The very list of things "analyzed" in Thucydides' book, i.e., the very way in which Auden renders them, suggests a historical perspective: from an old-fashioned "enlightenment" via ''habit-forming pain" and down to this very contemporary "mismanagement." As for "habit-forming pain," this expression, of course, isn't of the poet's own coinage (though it sounds remarkably like being one): he simply lifted it from psychoanalytical lingo. He did this often— and so should you. This is what these lingos are for. They save you a trip and often suggest a more imaginative treatment of the proper language. Also, Auden used this corn- pound epithet as a sort of homage to Thucydides: because of Horner, classical Greece is associated with hyphenated definitions . . . Well, at any rate, the succession of these items shows that the poet is tracing the present malaise to its origins: a process that, like every retrospection, renders one's voice elegiac.
Yet there is a more loaded reason for this succession, since "September 1, 1939," is a transitional poem for Auden; i.e., what you've heard about our poet's so-called three stages— Freudian, Marxist, religious—is presented here in a nutshell of two lines. For while ''habit-forming pain" clearly harks back to the Viennese doctor and "mismanagement" to political economy, the monosyllabic "grief' in which the entire succession results, nay, culminates, is straight out of King James and shows, as they say, our man's real drift. And the reasons for that drift, for the emergence of that third, religious stage which this "grief' heralds, are as much personal for this poet as they are historical. Under the circumstances the poem describes, an honest man wouldn't bother to distinguish between the two.
That Thucydides appears here not only because Auden was reading him at the moment, but because of the dilemma's own familiarity, is, I hope, clear. Nazi Germany indeed had begun to resemble a sort of Sparta, especially in the light of the Prussian military tradition. Under the circumstances the civilized world would thus have amounted to Athens, as it was duly threatened. The new dictator, too, was talkative. If this world was ripe for anything, it was retrospection.
But there is a peculiarity. Once you set the apparatus of retrospection into motion, you get yourself into a jumble of things possessing different degrees of remoteness, since all of them are past. How, and on what basis, does one choose? Emotional affinity with this or that tendency or event? Rationalization about its significance? Pure acoustic pleasure of a word or a name? Why, for instance, does Auden pick up "enlightenment"? Because it stands for civilization, cultural and political refinement associated with "Democracy"? In order to pave the road for the impact of "habit-forming pain"? And what is it in "enlightenment's" allusive powers that paves that road? Or maybe it has to do with the very act of retrospection: with its purpose as well as with its reason?
I think that he picked this word because it is enlightenment with a capital "E" that houses the origins of the malaise in question, not Sparta. To put it more aptly, what it seems to me was going through the poet's mind or, if you will, through his subconscious (although writing, let me repeat, is a very rational operation that exploits the subconscious to its own ends and not vice versa), was a search, in several directions, for those origins. And the closest thing in sight was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of a "noble savage" ruined by imperfect institutions. Hence, obviously, the necessity of improving those institutions, hence, then, the concept of the Ideal State. And hence an array of social utopias, bloodshed in order to bring them about, and their logical conclusion, a Polizeistaat.
Because they are so remote, the Greeks are always of an archetypal denomination to us, and this goes for their historians too. And in a didactic poem, one is more successful with one's audience if one throws it an archetype to munch. Auden knew this, and that's why he does not mention Mr. Rousseau here by name, although this man is almost solely responsible for the concept of an ideal ruler, i.e., in this instance Herr Hitler. Also, under the circumstances, the poet most likely didn't feel like debunking even this sort of Frenchman. Finally, an Auden poem always tries to establish a more general pattern of human behavior, and for that, history and psychoanalysis are more suitable than their side products. I simply think that the Enlightenment was very much on the poet's mind as he was pondering the situation, and it wandered into the poem in the lower case, the way it wandered into history.
I'd like to allow myself one more digression, though, now that we are on this subject of the "noble savage." The very expression, I suppose, went into circulation because of all those world voyages of the Age of Discovery. I guess the great navigators—people like Magellan, La Perouse, Bougainville, et al., were the ones who coined it. They simply had in mind the inhabitants of all those newly discovered tropical islands who presumably greatly impressed them by not eating the visitors alive. This is of course a joke, and in bad taste; literally so, I must add.
The appeal the concept of the "noble savage" enjoyed among the literati and, subsequently, with the rest of society had clearly to do with a very vulgar public notion of paradise, i.e., with a generally garbled reading of the Bible. It was simply based on the notion that Adam, too, was naked, as well as on the rejection of Original Sin (in this, of course, the ladies and gentlemen of the Enlightenment weren't the first; nor were they the last). Both attitudes—especially the latter—were presumably a reaction against the omnipresence and redundancy of the Catholic Church. In France, more particularly, it was a reaction against Protestantism.
But whatever its pedigree, the idea was shallow, if only because it flattered man. Flattery, as you know, doesn't take you too far. At best, it simply shifts the emphasis— i.e., guilt—by telling man that he is inherently good and that it's the institutions which are bad. That is, if things are rotten, it's not your fault but someone else's. The truth is, alas, that both men and institutions are good for nothing, since the latter, to say the least, are the product of the former. Still, each epoch—indeed, each generation—discovers this lovely species, the noble savage, for itself and lavishes it with its political and economic theories. As in the days of world voyages, the noble savage of today is mostly of a swarthy shade and dwells in the tropics. At present we call it the Third World and refuse to admit that our enthusiasm to apply there the formulas that failed in our parts is but an obverse form of racism. Having done all it could in the temperate zones, the great French idea in a sense has returned to its source: to breed tyrants al fresco.
Well, so much for "noble savages." Note other rhymes in this stanza which are no less suggestive than "knew-do" and "say-democracy-away": "talk-book," "grave-grief," and finally this "again" enhancing the habit-forming aspect of "pain." Also, I hope you've been able to appreciate the self-contained character of "mismanagement and grief": here you have that enormous distance between cause and effect covered in one line. Just as math preaches how to do it.
5
Why do you think he starts this stanza by mentioning "this neutral air" and why is this air neutral? Well, first of all, he does it in order to disengage his voice from the emotionally charged preceding line; any version of neutrality therefore is welcome. It also supports the notion of the poet's objectivity. Mainly, however, "this neutral air" is here because this is a poem about the outbreak of the war and America as yet is neutral; i.e., it hasn't yet entered the war. By the way, how many of you remember when it did? Well, never mind. Finally, "this neutral air" is here because there is no better epithet for air. What could be more apt? Every poet, as you probably know, tries to grapple with this problem: how to describe an element. Of the four, only the earth yields a handful of adjectives. It's worse with fire, desperate with water, and out of the question with air. And I don't think the poet would be able to pull it off here were it not for politics. Note that.