The Aristos

1 By art, I mean all the arts; by artists, creators in all the arts; by artefacts, anything that can be enjoyed in the absence of the artist. Since the discovery of sound recording and cinematography it is arguable that great performances, for example in music or in drama, are now artefacts. However, by artefact I mean here what it traditionally means. The composer’s, not the interpretant’s, kind of creating; the playwright’s, not the actor’s.

2 The practice and experience of art is as important to man as the use and knowledge of science. These two great manners of apprehending and enjoying existence are complementary, not hostile. The specific value of art for man is that it is closer to reality than science; that it is not dominated, as science must be, by-logic and reason; that it is therefore essentially a liberating activity, while science – for excellent and necessary causes – is a constricting one. Finally and most importantly it is the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings.

TIME AND ART

3 Art best conquers time, and therefore the nemo. It constitutes that timeless world of the full intellect (Teilhard du Chardin’s noösphere) where each artefact is contemporary, and as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be.*

4 We enter the noösphere by creating, whereby we constitute it, or by experiencing, whereby we exist in it. Both functions are in communion; ‘actors’ and ‘audience’, ‘celebrants’ and ‘congregation’. For experiencing art is experiencing, among other things, that others have existed as we exist, and still exist in this creation of their existing.

5 The noösphere is equally created, of course, by great achievements in science. But the important distinction between the artefact and what we may call the scientifact is that the former, unlike the latter, can never be proved wrong. An artefact, however poor artistically, is an object in a context where proof and disproof do not exist. This is why the artefact is so much more resistant to time; the cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia make very little impression and have very little interest for us. They are disproved scientifacts. On the other hand the artefacts of ancient Mesopotamia retain both interest and immediacy. The great test of a scientifact is its utility now; of course utility-now is of vital importance to us and explains the priority we accord science in our world now. But disproved scientifacts – those that no longer have this utility – become mere items of interest in the history of science and the development of the human mind, items that we tend to judge by increasingly aesthetic standards; for their neatness of exposition, style, form and so forth. They become, in fact, disguised artefacts, though far less free of time and therefore less immediate and important to us than true artefacts.

6 This timelessness of the artefact has a quantitative aspect; it is of course illogical and ungrammatical to speak of one object as being more timeless than another. But our eagerness to conquer time – or to see time conquered – does lead us into this illogic. We have to be very ruthless, suppress all our intuitive feeling, to find worthless ugliness in an artefact of over a few hundred years’ age. It is true that the passage of time often constitutes a kind of selection committee; objects of beauty stand a better chance of being preserved than ugly ones. But in many cases – such as archaeological finds – we know that there was no selection committee. Ugly objects in their own age survive side by side with beautiful ones; and yet we find beauty in them all.

7 Time, the length of survival of an artefact, becomes a factor in its beauty. The aesthetic value of the object becomes confused with its value as witness, or carrier of information from far places. Its beauty merges into its usefulness as a piece of human communication; and this will plainly vary according to our need of (previous lack of) communication from the particular source.

8 The older an artefact the nearer it is to the timeless; the newer the artefact the further away. Because it is new, yearless, it has none of the beauty or utility of having survived in time; but it may have the beauty or utility of being likely to survive time. Some artefacts are likely to survive because the future can use them as evidence against the age that produced them; and others as evidence for. Onicial art requires only the second kind. Monuments, not testaments.

9 Though this prejudice in favour of what is old or likely to become old affects our judgement of artefacts, and even our attitude to such things as fossils, it does not normally affect our judgement of other objects. In the stone, the mere enduringness of matter; in the artefact, the enduringness of man; of a name or of a nameless human existence; the thumb-mark below the handle of this Minoan pot.

10 An aged artefact is both what could not be created today and what still exists today; we admire in it the number of nows survived. It is doubly present; both survivant and now. This explains the long vogue of the antique. As organisms aware that we shall die, we are in one way nearer the oldest artefact than the newest natural object.

11 Since the normal standard by which we judge artefacts is their worthiness to survive, it is only to be expected that a contrary kind of artefact should on occasion appeal to us: that is, the ephemeral artefact.

12 A whole host of minor arts are, in themselves and by their natures, banned from the noosphere: for example, the arts of gardening, coiffure, haute cuisine, pyrotechnics. If they get into the noösphere, it is by chance, by happening to be made items in some greater art. It is true that the camera and the cinecamera, the tape recorder and the tin can, counter the intrinsic ephemerality of these sub-arts; and it is sometimes possible to reconstitute them by recipe. But it is precisely a part of our pleasure that the direct experience of these arts is essentially ephemeral and not shared by others.

13 The parallel with man: we also pass like fireworks, like flowers, like fine food and fine wine. We feel a kinship with these ephemeral arts, these manifestations of human skill that are born after and die before us; that may be come and gone in a few seconds.

Unrecorded performances in music, on the stage and on the sports field fall into the same category.

14 So there are two kinds of artefact: those we admire, and perhaps envy, because they survive us and those we like, and perhaps pity, because they do not. Both kinds are aspects of feeling about time.

15 All art both generalizes and particularizes; that is, tries to flower in all time, but is rooted in one time. An archaic statue, an abstract painting, a twelve-tone sequence may mainly generalize (all time); a Holbein portrait, a haiku, a flamenco song may mainly particularize (one time). But in the portrait of Ann Cresacre by Holbein I see one sixteenth-century woman and yet all young women of a certain kind; in this austere and totally unrooted concatenation of notes by Webern I hear nonetheless the expression of one particular early twentieth-century mind.

16 This balance between particularization and generalization that the artist struggles to achieve, nature achieves without struggle. This butterfly is unique and universal; it is both itself and exactly like any other butterfly of its species. This nightingale sings to me as it sang to my grandfather, and his grandfather; and to Homer’s grandfather; it is the same nightingale and not the same nightingale. It is now and it is ever. Through the voice I hear – and Keats heard – this passing night I enter reality two ways; and at the centre meet my richer self.

17 How we see a natural object depends on us – whether we see it vertically, in this one moment, now, or horizontally, in all its past; or both together; and so in art we try to say both in the one statement. Always these complex factors of time are inherent in the seeing and the saying.

18 How I see this artefact may depend on how the artist wants me to see it, vertically-now or horizontally-ever; but even with artefacts I can choose. I can see Caravaggio’s St Jerome vertically-now, in itself, or horizontally-ever, inserted in the history of painting. I can see it as a portrait of one old man, or as a study of the hermit; as a quasi-academic study in chiaroscuro problems; as a document with information about Caravaggio himself, about his age; and so on.

19 We also experience artefacts in ‘intended’ and ‘fortuitous’ ways (see group 5, note 49) and in ‘objective’ and ‘actual’ ones (6.23). These too are aspects of time.

20 Both in the creator and the spectator, art is the attempt to transcend time. Whatever else it may be and intend, an artefact is always a nexus of human feelings about time; and it is no coincidence that our current preoccupation with art comes at the same time as our new realization of the shortness of our duration in infinity.

THE ARTIST AND HIS ART

21 Inside this fundamental relationship with time, the artist has used his art, his ability to create, for three main purposes; and he has two main tests of success.

22 His simplest purpose is to describe the outer world; his next is to express his feelings about that outer world, and his last is to express his feelings about himself. Whichever of these purposes he has in mind, his test may be that he satisfies himself or it may be that he satisfies and pleases others. It is probable that all three purposes are present, and both tests satisfied, in varying degrees in almost every artefact. The simplest and most unemotional realism, mere description, still involves the selection of the object described; any expression of feeling about the outer world must obviously also be an expression of the artist’s inner world; and there can be few artists so self-sure that the approval of others means nothing to them. For all that, there have been great shifts in emphasis during the last two hundred years.

23 When other means of description were almost nonexistent, art had a great representational and descriptive duty. It made what was absent present; the bison loomed on the cave wall. The, to our eyes, charming stylization of Stone Age art was certainly, to begin with, a result of technical inefficiency, not of lack of desire to paint as realistically as possible. But very early on the cave men must have realized that stylization had a double charm: it not only brought to mind and recorded the past or the absent, but the deviations from strict reality also kept the real past and the real pressure at bay. So the first function of art and stylization was probably magic: to distance reality at the same time as it was invoked.

24 There was also a strong ritual motive in the use of stylization. It was only a short step from drawing animals in charcoal in order to give information to accentuating certain features because such accentuation seemed more likely to guarantee the end desired – killing for food, and so on. Some scientists argue that this ritual-traditional element in art represents a great flaw in its utility, a kind of only partially sloughed skin the poor artist has to drag behind him. They point to all the empirical methods and criteria that science has evolved to rid itself of ritual-traditional elements. But this is akin to the absurd fallacy that one can produce great art by the exercise of pure logic and pure reason. Art springs from humanity as it is, from history, from time, and it is always more complex in statement, if not in method, than science. It is for other human beings; it is consolatory or menacing, but always more or less therapeutic in intention, and its therapy has to apply to a thing far too complex (and indeed ritualistic) for science to control or cure – the human mind.

25 A second great utility of style must have become more or less consciously apparent to the visual artists of primitive man. Style distorts reality. But this distortion is in fact art’s most vital tool, since by its use the artist is enabled to express his own or communal feelings and aspirations. Fifty-breasted fertility goddesses are clearly not failures to portray realistically, but visual translations of feeling. The parallel in language is the development of metaphor and all that goes beyond the strict needs of communication. The parallel in music is the development of all those elements that are not strictly necessary as accompaniment to dancing; all beyond the drum or clapped hands.

26 The first two artistic purposes, representational and outer-feeling, were the main ones until at least the Renaissance; and the third purpose, inner-feeling, has been triumphant only during the last century or so. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is that the development of better means of exact representation than art has made purely descriptive realistic art seem largely mischanneled. The camera, the tape recorder, the development of technical vocabularies and scientific methods of linguistic observation – these things all make much overtly representational art look feeble and foolish. That we are not more aware of this is probably due to the fact that historically this representational art is of great value to us, and we still have not shaken off the habit of using it, even though far better means are now at hand.

27 If for example we really want to honour an eminent man it would surely be better to have good photographs or films of him taken, or to publish linguistic accounts of his eminence; anything rather than having his portrait painted by some ‘academic’ hack. No one supposes such portraits have any intrinsic biographical or artistic merit; they merely satisfy a traditional social convention about the rewards of eminence.

28 The second reason for the triumph of inner-feeling art is the rise of the importance of self in the existence of each as a result of those nemo-creating conditions I have already mentioned. It is not coincidence that the Romantic Movement, whose influence is still so powerful, was a result of the machine-orientated Industrial Revolution; and many of our contemporary artistic problems spring from a similar hostile polarity.

29 The result of this has inevitably been the emergence of style as the principal gauge of artistic worth. Content has never seemed less important; and we may see the history of the arts since the Renaissance (the last period in which content was at least conceded equal status) as the slow but now almost total triumph of the means of expression over the thing expressed.

30 A symptom of this triumph is the attitude of artists to the signing of artefacts. It is with the Greeks that signing becomes frequent, and as one would expect, it is in the most self-conscious art, literature, that it was commonest. But as late as the Renaissance many artists felt no great need to sign; and even today there is a tradition of anonymity in those craft arts, like pottery and furniture-making, that are least susceptible of exploitation by the artist’s self.

31 The artist’s main need today seems to him to be the expression of his signed feelings about himself and his world; and as our need for representational art has dwindled, so have arisen all those modes and styles, like abstractionism and atonalism and dadaism, that put a very low value on exact representation of the outer world (craft qualities) and on past conventions about the artist’s duty to that world; but that conversely allow the widest possible field for the expression of an unmistakably unique self. The enormous ‘liberation’ in style and technique and instrumentation (use of materials) that has taken place in our century is strictly caused by the need artists have felt for creative Lebensraum; in short, by their sense of imprisonment in the mass of other artists. Prison destroys personal identity; and this is what the artist now most fears.

32 But if the main concern of art becomes to express individuality, the audience must seem to the artist less important; and the slighted audience will in turn reject this doubly selfish art, especially when all other artistic purposes are so excluded that the artefacts must appear hermetic to anyone without special information about the artist’s intentions.

33 Two characteristic camps will emerge, and have emerged: one of artists who pursue their own feelings and their own self-satisfaction and who expect their audiences to come to them out of a sense of duty toward ‘pure’ or ‘sincere’ art; and the other of artists who exploit the desire of the audience to be wooed, amused and entertained. There is nothing new in this situation. But the camps have never been so clearly defined and so antagonistic.

34 All inner-feeling art thus becomes a disguised form of the self-portrait. Everywhere the artist sees himself as in a mirror. The craft of the art suffers; craftsmanship even becomes ‘insincere’ and ‘commercial’. Even worse, in order to conceal the triviality, banality or illogic of his inner self, the artist may introduce deliberately hermetic and ambiguous elements into his art. This is more easily done in painting and music than in literature, because the word is a more precise symbol and false ambiguity and hermeticism are in general more easily detectable in literature than in the other arts.

ART AND SOCIETY

35 But the tyranny of self-expresion is not the only factor the modern artist has to contend with. One of the most striking characteristics of our age has been the ubiquitous use of the poles of violence, cruelty, evil, insecurity, perversion, confusion, ambiguity, iconoclasm and anarchy in popular and intellectual entertainment and art. The happy end becomes ‘sentimental’; the open or tragic ends become ‘real’. It is often said that art movements do no more than reflect those of history. Our century is evidently violent, cruel, and all the rest: so what else should its arts be if not black?

36 But this suggests that the artist is incapable of any higher aspiration than that of presenting a mirror to the world around him. This is not to deny that a great deal of the ‘black’ art of our time is, alas, historically justifiable; but it is very often a result of the pressures unfairly put upon art by society. The artist creates blackly because society expects him to; not because he essentially wants to.

37 Black art may bring us a certain kind of pleasure, not only because we are secretly violent, cruel and nihilistically chaotic ourselves, and not only because the emotions such art arouses afford a vivid contrast to our day-by-day lives in a safe society, but because those grey-fearing lives gain a reality, colour and validity they lack if they have no such contrast easily accessible to them. This violent death is my safe life; this distorted shape is my symmetry; this meaningless poem is my clear meaning.

38 One of the deepest pleasures of tragedy is simply that we survive it; the tragedy might have, but has not, happened to us. We not only experience the tragedy empathetically; we have the subsequent survival.

39 There is thus a very deep-rooted sense in which the public never takes ‘black’ art at its face value. It is indeed a frequent defence of pornography that whatever its apparent intentions, its final effects are often highly moral. The spectacle of Vice’ and perversion serves to remind people of their own virtues and their normality. Sadism is far more likely to provoke increased respect for others than further sadism; and so on. But whichever view one takes – that such art corrupts society or that it secretly benefits it – the effect on the artist must be bad.

40 Art has to provide today what ignorance and social and physical conditions provided in the past: insecurity, violence and hazard. This is a perversion of its true function.

41 It is this unnatural role that accounts for a partiallarly common manifestation of guilty conscience among many so-called avant-garde artists; the attempt to suppress the creator from the creation, to reduce the artefact to the status of a game with as few rules as possible. Paintings where the colours and the shapes and the textures are a matter of hazard; music where the amount of improvisation demanded of the players reduces the composer to a cipher; novels and poems where the arrangement of words or pages is purely fortuitous. The scientific basis for this aleatory art is perhaps the famous, and famously misunderstood, principle of mdeterminacy; and it also springs from a totally mistaken notion that the absence of an intervening, in our everyday sense of intervening, God means that existence is meaningless. Such art is, though apparently self-effacing, absurdly arrogant.*

42 An artist can choose not to be an artist, but he cannot be an artist who has chosen not to be an artist.

ARTISTS AND NON-ARTISTS

43 The artistic experience, from the late eighteenth century onwards, usurps the religious experience. Just as the medieval church was full of priests who should have been artists, so our age is filled with artists who would once have been priests.

44 Many modern artists would no doubt dispute that they are priests manques. That is because they have substituted the pursuit of artistic ‘truth’ for the pursuit of good. There was so much injustice on every doorstep, once; it was easy to know what good meant in terms of action. But now even in – didactic art the pursuit is much more of the right aesthetic or artistic expression of the moral than of the moral itself.

45 It is true that the best right expression of the moral best serves the moral; the style is the thought. But an excessive pre-occupation with the style of the thought tends to produce a devaluation of the thought: just as many priests became so pre-occupied with ritual and the presentation of doctrine that they forgot the true nature of the priesthood, so have many artists become so blind to all but the requirements of style that they have lost all sight of, or pay no more than lip service to, any human moral content. Morality becomes a kind of ability to convey.

46 The growth of industrial civilization, the stereotyped work processes, the population surge, the realization, in an age of close international communication, that men are psychologically more similar than different: all these factors drive the individual to the individualizing act, the act of artistic creation: and above all to the creation that expresses self. Drink, drugs, promiscuity, unkemptness, the notorious conventions of anticonvention, are explicable statistically as well as emotionally.

47 The ominous innumerability of our world, the endless repetition of triviality, breeds the nemo. Our modern saints are the damned: the Soutines and the Alban Bergs, the Rilkes and the Rimbauds, the Dylan Thomases and the Scott Fitzgeralds, the Jean Harlows and the Marilyn Monroes. They are to us what the martyrs were to the early church; that is, they all died for the worthiest of causes – immortality of name.

48 How else can we explain the popularity of romanced biographies of artists and cheap biographical films? These new hagiographies, like the old ones, are less concerned with the ultimate achievements and motives of their subjects than with the outward and sensational facts of their private lives. Van Gogh with a razor in his hand; not with a brush.

49 But this produces an imitative insincerity in many modern artists. The great artists who have gone to the dark poles have been driven there. They are always looking back towards the light. They have fallen. Their imitators did not fall; they jumped down.

50 The lives of ‘bohemian’ artists, of les grands maudits, are more interesting to the public than their works. They know they could never make the works; but they might have lived the life.

51 Increasingly art has to express what the nonscientific intellectual élite of the world think and feel; it is for the top of the pyramid, the literate few. When the chief fields for intellectual expression and the main channels for the stating of personal views of life were theology and philosophy, the artist was able to remain in closer contact with a public. But now that art has become the chief mode of stating self, now that the theologian-philosopher is metamorphosed into the artist, an enormous gap has sprung.

52 The only persons who might have stopped this schism between the artist and the non-artist are the critics. But the more obscure and the more ambiguous a work of art the more need there is of interpretation and interpreters. There are thus excellent professional reasons for critics to encourage the schism. There is also a marked tendency to lycanthropism: to being a creator by day and a critic by night.*

53 Our society requires the artist to live like this, and to present an image like this, just as by its tedium and its conformity it obliges him to create ‘black’ art and entertainment. From the point of view of society, the artist thus dictated to and obeying the dictate is fulfilling a useful function. But my belief is that such a function is not the function of art.

54 The true primary function of art is not to remedy the faults and deficiencies of society, to provide salt for the ordinary; but in conjunction with science to occupy the cestral position in human existence.

55 Because in general we approach the arts and entertainment from outside, because we go to art, we regard it as external to the main part of our life. We go to the theatre, to the cinema, the opera, the ballet; to museums; to sports fields (for a part of all great games is as much art as theatre or ballet). Even our reading is outside the main occupations of our day; and even the art that is piped into our homes we feel comes from outside. This holding at a distance of art, this constant spectatoring, is thoroughly evil.

56 Another factor, the now ubiquitous availability of reproductions of art, aggravates matters; less and less do ordinary people have any direct contact with either artists or their creations. Records and radio usurp the experience of live music, ‘replicas’ and magazine articles the experience of the actual painting. It may seem that literature at least cannot be experienced at a remove in this way; but increasingly people prefer to absorb novels in the form of television plays or film s – and the same goes for theatre plays. Only the poem seems of its nature sacrosanct; and we may wonder if this is not precisely why poetry has become such a minority art in our time.

57 If we consign art to the leisure outprovinces of our lives, and even there experience it mostly in some indirect form, it becomes a mere aspect of good living – that is, a matter of facts, not feeling; of placing, of showing off cultural knowledge; of identifying and collecting. In short, it produces a total inability to see things in themselves, but an obsessional need to place them in a social, snobbish or voguish context. The vogue (that is, the new style) becomes an aspect of the general social-economic need for quick expendability.

58 This too, and perhaps most strikingly, corrupts the artist. And it has brought about the highly rococo atmosphere in which the contemporary arts now languish. The great eighteenth-century rococo arts were the visual and aural ones; the style was characterized by great facility, a desire to charm the bored and jaded palate, to amuse by decoration rather than by content – indeed serious content was eschewed. We see all these old tricks writ new in our modern arts, with their brilliantly pointless dialogues, their vivid descriptions of things not worth describing, their elegant vacuity, their fascination with the synthetic and their distaste for the natural.

59 The modern world and modern sensibilities are increasingly complex; but it is not the function of the artist to complicate the complexities; if anything, it should be to unravel them. For many nowadays what is taken as a criterion is not the meaning, but a skill in hinting at meanings. Any good computer will beat man at this.

THE GENIUS AND THE CRAFTSMAN

60 The concept of the genius arose, as we might expect, with the Romantic Movement; since that movement was above all a revolt of the individual against the machine in all its forms (including reason), it was inevitable that the super-individual – the Napoleon, the Beethoven, the Goethe – should be adulated.

61 The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles. He sees himself as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal. He feels himself mysteriously inspired or possessed. The craftsman, on the other hand, is content to use the traditional materials and techniques. The more self-possessed he is, the better craftsman he will be. What pleases him is skill of execution. He is very concerned with his contemporary success, his market value. If a certain kind of social or political commitment is fashionable, he may be committed; but out of fashion, not conviction. The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his commitment to his ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly, Byronically, indifferent to their contemporary popularity.

62 We can all see that being a genius constitutes a very good recipe for defeating the sense of nemo; and that is why the vast majority of modern artists want tacitly to be geniuses rather than craftsmen. It may be clear to the discriminating critic, it may even be clear to them themselves, that they are not geniuses; but the public in general is very inclined to take artists at their own valuation. We thus arrive at a situation in which all experiment is considered admirable (and the discovery of new techniques and materials is an act of genius in itself, regardless of the fact that all true genius has been driven to such discoveries by the need to express some new content) and all craftmanship ‘academic’ and more or less despicable.

63 Of course our real geniuses are indispensable to us and to our arts; but we may doubt whether the obsession with being a genius is of any value to the lesser artist. If the only race he will enter for is the Grand Genius Stakes, then we are obliged to grant some justice to the phihstines’ constant complaint about the selfish obscurity and technical poverty of modern art. But in any case a completely new factor is about to complicate this problem.

64 The cybernetic revolution is going to give us much more leisure; and one of the ways in which we shall have to fill that leisure must be in the practice of the arts. It is obvious that we cannot all pretend to be geniuses; and as obvious that we must give up our present contempt for the craft aspect of art. It is as much craftmanship as ‘genius’ that will fill in the abysses and oceans of leisure in the world to come; that will educate and analyse the self; that will console it. Here and there the craftsman will border on, even become the genius. For there are no frontiers here; no one can say before the journey where the one ends and the other begins; they may be eternity apart, they may be a second – that second in which the real poet has the line, the painter the inner sight, the composer the sound; that instantaneous force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

THE STYLE IS NOT THE MAN

66 Our obsession with the idea of genius has led us into another fallacy: that the style is the man. But just as in physics we begin to realize the extent of our knowledge – what we can know and what we can never know – so in art we have reached the extremes in techniques. We have used words in all the extreme ways, sounds in all the extreme ways, shapes and colours in all the extreme ways; all that remains is to use them within the bounds of the extreme ways already developed. We have reached the end of our field. Now we must come back, and discover other occupations than reaching the end of fields.

67 What will matter finally is intention; not instrumentation. It will be skill in expressing one’s meaning with styles, not just in one style carefully selected and developed to signal one’s individuality rather than to satisfy the requirements of the subject-matter. This is not to remove the individual from art or to turn artistic creation into a morass of pastiche; if the artist has any genuine originality it will pierce through all its disguises. The whole meaning and commitment of the person who creates will permeate his creations, however varied their outward form.

68 We see this polystylism already in two of the greatest, and certainly the two most characteristic, geniuses of our age; Picasso and Stravinsky. And if two such artists, authentic masters, have discovered new freedoms by sacrificing the nemo-induced ‘security’ of a single style, then surely the craft-artists of the new leisure societies may wisely follow suit.

69 We pay far too much heed to recognizability: the artist’s ability to make all his work typical of his style. It pleases the would-be connoisseur in us. Now it is true that every style and technique has to be explored; and a rapid migration through style after style, as every art student knows, is not the best method of producing satisfying work. But there is a balance to be struck.

POETRY AND HUMANITY

70 I do not believe, as it is fashionable in this democratic age to believe, that the great arts are equal; though, like human beings, they have every claim to equal rights in society. Literature, in particular poetry, is the most essential and the most valuable. In what follows, by ‘poetry’ I mean whatever is memorably expressed in words: principally but not necessarily what is ordinarily meant by poetry.

71 The ‘languages’ of the other arts are all languages of the mind minus words. Music is the language of aural sensation; painting, of visual; sculpture, of plastic-visual. They are all language substitutes of one kind or another, though in certain fields and situations these language substitutes are far more effective in communicating than verbal language proper. Visual art can convey appearance better than words, but as soon as it tries to convey what lies behind visual appearance, words are increasingly likely to be of more use and value. Similarly music can convey sound, and very often generalized emotion, better than words; but with the same disadvantage when we try to go beyond the surface of the sound or the emotions it evokes.

72 The language of music can convey natural sound and can create sound which is pleasurable purely as sound; but we think chiefly of it as an evoker of emotion. It reproduces natural sounds far better than words, which have only the clumsy technique of onomatopoeia; it creates pure sound as words can only if they are largely deprived of meaning, and then only within the narrow range of the human voice. But it evokes emotion in a characteristically imprecise way, unless descriptive words (as in a programme title or a libretto) or historical convention link the emotion verbally to some precise situation.*

73 Visual art has to deal with the mask; the artist may know what lies behind the appearance of what he paints or draws or sculpts, and we say of some visual artefacts, such as good portraits, that they ‘tell’ us about the subject. They may do this because, as Lavater believed of all human physiognomy, the appearance happens to reveal what lies behind; but they are more likely to do so because the artist translates his verbal knowledge of what lies behind the appearance into distortions or special emphases of the mask of appearance that reveal the ‘secret’ behind – a process that ends in caricature.

74 This distortion process has an advantage; it allows some, perhaps most, of the ‘secret’ behind, of the real character behind the appearance, to be grasped at a glance. If I am adequately to explain in words the sadness of this Rembrandt self-portrait, I must study his entire work and his biography. The iconographic entry into the reality of his life takes, for any except the professional critic, only a few minutes; the verbal-biographic will take at least several hours, and perhaps much longer.

75 There is the same comparative immediacy of effect, of communication, in music; in, say, the welling sadness of the adagio from Mozart’s G minor quintet. But the disadvantage of this immediacy is that, without verbal knowledge of the circumstances of Rembrandt’s or Mozart’s life, I have only a very imprecise knowledge of the true nature of their sadness. I know its intensity, but not its cause. I am once again faced with a mask, which may be very beautiful and moving, but behind which I can really penetrate only with words. In short, both the visual and the aural arts sacrifice accuracy of information to speed and convenience of communication.

76 This both justifies and evaluates them. Being human is wanting to do and to know and to feel and to understand many things in a short span; and any way of making that knowing, feeling and understanding more available to the many is justifiable. But the quality of knowing and understanding, and ultimately of feeling, must be inferior in the visual and aural arts to that in poetry. All the achievements of visual art beyond direct representation of appearance are in a sense the triumphs of a deaf-mute over his deaf-muteness, just as in music the triumphs are those of a blind mute over his mute blindness.

77 The stock reply in this often-used analogy is that literature is both blind and deaf: not being mute is its specific grace. But the incontrovertible fact is that there is no artefact in the other arts that could not be more or less precisely defined by words, while there are countless artefacts and situations in literature that cannot even in the vaguest way be defined by the ‘languages’ of the other arts. We have neither the time nor the vocabulary nor the desire to describe the great majority of aural and visual artefacts in words, but they are all ultimately describable; and the converse is not so.

78 The word is inherent in every artistic situation, if for no other reason than that we can analyse our feelings about the other arts only in words. This is because the word is man’s most precise and inclusive tool; and poetry is the using of this most precise and inclusive tool memorably.

79 Some scientists say that man’s most precise tool is the mathematical symbol; semantically some equations and theorems appear to have a very austere and genuine poetry. But their precision is a precision in a special domain abstracted, for perfectly good practical reasons, from the complexity of reality. Poetry does not make this abstraction of a special domain in order to be more precise. Science is, legitimately, precision at all cost; and poetry, legitimately, inclusion at all cost.

80 Science is always in parenthesis; poetry is not.

81 Some technological philosophers and scientists dismiss memorable poetic statements as no more than brilliant generalizations or statements of emotional attitude, whose only significant value is as historical data or bits of biographical description of the poet. To these bigots, all statements not statistically or logically verifiable are supposedly tinsel, pretty carnival gew-gaws remote from the sobriety of the allegedly most real reality: their notion of science.

82 If he had been such a scientist, Shakespeare would have begun Hamlet’s famous soliloquy with some properly applicable statement, such as ‘The situation in which I find myself is one where I must carefully examine the arguments for and against suicide, never forgetting that the statements I shall make are merely emotional verbal statements about myself and my own present situation and must not be taken to constitute any statement about any other person or situation or to constitute anything more than biographical data’.

83 Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. When once our short life has burnt away, death is an unending sleep. This is a totally unverifiable statement, but it is a proof that other standards exist besides verifiability. Why else has it been countlessly remembered for two thousand years?

84 The ‘brilliant generalizations’ of great poetry are not pseudo-equations or pseudo-definitions, because the things and emotions they summarize and define exist, yet cannot be summarized or defined in any other way. The situation about which most poetic statements are made is so complex that only such a statement can make it. Just as the equation may be proved useless because of errors about the data its symbols are based on, so may the poetic statement be ‘disproved’ because it is not sufficiently memorable – not semantically perceptive enough or, non-semantically, not well enough expressed. The better poet disproves the worse.

85 I think of two poets whose poetry I have a special love for: Catullus and Emily Dickinson. If their poetry were not to exist, no amount of historical and biographical information about them, no amount of music or painting they might have made, no quantity even (were such a thing possible) of interviewing and meeting them, could compensate me for the loss of the precise knowledge of their deepest reality, their most real reality, that their poems give. I wish there was a head of Catullus, I wish there was more than one miserable daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, and a recording of her voice: but these are trivial lacks beside the irreplaceability the absence of their poetries would represent.

86 Poetry is under attack from every side; it is under attack from science, more than the other arts are, because like science it deals in meaning, though generally it is not meaning in the same situations or with the same purposes as technological science. It is under attack from the other arts, though this is indirectly rather than directly; and it is under attack from the historical situation.

87 Poetry is often despised because it is not an art with an ‘international language’ like music and painting. It pays the penalty for having the precisest tool. But it is this tool that makes it the most open art, the least exploitable and the least tyrannizable.

88 Many people maintain that the poets have only themselves to blame for the unhappy state their art is in. Certainly they are guilty – and have been guilty since the Symbolist Movement – of a dangerous confusion between the language’ of music and language proper. A note has no meaning in itself, but gains whatever meaning it has by being put in a series of other notes, and even then, in a harmonic group or melodic series, its meaning will vary with the temperament, race and musical experience of the listener. Music is a ‘language’ whose chief beauty is multiple meaning, and even then, nonlinguistic multiple meaning; in short, music is not a language, so the metaphor is false. But poetry uses a language which must have meaning; most of the so-called ‘musical’ devices in poetry alliteration, euphony, assonance, rhyme – are in fact rhythmical devices, adjuncts of metre. The true sister of poetry is dancing, which preceded music in the history of man. It is from this historic confusion between music and poetry that some of the uncontrolled spread of complex imagery and ambiguity in the postsymbolist arts has come. Mallarme and his followers tried to effect a shotgun marriage between music and poetry. They tried to put the shiftingness, the changing flow, the shimmering essence of Wagnerian and Debussyan music into their words, but the words could not bear the burden; and so, since the word sounds would not sufficiently shimmer, the word meanings had to. I am not belittling the courage or the beauty of Mallarme’s work; but the practical modern result in all the arts of this confusion is this: it is cleverness with symbols, ability to shift them about, to establish and dissolve patterns, to be oblique, to proceed by a semantic differential calculus when a simple addition would be enough, that is alleged to be specifically ‘modern’ and creatively most valid. Of course it can be modern and valid; it is the specifically and the most that we should take less for granted.*

89 Though, like all the arts, poetry condenses, selects, distorts and emphasizes in order to present its view of reality, its very precision and the enormously complicating factor of linguistic meaning make it less immediate; and in an age neurotically aware of the brevis lux and the night to come, it is immediacy that the audiences want. But poetry is still even now more a nation’s anima, its particular mystery, its adytum, than any other of the arts.

90 If at the moment it seems less relevant it is because the sudden flood of mechanized techniques of presenting the visual and aural arts is producing a general linguistic anaemia, a debilitation of language, throughout the world. The majority, consisting largely at this stage of evolution of a recentiy emancipated proletariat to whom art is still much more an incidental source of pleasure than a fundamental source of truth, naturally hear beauty and see beauty more easily than they can find it in thinking, imagining and apprehending linguistic meaning.

91 This bias could be corrected in our educational systems. Most large schools have art and music teachers. A poetry teacher is at least as important; and the ability to teach the writing of poetry is not the same as the ability to teach the grammar and literature of the language.

92 What is even more ominous for poetry is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. He is chiefly interested in art, in the cinema, in photography, in dress fashions, interior decoration and the rest. His world is bounded by colour, shape, texture, pattern, setting, movement; and he is only minimally interested in the properly intellectual (moral and socio-political) significance of events and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals.

93 A visual is always more interested in style than in content, and more concerned to see than to understand. A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police; he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.

94 Poets are essentially defenders of order and meaning. If they have so often in the past attacked actual human orders and meanings, it was to establish a better order and meaning. Absolute reality is chaos and anarchy, from our relative human standpoint; and our poets are our ultimate corps of defence. If we think poetry of least concern among our arts, we are like generals who disband their best fighting troops.

95 Cherish the poet; there seemed many great auks till the last one died.