V2(1)POTNH
IF there is any one word which can sum up Mr. Powys, philosophy of culture, we must look for it in the language of the people who were pre-eminently gifted in the art of living. The cultured man is 646Optev, not " wise" as the schoolboy glibly translates it, hut a man living at harmony with himself, sensitive, and self-controlled, having the wisdom that comes of self-knowledge and supremely endowed with perception. It is this spiritual rhythm, this harmony between self and life, which the Greeks so richly practised and which Mr. Powys is now at pains to stress :— "The whole purpose and end of culture is a thrilling happiness of a particular sort—of the sort, in fact, that is caused by a response to life made by a harmony of the intellect, the imagination and the senses."
Culture implies a greater awareness. Philosophy, literature, painting, religion, all contribute to culture, not by imparting a sterile, academic knowledge, but by heightening our perceptions and providing us with media for the richest interpretation of life. The uncultured mind has its own thrills, obtained by direct contact with experience, but "the cultured mind approaches everything through an imagination already charged with the passionate responses of the great artists." For the cultured, literature and art are not consigned to libraries and museums, but properly assimilated enhance certain thrilling sensations to be got out of life. They are not an end in themselves, as the educated pedant would have it, but a way of culture. Life, literature, everything has to be integrated and fused into an organic and harmonious entity. "No one," writes Mr. Powys, emphasizing his meaning of assimilation, "has the right to say that he enjoys Homer until his actual reaction to sun and moon and earth and sea and to the significant groupings of peoples and things has been liberated by the Homeric open. secret." Properly assimilated,. made part of . one:a Individual culture, poetry (like the sister arts) widens our perceptions, endows us with greater sensitiveness, and falls into place as an essential part of the cultural rythm. "No man, however learned, can be called a cultured man while there remains an unbridged gap between his reading and his life." Culture is a constant building of bridges, not the acquisition of psychological refuges dissociated from our daily activities. "A cultured man is not one who turns from a disorganized feverish day to a nightly orgy with Hegel or Bergson "—but he who through Bergson or Hegel is enabled to find a richer or more harmonious content in his environment.
Culture, then, demands sensitivity and awareness, while philosophy and the arts are the media for broadening our perceptions and for giving us that scepticism which permits us to remain ironically unmoved "amid the furious dictator- ship of aesthetic fashion." For culture is not concerned with this or that craze of the moment, but the cultured man, being better equipped with aesthetic taste and surer therefore of his own judgment, looks beyond the ephemeral to the per- manent substratum, which alone can give him the happiness which it is the aim of culture to attain.
This scepticism, however, is not conceit; whieh has no part in the spiritual make-up of the man called 0%,50pf :-- "Culture demands that you should be good and humble and free from the burden of possessions. Such humility, such goodness, such freedom from possession, are necessary mediums of psychic clairvoyance. Conceit seals up the exploring antennae of your free sensibility. Malice and hate distract you and waste your life-energy. Possessions make you a fussy supercargo."
It is hardly a philosophy that Mr. Powys has given us, but a way of living beautifully. His tr4daut• must not only be aware and perceptive, but he must be a dreamer of dreams, and must also have achieved the difficult art of forgetting whatever is unessential or out of harmony. Perhaps he suggests to us what is impossible in these days when there is little leisure to dream : but beguiled by a prose of curious inversions and illuminating metaphors, touched with the magic of Pater, we turn the last page convinced at least that, impossible or not, his recipe for culture, as that of the Greeks, provides the only sure way to happiness and self- fulfilment.
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