Sentences
Michael Curran
CONTENTS
Art
Taste and tradition Style Know yourself Psychology Religion Happiness Self-interest
Success and failure Pride
Vanity Praise
Shame and modesty Work and independence Vices Virtues Pity Conscience Politics The end We don’t think Thinking Cynicism
Genius Illusions Imitations Kitsch
Goodness, truth and beauty The purpose of life
ART
1 Order and energy
Energy and order are the two great things in both art and life. In art energy is imagination, and order is form, and a great work is imaginative force organized into permanent shape. Order is frugal, sober, chaste and austere. Energy is extravagant, irregular, promiscuous and self-delighting.
Order obeys, imagination rebels. ‘Good is the passive that obeys reason,’ Blake says. ‘Evil is the active springing from energy.’ God works by order, and the devil by energy, and whoever lives by imagination can’t help being of the devil’s party. ‘Order,’ as Pope wrote, ‘is heaven’s first law.’
Some of the angels of order were the egyptians, the greeks, Johnson, Mozart, Cézanne, Mies van der Rohe and Brancusi. Some of the demonic imaginers are Milton, Melville, Hugo,
Beethoven, Pollock, Le Corbusier. Shakespeare was unique in fusing the solidity of controlling order with the force of uncontainable imagination.
Disruptive imagination springs from the downtrodden celts and gauls, regulation is enforced by the legions of Rome.
Art must realize its energies in form, and animate its order with imagination. Writers spend half their strength to discipline their energies, but then they have to task half their discipline to temper their discipline, to make words sing in their chains. It may be made by exuberance, but beauty is calmness and control, though control may be so assured that it looks like exuberance, as it does in Matisse. Intensity makes one sort of force, and restraint another, and power is manifest in both.
Imagination is electricity, order is gravity. Order builds in stone, imagination writes in flame. It is the god that answers by fire. Shape sets out plain symmetrical motifs, imagination works up a lavish palette of effulgent colours. It knows the joy of speed, while regularity has the serene dignity of stillness.
Order coheres and unifies, imagination disunites and disaggregates. Imagination is a centrifugal force that spurts out in a myriad sparkling fragments which never coalesce to form an unbroken unity and coherence. Why else would Shakespeare’s plays be such prodigal anarchies of lushly embroidered episodes? A single page of a great writer’s book is worth as much as the whole, and its sidelights disclose as much as its pith. ‘Digressions,’ Sterne says, ‘incontestably, are the
sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading.’ If we set all our mind to grasp a few lines of it, we would learn far more than we do from all our hasty devouring of their copious volumes. Only a dull work adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
Imagination is lexical, order is syntactic.
Greek and roman writers used a convoluted syntax but a penurious vocabulary. Their verse is literal and rhetorical, and their prose is turgid and baroque. The hebrew Bible used the plainest diction and syntax to make a rough music. French writers have stripped and polished both their vocabulary and their structures. English ones have set the most copious and exuberant lexicon in the simplest arrangements.
Art, like nature, is force made form. It calls on disorderly imagination to rival the earth’s feckless prodigality, and subjects it to laws just as stern and immutable. It reminds us of all the
splendours of the world, by conjuring into existence kinds of splendour quite unlike the world’s.
2 Order makes like, imagination makes different
Form shines clearest where it shapes uniform patterns out of elements that are similar, but it works most potently where it frames dappled patterns out of elements that are different.
The mind delights in similarity of structure and diverseness of hue. It loves forms when they are repeated, and colours when they are varied.
Creators have to use both the veneration which prompts them to emulate and the
imaginativeness which spurs them to deviate. Their task, as Hopkins said, is to ‘admire and do otherwise.’
Artists don’t see what no one else has seen, they make what no one else could make. They are fabricators, not observers, as a poet is a sayer, not a seer. They don’t glimpse similarities that have not been glimpsed before, but shape things that contrast with those that have been shaped before. They don’t find beauty, they find formlessness, and make of it a lovely work. Creators use their style to model a new earth, not to look at this one. It is not how they view the world but how they want the world to view their work.
A metaphor doesn’t bring out the latent analogies that join two objects, but applies the words used of one to manifest and enrich the other. It is not discovered but invented. It does not assimilate things, but differences language. It is a substitution, not of one thing for another, but of one set of words for another. It’s the verbal energy which is released when one entity is forced to take on the form of another. It doesn’t show that one reality is like some other, but
transfigures speech so that it resembles no other. It doesn’t clarify but complicates. We owe to our flair for substitutions both our craziest swervings from what is and our most fertile dreams of what might be.
Mathematics proves rigorous equivalences between interchangeable quantities. Metaphor spins improbable parallels between incommensurable qualities. ‘Each thought,’ Nietzsche says, ‘originates through equating the unequal.’
Pattern and repetition are the essence of beauty. Variation and strangeness are the seed of originality. Coloured writing must justify its exacting strangeness by its lush suggestions. Plain writing must justify its plainness by the grand truths which it reveals. Similarity manifests the form, difference discloses the sense. Form iterates, force varies.
Orderliness, grown to an excess, stiffens into autism. Imagination riots into schizophrenia. Form congeals into ritual, force flares into rapture.
3 Imagination
Artists must use visible forms to give shape to invisible imagination. They haunt us with unseen things, and delight us with stark and vivid ones. ‘The imagination,’ Joubert says, ‘has made more discoveries than the eye.’ It lends a brief reality to unreal things, so as to show them as they are at their most real.
Shakespeare, like the Bible and all true poets, is great sentence by sentence, line by line, phrase by phrase, and not by his overarching plots and designs, which he stole from others. As a storyteller he is derivative, naive and inefficient. As a poet he is deep, original and all-knowing. ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’ What does it matter if you curse or bless, praise or blame, so long as you do it all with gusto and relish? ‘Energy is eternal delight.’ Some art is charged with a stored potential energy, which strains with a vast pent force, though outwardly mild, sedate and masterly. And some has a kinetic power, erupting into excess, gushing and tumbling like a waterfall of delirious volubility, as it does in Milton, Hopkins, Faulkner or Joyce.
‘Write the vision, make it plain.’ A visionary imaginer, such as Dante, Bunyan, Blake or Yeats, must use the simplest style, as Coleridge said. A verbal imaginer, such as Shakespeare, Melville or Conrad, generates a varied, profuse and elaborate dialect.
Imagination breeds thoughts that are worth remembering, and form stamps them in your memory.
Imagination is essentially material. It grants the power to realize the maximum possibilities of its elected medium. It is morally wayward, but embedded in its sensible form. Shakespeare makes a world of pure words, Mozart of notes, and Velasquez of paint. And if words, notes or paint had been taken from them, they would have ceased to create. As the soul lives in this flesh and would die outside it, so a prolific mind can find its own thoughts by immersion in its own medium.
There is more imagination in Le Corbusier’s austere modifications of the medium than in all Gaudi’s grotesqueries There is more vision in one of Cézanne’s unobtrusive still lives than in the bizarre hallucinations of Fuseli or Piranesi. Imagination is perennially revolutionizing its means of representation.
Intelligence beams like white light, pure and limpid. Imagination shivers into the rainbow’s scattered hues.
The sweetness of life lies all in the imagining, be it anticipating what’s to come, or recalling the past, or creating works that are not prey to the havoc of time.
We need forms and institutions, to force us to curb our worst appetites and to aspire to our best achievements. Break the capacious vessel of tradition, and the wine of imagination spills out wasted. Its fruit buds and ripens on the tall tree of form, which we have now sawn down, as it stood in the way of our automated ascent. Nothing without imagination, but no imagination without tradition.
Imagination is the wings which we have not yet grown.
4 Invention and imagination
Most people take imagination to be the same thing as invention, visualization or empathy. But these are only its mongrel likenesses which are prized by those who have no imagination. Fantasy and invention are low stand-ins for imagination. ‘Imagination, not invention,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is the supreme master of art as of life.’ Invention is the mechanical substitute for imagination, and this age excels in ingenuity as it has run out of fresh ideas. Both realism and fantasy are sure signs of its atrophy. We now crave titillating and unctuous impossibilities dealt with in a flat naturalist manner. Inventiveness mints new stories, but it requires a visionary power to raise their plain prose to poetry. Invention belongs to the mere tale, imagination to the telling. True writers don’t dream up new worlds. They recast speech to bring out the richness of this one. They make form strange and truth vivid.
Good fictions draw their plots from life or else invent them, great ones take them over readymade from previous fictions. Shakespeare was able to find fresh words for all things, because he was not distracted by the need to make up new stories. He sourced his plots from second-rate historians, chroniclers and romancers. Only his words are his own. But now storytellers have to surprise us with their clever plot twists, because they lack the capacity to reimagine their medium. ‘It is,’ Wilde says, ‘only the unimaginative who ever invent.’
Dreams are phantasmal but not imaginative, art is imaginative but not fantastic.
5 Imagination defies belief
Knowledge must settle in certitude, but imagination bursts out into the possible. Truth has one god, poetry a whole pantheon, ‘many gods and many voices.’ ‘What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet.’ A poem glows, not by the one sense that it states, but by the hundred that it darkly hints. There are a plethora of gods, and Shakespeare is their prophet.
‘For the life after death,’ Butler says, ‘it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.’ To the imaginative mind existence is the drabbest attribute that a creature can possess. The gods, like the rest of the beings of fiction, mean no less for not having lived, and the stage of our dreams shrinks when they cease to play on it. A literary persona, like a deity, has life without incurring the taint of being real and human. The figures of art, like those on Keats’s urn, gain the one brief immortality that this world can grant to anything. The work of art is the city that Tennyson wrote of, which ‘is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever.’
Before the gods came there was art. Now that they have gone there will be nothing but kitsch. Belief petrifies imagination, and paralyses reason. What is faith but frozen vision? The intellect is at its best when it imagines, but it is at its stupidest and most dishonest in what it believes. Imagination can dare to tell the truth, because it has no wish to be believed. Dante or Chaucer show that an orthodox creed is a good point for poetry to set sail from, but neo-christians like T. S. Eliot show that it’s a dull port in which to come to anchor. The gods were one of our most fertile fictions, though also one of our most fallow convictions.
Art is produced by the decomposition of conviction, when the old gods are departing, but reason has not yet arrived to fill their thrones. ‘Art rears its head where creeds relax,’ as Nietzsche said. It is a gas exhaled by decaying faith, and the christian one festered more luxuriantly than the rest. No kingdom has been the source of more art and thought and science than the worldly
kingdom of Christ, since none has been rent by such gory civil brawls. It gave rise to the finest civilization, as dung breeds the sweetest roses and lilies.
Philosophers dissolve faith with their corrosive doubts, art eludes it by its imaginative plenitude. Art is a dance of ravishment and disillusion. Poets dream visions as sensual and tormenting as an unrequited lover’s. They imagine as aboundingly as they think severely and stringently. They make us drunk with their pure and fresh distillations, but sober us from the flat confections of life. They dry up our trust in the lies by which we live. They may not have enough faith to doubt, but we lack the imagination to be disabused.
Some writers rouse you from your sleep, and some call you back to dream again. They wake your mind to its proper glory, and show you the world as it is at its most real.
Only an audience of infants suspends its disbelief, and is transported out of its own world, and tries to play a part in the show.
6 Causes of art
Too little civilization, and art won’t germinate, too much, and it goes to seed. Art is at length killed by the same conditions that give it nourishment. Emerson forewarned that our race would die of sophistication, and, as the Goncourts said, it needs a periodic jolt of barbarism to revive it. But now that the earth is smothered with global kitsch, where will the scythians come from, to reinvigorate it with their untamed sap and sinew? There are no barbarians left, but only avid consumers. ‘If mankind does not perish through passion,’ Nietzsche says, ‘it will perish through debility.’
Nature will hatch the egg of genius, but culture must fertilize it. Penury may not keep a Milton mute and inglorious, but it and any number of pitfalls may stall him from becoming a Milton. ‘It needs a complex social machinery,’ Henry James said, ‘to set a writer into motion,’ and it takes an apparatus of class, syllabuses, snobbery and institutes to set a reader on to read great books. But they need no prompt to read bad ones. ‘For even the most trifling revelations of art need preparation and study,’ as Nietzsche points out. ‘There is no immediate effect of art.’ If art couldn’t bank on the good will and patronage of people who don’t much care for it, it wouldn’t last from one year to the next.
If there were no serious readers, there would be no serious writers. And so great authors can write up to the top of their talent only by overestimating their readers.
A book has no hope of lasting through the centuries, till we have been trained to read it as if it will. Had we not been lessoned to revere Shakespeare as the most sublime of poets, we’d laugh at him as a pompous windbag. As Thoreau wrote, ‘We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.’
The children write the stories that their parents lived. A book is dunged by the flesh and bone of a file of generations, and watered with the blood of a host of lives. The towering dead come back as the native characters of fiction. They haunt our writing and our reading.
For lack of brutality art will die. ‘The modern artist must live by craft and violence,’ Pound wrote. ‘His gods are violent gods.’ Like some savage idol, art will have blood. The consummate artist would devote one half of life to the making of music and the rest to making war. Such a fierce creator would be half dandy and half thug, not an artistic Socrates, as Nietzsche claimed, but an artistic Caesar, still at work in art’s old vocation of decorating the slaughterhouse, and singing a song ‘as if he had a sword upstairs.’ Art is a priesthood, as Cézanne said. But it is a blood-steeped one that still practises human sacrifice.
7 Adversity
How but in fret and tumult could you shape an art of tranquility and poise? The one place that you can write from is the end of your tether. The mind works most forcefully not in rest and composure, but in weariness and despair. It must come to the brink of disintegration, before it can build up a whole. Insomnia keeps a fatiguing but instructive night school. Even debt has been the relentless muse of some of the best writers, such as Balzac, Dostoyevsky or Scott, chivvying them into inspiration.
Art is what we make of what we’ve lost. Why would a soul that was bathed in a tranquil bliss need to make beauty or find truth? Force thrives on all things adverse. If you would set the artist going, make their lot a touch less propitious. Dante was reborn by banishment, and Machiavelli by his fall. Paradise is decked with the works that artists make in their purgatory. The art
ascends to a cool Elysium. The artist stays below in the flames, burning and unregenerate. The work preys on the artist, to feed the art. A flawless piece is reared up on the wreck of a life. The artist need not have lived through a catastrophe. Life itself is catastrophe enough. Each cruel day takes from the artist and adds to the art, for both of which the artist gives thanks. The work gains for all that its sad maker has lost.
Neglect and obscurity, though they mar the artists, make the art, which blooms in the shade, where they would wilt and wither. They work, as Proust said, in the abyss of the primeval fears of silence, solitude and the dark.
8 Inspiration
An artist must keep vigilantly on the watch for inspiration, and just as vigilantly on the watch against it. We might have more faith in it, were it not so undiscriminating. It throws up all the duds as well as all the marvels. The best authors may write from the subconscious, but so do the worst. Scribblers of the most dull-witted ditties or chirpy lyrics don’t doubt that a trance takes possession of their soul when the muse visits. In those rare and blest hours when the flame of inspiration hovers over me, all I make is lacquered trash.
Creators are sure that what they make is such a miracle, that they must disclaim ownership of it and shyly ascribe it to some higher power, such as a god, or to some deeper source, such as the id.
Art works by a conscious mastery of deliberate form, not by the momentary indulgence of
unrehearsed feeling. The spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion breaks out not in poetry but in pop tunes and kitsch. An age of great poetry is not an age of strong feeling but an age of rich forms. ‘All that is beautiful and noble,’ Baudelaire says, ‘is the product of reason and
calculation.’ Strenuous form counts for far more than slack sincerity. Inspiration is the ease and fertility that comes with the prolonged and tensed application of a strong will. It heaps up measureless wealth, not because it yields a higher proportion of gold, but because it mines more ore. Centuries of inherited practice steer the spontaneous strokes of all true designers. They owe their instant inspiration to the long craft and tradition which they boast it lifts them above. They carefully fill a pot with water, light a fire under it, and then call it inspiration when it boils.
An inspiration is the sudden detonation of a long and deliberate obsession.
Poets don’t write because they have rich thoughts, they have rich thoughts because they write. They don’t create because they are inspired, they grow inspired by creating. A poet comes to be a poet by the habit of composing poems. The poem is the parent of the poet. Inspiration, as Renard said, is ‘the joy of writing. It does not come before writing.’
Most of us speak with glib and hackneyed candour as poets create with glib and vivid artifice. They think as frivolously as the poem thinks profoundly. By patient craft they raise their shallow frankness to the dispassionate veracity of art. The poem leads a more resonant and spacious life than the cramped and insubstantial poet. The poem has a wisdom that the poet lacks, and poetry has a wisdom that the poem lacks.
You don’t write because you need to, you write because others have written. And then you go on writing because you have written. ‘All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate,’ Wilde wrote. ‘No poet sings because he must sing.’
It feels as delightful to be inspired as it does to be drunk, and it’s just as likely to lead us to the truth. Artists claim that they are inspired, in the hope of validating what they make by the state of mind in which they made it. But how does the warmth that you feel when you form a thought vouch for its truth? Is the euphoria of conceiving a child a pledge that it will tell no lies?
9 The effects of art
The great heresies of aesthetics are that style should mimic its content, that a fiction means no more than the tale that it tells, that art has a strong emotional effect or ought to have a strong moral effect, and that a work of art should express the artist’s personality.
The effects of art and imagination are cognitive and not emotional. But they have so little cognitive effect on most of us, that we conclude that they must be made to stir our feelings. Art is the most genuine thing that we have, and so most of our responses to it are fake.
We don’t doubt that what is precious, good or beautiful must touch the bottom of our hearts, and that what fails to touch the bottom of our hearts can in no way be precious, good or beautiful. But we know a profound work by how insipidly it affects us, a genuine work by how spuriously it affects us, and a priceless one by how cheaply it affects us. We can tell a strong work by how limply it moves us, and a shoddy melodrama by how evocative it seems. Don’t the hollowest tales stir in us the most piquant effusions, be they tears or laughter, horror or condolence? It’s the hokiest rigmarole that sparks the most genuine thrills. A good book knows how to play on our feelings, a great one doesn’t care to. Art is cold and affectless. Kitsch is eager to please. The spectators go through a far more impressive range of passions at a football game than they would at a play or piece of music. The distillations of pure thought or pure poetry leave us stone-cold sober. It is hack style that intoxicates, dull art that improves, and phony affects that fire the soul. The only verse that evokes instant tears or smiles is on greeting cards. The songs that heal our hearts are sure to be treacly, and the truths that warm them are sure to be lies. Music is better at stimulating a fake grief than at assuaging a real one. For every one who has been touched by a poem, there are a thousand whose souls have been saved by a pop song. We are soothed or roused by mere dross, and thrilled by the cheapest tricks. A fake is in every case more convincing than the real thing.
We feel a genuine enthusiasm for fake things. But we can muster only a lukewarm respect for real ones.
Our response to a work of art is at best a pale reflection of the intensity of its vision. We don’t laugh at great comedies. We don’t sob at great tragedies. ‘The wittiest authors,’ Nietzsche says, ‘elicit a scarcely noticeable smile,’ while the coarsest joking or the most asinine farce gives rise to gales of hilarity.
Nine laughs in ten are cued by the occasion and not by the joke.
How bland and unaffecting a piece of art looks, when set alongside the dazzle, blare and sensationalism of kitsch.
Imagination wells up from the depths of hell, kitsch springs straight from the soul, which craves crass fun and diversion, but can flourish with no help from truth or beauty. When the heart was freed to ask for what it yearned for, kitsch was born. ‘All bad poetry,’ Wilde wrote, ‘springs from genuine feeling.’ Kitsch is naive in its form, but calculating in its effects. We take in art half-heartedly, but flock to kitsch in fads and crazes. Kitsch gives us far more pleasure than art. Art is for the long ages, kitsch is for the crowded now. The art that appeals to us straight off must be kitsch. We love what we can grasp or what grips us at first sight. Our famished hearts, which would be wearied by a poem, lick up the syrup of a pop lyric, and are moved to unseal their deepest moods in crude and trite scribblings. They are stuffed with stale images, jellied sentimentalism and panting phantasms, and so how could they be touched by anything but kitsch? Like Madame Bovary, we swoon at sensations more than art, from which we have to squeeze some private service. We welcome only those works that thrill us or amuse us or tell us how fine we are.
There is a bad poet in each of us, and it comes out when a true poet would be lost for words. Life stirs us so much more feelingly than art, since life is pressing and personal, while art is cool and ageless. We are untouched by art’s bland perfections, but we are delighted by life’s squalid gaudiness.
Most witty writing, such as Dorothy Parker’s, is too palpably pleased with its own wit to please us much.
What impotent books ravished our youth.
Most people assume that art at its most potent ought to work on them like an emotional
pornography, titillating them with an unceasing arousal of their worthy passions and climaxing in some happy ending. Though even this would seem insipid if there weren’t some villain caught in the cogs of its moral machinery.
You must be blind and lost indeed, if you need a painting to teach you how to see, or a book to teach you what to feel. It’s not art but kitsch that makes us see or hear the world in a new way. Art does so only if it gets turned into an advertisement. If art could change the way we see the world, it would make artists of us all. Art doesn’t modify how you see anything save art, and then solely if you are an artist. A painter looks at each thing with the cold impassioned eye of a professional, on the alert for anything that might be of use for art.
We pay choice art the tribute of tawdry emotion which is due to cheap melodrama. Like Proust’s Madame Verdurin, we greet with unearned feeling works which were conceived with abounding poetic fire, and we deem that we thus confer on them the highest praise. Vermeer’s restful scenes melt the hearts of meretricious sentimentalists. They were much loved by the nazis. Art holds out to you nothing but the frail and makeshift consolations of perfect and permanent form. It falls short of our pretend praise, but outstrips our real one. We don’t grasp how rich it is till it’s remade us, and that would take more than a whole life. How mortifying, that great books find me so facile, trite and forgettable when they read me. And I don’t improve on a second reading.
A good artist makes you feel more at home in the world, a golden one makes you wish that you were and content that you are not. Good art soothes us with its predictable satisfactions, great art desolates and exhilarates us, ravaging us with its lacerating truths, and delighting us with its intrepid imagination.
A book acts like a virus which must infect a long column of unaffected carriers till it at last latches onto the one victim that it was meant for.
10 Surprise
Good writers amuse you by contriving highly-wrought tales, great ones awe you by revealing the bare truth. They forgo the crude and evanescent shocks of plotting for the enduring marvel of fresh insights illuminated in fresh forms. Real surprises go on astonishing us over and over, and yet they don’t startle us, but pour new light on things that we have long been used to the sight of. Surprise is to wonder as lust is to love. Surprise craves unremitting variation, wonder is content with the simple and unshifting. Surprise fades with familiarity, but wonder grows in radiance.
We read stories in the same way that we consume all that we desire, so avid for the next thrill, that we miss the wonders that are unrolling right in front of us. And the one kind of surprise which we don’t like is that of a new truth.
We keep on the watch for surprises, since they corroborate our predetermined views, which prime us to keep on the watch for surprises. ‘In the playhouse,’ Tristan Bernard says, ‘the onlookers want to be surprised, but by what they expect.’
11 Bright surfaces, false depth
‘It is only shallow people,’ as Wilde says, ‘who do not judge by appearances.’ Why are we so reluctant to rest our senses on the surface where surfaces are grace? Why prefer treacherous clefts to translucent shallows? Surfaces alone are fathomless. ‘The less it means,’ as Warhol said, ‘the more beautiful it is.’
Form rescues us from the depths. And yet in order to love art, we feel obliged to pretend that it goes deep. A painting or a piece of music may seem to mean something, but don’t they mean only on the outside? Deep within they are pure form, and it’s this that is their true significance, and why they are so hard to make sense of. ‘Form and colour,’ as Wilde says, ‘tell us of form and colour. That is all.’ But we are too superficial to see the wonders that stare us in the face. Beauty doesn’t dive to a hidden depth, but basks on a boundless surface which dazzles our eyes. Beauty is skin deep, ugliness is soul deep. What heart is as handsome as a handsome face? What soul is as beautiful as a beautiful body and its lovely covering of flesh?
The body is our Eden. The soul has learnt to know good and evil, and so has corrupted it. Those who have suffered from false profundity like an infection are glad to douse their wounds with the antiseptic of shallowness. The sole way to stay clean in this filthy world is to make yourself all smooth surface, so that its slime will slip straight off you. ‘How much good sense lies in superficiality,’ as Nietzsche said.
12 Art is antinomian
The creatures of fiction inhabit a spacious country of the imagination. So why do we persist in judging them by the stifling moral protocols of the low cave in which we lodge? Pious writers pardon their villains, to tout their own generosity, and to show that the villains have not earned it. Peerless writers, like Shakespeare, Milton or Dostoyevsky, don’t indulge their malefactors with cheap clemency. They charge them with their own demoniac force. They send their rain on the just and on the unjust. They show us kinds of justice that lie outside our suburban codes of right and wrong.
Moralizing writers such as Dickens draw much more interesting villains than heroes, since they’re not tempted to turn them into whitewashed portraits of themselves.
Any facile storyteller can make the good prevail, but only one as fine as Austen can make it fascinating.
We relish fictions that show the triumph of the fine qualities which we assume we possess. I am touched by tales of people like me, who choose love and integrity instead of lucre, and are then recompensed with a fortune. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you,’ and when they are added unto us, we take this as sign that we must have found the kingdom. Sermonizing writers, like Dickens, sense that a bald moral victory will not do. They must show you the good gaining the world, and the wicked forfeiting their souls and their loot. They guarantee that if you leave off jostling to get what you want, it’s bound to fall in your lap. They excoriate greed, yet make their heroes millionaires, and they rail at vengefulness, while devising a crafty retribution for the culpable. And though they paint hypocrisy as the one unforgivable sin, their own art works by devious indirection. Their narration makes use of all the wiles which they so righteously condemn in their villains.
A great poet such as Milton dares to assert as an artist the same overweening pride that he condemns in Lucifer.
Mawkish critics presume to deliver art from its inhuman flawlessness, and graciously vest giant writers with their own lilliputian virtues.
The world is in such a state, that if poets are in fact its unacknowledged legislators, would we not do well to burn their books?
Only inferior artists care so much for the world that they want to reform it, though some of the best, like Dickens or Picasso, still fancy that they do. Only dull ones could improve us and crop us to the shape of the latest moral stamp. ‘All bad art,’ as Wilde said, ‘is the result of good intentions.’ Art is strong enough to live down its producer’s best purposes or worst prejudices, but it can’t fulfil the former or fix the latter. Art doesn’t care enough about our prejudices to want to undermine them, and our prejudices are too coarse to be touched by art.
A poem that could change the world would have to be doggerel.
A true artificer treats categories of good and evil as part of the external furniture of the age. It’s the ones who don’t know their own trade that try to renovate or reconfigure them. Moral
seriousness in a work of art would be a frivolous shirking of the real seriousness of art. ‘The morality of art,’ Wilde says, ‘consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.’ Right and wrong are nets which enmesh small souls.
13 Art is pitiless
Arctic hearts have ardent imaginations. Those who live for art, as Keats says, ‘must have self-concentration.’ They conceive so fervently, because they sympathize so coolly. They are moved not by a generous and dissipating compassion, but by an omnivorous and focused self-will. ‘I value people for what I can get out of them,’ said the saintly Beethoven. Their iron integrity is one kind of ordinary egoism. Their sympathies are profligate and not ethical, always on the watch for scenes or feelings that might fertilize their art, be they ever so insalubrious. They take ‘as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen,’ creating without risk, and destroying without responsibility. They are at once unworldly and unscrupulous. They have an icy
fascination with the lives of others, and we mistake their fascination for pity and their iciness for impartiality. Art, like the deities of Epicurus, sits uncaring and unruffled. Its makers are like the bright gods, moral infants with more than mortal capabilities. The few who aspire to build a work for the ages must, like the ages, be patient and inexorable. The finest, as Flaubert said, are calm and pitiless.
The artist’s imagination is as likely to flash out in playful cruelty as in heart-rending pity. Shakespeare could see the jocular side of Gloucester’s blinding as well as its horrors. The sterile sympathies of art don’t move us to share the sorrows of live men and women. I gorge myself on pity in literature, as I’d choke on it in life. Have we learnt to pity by simulating bad art? Or have bad artists grown maudlin by mimicking us? We assume that we feel for characters in books because they seem real, but it may be that we feel for people in life
because we’ve got used to viewing them as if they were characters in books. We are vigilant to see justice done at every turn, save where it might do some real good. History or fiction lack the power to make you care for what lies outside them. They may sway you to feel for others, but only for the others of history or of fiction.
We feel a pathos for great characters, not because they are like people in life, but because we know that life would have no place for such as they. They belong to an eternal country.
What we learn by reading fiction is not to pity the afflicted but to feel that we must be as grand and as significant as its heroes and that others are as unreal and as marginal as the bit parts. Why do we assume that the best use that artists can make of their imagination is to train it to view the world as the rest of us who are not artists and have no imagination view it? They don’t feel the same as us, but think quite differently from us, and are able to shape forms which we would be at a loss to conceive. They work not by empathy, which stays behind to nurse aching hearts, but by audacity, which dares to dart on and leave them uncared for. Sympathy sees likenesses, art makes differences. Empathy is a mirror, imagination is a torch.
We are now so incurably ill, that we mistake artists for healers, and look to them to relieve us. But they have the ruddy carelessness of the healthy, while those who write for therapy make their readers sick.
14 Art makes more evil
Art owes more to evil than to good, both for its content and for the alienated energies which fire its production.
Scrupulous writers don’t waste their evil or their truth on life. They save their justice for their style, and their mischief for their works. They teach their malice to think, and their virtues to dance.
The artist moulds celestial shapes from infernal fires, marrying calm harmony and wild fantasy. Writers are the sort of people who would eavesdrop at keyholes and then make up what they have heard.
A work of art, like the resurrected flesh, ‘is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption.’ How is it born, but by debauching innocence? An artist is an undiscovered traitor. They are so eloquent in broadcasting their love for our sad dust because they have left it so far behind them. The only compromises that they make are with the prince of sin.
Art is indirect, egotistical, ineffective and devouring. It’s more like vindictiveness than sympathy. I have no doubt that it’s myself that art improves, and my neighbours that it needs to.
Reading won’t make you better, but read as well as you can, and it might at least make you worse. A great book ought to leave you happier and more evil, more open to adventure in mischief, and more mistrustful of your own fine feelings.
Hold fast to your integrity, but don’t allow it to taint your work. As Catullus wrote, singers ought to be chaste, but not their song.
TASTE AND TRADITION
1 Taste
As we grow more discriminating, the more things we see and hear both to delight and to disgust us. Cursed are they who have the taste to see how ugly we have made the world, but not the vision to remake it. Knowledge desolates the world. Only the most bountiful dreams can
replenish it. ‘Taste,’ Renard wrote, ‘ripens at the expense of happiness.’ Life for the discerning is a long process of getting disgusted.
Taste, like all the rest of our traits, is disjointed and fragmentary. Try to trace the shape, and you’ll miss the colours. Contemplate the colours, and you’ll fail to catch the form. And few of us have much relish or judgement for more than one or two of the arts.
Good taste preserves a tradition, imagination renews and extends it. Imagination is the car, taste is the driver.
All that cosmopolitan sight-seeing, the brilliant friendships, those fine dinners and great conversations, have gone to make us the complacent mediocrities that we are.
‘Taste,’ as Valéry wrote, ‘is made of a host of distastes.’ All discernment begins in disgust. A fastidious taste has a distasteful prehistory. Bad taste is made by our desires. Good taste is made by our disgust.
What a swamp of mortifications you have to wade through in learning how to judge cleanly. Shame piques us to acquire a fine taste. Yet we are still vain of whatever taste we have acquired. Taste is honed by shame. Imagination is heightened by pride.
Let pleasure guide what you read, but only if you have first learnt to read for some worthier end than pleasure.
‘He that ploweth should plow in hope,’ as Blake urged. Create your work in hope, but judge it in despair. Who of us has not felt the exhilaration of working better than we know, and then the dismay of discovering that what we’ve made falls far short of what we planned?
A writer has a brace of adversaries to tussle with, first the blank page, and then the full one. God spent only a week on creating the world, and so he had no one but himself to blame that he so soon regretted it. If he is pleased with his work, then he must have as little taste as ability. Would he not have come to a far less encouraging appraisal of his workmanship, had he not
been in such haste to judge if it was all very good? As a creator he was precipitate, as a critic he was fickle. How often he must have said to his angels, What a lovely planet earth might have been, if I had spent a few more days on its making, or else had stopped on the fifth. He was the first to find out that the bliss of creating is the sole thing that makes up for the bitterness of existing, but that this joy too soon sours. Create in haste, and repent at leisure. Time is the best critic.
We can’t get rid of our prejudices. So we should at least try to make them as discriminating as possible.
2 Corrupted taste
Each day good taste is stripped of a little more of its influence, but bad taste goes on insensibly gaining ground.
When style is said to win out over substance, most times it is a crass and self-satisfied manner that has won out over subtle style, as in the case of Chesterton. Gaudy writers boast that they love form, but they are just infatuated with its crude effects. Style too has its hypocrites and pharisees, who confuse it with the frills, flourishes and embroidery which mask its absence. When they think that they’re mastering their craft, they are in fact learning the flashy stunts that will take in their audience.
Years of success had depraved his taste. He had lapsed from plain dignity into purple decoration, and bought publicity by peddling his judgment. He ‘ruined a fine tenor voice for effects that bring down the house,’ as Auden phrased it. May you be spared the misfortune of success, and die before praise gets a chance to debauch you.
Life is a slow erosion of all our standards. You must be prepared to allow them to sink if you want to succeed.
Those who have a decided taste are sure that they have an exquisite one. If they prize
discernment, they presume that they know what it is. And if they presume that they know what it is, they have no doubt that they possess it.
Bad taste is born, good taste is made. Nature will supply you with your fake taste. Your true taste you have to piece together by your own efforts. ‘It is,’ Reynolds said, ‘a long and laborious task to acquire it.’ First you have to learn what is worth admiring, then you have to act as if you admired it, till at last you start to admire it for real, and gather why it has earned the admiration that you give to it.
Our naturally bad taste is further corrupted by convention. It can be cleansed only in the sluice of tradition.
Lax taste discriminates as fastidiously as finicky taste. A nice taste is as pleased with itself as a nasty one. A fine palate spurns most foods, but so does a coarse and uncultivated one. People are exceptionally choosey, and what they usually choose is trash. We aren’t deaf to style, but most of us prefer a trite style to a choice one. ‘People do not deserve to have good writing,’ as Emerson said, ‘they are so pleased with bad.’ A great work of art is a lightning show put on for the blind. They may feel the house rumble, but they can’t see the brightness.
My taste calibrates its standard to suit the class of things that I have had the means to pay for. Like my conscience, I use it not to weigh what I ought to do or get, but to weave shrewd justifications for what I have done or got.
The rich use their wealth to hide how cheap their taste is or else to show it off. Their taste is their avarice straining to live up to the demands of their coarse or cultivated snobbery. Elegance is the plush luxury that the rich have in place of beauty.
Most people get the taste for the most expensive grade of vulgarity that they can afford to buy. Most of us don’t doubt that we deserve the best. But we feel sure that the best must be
whatever we have been able to afford.
3 Good taste, bad reasons
If you want to gauge the quality of a person’s admiration, don’t ask them what they admire, ask them why. Sophisticates cry up a masterwork for reasons no less fatuous than those for which oafs hoot at it. They bolt it, and then belch their appreciation in stale patter. ‘A painting in a gallery,’ the Goncourts wrote, ‘hears more ludicrous opinions than anything else in the world.’ Some people’s enthusiasms are good for nothing but to warn you not to waste your time on what they praise.
Admiration knows more than understanding. It’s much easier to acquire good taste than good reasons. We prize the right things for the wrong reasons. Cultivated people have no more valid grounds for admiring fine things than bumpkins do for deriding them, though they may have more valid grounds than the perfunctory ones that they profess.
Take care that you don’t allow your quirks, habits and reflexes to do the job of your taste. We raise our prejudices to the rank of principles and our predilections to the rank of taste. We pervert our precepts to rationalize our likes and dislikes. Instead of elevating our taste by
founding it on our judgment, we contort our judgment by coercing it to ratify our choices. ‘How quick come the reasons for approving what we like,’ as Austen said.
It’s more of a surprise when an uncommon mind is fêted than when it’s vilified, since in both cases it is misunderstood. ‘To be great,’ as Emerson says, ‘is to be misunderstood.’ A masterpiece lasts, because it furnishes the passing generations with conceptions which they can misinterpret each in their own way. Tradition links a chain of fecund misconstructions. Time tells you what to value, but fashion tells you why. People keep up in the sweep of the centuries the same catalogue of great works. But they adjust the reasons for which they praise and misread them to dovetail with the prejudgments of their own age, and so they love them for the very traits that they lack. They make them their contemporaries by misunderstanding them. We read great and desolating books to find the anodyne platitudes which we have been trained to look out for by dull and conventional preceptors. The one style for which we now have any relish is a debased democratic realism. And so we can praise even Shakespeare only by demoting him to a democrat and obsequious realist. But on the rare occasions that he brought commoners on stage it was to make them the butt of a joke. His aim in writing was not to crack the inherited mould of form by compelling it to make room for real life, but to take it over and fill it with more and more imagination.
4 Rules
Where there are no strong rules, there will be no sweet exceptions. ‘The law alone brings us liberty,’ as Goethe wrote. A strong artist must frame strong laws, though it is all case law. ‘Precept must be upon precept, line upon line.’ By revering rules artists are freed from following fads and trends. But they have now shucked off the bountiful ways which used to nurture them, only to give in to the deadening conventions of the vogue. They don’t lack the aptitude to create, but they have lost the power to conceive what a fine work might be. ‘All men can do great
things,’ Butler says, ‘if they know what great things are.’ How could they craft a piece of abiding beauty, when they can’t make out the plainest axioms or won’t obey them? ‘Beauty,’ as Alberti said, ‘is the revelation of law.’ Each timid conformist has been coached to parrot the platitude that regulations are made to be transgressed. The ordinances of art are as trite and disregarded as the ten commandments.
Our iconoclastic age has smashed art and set up kitsch on its gilded plinth.
Artists don’t breach the rules, they lay down better ones, to found a new freedom and a new rigour. Genius, as George Eliot said, ‘comes into the world to give new rules.’
Poets must create the taste by which they are relished, as Wordsworth said. They begin by creating their own, to make it both exacting and permissive. And then they have to raise their readers to be the next best thing to poets. They must enable the most impetuous flights, yet build to fit the most stringent specifications.
Artists, unlike moralists, practise better than they preach. Most of them have a theory of art, so it’s just as well that they don’t obey it. Shakespeare’s plays give the lie to most of what he wrote about play writing. Flaubert, if he had paid heed to his own impeccable aesthetic code, would have disciplined his scandalous brilliancy into desiccated correctness. Had he excised his own persona from his books, he would have robbed them of their richest character. Few tellers intrude so unremittingly in their tale.
In vigorous eras artists make strong works, though they may hold incorrect views on art, but in spent eras they can’t, even if they have the right ones. They glean leaden lessons from golden instructors. We have now swallowed such a crop of faulty postulates, what could purge us but the dawn of a new dark age of unlearning?
We now churn out great reams of shoddy verse, since it’s not the age of poetry, and great reams of shoddy prose, since it is the age of prose.
5 The good and the great
Major artists don’t do better what minor ones do well. They have quite contrary aims, and accomplish quite contrary ends. They differ in kind, not in degree. Good art has an eye for the telling nuance. Great art cleaves to the abstract and elemental. Good art is detailed, fluent and relaxed. Great art is stark, stilted and hieratic. Good art reflects life. Great art imprints on it its own strange vision. A good writer shows you how life looks and feels. A great one shows you what it means. ‘Art,’ as Aristotle notes, ‘does not detail the outward guise of things but their inward import.’ Good art invents and surprises, is colourful and amusing. But the best imagines monotonously. It dares to bore you and to demand that you give it all your attention. It repels you, where lacklustre art charms and entertains, satisfies and salves. Second-rate works invite us in and make us feel at home. They amuse us but don’t ask anything of us. A good artist experiments and innovates. A great one realizes and culminates. ‘Sowing is not as difficult as reaping,’ as Goethe points out.
Just as we dote on a great mind such as Einstein for the quaint traits that denote a trashy celebrity, their peculiarities, dress and gestures, so we applaud the best books for doing what unexceptional books do much better, for contriving suspenseful plots, pronounced effects, characters with whom we identify, a vivid portrayal of a time or place, and slick sermons which confirm our own virtuous prejudices or subvert the herd’s.
The best, as Voltaire said, may be the enemy of the good. But in politics the better is as deadly a foe of the good as the best, while in art the good perverts the best and promotes the dull. A lot of good books are much better than great ones, and the best may share more traits with the bad than with the good. And some of the finest books, such as Wordsworth’s or Hawthorne’s, are not much good, as a woman may have true grace and yet not look pretty. ‘In art,’ as Goethe points out, ‘the best is good enough.’
6 The mind is matrix to the medium
The deepest thinking is neither conscious nor subconscious. Great thought is not unconscious but extra-conscious. It goes on outside the mind in the medium that begets it, be it numbers or words or paint. The mind is the womb which the medium must make pregnant. As Dirac said, the equation knows more than the mathematician.
Genius is not so much a high aptitude for general creativeness as a preternatural affinity for a particular medium. A great mind is a dunce in everything but its chosen métier. Poetic souls are a dime a dozen. What is needed is poetic craft. When this is lacking, the poetic soul is stillborn or sterile. The heart of the poet is so thin, that words have space to jiggle about in it and form new compounds.
Imagination is a mind spurred to a high pitch of activity by the possibilities of the medium in which it works.
A great work of art is born, not when an idea finds its fitting form, but when a form inspires fresh ideas. A poem is not a thought struggling into words, but words giving birth to thought. ‘The real artist,’ as Wilde wrote, ‘proceeds not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion.’ Speech has tormented a few men and women to perfect them as the organs of its power. They are the pipes through which it plays its airs. Poets must be born again into language. In
composing a poem, they give birth to a being who is able to retrieve the poem which is already there in words. Language is hidden poetry in wait for its bright revealer. It is, as Wilde wrote, ‘the parent not the child of thought.’
Form guides a great writer to deep insights, but it waylays a mannered one into the paths of cheap pretences.
The passion that inspires a painter is the passion for paint. The love that stirs a poet is the love of language, ‘smit with sacred song’. Their true muse is the medium of their art. Writers see visions, but only visions of words and their translucent forms. They labour more to clarify form than meaning.
Language has more imagination than any individual. So the best writers are content to serve as the clear channels of its up-welling. The poet is absorbed in language as the mystic is absorbed in God.
It is we who are glib, not words. We are too facile to grasp to what depth they might tow us or to what height they might lift us. Poets do both by ravishing us with their ecstatic dialect. Words go deeper than we do, but we find them superficial, since all we see of them is their upper face as we paddle in the shoals above them.
Why do glib and mawkish people insist that writing is deeper than words, and a picture deeper than paint, and that all music tends toward silence, and that the poetry lies in the pauses? If there is anything in the pauses, it is the sentimentality that we put there. We prefer to read between the lines of a poem, so that we won’t have to grapple with its verbal power. A book must be feebly written, if it means more than the words that it’s made of, though if it’s underpinned by nothing but its words it will soon crumple.
Why do we presuppose that writing encodes visual images in words, which we then project as a film on our mind’s screen when we read? So inadequately do we grasp what goes on in our own heads, and so prone are we to mouth borrowed nonsense rather than make our own sense. Words stand for concepts, not for sense impressions. Their true sensory power lies in their sound, not in the pallid duplicates that they make of the entities that they refer to. But we have no ears to hear their melody. Words are not pictures. In order to take in their glory, you have to shut your eyes and unstop your ears. They become flesh by making their subtle music, not by fabricating blatant images.
Words impart vague, imprecise and indistinct pictorial images, and bland and watery feelings. ‘Nothing we use or hear or touch,’ Clausewitz said, ‘can be couched in language that equals what is presented by the sense.’ Who would read a description of a peach to find out how it tastes? Just bite its pulp.
Why do people celebrate one form of art for doing imperfectly what another does so much better? Why praise a book for appearing cinematic, or a statue because it seems to move, or a building as if it were readable, or prose for being poetical, or a tune as if it could recount a tale? A painting turns to pure matter by remaining purely abstract. The sole body that a painter can shape is a body of paint. A painting should be seen and not read, as writing should be heard and not seen. A picture that tries to relate a story is as false to its medium as words that try to paint a picture. A picture is worth a thousand words only to those who have learnt what it means from some other source. Most of us don’t care for a painting, if we can’t turn it or its maker or its
making into a corny tale. And many of the most renowned painters, such as Michelangelo, have been mere illustrators. We are addicted to anecdotes, but we have lost the relish for art.
A sense can tolerate discordance in inverse ratio to how primitive it is, the nose least of all, and the ear less than the eye.
7 Genres
For a true artist genres are mere incitements to imagination. Order is generic, imagination is impish and perverse. Genres are the bowls into which artists pour their imagination. They fix the outline of the shape it will take, but they don’t affect its quality.
Creative energy, like a people, is real and continuing. Genres, like the borders that enclose them, come and go.
An epic is an essence of one third intense tragedy filled out with a wadding of more or less tedious digressions.
Tragedy is not a particular kind of story. It is a grand character responding to the deepest affliction with a commensurate depth of imagination. So in life there are no tragedies, only mishaps. And how could anyone now write one? We have had our fill of suffering, but we are at a loss to conceive the stern majesty of character that might trace its mystic drift.
Out of its heroic suffering a noble class may make tragedy. Out of its moral seriousness and hopes for continual improvement the triumphant middle class makes novels. Only a proud privileged caste that foresees the waning of its dominance brings forth tragedy.
Great stories of crime, such as Dostoyevsky’s, Hawthorne’s or Hugo’s, tell of the vindication of the culprit’s soul or of the damnation of the detective.
8 Music
Music composes formal associations between sound and sound, not associations of meaning between sound and sense. Though we call it a universal language, it is in fact neither universal nor a language. It gives expression neither to rich ideas nor to complex moods. It communicates no thoughts at all, as Stravinsky argued, or else it conveys none but musical ones. And it
evokes a restricted range of coarse, obvious and extraneous feelings, not much more than sad or glad, up or down, sunny or spooky, and it’s the crudest sort that is best equipped to do so.
Music is how the gods do mathematics. It’s an ineffable algebra for the ears. It is, as Leibniz says, ‘the pleasure the mind feels from counting while not being aware that it is counting.’ It is at once the most sensual and the most abstract of the arts.
Beauty doesn’t hasten like a disciplined line, but wanders like a sinuous curve. A tune is the most roundabout way to get from c to c.
It was a great mischance for music that it came of age in the nineteenth century, just as european taste was degenerating into kitsch.
Bad music now sounds like good film music, overblown, mushy and thrusting, cuing our responses scene by scene to lead up to some grandiose climactic fanfare.
Ballet is the Fabergé egg of the arts, the over-refined knick-knack of an epicene age. It’s a vain attempt to mime feelings by overdone and stereotyped gesticulations, and to rival feline poise by an unachievable bodily control. If it makes music visible, as Balanchine alleged, then it plays it on a sorry instrument, like performing Bach on a kazoo. It ought to leave off straining for fluid organic grace, and aspire instead to a mechanical, puppet-like and affectless awkwardness. Nijinsky alone by his rigorous anti-ballet gave back to the dance its savage vitality.
9 The visual arts
We assume that portraits get to the core of a soul, since we know the bare husk of both life and art. Is the heart so thin and transparent, that mere paint can unveil it? The face may be a map of habits and experiences, but only those of its own flesh, and not what lies behind it. The
phrenologist Lavater, when asked to differentiate a sketch of Kant from that of an infamous brigand, singled out the markers of the true metaphysician in the robber, and the unmistakable tokens of an outlaw in Kant.
A building must have a function as a fiction must have a meaning. But whereas a book is able to unroll the whole skein of the spirit, a building’s purpose is the mere servant of menial
instrumentality. Architecture fouls pure form with functionality, literature lights it up with truth. Sentimentalists would have us believe that no building is worth as much as the acts that take place underneath its roof. But the form of a great edifice is worth far more than what it does, and it doesn’t start to live its real life till it has ceased to work. It’s as great as it is greater than its use. The best structures outlast their function for the longest time, and one that is perfectly fitted to its present purpose will soon be pulled down. A pyramid was a tomb for a booby, a cathedral a barn for superstitious cows to congregate in. Is the ruby brightened by the grubby fingers that it adorns? Architecture is art contaminated by utility, which only the finest breaks free of. If form does follow function, then every building ought to be a uniform precast box.
The rest of the arts may despair, but architects must frame an art of hope, since they are building a new world.
Sculpture is a more one-dimensional art than painting. A sculpture has more spatial facets, but a picture has more formal ones.
Only the most infamous tyrants deserve to be satirized by commemorative statues.
10 Film
Cinema is beggared by the wealth of its possibilities. Like Orson Welles, it will do nothing great, since it can do such a spread of facile things so well. Like life, it is vibrant but insipid, saturated but vacuous, loud and raucous though with nothing to say, as mechanically precocious as it is aesthetically regressive and juvenile. It is advanced in everything except its sensibility. It is the epitome of present-day art, since it is neither modern nor art but a lucrative branch of the global business of kitsch. It thrills us with the pap of fantasy and the infantile gratifications of plot, and feasts our greedy hunger for happy endings and our need to identify with attractive idols. A pseudo-intellectual is one who treats films as if they were works of art.
A film is too rushed to make luminous images, and too stuffed with visual details to make thoughtful drama.
Photography memorializes the sadness of time in a medium that claims to prevail against it. It replaces artistic form with gadgetry and its feeling with sentimentality and self-centredness. It paints the icons of our narcissism.
11 Tradition
Time is wiser than taste. Tradition knows more than the individual. We need the stolidity of tradition to counterbalance the gross obstinacy of our own judgment, and to preserve the works of imperishable originality from each generation’s thirst for crude novelty. The soul is too shallow to harbour the huge bulk of a work of art. It must moor out in the broad sea of tradition. As art tells the truest lies, so tradition is the most sagacious foolishness. Why commend what time tells you to? Yet time will tell you where all the best things are to be found. The dead make up the most vital community, because they are not a community at all. And posterity frames the most reliable consensus, since it is made without the need for agreement. The past, which reigns as the sovereign of the long age, saves us from fashion, which rules as the usurper of the hour, more boorish and more peremptory. But we have mutinied against the majesty of the old ways, to kneel down to the despotic imbecility of the clanging now.
Tradition is all, the individual nothing. ‘The richness of a work, of a generation,’ Pavese wrote, ‘is in all cases determined by how much of the past it contains.’ But to save the past alive, artists must act as if they were all and the past nothing. ‘Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead,’ as Blake urged. All good is made by the tyranny of tradition and by the wilful hardihood of the few who fight to depose it. Creators cherish it only if they hope to become part of it. But how can they enrich it but by being unequivocally of their own time? They are at once idolaters and iconoclasts. ‘Each act of creation,’ Picasso said, ‘is first of all an act of destruction.’ Artists make a god of beauty. But they want to smash its old images and set up their own on the unfilled pedestals.
Tradition used to be the care of a whole class. Now it is the endangered possession of a scattering of rare individuals swamped by the heedless greed of the giddy crowd.
The true originators shun historicism for anachronism. What do they care for archaeology or antiquarianism? Rapturous vision makes all things new. Art is indifferent to time and place. Kitsch is both topical and eclectic, localized and globalized. The historical sense benumbs the imagination. ‘All beautiful things,’ as Wilde says, ‘belong to the same age.’
Some writers, such as Emerson, who have lived at ease on a sumptuous legacy of tradition, urge their juniors to throw up their patrimony and earn a toilsome livelihood of their own. All are born heirs to the past’s inexhaustible bequest, but you must labour for long years to make it your own. ‘What you have inherited from your antecedents,’ Goethe said, ‘you must first win for your own use.’
Tradition works like love. How do your deeds come to mean anything at all but by their communion with the ones whom time has made dear to you?
12 Periods
The muses don’t dance in unison, as Degas points out, or grow at the same rate, or age in the same way. They may form one family, but they each retain their individual characteristics. ‘That urge to find counterparts and analogies in the various arts gives rise to queer blunders,’ as Baudelaire points out. The english and russians can write great books but not make great paintings. The french can paint and write but not make music. The germans can write and make music but can’t paint. The italians can paint and make music but not literature. The english put all of their music into their poetry. The french put all their music into their prose.
Realism has starved art till it has grown as stunted and pale as life itself. It is the style of a world emptied of meaning but crammed with stuff. Literature has ceased to reveal to us large truths, since it has sold itself as a reporter of small facts. It now aspires to the condition of journalism, and aims to make books that are as probable as a news report, as accurate as a chronicle, as bustling as a film, or as instant as the net.
Sober and prosaic America, as Tocqueville showed, is drunk on its own grandiloquence and tears. Its writers, though wedded to the colloquial, still lust for the sublime.
13 Classic and romantic
Classicism is at its best an architectural and sculptural style, baroque a musical one, romanticism a literary one, and modernism a painterly one.
Ancient Egypt shaped an authentically modern visual style, stark, impassive and menacing. Greece was not really classical, but formed its sinuous and theatrical baroque.
The greeks were teenagers, beautiful, sad, lost, dangerous, but not very deep. They were shallow enough to see a lot of things clearly. They might have rescued us from our false complexities by guiding us back to a bright simplicity and surface, ‘the whole Olympus of appearance,’ as Nietzsche termed it. But now that we have gained a more accurate view of them, we can’t glean a thing from them. They were sculptors, not psychologists. They carved the embodied abstractions of architecture, geometry and myth. Their imagination was fixed on the plastic and formal. Their eyes were oriented outwards to the serene shape, not inwards to the chaos of the mind. ‘For us greeks,’ as Valéry wrote of them, ‘all things are forms.’
Greek and french tragedy is formally frigid, imaginatively impoverished and emotionally incontinent. The sole reason to read it is to grasp how great Shakespeare is, and how right he was to keep clear of its bombastic minimalism, pompous choral insipidities, kitsch mythology, vulgar spectacle, sophistic debates, copybook moralizing, pretentious yet prosaic rhetoric, and formal monotony. All its bellowing has less to say to us than one quiet work of heartbreaking savagery by Conrad or Faulkner.
Homer and Plato are the only two first-rate greek writers, Homer because he embodies the greek spirit, and Plato because he negates it.
Paganism was a boon for painting and sculpture, because it was so picturesque. Christianity was a boon for literature and psychology, because it was so perverse.
Unrivalled artists, such as Velasquez or Shakespeare, Bach or Dostoyevsky, are no more classic or romantic then the tallest peaks are tropical or temperate. Their weather is made not
by the latitude which they share with the surrounding countryside but by their own solitary altitude.
Classicism is a shallow pond, imagination is a shoreless ocean. Classicism cramps imagination by trussing it in the brace of organic form and subjecting its exuberant parts to a dulling unity. Some writers, such as Voltaire or Franklin, grow great by endorsing the progressive platitudes of their age, its rationalism, positivism, deism, tolerance, enlightened self-interest and faith in human perfectibility, and some, like Balzac or Dostoyevsky, have grown great by assaulting them.
The eighteenth century was still flushed with the health that it was squandering. Its elegance and sprightliness was the lively glow in the cheek of the doomed consumptive.
14 Modernism
Discontinuity is the essence of modernity and the mainspring of all modern art, both in its own form and between it and the works of the past, as quantized energy is the basis of the new physics. It works by the fraction not the whole, by dissonance not harmony, by multifariousness not oneness, by fragmentation not by integrity, by disconnection and not by continuity, through the elementary particles of unpredictable imagination. The modern artist is left with the fragment as the sole weapon with which to combat kitsch and the whole. ‘Unity,’ as Blake wrote, ‘is the cloak of folly.’
There were two strains of modernism. The first, the modernism of order, that of Hemingway, Cocteau, Mondrian, Brancusi, Mies van der Rohe or Schoenberg, was a clean white apartment. It pared back reality to uncluttered, austere and angular shapes, sleek and metallic. The
second, the experimental modernism of Joyce, Faulkner, Le Corbusier, Kandinsky, Miró, Pollock or Stravinsky, enriched and complicated it with bold, eclectic, liquid and lyrical ones. The arts grew modern by battling their own assumptions. But painting, in its struggle to break loose from its past, became more and more abstract, and so more like what it essentially is, while music, which was already abstract, came to sound less and less like music.
The impressionists had dematerialized the subject-matter of painting. The modernists rematerialized the medium of paint.
