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Feeling and sensation. When W. H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky collaborated on The rake's progress, the
shabby, dandruff-speckled, and slightly peculiar-smelling poet (attributes easily offset by his purity of spirit and intellectual punctiliousness) could not have been more unlike the neat, sartorially perfect, and faintly eau-de-cologned composer. At table, too, while the poet demolished his lamb chops, potatoes, and sprouts, as if eating were a chore to be accomplished as quickly as possible, and gulped Stravinsky's carefully chosen Chateau Margaux, oblivious to its qualities, the composer fussed over his food, and sniffed, sipped, and savoured the wine. These habits illustrate an essential difference between the two men. With Auden the senses seemed to be of negligible importance, whereas with Stravinsky the affective faculties were virtual instruments of thought (CRAFT 8, p. 30).
People are different in such ways as this—different in the parts of their experience to which they attend—and some of these differences are well expressed if one says that Stravinsky was a sensation type and Auden not. But it is significant that the writer of this description should call Stravinsky's sensation his ‘affective faculties’ and these in turn, ‘virtual instruments of thought’: sensation is for him affection—it excites his interest, admiration, love—and this has a rational component resembling thought—he contemplates his sensations, perhaps measuring them by a complex system of scales. (That scales can form such a system is suggested by a person eating the Mediterranean delicacy of squid and relishing most the bits that look like dead, shaggy spiders.)
In other words, in his attempt to convey something of Stravinsky's individuality, the writer must, in effect, introduce a concept of ‘feeling-sensation’, meaning by it not the proneness to affect emphasized by Jung, but rather a differentiated and alert sensorium, attentive no less to affective currents than to the sensory q