but accentuated in the case of a sensitive, musical soul, to find a proper relationship between inner and outer world. He tried a number of therapies, all to no avail. Hope fled and one night—he was fifteen or sixteen years old—he wondered whether it might not be better to fall asleep and never awake. These somber musings had an unexpected effect: they resulted, not in an attempt on his own life, but in his first stab at poetry. “Sleep has a brother…” reads one of the lines. The brother, of course, is death; but for Owen, poetry became the means to reclaim his life. He didn’t write much at this age, but he found that while reciting poems, whether his own or others, and also when singing (what is song but musical poetry?), his stutter eased, sometimes dramatically. Poetry, then, was the hitherto unknown link between his two great loves, words and music. Naked words eluded him, but words clothed in music, rhyme, or rhythm rang forth without impediment.
At about the same time, he made a related discovery: that the body possessed its own melody and rhythm. He became an expert gymnast, swooping, spinning, flying, and springing on the parallel bars, the horse, and the other vaguely menacing implements of this mysterious new art. Soon he was Highgate’s senior gymnast. “I was rather well developed, had rather a good figure and held myself well.” Away from the gym, he continued to recite poems, particularly lyric verse. Soon he realized that poetry not only stilled his stutter but instilled hope and joy. He came to believe that it contained uncanny power; that the joy he felt was more than pleasure at a poem’s wit, beauty, or insight. It sprang from the power of poetic metaphor—that power he had first glimpsed while listening to Harwood translate—to bring new meaning into the world. “Poetry,” he now realized, “had the power to change one’s consciousness a little.” This insight would have profound implications for his later life.
World War I interrupted these breakneck youthful discoveries. For Barfield, unlike Tolkien and Lewis, the war proved a placid, even boring, affair. He entered the Officers Training Corps and then the Royal Engineers, learning Morse code and wireless telegraphy while safe on British soil. His unit, comically, set sail for the continental battlegrounds only after the armistice; once arrived in Belgium, he whiled away six months polishing his French. Then the army decided that its idle soldiers needed a useful occupation. Why not go in for education? Barfield was detailed to Oxford University for three weeks, to learn how to teach English literature to the troops. During this brief idyll he discovered Georgian poetry, including the writings of Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, and Siegfried Sassoon. He grew to love the simple lyric beauty, tinged with melancholy, that marked their work, a poetic style that would be swept away in the avant-garde floodwaters of modernism loosed by Eliot and Pound. He turned to writing verse, but his early efforts, with simple rhymes and little depth, failed to match the work of those Georgians he most admired. His first published poem, “Air Castles,” appeared anonymously in Punch on February 14, 1917; a comic soufflé, it is as insubstantial as its subject:
When I grow up to be a man and wear and wear
Whate’er I please,
Black-cloth and serge and Harris-tweed,
—I shall have none of these;
For shaggy men wear Harris-tweed …
Nonetheless, Georgian poetry had won his heart, and when he entered Wadham College, Oxford, some months later, he abandoned his plan to concentrate on Latin and Greek and chose to read English language and literature. In time, philology—in particular, what the history of words reveals about the history of mind—would become his ruling intellectual passion. But he was still very young, with an athlete’s physique and love of movement, and while he was at university and for some years beyond, he addressed the world as much through his body as through his mind. He studied the English classics, but in every spare moment, “the sort of thing my mind was full of—it wasn’t literature, it was … dancing and so forth.”
Dance became his new mistress, an advance upon gymnastics, for it added to that sport’s power and grace the incomparable spiritual beauty of music. Joining the English Folk Dance Society, he learned Morris dancing and other ancient forms, kinetic counterparts to the lyric traditionalism of Georgian poetry. Morris dancing was a revelation. A vigorous folk dance, traditionally reserved for men, that involves rhythmic arm and leg movements, foot stomps, handkerchief waving, and stick clapping, it opened to him a new realm of quasi-mystical inner experience, in which music served as his daemon or psychopomp. One day in particular, he enjoyed “a vivid experience,” a near ecstasy “at the end of one of the movements,” when, his hands caught by one rhythm and his feet by another, he “had a very strong experience of the music flowing through [him]”; he was the vessel, the music a supernormal force. “It was very strong.”
Sophianic Revelations
Music brought strength, rapture, intimations of a higher world, but something remained amiss. While still at Oxford, Barfield received an invitation to travel to Cornwall for the summer, joining a small troupe of musicians and dancers led by two young sisters named Radford. The group planned to go from village to village, making music and dancing galliards, pavanes, bourrées, and other preclassical forms. “It was a kind of new world” for Barfield, one that he found “delightful.” He reveled in the work and in boat journeys around the stunning Cornish coast. But as all Romantics know, beautiful landscapes and sunny days often harbor, like arsenic in paint, the taint of corruption. Like so many young people before him, Barfield fell prey, in the midst of joy and splendor, to Weltschmerz. The immediate catalyst was a young woman, a cousin of the Radfords, who rebuffed his timid advances; but, as he himself realized, he was not in love with her but with “the idea of love.” He was “in despair,” “very much oppressed,” with “no confidence … that life had any meaning.” No doubt growing pains triggered many of the tears; but there was something more at work. Many years later, Barfield surmised that “what was really at the root of the misery” was “being caged in the materialism of the age.” His doubts about existence forced him into a miserable solipsism. On August 20, 1920, he wrote a despairing note to a close Oxford friend, Leo Baker—the same Baker who would later introduce him to C. S. Lewis—describing his sense of cosmic solitude:
I have been seeing practically no-one with whom I can talk naturally of the things I want to talk about, and the result is that I am being forced in on myself like an ingrowing toe-nail. It has come to such a pass that I seem to be living in a land of dream. My self is the only thing that exists, and I wear the external world about me like a suit of clothes—my own body included. It—the world—seems to have about as much objective importance as a suit of clothes, and quite often I have a suspicion that I am really naked after all. When I am alone at night, I sometimes feel frightened of the silence ringing in my ears. Something inside me seems to be so intensely and burningly alive, and everything round me so starkly dead …
The anguish was nearly unbearable, as he found himself “pondering the problem of existence at most hours of the day & some hours of the night”—and this not for a few days or weeks, but for “years.” He later termed it a case of “acute depression.”
Trapped in this slough of despond, Barfield visited Switzerland. There, without warning, at the very end of his vacation, he enjoyed an instantaneous and utter remission of his world-weariness, a metanoia that he came to call his “Sophia experience,” as an unbidden transformative wisdom (sophia = Greek for wisdom) flooded his mind. The volte-face came “suddenly one evening, one fine evening … the clouds sort of lifted—I know this sounds very dramatic, but it is rather essential—all the misery that I had felt, all this lifted with it.”
What scattered the clouds? To any skeptic—say, to Lewis at the same age (and he was almost exactly the same age, born only twenty days after Barfield)—the depression would be traceable to Barfield’s failed love affair, with adolescent angst a predictable emotional variation on the theme, and its alleviation just as obvious; for at just this time, Barfield met a new love interest: Matilda “Maud” Douie (1885–1980), who would become his wife. Maud, a friend of the Radfords, was thirteen years older than Barfield, but the age gap meant nothing to either of them. She entranced him with her choreography and her Scottish ballads, and they married in 1923.
Barfield, however, understood his epochal “Sophia experience” not as a rebound from lovesickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness. Although he remained circumspect about what occurred, the broad outlines of the event are apparent. It seems to have been an episode of nature mysticism, akin to those described by Richard Maurice Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness (1901) and by William James with more sophistication in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): an overwhelming sense of unity with the cosmos, accompanied by certitude and bliss. By the time Barfield had his own Sophia experience in the early 1920s, the doctrine of “cosmic consciousness” had penetrated the Weltanschauung of the age and may have helped to shape what he underwent. An apprehension of beauty was also an important component, for Barfield realized, in his ecstasy, that he “would be able to find all the beauty I had fallen for in this woman [the Radfords’ cousin] in the whole world of nature.”
This sounds banal in the telling, and perhaps it is, but Barfield’s Sophia experience brought with it a profound discovery: that the heightened perception that he had tasted previously only through poetic metaphor, especially that of Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, and the Georgians, could be experienced directly, in life as well as in art, a transforming event available to anyone at any moment. Later, he would argue in book after book that this experience had been commonplace among the ancients and that in the future it would become so again, albeit in a more self-aware, sophisticated form. The Sophia event changed his life. It “led into the whole shape and development of my literary and philosophical work,” by pointing him toward the monumental idea that would become the focus of his life’s work: the nature and evolution of human consciousness.
The Evolution of Consciousness
For over seventy years, the question of how human perception has changed (and continues to change) over the course of centuries would remain at the center of Barfield’s thought, so much so that he once observed that while there is an early C. S. Lewis and a later C. S. Lewis, there is only one Barfield from beginning to end: a man devoted to a single idea, the evolution of consciousness, and how language reveals this evolution by serving as a fossil record of human consciousness as it existed in the past and as a harbinger, with the aid of spiritual insight, of its possible future state.
Barfield’s first step in examining the question, in the wake of the Sophia experience, came in August 1920, when a little essay, “Form in Poetry”—his first published prose work—appeared in the New Statesman. The essay offers a vigorous response to the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell’s Art (1914), a widely read work that argues that one arrives at the meaning, value, and significance of a work of art by looking at its “significant form”—in the case of a painting, the play of line, shape, and color. Subject matter counts for nothing. Bell’s disciples applied the same principles to poetry, contending that a poem’s art lies in its sound, stress, and cadence, and that its content—for example, the ideas and events it may present—is irrelevant. To this Barfield tartly answers that it follows that “Hey-diddle-diddle ranks as an idyll.” Instead, he proposes that the form of a poem unfolds in the reader’s consciousness and is different for each reader, that every word in a poem is “the final objective record for each person of the whole series of thoughts or sense-impressions received by him every time he has spoken or heard that word,” and that the art of poetry consists in the juxtaposition of these thoughts or sense-impressions. That is to say, “the poet’s material … is memory.” Contra Bell and his disciples, a poem does not mean only how it says; it means what each reader reads in it when he brings his full experience to bear upon it. This leads ineluctably to the unstated but implicit conclusion that words transmit more than sound, even more than lexical meaning—more, that is, than the sort of information one might find in a dictionary; words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
The radical idea that words carry such hidden cargo is elaborated in a second essay that Barfield published two years later in the London Mercury for December 1922. He begins his piece, “Ruin,” by quoting with approval Maupassant’s declaration that les mots ont une âme (“words have a soul”). Making industrious use of the OED, he then bares the soul of the English word “ruin” by exploring its etymology (here one may note that Emerson declared in “The Poet” that “language is the archives of history,” and in “In Praise of Books” that dictionaries are “the raw material of possible poems and histories,” and one wonders about the extent of his influence on Barfield, largely unacknowledged apart from scattered references in the latter’s 1931 Poetic Diction and a few essays). Barfield finds in the Latin origin of “ruin,” ruo, “a large sense of swift, disastrous movement.” This sense would not last. “Ruin” changes—or evolves—through the writings of Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Shakespeare (in the latter’s writings it becomes “a warm and living thing”), Milton, Pope, Dryden, and others, each contributing to its shifting meaning, to the import of the word’s “four magical black squiggles, wherein the past is bottled, like an Arabian Genii, in the dark.” By the late eighteenth century with its Enlightenment, neoclassical, and satirical sensibilities, “ruin” had been bled of its original power, speed, and terror, becoming “all tumbledown walls and mossy masonry.” The case is exemplary; “ruin” is but one of ten thousand “ancestral words embalming the souls of many poets dead and gone and the souls of many common men.” It is also, Barfield proclaims in an ending burning with eschatological fever, a word with a bright future. For all words, all language, invented so that people can relate to one another, are “striving still towards that end and consolation.” As language “grows subtler and subtler, burying in its vaults more and more associations, more and more mind, it becomes to those same spirits a more and more perfect medium of companionship. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Barfield’s task from now on would be to illuminate these dark vaults, this past, this future; in so doing, he would uncover an understanding of history scarcely guessed at by the vast majority of his contemporaries. Words contain the “souls” or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness. And by scrutinizing the record of how words change and of how we coin new words with new meanings, Barfield is beginning to grope toward his great discoveries: that consciousness is not the same now as it was in the past or will be in the future; that in the deep past, human consciousness “participated” directly in nature, it was alive, vigorous, and resplendent, but not fully aware of itself; that our modern consciousness is utterly different, aware of itself and able to analyze and reflect upon itself, while at the same time enervated, depressed, wallowing in materialism, atheism, and despair; and that the future offers hope of a new golden age, in which we will
recapture our primordial vigor while retaining our modern self-awareness.
The Coming of Rudolf Steiner
At this stage in his life—he was in his twenties—Barfield had worked these ideas out in haphazard, inchoate form. A new perspective was needed in order to place them in a reliable or at least internally coherent historical, scientific, and philosophical framework. It came from an unexpected quarter: Anthroposophy, the teachings of the Austrian spiritual seer Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). Barfield discovered Steiner during a summer in Cornwall spent in the company not only of the Radford sisters but of his old classmate Harwood and Harwood’s future wife, Daphne Olivier. After hearing Steiner lecture in Stuttgart, Olivier had become an enthusiast, and before long she and Harwood were attending talks at the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society in Gloucester Place, London. When Barfield heard about Steiner, his initial skepticism quickly melted. He came to realize that “Steiner had obviously forgotten volumes more than I had ever dreamed,” embraced his occult teachings, joined the society, and made much of his membership card (number 15), signed by Steiner himself. Admiration soon gave way to adulation; Steiner became for Barfield a philosopher with a “stature … almost too excessive to be borne,” “a key figure—perhaps on the human level, the key figure” in the evolution of consciousness, a man in whom “we observe, actually beginning to occur, the transition from homo sapiens to homo imaginans et amans.”
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 13
