The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

It is just here that we touch one of the profoundest secrets of the aesthetic sense. I refer to that condition of the soul when the creative energy which is life and love, suffers an insidious corruption by the power which resists creation and which is malice and death. This psychological secret, although assuming an aesthetic form, is closely associated with the sexual instinct.

The sexual instinct, which is primarily creative, may easily, by the insidious corruption of the power which resists creation, become a vampirizing force of destruction. It may indeed become something worse than destruction. It may become an abysmal and unutterable "death-in-life." That voluptuous "pleasure in cruelty" which is an intrinsic element of the sexual instinct may attach itself to "the pleasure in death" which is the intrinsic emotion of the aboriginal inert malice; or rather the "pleasure in death" of the adversary of creation may insidiously associate itself with the "pleasure in cruelty" of the sexual instinct and make of "this energy of cruelty" a new and terrible emotion which is at once cruel and inert.

All this were mere fantastic speculation if it lacked touch with direct experience. But direct experience, if we have any psycho-clairvoyance at all, bears unmistakable witness to what I have been saying. If one glances at the expression in the countenance of any human soul who is deriving pleasure from the spectacle of suffering and who, under the pressure of this queer fusion of the aesthetic sense with the abysmal malice, is engaged in vampirizing the victim of such suffering one will observe a very curious and very illuminating series of revelations.

One will observe, for instance, the presence of demonic energy and of magnetic dominance in such a countenance; but parallel with this and simultaneously with this, one will observe an expression of unutterable sadness, a sadness which is inert and death-like, a sadness which has the soulless rigidity and the frozen immobility of a corpse. We are thus justified, by an impression of direct experience, in our contention that the peculiar pleasure which many artists derive from the contemplation of suffering and from the contemplation of what is atrocious, obscene, monstrous and revolting, is the result of a corruption of both the sexual instinct and the aesthetic sense by the abysmal malice.

For the pleasure which such souls derive from the contemplation of suffering is identical with the pleasure they derive from contemplating the "illusion of dead matter." Philosophers who give themselves up to the profoundest pessimism do not do so, as a rule, under the influence of love. The only exceptions to this are rare cases when preoccupation with suffering does not spring from a furtive enjoyment of the spectacle of suffering but from an incurable pity for the victims of suffering. Such exceptions are far more rare than is usually supposed, because the self-preservative hypocrisy of most pessimists enables them to conceal their voluptuousness under the mask of pity.

Nor must we hide from ourselves the fact that even pity, which in its pure form is the very incarnation of love, has a perverted form in which it lends itself to every kind of subterranean cruelty. Our psychological insight does not amount to very much if it does not recognize that there is a form of pity which enhances the pleasure of cruelty. There may indeed be discovered, when we dig deep enough into the abysses of the soul, an aspect of pity which thrills us with a most delicate sensation of tenderness and yet which remains an aspect of pity by no means incompatible with the fact that we continue the process of causing pain to the object of such tenderness.

Of all human emotions the emotion of pity is capable of the most divergent subtleties. The only kind of pity which is entirely free from the ambiguous element of "pleasure in cruelty" is the pity which is only another name for love, when love is confronted by suffering. There is such a thing as a suppressed envy of "the pleasure of cruelty" manifested in the form of moral indignation against the perpetrator of such cruelty.

Such moral indignation, with its secret impulse of suppressed unconscious jealousy, is a very frequent phenomenon when any sexual element enters into the cruelty in question. But the psychologist who has learnt his art from the profoundest of all psychologists—I mean the Christ of the gospels—is not deceived by this moral gesture. He is able to detect the infinite yearning of the satyr under the righteous fury of the moral avenger.

And he has an infallible test at hand by which to ascertain whether the emotion he feels is pure or impure pity; whether in other words it is merely a process of delicate vampirizing, or whether it is the creative sympathy of love. And the test which he has at his disposal is nothing less than his attitude towards the perpetrator of the particular cruelty under discussion. If his attitude is one of implacable revenge he may be sure that his pity is something else than the emotion of love. If his attitude is one which implies pity not only for the victim but also for the victim's torturer—who without question has more need for pity—then he may be sure that his attitude is an attitude of genuine love.

The mood of implacable revenge need not necessarily imply a suppressed jealousy or envy; but it certainly implies the presence of an element which has its origin in the sinister side of the great duality. The pleasure which certain minds derive from a contemplation of the "deadness of matter" is closely associated with the voluptuousness of cruelty drawn from the recesses of the sexual instinct. Such cruelty finds one of its most insidious incentives in the phenomenon of humiliation; and when the philosopher contemplates the "deadness of matter" with exquisite satisfaction, the pleasure which he experiences, or the "sweet pain" which he experiences, is very closely connected with the cruel idea of humiliating the pride of the human soul.