Chapter IV: Art and Literature

98

_Psychology of Style_

There are writers with a style--it may be either good or bad--and writers with no style at all, who just write badly. What quality or combination of qualities is it which makes a writer a stylist?

Style probably arises out of a duality; the association in a writer of the scribe and the spectator. The first having set down his thought, the second goes aside, contemplates it, as things should be contemplated, _from a distance,_ and and asks, "How does this strike me? How does it look, sound, move?" And he suggests here a toning down of colour, there an acceleration of speed, somewhere else, it may be, an added lucidity, for clearness is an æsthetic as well as an intellectual virtue.

The writer without style, however, just writes on without second thought; the spectator is altogether lacking in him; he cannot contemplate his work from a distance, nor, indeed, at all. This explains the unconsciousness and innocence in bad writing--not in bad style, which is neither unconscious nor innocent! The stylist, on the other hand, is always the actor to his own spectator; he must get his effect; even Truth he uses as a means to his effect. If a truth is too repulsive, he throws this or that cloak over it; if it is uninteresting, he envelops it in mysticism (mysticism is simply an artist's trick); in a word, he æstheticizes, that is, falsifies everything, to please the second person in his duality, the spectator. Even if he gets his effects by moderation of statements, he is to be distrusted, for it is the moderation and not Truth that is aimed at. And, then, his temptation to employ metaphors, to work up an interesting madness, to rhapsodize--these most potent means to great effects, these falsifications! Well, are we to assent, then, to the old philosophic prejudice against style and refuse to believe any philosopher who does not write badly?

99

_Modern Writing_

The greatest fault of modern style is that it is a smirking style. It fawns upon the reader, it insinuates, it has the manner of an amiable dog. If it does something smart, it stops immediately, wags its tail, and waits confidently for your approval. You will guess now why those little regiments of dots are scattered so liberally over the pages of the best-known English novelist. It is H.G. Wells's style wagging its tail.

100

_The Precise_

There have been writers--there _are_ writers--whose only title to fame is an interesting defect. They are unable to write soundly, and this inability, being abnormal, is more interesting than sound writing, which is only normal. For to limp or to hop on one leg is never pedestrian--what do I say?--is _not even_ pedestrian.

101

_Paradox_

What is paradox? The "bull" raised to a form of literary art?

102

_The Platitude_

There should be no platitudes in the works of a sincere author. A platitude is an idea not understood by its writer--in one word, a shibboleth.

103

_Praise?_

It is usual to extol the industry of those realists who put _everything_ into their books, but they should rather be censured for their want of taste. The truth is that they lack the selective faculty--lack, that is, art. Afraid to omit anything from their reproductions of existence--lest they omit what is most significant--they include _all_: the easiest course. The easiest course, that is--for the writers.

104

_Hostility of Thinkers_

When a thinker has a world of thought of his own, he generally becomes cold towards other thinkers, and to none more than to him whose star is nearest his own. It is necessary, therefore, that he should read, above all, the philosopher whose thought most closely resembles his, for to him he is most likely to be unjust. We are the most hostile to those who say what we say, but say it in a way we do not like.

105

_The Twice Subtle_

The thinker who has been twice subtle arrives at simplicity. And in doing so he has, at the same time, discovered a new truth. But this other thinker has possessed simplicity from the beginning. Has he also possessed this truth? At any rate, he does not know it.

106

_Mastery of One's Thoughts_

One should know how to keep one's thoughts at a distance. The French can do this, and, therefore, write at once wittily and profoundly of serious things. But the Germans live, perhaps, too near their thoughts, and are possessed by them: hence, their obscurity and heaviness. Wit--lightness of hand--shows that one is master of one's thought, and is not mastered by it. Nevertheless, the thoughts of the Germans may be the mightier. In this matter the complete thinker should be able to become French or German as occasion demands.

107

_Psychologists_

The keenest psychologists are those who are burdened with no social mission and get along with a minimum of theory. Joseph Conrad, for instance, is infinitely more subtle in his analysis of the human mind and heart than is H. G. Wells or John Galsworthy. He has the happy unconcern and detachment of a connoisseur in humanity, of one who experiences the same fine interest in an unusual human situation as the dilettante finds in some recondite trifle. Henry James carried this attitude to a high degree of refinement. He walked among men and women as a botanist might walk among a collection of "specimens," dismissing the ordinary with the assured glance of an expert, and lingering only before the distinctive and the significant. Should we who nurse a mission deplore the spirit in which these disinterested observers enter into their task? By no means. But for them, certain domains of human nature would never have been discovered, and we should have been correspondingly the losers. For we revolutionists must know the human kind before we can alter them. The non-missionary is as necessary as the missionary, and to none more than to the missionary.

108

_Realism_

Novels which take for their subject-matter mere ordinary, pedestrian existence--and of this kind are three-fourths of present-day novels -are invariably dull in one of two ways. In the first instance, they are written by pettifogging talents to whom only the ordinary is of interest, by people, that is to say, who are incapable of writing a book that is not dull. In the other, they are written by men generally of considerable, sometimes of brilliant, ability, who, misled by a theory, concern themselves laboriously with a domain of life which they dislike and which even bores them. But if the writer is bored, how much more so must be the reader! In short, the realist theory produces bad books because it forces the writer to select subjects the only emotion towards which it is possible to feel is boredom. And great art may arise out of hate, grief, even despair, but never out of boredom.

109

_Fate and Mr. Wells_

Fate has dealt ironically with H. G. Wells. It has turned his volumes of fiction into prophecies, and his volumes of prophecies into fiction.

110

Mr. G. K. Chesterton

A man's philosophy may be uninteresting, although he writes about it in an interesting manner. Just as the many write dully about interesting things, so a few write interestingly about dull things. And Mr. Chesterton is one of these. Equality is a dull creed, Christianity is a dry bone, tradition is wisdom for ants and the Chinese. But Mr. Chesterton is a very interesting man. How is it possible for an interesting man to have an uninteresting philosophy? Is this simply the last paradox of a master of paradox?

Mr. Chesterton's most charming quality is a capacity for being surprised. He writes paradoxically, because to him everything is a paradox--the most simple thing, the most uninteresting thing. And that is his weakness, as well as his strength. He has found the common things so wonderful that he has not searched for the uncommon things. The average man is to him such a miracle, that he will not admit the genius is a far greater miracle. The theories he finds established, Christianity, equality, democracy, traditionalism, interest him so much that he has not gone beyond them to inquire into other theories perhaps more interesting. And this, because he lacks intellectual curiosity, along with that which frequently accompanies it, subtlety of mind. For the intellectually curious man is precisely the man who is _not_ interested in things, or, at any rate, is interested in them only for a little, and then passes on or burrows deeper to find something further. One dogma after another he studies and deserts, this faith--- less searcher, this philanderer, this philosopher; and that which leads him on is the hope that at last he will find something to interest him for an eternity. Perhaps it is this dissatisfaction of the mind which has always driven men to seek knowledge; perhaps, if all mankind had been like Mr. Chesterton, we should not have had even Christianity, equality, democracy and the other theories which he holds and adorns.

For Mr. Chesterton's impressions are all first impressions. Like his own deity, he sees everything for the first time always. And he lacks, therefore, the power, called vision, of seeing _into_ things: the outside of things is already sufficiently interesting to him. He possesses imagination, however, and kindly and grotesque fancies which he hangs on the ear of the most common clodhopper of a reality. In fantasy he reaches greatness. But his philosophy is not interesting. It is himself that is interesting.

111

_Nietzsche_

Nietzsche loved Man, but not men: in that love were comprehended his nobility and his cruelty. He demanded that men should become Man before they asked to be loved.

112

_Strindberg_

This writer, despite his genius, earnestness and courage, arouses in us a feeling of profound disappointment. Nor is the cause very far to seek. For along with earnestness and courage in a writer we instinctively look for nobility and joy: if the latter qualities are absent we feel that the _raison d'être_ of the former is gone, and that earnestness and courage divorced from nobility and joy are aimless, wasted, almost inconceivable. And in Strindberg they are so divorced. A disappointed courage; an ignoble earnestness! These are his pre-eminent qualities. And with them he essayed tragedy--the form of art in which nobility and joy are most required! As a consequence, the problems which he treats are not only treated inadequately; the inadequacy, when we stop to reflect upon it, absolutely amazes us. His crises are simply rows. His women, when they are angry, are intellectual fishwives; and--more disgusting still--so are his men. All his characters, indeed, intellectual and talented as they are, move on an amazingly low spiritual plane. The worst in their nature comes to light at the touch of tragedy, and an air of sordidness surrounds all. Posterity will not tolerate this "low" tragedy, this tragedy without a _raison d'être,_ this drama of the dregs.

113

_Dostoieffsky_

Dostoieffsky depicted the subconscious as conscious; that was how he achieved his complex and great effects. For the subconscious is the sphere of all that is most primeval, mysterious and sublime in man; the very bed out of which springs the flower of tragedy. But did Dostoieffsky do well to lay bare that world previously so reverently hidden, and to bring the reader behind the scenes of tragedy? The artist will deny it--the artist who always demands as an ingredient in his highest effects mystery. For how can mystery be retained when the very realm of mystery, the subconscious, is surveyed and mapped? In Dostoieffsky's imperishable works the spirit of full tragedy is perhaps never evoked. What he provides in them, however, is such a criticism of tragedy as is nowhere else to be found. His genius was for criticism; the artist in him created these great figures in order that afterwards the psychologist might dissect them. And so well are they dissected, even down to the subconsciousness, that, to use a phrase of the critics, we know them better than the people we meet. Well, that is precisely what we object to--as lovers of art!

114

_Again_

Not only is Dostoieffsky himself a great psychologist; all his chief characters are great psychologists as well. Raskolnikoff, for instance, Porphyrius Petrovitch, Svidragaïloff, Prince Muishkin, walk through his pages as highly self-conscious figures, and as people who have one and all looked deeply into the shadowy world of human motives, and have generalized. The crises in Dostoieffsky's books are, therefore, of a peculiarly complex kind. It is not only the human passions and desires that meet one another in a conflict more or less spontaneous; the whole wealth of psychological observation and generalization of the conflicting character is thrown into their armoury, and with that, too, they do battle. The resulting effect is more large, rich and subtle than anything else in modern fiction, but also, if the truth must be told, more impure, in the artistic sense, more sophisticated. Sometimes, so inextricably are passion and "psychology" mingled, that the crises are more like the duels of psychologists than the conflicts of human souls. In the end, one turns with relief to the pure tragedy of the classical writers, the tragedy which is not brought about by people who act like amateur psychologists.

115

_Tolerance of Artists_

No matter what their conscious theories may be, all artists are unconsciously aristocratic, and even intolerant in their attitude to other men. They are more blind than most people to the _raison d'être_ of the politician, the business man and the philosopher--these unaccountable beings who will not acknowledge the primacy of Creation and Beauty. But at last they magnanimously conclude that these exist to form their audience, _not_ the subject-matter of their art--that is the modern fallacy!

116

_Climate_

There are natures exquisitely sensitive to their human environment. This man depresses them, they feel the vitality ebbing out of them in his presence; that other brings exhilaration, at the touch of his mind their powers increase and become creative. It is a question of atmosphere. The first has a wintry, grey soul; the latter carries a sun--_their_ sun--in his bosom. And these artists require sunlight and soft air, before the flowers and fruit can hang from their boughs. Every artist of this type should go to Italy or France and live there; or, failing that, create for himself an Italy or France of friends. Others require the tempest with its lowering skies. But that is easier to seek; they can generally find it within themselves.

117

_Sensibility_

It may be wisdom for the man of action to smother his griefs, and follow resolutely his course. But with the artist it is different. He should not close his heart against sorrow, for sorrow is of use to him; his task is to transfigure it; thus he makes himself richer. Every conquest of suffering which is attained by isolating the pang makes the artist poorer; the part of him so isolated dies: he loses bit by bit his sensitiveness, and how much does his sensitiveness mean to him! The artist is more defenceless than other men, and he must be so. For his sensitiveness should be such that the faintest rose-leaf of emotion or thought cannot touch his heart without evoking in him infinite delight or pain; and, at the same time, he should be able to respond to the great tempests and terrible moods of life. Great strength, great love, great productiveness, these are required if he is to endure his sensitiveness; alas, for him, if he have them not! Then he must suffer and suffer, until he has cut off one by one the sources of his suffering, until he has mutilated and lamed what is most godlike in him, and has made himself ordinary at last--or a Schopenhauerian.

118

_The Artist's Enemy_

I waited once beside a lake, created surely to mirror Innocence, so pure it was. The passage of a butterfly over it or the breath of a rose-leaf's fall was enough to stir its surface, infinitely delicate and sensitive. Yet tempests did not affright it, for it laughed and danced beneath the whip of the fiercest storm. And it could bury, as in a bottomless tomb, the stones thrown at it by the most spiteful hands; to these, indeed, it responded with a Puck-like radiating smile that spread until it broke in soft laughter upon its marge. So strong and delicate it lay, and yet, it seemed, so defenceless. Yet what could harm it? Storm, shower, sunshine, and darkness alike but ministered to it, and even the missiles of its enemies were lost in its boundless security. It seemed invulnerable. I returned years later, and looked once, looked and fled. For the lake had grown old, blind and torpid, so that even the light lay dead in it. Then I noticed that on every side, almost invisible, there were innumerable black streams oozing--infection! The tragedy of the artist.

119

_Uniformity_

In the mien of children there is sometimes to be noted a natural nobility and pride; they walk with the unconscious grace of conquerors. But this grace and freedom soon disappear, and when the child has become man there is nothing left of them: his bearing is as undistinguished as his neighbour's. Nowhere, now, is nobility of presence and movement to be found, except among children, the chieftains of half-barbarous peoples, and some animals. The farther man departs from the animal the less dignified he becomes, and the more his appearance conforms to a common level: indeed, civilization seems, on one side, to be a labourious attempt to arrive at the undistinguished and indistinguishable. Is Man, then, the mediocre animal par excellence? Only, perhaps, under an egalitarian régime. Wherever a hierarchy exists in Europe there is more of nobility of demeanour than elsewhere. Equality and humility are the great fosterers of the mediocre: and not only, alas! of the mediocre in demeanour. Who can tell how many proud, graceful and gallant thoughts and emotions have been killed by shame--the shame which the egalitarians and the humble have heaped upon them? And how much Art, therefore, has lost? Certainly, in the minds of children there are many brave, generous and noble thoughts which are never permitted to come to maturity. Ye must become as little children----.

120

_Immortality of the Artist_

An artist one day forgot Death, so entirely had he become Life's, rapt in a world of living contemplation; and, established there, he created a form. That hour was immortal, and, therefore, the form was immortal. This is the "timelessness" of true art-work; they are fashioned "in eternity," as Blake said, and so speak to the eternal in Man.

121

_The Descent of the Artist_

At the beginning of his journey he climbed daringly, leaping from rock to rock, exuberant, tireless, until he reached what he thought was his highest peak. Then began his descent, and, lo, immediately great weariness fell upon him. A friend of his wondered, Is he going downhill because he is tired? Or is he tired because he is going downhill?

122

_Apropos the Cynic_

He wrote with an assumption of extreme heartlessness, and the public said, "How tender his heart must be when he hides it under _such_ a disguise!" But what he was hiding all the time was his lack of heart.

123

_Artist and Philosopher_

In all ages the philosophers have _pardoned_ the artists their lack of depth, on account of their divine love of the beautiful. In our time, however, this only reason for pardoning them has disappeared, and they are now entirely deserving of condemnation. For the realists abjure equally thought--interpretation, and beauty--selection. To be an eye, with a fountain pen attached to it; that is their aim, successfully attained, alas! A single eye and not a single thought: the definition of the realist.

124

_An Evil_

Art is at the present day far too easy for comprehension, far too obvious. Our immediate task should be to make it _difficult,_ and the concern of a dedicated few. Thus only shall we win back reverence for it. When it is reverenced, however, it will then be time to extend its sway; but not until then. Art must be approached with reverence, or not at all. A democratic familiarity with it--such as exists among the middle classes, _not_ among the working classes, in whom reverence is not yet dead--is an abomination.

125

_Modern Art Themes_

How sordid are the themes which modern art has chosen for itself! The loss of money or of position, poverty, social entanglements--the little accidents which a thinker laughs at! Are modern artists as bourgeois as this? A coterie of shop-keepers? Tragic art has no concern with the accidental: that is the sphere of comedy. Tragedy should move inevitably once it has begun to revolve; it is beyond fashion, universal, essential; Fate, not Circumstance, is its theme. The presence of the accidental in a tragedy is sufficient to condemn it. For it is the inevitable, the "Fate" in Tragedy, that makes of it a heroic and _joyful_ thing. It cannot be improvised like Comedy. It demands in its creator a sense of the eternal, just as Comedy, on the other hand, demands an exquisite appreciation of temporal fashion. Tragedy is the greater art; Comedy, perhaps, the more difficult. Our modern tragedies, however, are mainly about accidents, and very mean accidents; they are improvised misfortunes and their effect is depressing.

126

_The Illusionists_

How shallow are most artists! How childish! How subject to illusion! This novelist at the end of his novels leaves his characters in a Utopia, from which all sorrow and trial have been banished, a condition absolutely unreal, contemptible and absurd. And all his readers admire without thinking, and call the author profound! He is not profound, but shallow and commonplace. Except for his gift of mimicry, which he calls Art, he is just an average man. And, moreover, he is tired: the "happy ending" is his exhaustion speaking through his art, his will to stagnation and surrender. Works of art should only end tragically, or enigmatically, as in "A Doll's House," or at the gateway of a new ideal, as in "An Enemy of the People."

127

_Majorities and Art_

When it is said that in modern society poetic tragedy is out of season and cannot _succeed,_ an assumption is made which on literary grounds can never be admitted. It is that majorities count in literature as in politics; that "Brand" was a failure and "A Doll's House" a success. But from another point of view, "Brand" was the success, "A Doll's House" the failure. And the whole "problem" drama a failure with it, and all the realistic schools, as well--a failure! This is _certainly_ how the future historian of literature will regard it. Our era with its depressing "masterpieces" will be called the barren era, because the grand _exception,_ great art, has not bloomed in it, because even our critics have judged contemporary art by a criterion of success instead of the eternal spiritual criterion: their championship of "problem" art proves it! In the meantime, then, realism is considered "the thing," and people speak pityingly of poetic tragedy. Only those forms of art which can "survive" in the struggle for existence are counted good--so deeply, so unwisely have we drunk at the Darwinian spring!

128

_The Decay of Man_

The aim of Art was once to enrich existence by the creation of gods and demi-gods; it is now to duplicate existence by the portrayal of men. Art has become imitation, Realism has triumphed. And how much has materialism had to do with this! In an age lacking a vivid ideal of Man, men become interesting. The eyes of the artist, no longer having an ideal to feed upon, are turned towards the actual, and imitation succeeds creation. Every one busies himself in the study of men, and Art becomes half a science, the artists actually collecting their data, as if they were professors of psychology! Theories glorifying men are born, and the cult of the average man arises, which is nothing but the exaltation of men at the expense of Man. In due time all ideals perish, only an inspiration towards averageness remains, and equality is everywhere enthroned. Art has no longer a heaven to fly to, there to create loftier heavens. In despair, she descends to earth and the ordinary, and for her salvation _must_ find the ordinary interesting, must _make_ the ordinary interesting. Realism arises when ideals of Man decay: it is the egalitarianism of Art.

129

_A New Valuation_

But why do ideals of Man decay--why _did_ the ideal of Man decay? Because there were no longer examples to inspire the artists in the creation of their grand, superhuman figures. Suspicion, envy, equality--call it what you will--had become strong: the great man could no longer fight it and remain great. By the radicals the genius was regarded as an insult to the remainder of mankind. And how ordinary he was, this genius, compared with the grand figures of the time of the Renaissance; that time when men were weighed and valued, when elevation and inequality were acknowledged and acted upon, and Man became greater in stature, with Art his Will to Greatness! Well, we must weigh men again; we must deny equality; we must affirm aristocracy--in everything but commerce and production, where democracy is really a return to the aristocratic tradition. And, you artists, you must turn from men to Man, from Realism to Myth. And if you can find in your age no example to inspire you to the creation of a great ideal of Man, then become your own examples! Man must be born again, if you would enter into your heaven.

130

_The Man and the Hour_

A. Let people say about aristocracy what they will, it remains true that Man generally is equal to the event. Events are the true stepping-stones on which Man rises to higher things. B. Ah! you are not speaking of Man, but of men, of the many. The great man, however, does not require an event to call his greatness forth. He is his own event--and also that of others!

131

_The Lover to the Artists_

Love idealizes the object. If you would create an ideal Art, must you not, then, learn to love? And that you are Realists--does it not prove that you have not Love?

132

_Origin of the Tragic_

Here is yet another guess at the origin of the tragic:

A man is told of some calamity, altogether unexpected, the engulfing of a vessel by the sea, an avalanche which wipes out a town, or a fire in which a family of little ones perish, leaving the father and mother unharmed and disconsolate; and at once the very grandest feelings awaken within him, he finds himself enlarged spiritually, and life itself is enriched for him--the people in the vessel and in the town, the children and the parents of the children, are raised to a little more than human elevation by the favouritism of calamity. Next day he hears that the news was false, and immediately, along with the feeling of relief, he experiences an unmistakable disappointment and loss; for all those grand emotions and the contemplation of life in that greater aspect are snatched from him! Perhaps in primitive times, when the means of disseminating news were more untrustworthy than they are today, disappointments of this kind would occur very often; and one day some rude poet, having noted the elevation which calamity brings, would in luxurious imagination _invent_ a calamity, in order to experience _at will_ this enlargement of the soul. But a tale of calamity, being invented, would inevitably please the poet's hearers, both for the feelings it aroused and the grand image of Man it represented. So much for the origin and persistence--not the meaning--of the tragic.

133

_Tragedy and Comedy_

Tragedy is the aristocratic form of art. In it the stature of Man is made larger. The great tragic figures are superhuman, unapproachable: we do not sorrow with them, but for them, with an impersonal pity and admiration. And that is because Man, and not men, is represented by them: idealization and myth are, therefore, proper to their delineation.

But Comedy is democratic. Its subject is men, the human-all-too-human, the unrepresentative: it belittles men in a jolly egalitarianism. This static fraternity, this acceptance of men as they are, is resented by the aristocratic natures, who would make Man nobler; but to the average men it is flattering, for it proclaims that the great are absurd even as they, it unites men in a brotherhood of absurdity. Thus, all comedy is an involuntary satire, all tragedy an involuntary idealization of men.

Tragedy is the supreme affirmation of Life, for it affirms Life even in its most painful aspects, struggle, suffering, death; so that we say, "Yes, this, too, is beautiful!" _That_ was the _raison d'être_ of classical tragedy--and not Nihilism!

Well, in which of these forms, Tragedy or Comedy, may our hopes and visions of the Future best be expressed? Surely in that which idealizes Man and says Yea to suffering, Tragedy, the dynamic form of Art.

134

_Super-Art_

In the works of some artists everything is on a slightly superhuman scale. The figures they create fill us with astonishment; we cannot understand how such unparalleled creatures came into being. When we contemplate them, in the works of Michelangelo or of Nietzsche, there arise unvoluntarily in our souls sublime dreams of what Man may yet attain. Our thoughts travel into the immeasurable, the undiscovered, and the future becomes almost an intoxication to us.

In Nietzsche, especially, this attempt to make Art perform the impossible--this _successful_ attempt to make Art perform the impossible--is to be noted in every book, almost in every word. For he strains language to the utmost it can endure; his words seem to be striving to escape from the bonds of language, seeking to transcend language. "It is my ambition," he says in "The Twilight of the Idols," "to say in ten sentences what every one else says in a whole book--what every one else does _not_ say in a whole book." In the same way, when in his first book he wrote about Tragedy, he raised it to an elevation greater than it had ever known before, except, perhaps, in the works of Æschylus; when, in his essay upon "Schopenhauer as Educator," he adumbrated his conception of the philosopher, philosophy seemed to become a task for the understandings of gods; and when, having criticized the prevailing morality, he set up another, it seemed to his generation an impossible code for human beings, a code cruel, over-noble. Finally, when he wrote of Man, it was to create the Superman. He touched nothing which he did not ennoble. And, consequently, in Art his chosen form was Myth; he held it beneath the nobility of great art to create anything less than demi-gods; religion and art were in him a unity.

In super-art, in these works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, of Æschylus and Nietzsche, Man is incited again and again to surpass himself, to become more than "human."

135

_Love Poetry_

Love poetry, so long as it glorifies Love, is supremely worthy of our reverence. Everything that idealizes and transfigures Love, making it more desirable and full even of transcendental meaning, is of unquestionable advantage to mankind; on the other hand, a crudely physiological statement, even though this may be _formally_ true, serves neither Love nor Life. It is assuredly not the function of art to treat Love in this way. On the contrary, amatory poetry by its idealization allures to Love; this is true even of such of it as is tragic: we are prepared by it to experience gladly even the suffering of Love. The only poetry that is noxious is that which bewails the "vanity" of Love, and that in which a deliberate sterility is adumbrated. These are decadent.

136

_Literature and Literature_

Literature that is judged by literary standards merely is not of the highest rank. For the greatest works are themselves the standards by which literature is judged. How, then, are they to be valued? By a standard outside of literature, by their consonance with that which is the _raison d'être_ of literature? In them a far greater problem than any literary problem faces us, the problem, Why does literature exist? What is the meaning of literature?

Through whole generations men forget this problem, and literature becomes to them a specialized form of activity to be pursued for its own sake, a part of Man's soul, thrown off and become static and separate, with a sterile life of its own. The more shallow theory and practice of literature then come into being; Realism and Art for Art's sake flourish. But the eternal question always returns again, Why does literature exist? What is its meaning? And, then, the possibility of another blossoming of literature is not far away.

137

_The Old Poet_

An old poet who had lived in the good days when poets were _makers_--of moralities and gods, among other things--lately re-visited the earth, and after a study of the very excellent exercises in literature to be found in our libraries, delivered himself thus:--

"How has our power decayed! Into litterateurs have we declined who were creators. Perish all literature that is only literature! Poets live to create gods; to glorify gods should all their arts of adornment and idealization be used. But I see here adornment without the object worthy of adornment; beautification for the sake of beautification; Art for Art's sake. These artists are only half artists. They have surely made Art into a game."

The critics did not understand him, and, _therefore,_ disagreed. The artists thought he was mad, besides knowing nothing of æsthetics. The moral fanatics acclaimed him vociferously, mistaking him for a popular preacher. Only a philosophico-artistic dilettante listened attentively, and said, a little patronizingly, "He is wrong, but he is more right than wrong."

138

_The Old Gods_

Perhaps there is too much made of anthropomorphism. Man's first gods were not "human" gods; they were stars, animals, plants and the like. It was not until he became an artist that he made gods after his own form: anthropomorphism is just an artistic convention! For gods are in their _content_ superhuman. There has never been a man like Jehovah or Zeus or Odin. The essential thing in them is that they embody an ideal, a fiction, adumbrating something _more_ than Man. Religion is poetry in the grand style, and, as poetry, must have its conventions.

139

_The Old Poets_

In primitive times the poet was far more both of an inventor and a liar than he is at present. For many centuries the lies of the poets have been innocent lies, a convention merely, and to be recognized as such before "æsthetic" enjoyment can begin. But the lies the old poets told were believed literally--as they were meant to be! Yes, the poet at the beginning was just a liar, a great liar. How else, if he had not deceived Man, could he have peopled the heavens with Man's deities? And as the father of whole families of gods, he has done more to decide the fate of Humanity than all the philosophers, heroes and martyrs. These are only his servants, who explain war or die for his fictions. And not merely error, as Nietzsche held, but lying has from the earliest times been the most potent factor of progress. But not all lying; only the lies told out of great love have been creative and life-giving. Art, imagination, prophecy, hallucination, ecstasy, vision--all these were united in the first poets, the true creators.

140

_The Creator Redivivus_

The only modern who has dared to be a poet through and through, that is, a liar in the noble and tragic sense, is the author of the Superman. In Nietzsche, again, after centuries of divine toying, the poet has appeared in his great _rôle_ of a creator of gods, a figure beside whom the "poet" seems like nothing more than the page boy of the Muse.

141

_Literature as Praise_

A. Would you erase from the book of literature all that is not idealization and myth, you neo-moderns? Would you deprive us of all the charming, serious, whimsical, and divinely frivolous works which are human-all-too-human? B. If we could--a thousand times no! We would only destroy what defames Life. All that praises Life, all that enchants to Life, we would cherish as things holy. Idealization, it is true, is the highest form of praise, because it arises out of Love; but there are other forms. Modern Realism, however, is a calumny against Life. _Écrasez l'infâme!_

142

_The Poet Speaks_

How unhappy must all those poor mortals be who are not poets! They feel and cannot express. They are dumb when their soul would utter its divinest thoughts. Cloddish and fragmentary, they are scarcely human, these poor mortals! For one must be a poet to be altogether human. Yes! in the ideal society of the future every one will be a poet, even the average man!

143

_Myth_

The worst evil of our time is this, that there is nothing greater than the current average existence to which man can look; Religion has dried up, Art has decayed from an idealization of life into a reflection of it. In short, Art has become a passive thing, where once it was the "great stimulus to Life." The idealization and enchantment which the moderns have so carefully eliminated from it was precisely its _raison d'être._ And modern Art, which sets out to copy life, has forgotten Art altogether, its origin, its meaning and its end.

Against this aimless Realism, we must oppose idealization, and especially that which is its highest expression, Myth. And let no one say that it is impossible at this stage in Man's history to resuscitate Myth. The past has certainly lost its mystery for us, and it was in the past, at the source of Humanity, that the old poets set their sublime fictions. But the future is still ours, and there, at Man's goal, our myths must be planted. And thither, indeed, has set the great literature of the last hundred years. Faust, Mephistopheles, Brand, Peer Gynt, Zarathustra--there were no greater figures in the literature of the last century--were all myths, and all forecasts of the future. The soil out of which literature grows, then, has not yet been exhausted! If we but break away from Realism, if we make Art symbolic, if we bring about a marriage between Art and Religion, Art will rise again. That this is possible, we who have faith in the Future _must_ believe.