But in any case, whatever the causes, the fact remains that the present age has produced a hitherto unprecedented quantity of popular art (popular in the sense that it is made for the people, but not—and this is the modern tragedy—by the people), and that this popular art is composed half of the little obvious truths, stated generally with a careful and painstaking realism, half of the great obvious truths, stated for the most part (since it is very hard to give them satisfactory expression) with an incompetence, which makes them seem false and repellent.
On some of the most sensitive and self-conscious artists of our age, this state of affairs has had a curious and, I believe, unprecedented effect. They have become afraid of all obviousness, the great as well as the little. At every period, it is true, many artists have been afraid—or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, have been contemptuous—of the little obvious truths. In the history of the arts naturalism is a relatively rare phenomenon; judged by any standard of statistical normality, Caravaggio and the Victorian academician were artistic freaks. The unprecedented fact is this: some of the most sensitive artists of our age have rejected not merely external realism (for which we may be rather thankful), but even what I may call internal realism; they refuse to take cognizance in their art of most of the most significant facts of human nature. The excesses of popular art have filled them with a terror of the obvious—even of the obvious sublimities and beauties and marvels. Now, about nine-tenths of life are made up precisely of the obvious. Which means that there are sensitive modern artists who are compelled, by their disgust and fear, to confine themselves to the exploitation of only a tiny fraction of existence.
The most self-conscious of contemporary artistic centres is Paris, and it is, as we should expect, in Paris that this strange new fear of the obvious has borne the most striking fruits. But what is true of Paris is also true of the other artistic capitals of the world. Either because they are deliberately imitating French models, or else because they have been driven by similar circumstances to make a similar reaction. The advanced art of other countries differs from the advanced art of France only in being rather less deliberate and less thorough-going. In every country, but in France a little more clearly than elsewhere, we see how the same fear of the obvious has produced the same effects. We see the plastic arts stripped of all their ‘literary’ qualities, pictures and statues reduced to their strictly formal elements. We listen to a music from which almost every expression of a tragical, a mournful, a tender sentiment has been excluded—a music that has deliberately confined itself to the expression of physical energy, of the lyricism of speed and mechanical motion.
Both music and the visual arts are impregnated to a greater or less extent with that new topsy-turvy romanticism, which exalts the machine, the crowd, the merely muscular body, and despises the soul and solitude and nature. Advanced literature is full of the same reversed romanticism. Its subject-matter is arbitrarily simplified by the exclusion of all the great eternal obviousnesses of human nature. This process is justified theoretically by a kind of philosophy of history which affirms—quite gratuitously and, I am convinced, quite falsely—that human nature has radically changed in the last few years and that the modern man is, or at least ought to be, radically different from his ancestors. Nor is it only in regard to subject-matter that the writer’s fear of the obvious manifests itself. He has a terror of the obvious in his artistic medium—a terror which leads him to make laborious efforts to destroy the gradually perfected instrument of language. Those who are completely and ruthlessly logical parade a total nihilism and would like to see the abolition of all art, all science, and all organized society whatsoever. It is extraordinary to what lengths a panic fear can drive its victims.
Almost all that is most daring in contemporary art is thus seen to be the fruit of terror—the terror, in an age of unprecedented vulgarity, of the obvious. The spectacle of so much fear-inspired boldness is one which I find rather depressing. If young artists really desire to offer proof of their courage they should attack the monster of obviousness and try to conquer it, try to reduce it to a state of artistic domestication, not timorously run away from it. For the great obvious truths are there—facts. Those who deny their existence, those who proclaim that human nature has changed since August 4th 1914, are merely rationalizing their terrors and disgusts. Popular art gives a deplorably beastly expression to the obvious; sensitive men and women hate this beastly expression; therefore, by a natural but highly unscientific process, they affirm that the things so hatefully expressed do not exist. But they do exist, as any dispassionate survey of the facts makes clear. And since they exist, they should be faced, fought with, and reduced to artistic order. By pretending that certain things are not there, which in fact are there, much of the most accomplished modern art is condemning itself to incompleteness, to sterility, to premature decrepitude and death.
‘And Wanton Optics Roll the Melting Eye’
‘The sunrise was magnificent. The luminary of day, like a disc of metal gilded by the Ruolz process, came up from the Ocean, as from an immense voltaic bath.’
Jules Verne
Poetry and Science: a marriage has been arranged—again and again, in the minds of how many ambitious young men of letters! But either the engagement was broken off; or else, if consummated, the marriage was fertile only of abortions. Education, The Sugar Cane, The Loves of the Plants, Cyder, The Fleece—their forgotten names are legion.
On what conditions is the marriage possible? Let Wordsworth answer. ‘The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which he is now employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.’ Poetry can be made out of science, but only when the contemplation of scientific facts has modified the pattern, not only of the poet’s intellectual beliefs, but of his spiritual existence as a whole—his ‘inscape,’ as Father Hopkins calls it. Information which has modified the poet’s existence-pattern may be expected (when skilfully ‘put across’ in terms of art) to modify the existence-pattern of his reader. In good scientific poetry the science is there, not primarily for its own sake, but because it is a modifier of existence-pattern. Bad scientific poetry is of two kinds: that in which the science is meant to be a modifier of existence-patterns, but owing to the poet’s incompetence as a communicator, fails to do what it was meant to do; and that in which the science is there primarily for its own sake, and not to produce an effect on existence-patterns. Most professedly didactic poems are of this type.
Gnomes, as you now dissect with hammers fine
The granite rock, the noduled flint calcine;
Grind with strong arm, the circling Chertz betwixt,
Your pure Kaolin and Petuntses mixt.
The scientific information contained by implication in these lines would be much more effectively communicated in the prose of a geological text-book. Text-book prose exists for the purpose of imparting information as accurately as possible. To inform is only a secondary function of poetical language, which exists primarily as an instrument for the modification of existence-patterns.
Information about kaolin is not likely to modify the existence-pattern of any normally constituted human being, however learned in geology—though of course a lyrical poet who happened to be so learned might use a fact about kaolin to illuminate a wholly non-geological theme. The universally knowledgeable Donne made use of the most ‘remote discoveries’ of the scientists of his time as illustrations and enrichments. Kaolin, or its equivalents, helped him to ‘put across’ what he felt about love, God, death, and many other pattern-modifying matters. It was as a suffering and enjoying man that he made use of his knowledge. The didactic poets, on the contrary, were, in almost all cases, primarily students. ‘The Botanic Garden’ and ‘The Economy of Vegetation’ provide no internal evidence to show that Erasmus Darwin’s general ‘inscape’ was modified by what he had learnt about kaolin and the like.
There is much rhymed astronomy in the Divine Comedy; but it is never, like Erasmus Darwin’s rhymed botany and rhymed geology, ridiculous. Why is this? In the first place, Dante had an incomparable capacity for ‘putting things across.’ And in the second place, that which he put across was not merely scientific information; it was always scientific information that had modified the pattern of Dante’s whole existence. ‘An infidel astronomer is mad.’ For Dante, it is evident, the heavens (the ptolemaic heavens in all their intricate detail of sphere and epicycle) proclaimed the glory of God. The most unlikely piece of information about the sun or the stars was never merely a piece of out-of-the-way information; it was indissolubly a part of that religious system which patterned the whole of Dante’s existence. Most of us are ignorant where Dante was learned and sceptical about what he believed. Consequently, in such lines as—
Surge ai mortali per diverse foci
la lucerna del mondo; ma da quella,
che quattro cerchi
