The Aristos

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 elite 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.