TASTES
Taste, like all the rest of our traits, is not unified and whole. It is disjointed and fragmentary. Try to trace the shape, and you miss the colours. Contemplate the colours, and you’ll fail to catch the form. Even those who love art don’t have much zest or judgement for more than one or two of its forms.
Imagination is the car, taste is the driver.
‘He that ploweth should plow in hope,’ as Blake urged. Create your work in hope, but judge it in despair. Who of us has not felt the exhilaration of working better than we know, and then the dismay of discovering that what we have made falls far short of what we had planned?
A writer has a brace of foes to tussle with, first the blank page, and then the full one.
Tact is the passive of taste. Taste selects, tact forbears.
What a blessing, that life hands us so few outlets to show off our true selves. Most of our good taste we owe to our inhibitions or our lack of opportunity.
1 Taste begins in disgust
As we grow more discriminating, the more things we see and hear both to delight and to disgust us. Cursed are they who have the taste to see how ugly we have made the world, but not the vision to remake it. ‘Taste,’ Renard wrote, ‘ripens at the expense of happiness.’ Life for the discerning is one long process of getting disgusted. God was the first to learn this hard lesson.
You can’t have much taste, if you’re not disgusted with the world by the time you’re thirty. And the world has been made by people who are not.
‘Taste,’ as Valéry wrote, ‘is made of a host of distastes.’ All discernment begins in disgust. A fastidious taste has a distasteful prehistory. Bad taste is made by our desires, good taste is made by our disgust.
We judge ourselves and our works both more harshly and more indulgently than we judge others, more indulgently because of our self-love, more harshly because of our ambition.
What a swamp of mortifications you have to wade through in learning how to judge cleanly. Shame piques us to acquire a fine taste. Yet we are still vain of whatever taste we have acquired. Taste is honed by shame, imagination is heightened by pride.
We are vain of our good taste, which is proof that we have none.
Some people are not hard to please because they have no taste, a few because they have enough to know that most things are not worth their displeasure.
Distaste is pleased with itself for being so displeased with all it sees.
2 Pharisees of taste
When style seems to have won out over substance, most times it is crass and smug mannerisms that have won out over subtle style, as in the case of Chesterton. Gaudy writers boast that they love form, but they are just enamoured of its crude effects. Style too has its hypocrites and pharisees, who confuse it with the frills, flounces, flourishes and embroidery which mask its absence. ‘All their work they do for to be seen of men. They make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments.’ When they think that they are mastering their craft, they are learning the flashy stunts that will take in their fans.
Few of us have the taste to feel disgust at anything that flatters our own taste.
3 Success debauches taste
Each day good taste gives up a touch more of its influence, but bad taste goes on insensibly gaining ground.
Years of success had depraved his taste. He had lapsed from plain dignity into purple decoration, and had bought publicity by peddling his judgment. He ‘ruined a fine tenor voice for effects that bring down the house,’ as Auden phrased it. May you be spared the misfortune of success. And may you die before praise gets a chance to debauch you.
We don’t emulate the best, but we ape those who know how to spark the most striking effects.
All that cultured sight-seeing, the brilliant friendships, those fine dinners and great conversations, have gone to make us the complacent mediocrities that we are.
Life is a slow erosion of all our standards. You must leave them to sink if you want to succeed.
4 Taste and prejudice
We can’t rid ourselves of our prejudices. So we should try to make them as discriminating as we can.
Take care not to let your quirks, habits and reflexes do the job of your taste. We raise our prejudices to the rank of principles and our predilections to the rank of taste. We pervert our precepts to give a pretext for our likes and dislikes. Instead of elevating our taste by undergirding it with our judgment, we contort our judgment by coercing it to ratify our choices. ‘How quick come the reasons for approving what we like,’ as Austen said.
5 Taste and wealth
My taste calibrates its standard to suit the class of things that I have had the means to pay for. Like my conscience, I use it not to weigh what I ought to do or get, but to weave shrewd pretexts for what I have done or got. Most people get a taste for the costliest grade of vulgarity that they can pay for.
The rich use their wealth to hide how cheap their taste is or else to show it off. Their taste is their avarice straining to live up to the demands of their coarse or cultivated snobbery. Elegance is the plush luxury that the rich have in place of beauty. It’s the bourgeois substitute for real style.
Our greed keeps ruthlessly up to date. But our taste lags hopelessly behind the times.
Most of us don’t doubt that we deserve the best. But we feel sure that the best must be whatever we have managed to get.
Others lay waste their powers by getting and spending, but I flex and strengthen mine. Their covetousness makes life ugly. But if I had a fortune, I could make mine graceful. My plain need is their uncontrolled greed.
Those who are poorer than me must lack the sense to know how to get money, and those who are wealthier lack the taste to know how to spend it.
6 Fastidious bad taste
Those who have a decided taste are sure that they have an exquisite one. If they prize discernment, they presume that they know what it is. And if they presume that they know what it is, they have no doubt that they possess it.
Lax taste discriminates as fastidiously as finicky taste. And a nice taste is as pleased with itself as a nasty one. A fine palate spurns most foods, but so does a coarse and uncultivated one. People are exceptionally choosey, and most of what they choose is trash. We aren’t deaf to style, but most of us prefer a trite style to a choice one. ‘People do not deserve to have good writing,’ as Emerson said, ‘they are so pleased with bad.’
Style is something that most people fail to notice, except when it’s cheap and showy, in which case they find it exquisite, or when it’s rich and solid, in which case they call it pretentious.
What we find disgusting in others we find natural and healthy in ourselves.
7 Bad taste is born with us
Most people have bad taste, but it is not even their own bad taste. And if it were, it might be a great deal worse.
A good heart is a likely sign of bad taste. But bad taste is no proof of a good heart.
Our parents give us a template of bad taste, first of all in their choice of each other. And the one badge of good taste that they show comes when they can no longer stand the sight of each other.
Our natural bad taste has crammed the world with such ugly unnatural things, that the taste we learn is even worse than the one we have from birth.
8 Good taste must be learnt
Bad taste is born, good taste is made. Nature will lavish on you plenty of fake taste. Your true taste you have to piece together by your own efforts. ‘It is,’ Reynolds said, ‘a long and laborious task to acquire it.’ First you have to learn what is worth admiring, then you have to act as if you admired it, till at last you start to admire it for real, and gather why it has earned the admiration that you give to it.
We keep our good taste in trim by battling our innate inclinations. Each advance in taste is an advance of inhibition.
There’s more vitality in vulgarity than there is in good taste. And vitality consumes more than it creates.
9 Good taste, bad reasons
If you want to gauge the quality of a person’s likes and dislikes, don’t ask them what they admire, ask them why. It’s much easier to acquire good taste than good reasons. As your taste matures, you admire fewer things, but you admire them more, and you know why they deserve it.
Sophisticates cry up a masterwork for reasons no less fatuous than those for which oafs hoot at it. Cultivated people have no more valid grounds for admiring fine things than bumpkins do for deriding them, though they may have more valid grounds than the perfunctory ones that they profess. They bolt them, and then belch their appreciation in stale patter. ‘A painting in a gallery,’ the Goncourts wrote, ‘hears more ludicrous opinions than anything else in the world.’
Some people’s enthusiasms are good for nothing but to warn you not to waste your time on what they praise.
Admiration knows more than understanding. We prize the right things for the wrong reasons.
It’s more surprising when an uncommon mind is fêted than when it’s vilified, since in both cases it is misunderstood. ‘To be great,’ as Emerson says, ‘is to be misunderstood.’
10 The taste of the present and posterity
Popularity is the anteroom of oblivion. An artist who works to win an audience must be content to be forgotten. The book that millions now can’t put down in a few years no one will want to pick up. The most enduring writers have the fewest readers in their own or any other age.
A bestseller is a book that everyone reads because everyone else is reading it.
To refer to a book as a bestseller used to be to dismiss it. But now that we fetishize numbers and success, sales are the sole endorsement that we take note of. ‘Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood,’ Hume wrote, ‘than the approbation of the multitude.’
11 The proof of popularity
If a thing is popular, it must be fake. And our sole touchstone of truth is popularity.
The things that a great number of people think they believe in are not even worth refuting.
We take it that a work of art will be no good if it aims to make money, but that if it is any good it will be sure to make bags of it. Our estimates of value are both mawkish and hard-headed.
There may be no arguing about taste, but there is no arguing with numbers.
These days there are so many heads, and we can tally them down to the last one, that the quality of what might be inside them is of no account.
An age that prides itself on its individualism is a slave to number, quantity and mass.
The one thing that awes large numbers of people is large numbers of people. And the one quality that they respect is quantity. We don’t know what makes a work of art good, but what sells is good enough for us.
Most of us know or admire nothing of a rare work save its reputation. ‘The more a work is praised,’ Gourmont said, ‘the more beautiful it grows to the multitude.’
The one sure way to spruik a thing these days is to tell people that hordes of other people are sold on it.
12 Taste and fashion
A masterpiece lasts, because it gives each era rich ideas which it can misinterpret in its own way. Tradition links a chain of fecund misconstructions. It is so necessary, just because almost all the things that people believe from age to age are false. Time tells you what to value, but fashion tells you why. People keep up in the sweep of the centuries the same catalogue of great works. But they adjust the reasons for which they praise and misread them to suit the stock views of their own age. So they come to admire them for the very traits that they lack. They make them their contemporaries by misconstruing them.
We read great and desolating books to find the anodyne cant which dull and pious preceptors have trained us to look out for.
Fashion makes our innate false taste even worse than it might have been. The sluice of tradition is the one thing that can cleanse it.
STANDARDS
13 The rule of taste
Nothing so admirable as the rule, or so ravishing as the exceptions. And where there are no strong rules, there will be no sweet exceptions. And where there are no limits, there will be no striving to pass them. ‘The law alone brings us liberty,’ as Goethe wrote. A strong artist must frame strong laws, though it’s all case law. ‘The rules of style,’ Johnson wrote, ‘like those of law, arise from precedents often repeated.’ By revering rules artists free themselves from following fads and trends. ‘Precept must be upon precept, line upon line.’ How many inhibitions a mind needs to be bound by in order to think free thoughts.
Artists are not like moralists. They practise better than they preach. Their art knows more than the artist. Most of them have a theory of art, so it’s just as well that they don’t stick to it. Shakespeare’s plays give the lie to most of what he wrote about dramaturgy. And if Flaubert had paid heed to his own impeccable aesthetic code, he would have disciplined his scandalous brilliancy into desiccated correctness. Had he excised his own persona from his books, he would have robbed them of their richest character. Few tellers intrude so unremittingly in their tale.
14 Creating taste
Poets must create the taste by which they are relished, as Wordsworth said, and this taste is one of the things that their work must teach them. First they mould their own, to make it both exacting and permissive. And then they need to raise their readers to be the next best thing to poets. They must enable the most impetuous flights, yet build to fit the most stringent specifications.
In art it is the exceptions that must set the rules, and the purpose of the rules is to spur further exceptions. Of course the real rules are not those that the academies teach. And even artists don’t grasp what they are. It is the works themselves that must embody them, though they too do not know them.
By the time dictionaries come to be made, language has lost its freshness.
15 Breaking the rules of taste
Artists don’t breach the rules, they set up better ones, to found a new freedom and a new rigour. They strengthen them by enlarging their writ and by showing how much they can achieve. Genius, as George Eliot said, ‘comes into the world to give new rules.’ But those who are not great minds could not follow the rules that it lays down, while a great mind would not want to.
Half the pleasure of creation comes from the destruction it entails. And, as Picasso knew, ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge.’
Where personal taste holds sway, standards don’t just fall. The very notion of standards is bound to be done away with, and replaced by the criteria of relevance, popularity, profit and feeling good. Kitsch is the democracy of taste.
‘Beauty,’ as Alberti said, ‘is the revelation of law.’ But each beginner now parrots the platitude that precepts are made to be transgressed. The ordinances of art are as trite and disregarded as the ten commandments.
Our iconoclastic age has smashed art and set up kitsch on its gilt plinth.
16 Freedom and decline
Artists these days don’t lack the aptitude to create, but they have lost the power to conceive what a fine work might be. ‘All men can do great things,’ Butler says, ‘if they know what great things are.’ How could they craft a piece of abiding beauty, when they can’t make out the most basic axioms or won’t obey them?
In vigorous eras artists make strong works, though they may hold incorrect views on art. In spent eras they can do nothing great, even if they hold the right ones. They glean leaden lessons from golden instructors.
It’s often said that if Shakespeare were on earth today he would be a copywriter or a screenwriter. But that is the reason why there can be no more Shakespeares.
We now churn out great reams of shoddy verse, since it’s not the age of poetry, and great reams of shoddy prose, since it is the age of prose. Most novels are written by people who are too bright to write them or not bright enough.
17 The good and the great
Major artists don’t do better what minor ones do well. They have quite contrary aims, and gain quite contrary ends. They differ in kind, not in degree.
The best, as Voltaire said, may be the enemy of the good. But in politics the better is as deadly a foe of the good as the best, while in art the good perverts the best and promotes the dull. A lot of good books are much better than great ones, and the best may have more in common with the bad than with the good. If Milton’s high-blown rhetoric had not made him one of the best of poets, it would have made him one of the worst. And some of the finest books, such as Wordsworth’s or Hawthorne’s, are not much good. ‘In art,’ as Goethe points out, ‘the best is good enough.’
The few great books differ more from the many good ones than a good book differs from the mass of bad ones. Or else they may differ less, but the differences matter far more.
18 At home in the world
A middling artist makes you feel more at home in the world, a golden one makes you wish that you were and content that you’re not. Good art soothes us with its predictable satisfactions. Great art desolates and exhilarates us, ravaging us with its wounding truths, and delighting us with its strange visions.
Great things both exalt us and annihilate us. Kitsch diminishes us, but plays up to our low pretensions.
We want stories to take us to a threatening place and make us feel safe there, just as we want to go abroad and feel familiarly at home.
THE MEDIUM
19 The work knows more than its maker
The work knows more than its maker. And the metaphor knows more than the poet. As Dirac said, the equation knows more than the mathematician.
The work, which is all on the surface, is far more profound than the soul that gave it birth. Imagination inheres in the medium. It is only an occasional visitant to the maker.
If authors were to explain all they know, fools would assume that they understood them, and the wise might see that they weren’t worth understanding.
Speech has more imagination than any of its users. So the best writers are content to serve as the clear spouts of its upwelling.
The poem has a wisdom that the poet lacks. And poetry has a wisdom that the poem lacks.
20 The medium is the true muse
A choice work of art is born, not when a thought finds its fitting form, but when a form fathers live thoughts.
The passion that fires a painter is the passion for paint. And the love that stirs a poet is the love of language, ‘smit with sacred song.’ Their true muse is the medium of their art. Writers see visions, but only visions of words and their translucent forms. They labour more to clarify form than meaning. A poet like Shakespeare is promiscuous in his thoughts, because his one true love is words. And he had faith in nothing but language, which he knew to be all feigning.
Shakespeare is engaged in a dance with language, and he always makes the right step, because he is content to follow its lead.
The poet does not put ideas into poetic form. Poetic form puts ideas into the poet.
Prophets and religious poets are made fools by their narrow faith, and must be redeemed by the abounding grace of language.
Forms call forth imagination, and imagination shapes new forms.
When the hand is working right, the best solution to each problem of form proves at the same time to be an enrichment of its content.
In weak verse the constraints of form diminish the thought, in strong verse they enrich it.
21 The muse of language
A poem is not a thought struggling into words. It is words giving birth to thought. ‘The real artist,’ as Wilde wrote, ‘proceeds not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion.’
For a poet language is the code that cracks the safe.
Language is like rain. Where it falls, thoughts will spring up. Most may turn out to be common weeds, but in a few receptive minds the seeds of fresh ideas will sprout.
A writer must love language as a sailor loves the sea.
Speech has tormented a few men and women to perfect them as the organs of its power. They are the pipes through which it plays its airs.
A poet is a bird gliding on gusts of language.
If tradition didn’t think one third of poets’ thoughts for them, and speech one third, they would conceive no thoughts of their own at all.
22 Inspired by words
It is not the job of poets to think. Their job is to find the words that will think for them.
In a poem the accidents of form shape the inevitabilities of thought.
For the true writer real things don’t reveal their colours till they have been forced to pass through the prism of language.
The chief force that shapes writers is not their family or their country, but the state of the language into which they have been born. They live in a language more than in a nation. Shakespeare was the child of elizabethan english. In any other age he would not have been Shakespeare.
Writers are people with whom language has some private business to transact. And their job is to make it the general business of all.
Other plays gain by being put on stage, since they can’t stand on their own. But Shakespeare’s are so rich in thought and language, that they lose by the distractions of the spectacle.
23 Born again into language
A poet must be born again into language. In composing a poem, they give birth to a being who is able to retrieve the poem which is already there in words. They are ravished by words as the mystic is ravished by God.
In a poem words regain their innocence by beguiling craft.
Poetic souls are a dime a dozen. What is needful is poetic craft. When this is lacking, the soul of the poet is stillborn or sterile. The soul that poets give voice to is not their own. It is the soul of language.
A poet is saved by words or not at all. And writers live by language, but know that it will not avail. They feel empty if they can’t empty out their soul each day in words on a page.
Shakespeare loved nothing but language, and language loved no one more than Shakespeare. Other loves seemed to him thin and insubstantial when set against the love of thin and insubstantial words.
24 The poet is the tool of language
Weak poets use language as a tool. A strong poet is a tool used by language. ‘Painting is stronger than I am,’ Picasso said. ‘It makes me do what it wants.’
Poets are not lords of language. They are its most obedient servants, and at times they may act as its jesters.
The soul of the poet is so thin and empty, that words have space to jiggle about in it and form new compounds.
It is the hand of the painter, not the soul, that is inspired. As Picasso said, ‘my hand tells me what I’m thinking.’
A poet is a mind plugged in to one of the high-voltage powerlines of language.
Before the poet can choose the words, language must first choose the poet.
Words make use of ordinary speakers when they want to go on foot. When they want to fly, they use a poet.
We are the cracked kettles on which language raps out tunes for bears to dance to. But when it finds a poet, it may move the stars to pity.
Words give a poem richer thoughts than its rich words give its readers.
25 The taste of language
Words are the one net in which we can catch the truth. We can grope our way through the dimness only by following the echo of language.
Words are the best and worst of us. We pack them with all our hollowest freaks and all the fullness of our minds.
Form guides a great writer to deep insights, but it waylays a mannered one into the paths of cheap imposture.
True writers follow the trails of language to reach fresh insights. And then by clarifying their thought they cleanse their language.
For the philosopher life is mediated through schemes of thought. And for the poet life is mediated through speech. ‘Between me and life,’ Wilde said, ‘there is a mist of words always.’
26 Language is imagination
Language is hidden poetry in wait for its bright revealer. It is, as Wilde wrote, ‘the parent not the child of thought.’ Language is not the body of thought. Thought is the body, and language is the soul which gives it form and actuality.
The play of language leads us to deeper springs of truth than the strait path of belief.
The music of language pipes us to truths past our ken.
Instead of striving to make our language the image of our mind, we would do well to make our minds more like language, promiscuous, open, free-flowing and constantly recreating themselves.
It is language that is myriad-minded, and writers must be single-minded in their dedication to make the most of its vast range of resources.
Shakespeare’s plays are a field of dancing verbal energy, and speech is their one true hero. There’s magic in each line. They are a perennial springtime of language.
The true drama of a great fiction is the drama of its author’s vision travailling to find the shining words to blaze forth its splendour. It’s what Lawrence calls the ‘struggle for verbal consciousness.’ But our sense for words is so dulled, that the true drama is no more than a dumb show to us.
27 Words are deeper than we are
It is we who are glib, not words. Words go deeper than we do.
We are too glib to grasp to what depth words might tow us or to what height they might loft us. Poets do both by ravishing us with their ecstatic dialect.
The writer’s struggle is not with the poverty of speech but with its plenitude. It holds out to them at every turn a more exuberant range of possibilities than they know what to do with.
It’s those who have impoverished ideas that rail at the poverty of language. For poets it is all too rich for their poor passions, which they therefore feel they must make out to be bigger than they are. And then when we read them, we take it that we have these outsized passions too. And so we deem words too poor to give them flesh.
Why do glib and mawkish people insist that writing is deeper than words, and a picture deeper than paint, and that all music tends toward silence, and that the poetry lies in the pauses? If there is anything in the pauses, it is the fake feelings that we fill them with. We try to read between the lines of a poem, so that its verbal fire won’t blind us.
28 The taste of the medium
A painting manifests pure matter by remaining purely abstract. The sole body that a painter can mould is a body of paint.
A painting should be seen and not read, as a text should be heard and not seen. So a picture that tries to relate a story is as false to its form as words that try to paint a picture. A picture is worth a thousand words only to those who have learnt what it means from some other source. Half the interpretation of a painting is an interpretation of its title. And all of it is an importation of things that lie outside the painting.
Most of us don’t care for a painting, if we can’t turn it or its maker or its making into a corny tale. And many of the most renowned painters, such as Michelangelo, have been mere illustrators.
A sense organ can put up with discordance in inverse ratio to how primitive it is, the nose least of all, and the ear less than the eye.
29 Words are not pictures
A book must be feebly written, if it means more than the words that it’s made of, though if it’s underpinned by nothing but its words it will soon crumple.
The standard view holds that a text encodes pictures in words, which we then project as a film on our mind’s screen when we read. So inadequately do we grasp what goes on in our own heads, and so prone are we to mouth borrowed nonsense rather than make our own sense.
Words stand for concepts, not for sense impressions. And their true sensory power lies in their sound, not in the pallid duplicates that they form of the entities that they refer to. In order to take in their glory, you have to shut your eyes and unstop your ears. They become flesh by making their subtle music, not by forging crude images. But we have no ears to hear their melody.
Words throw a veil over things, which reveals their outlines, but softens their contours.
Words are not pictures. They impart vague, imprecise and indistinct visual images, and bland and watery feelings. ‘Nothing we use or hear or touch,’ Clausewitz said, ‘can be couched in language that equals what is presented by the sense.’ Language is translucent to thought, but not transparent to action or sensation. Who would read a description of a peach to find out how it tastes? Just bite its pulp.
FORMS AND GENRES
30 Taste and form
For a true writer a genre is no more than an incitement to find fresh forms of words. Order is generic, imagination is wayward and perverse. Genres are the bowls into which artists pour their vision. They fix its shape, but not its quality.
Creative energy, like a people, is real and enduring. Genres, like the borders that enclose them, come and go.
Architecture builds the music of space. Music shapes the architecture of time. Writing designs the music and architecture of thought. Ideas are the melodies of writing, words are the instruments that play them.
The rest of the arts can be abstract, because they have a satisfying sensuous form. But literature must be packed with material, because its form cannot stand up on its own.
31 Genres
An epic is a core of one third intense tragedy with a wadding of more or less tedious digressions.
Tragedy is not a certain kind of story. It is a certain choice of language. It is a grand character responding to the deepest outrages with a commensurate depth of imagination. So in life there are no tragedies, but mere disasters. And though we live out such mean mishaps, our thoughts and words fail to match even these.
If fate is what makes for tragedy, then every insect is a tragic hero.
Greek and french tragedies are formally frigid, imaginatively impoverished and emotionally incontinent. The sole reason to read any of them is to learn how great Shakespeare is, and how right he was to keep clear of such bombastic minimalism, pompous choral insipidities, kitsch mythology, crass spectacle, sophistic debates, copybook moralism, pretentious yet prosaic rhetoric, and formal monotony. All their bellowing has less to say to us than one quiet work of heart-breaking savagery by Conrad or Faulkner.
A pastoral poem is not a poem that shows a love of nature. It is a paean of victory boasting of our triumph over nature.
Great stories of crime, such as Dostoyevsky’s, Hawthorne’s or Hugo’s, tell of the vindication of the culprit’s soul or of the damnation of the detective.
Biography is gossip and anecdote, literature is form and imagination. And so people much prefer biography to literature. And when they do read literature, they treat it as if it were a fictional biography, setting out tattle and anecdotes to be raked over and judged by our tawdry moral prejudices.
32 The stupidity of story
The plot counts as little in fiction as opinions count in speculation. Stories are the despair of art, as opinions are the desolation of thought. ‘The story,’ Henry James wrote, ‘is just the spoiled child of art.’
The story is the golden calf which readers adore. Language is the god for whose voice they have no ears.
The tale belongs to mere entertainment, the treatment to high art. But we care for art only insofar as we find it entertaining.
Stories are the thralls of our desires. Art sets our minds free to rove, by raising them above our desires.
People read stories in the same way that they consume all the things that they crave. So avid are they for the next frisson, that they miss the wonders that are unrolling right in front of them. A plot surprises us by where it ends up, but a poem must astonish us with each step on the way.
Lesser writers know how to narrate a plot most effectually, since they have no rich insights to deflect them from it. Thrilling plots do not make for great novels, and great novels do not tell thrilling stories. There are so few great short stories, because they have no time to do more than race through a piquant tale.
33 Great fiction is greater than its story
In good fiction the telling exists for the sake of the tale. But in great fiction the tale exists for the sake of the telling, ‘the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing,’ as Henry James phrased it. And yet we treat the workmanship as a gaudy and wasteful packaging which we rip off to unwrap the tale as fast as we can.
A fiction is as great as it is greater than the story that it tells. And it means nothing at all if it means no more than that. Its grand characters outshine their fables as art outshines life, by illuminating its drift. Form and imagination are the pearls of writing, the tale is the dry twine on which they are beaded. Plot is not the soul of a great fiction. It is its dry bones.
Great writers know that a good plot is necessary to make a great fiction. Readers think that it is sufficient.
34 Selection and taste
Why do we assume that an artist makes art by extracting the illustrative details from life? As if life, when its quotidian slag were scummed off, would leave a concentrate of unalloyed gold. But not even the fire of imagination burns at a high enough temperature to transmute banality’s refractory ore. Writers who knew how to delete would not, as Stevenson claimed, make an Iliad out of a morning paper. They would just report trite incidents in the random vein of a morning paper. Art does not select from life, but adds to it. It distorts and reshapes, intensifies and simplifies.
35 Music is not a language
Music arranges formal associations between sound and sound. It does not forge associations of meaning between sound and sense. Though we call it a universal language, it is neither universal nor a language. It can convey neither rich ideas nor complex moods. The only ideas that music gives play to are musical ones. And the feelings it evokes are coarse and obvious, not much more than sad or glad, up or down, sunny or spooky. And it’s the crudest sort that thrills us with the most intense effects. If music had anything to say, it would speak. And when it does use words, it shows that what it has to say is nonsense.
Most of the emotions roused by a piece of music come not from the music itself, but from the associations and recollections which have nothing to do with it.
Music seems the most profound art because it has no content. It is all depthless form.
Music is made with notes, not with emotions. And these notes touch our sonic imagination, not our moral or narrative or pictorial one.
Music can’t tell the truth, because it can’t say anything at all. And yet so much of it is still a lie. Music like Wagner’s is even worse than it sounds.
36 Music good and bad
Music is how the gods do mathematics. It’s an ineffable algebra for the ears. It is, as Leibniz says, ‘the pleasure the mind feels from counting while not being aware that it is counting.’ It is at once the most sensual and the most abstract of the arts.
What a mischance for music that it came of age in the nineteenth century, just as european taste was declining into kitsch.
Bad music now sounds like good film music, overblown, mushy and thrusting, cuing our responses scene by scene to lead up to some grandiose climactic fanfare.
In most songs the tune is so flat that it needs the words to raise it, and the words are so thin that they need the tune to fill them out.
37 Savage dance
Ballet is the Fabergé egg of the arts, the over-refined knick-knack of an epicene age. It is a vain attempt to mime feelings by stereotyped gesticulations, and to rival feline poise by an unachievable bodily control. If it makes music visible, as Balanchine alleged, then it plays it on a sorry instrument. It’s like performing Bach on a kazoo. It should leave off straining for fluid organic grace, and aspire instead to the affectless awkwardness of a puppet. Nijinsky alone by his rigorous anti-ballet gave back to the dance its savage vitality.
38 Painting and sculpture
Cézanne is the ideal painter. He framed a style scoured of feeling, ornament, history and expression. He kept nothing but the solid and essential, and purged his art of all the extraneous seductions for which even connoisseurs love a painting. So he made pictures that hold out to us nothing to flatter, to soothe or to allure, no fable or drama, no psychology or sympathy, no depth, memory, mystery or meaning. Rembrandt is the anti-painter, always using stage effects to bring out some inner depth which has nothing to do with the truth of painting.
Sculpture is a more one-dimensional art than painting. A sculpture has more spatial facets, but a picture has more formal ones.
Only the most infamous tyrants deserve to be satirized by a brazen public statue.
39 Portraits of bad taste
We hold that a portrait can bare the depths of a soul, since we know only the outer shell of both life and art. Is the heart so thin and transparent, that mere paint can unveil it? The face may be a map of habits and experiences, but only those of its own flesh, and not what lies behind it. The phrenologist Lavater, when asked to differentiate a sketch of Kant from that of an infamous highwayman, singled out the markers of the true metaphysician in the robber, and the unmistakable tokens of a brigand in Kant.
Our clothes show more about us than our face. At least they are our own choice. But what they show is that the economic order determines most of our choices for us. Our bodies show our born ugliness, and our clothes flaunt our fashionable bad taste.
A good portrait is one that doesn’t pretend to lay bare the soul of its sitter. What it lays bare is the soul of art.
40 Architecture
Architecture is art contaminated by utility. It fouls pure form with gross functionality. Literature lights it up with truth.
Mawkish people claim that no building is worth as much as the acts that take place beneath its roof. But the form of a great edifice is worth far more than what it does. And it doesn’t start to live its real life till it has ceased to work. It’s as great as it is greater than its use. The best structures outlast their function for the longest time. And a building that is perfectly fit for its present purpose will soon be pulled down. A pyramid was a tomb for a booby, a cathedral a barn for gullible cows to congregate in. Do the grubby fingers brighten the ruby that bejewels them?
41 Modern builders
If form does follow function, then every building would be a uniform precast box. There would be no pyramids, steeples, spires or domes.
The rest of the arts may despair, but architects must frame an art of hope, since they are building a new world.
Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe shared out modern architecture between them, while Wright was the builder for those who don’t like modern buildings. Le Corbusier made titanic, protean, joyous, southern structures, Mies reticent, cool, sleek and serene ones. So Le Corbusier fashioned the fresh morning poetry of the new design, Mies its taut and severe prose. So the complete writer would blend the barbaric force of Le Corbusier and the delicate discipline of Mies.
42 Film
Cinema is beggared by the wealth of its resources. Like Orson Welles, it will do nothing great, since it can do such a range of facile things so well. Like life, it is vibrant but insipid, saturated but vacuous, raucous but inarticulate. It thrills us with the pap of fantasy and the infantile delights of plot. It feasts our greedy hunger for happy endings and our need to identify with attractive stars. A pseudo-intellectual is one who treats films as if they were works of art.
Film is as mechanically precocious as it is aesthetically regressive and juvenile. It is advanced in everything except its sensibility. It is the epitome of present-day art, since it is neither modern nor art but a lucrative branch of the global business of kitsch.
A film is too rushed to paint luminous images, and too stuffed with visual details to make thoughtful drama.
Great novels make poor films. Films may tell the same story, but they lose the vocal life and glory. But since they burst with banal details, we have to speak as if they were dense with symbolism.
The cinema did not thaw out our brains, as Cocteau claimed. It inflamed our senses, and overheated our sentimentality.
TRADITION
43 Time and taste
Inspiration is instant, judgment is slow. Time is the best critic. We hold to our ideas because we have not thought long enough about then to see through them. It takes me six weeks to see that two thirds of what I have written is no good. It takes me six months to see that two thirds of what is left is also no good.
God was the first to find out that the bliss of creating is the sole thing that makes up for the bitterness of existing, but that this joy too soon sours. If he is happy with his work, then he must have as little taste as ability.
Would God not have come to a far less encouraging appraisal of what he had done, had he not been in such haste to judge if it was all very good? As a creator he was precipitate, as a critic he was fickle. He must be like us, impossible to satisfy, but easily pleased. Nothing can be good enough for him, yet his noblest work, so men used to say, is an honest man.
44 Time is wiser than taste
Time is wiser than taste. And tradition knows more than the individual. We need the stolidity of tradition to counterbalance the gross obstinacy of our own judgment, and to preserve the works of deep originality from each epoch’s thirst for crude novelty.
Good taste preserves the old forms, imagination revitalizes and extends them.
Some writers, such as Emerson, who have lived at their ease on a rich legacy of tradition, urge their juniors to throw up their patrimony and earn a toilsome livelihood of their own.
Why commend what time tells you to? Yet time will tell you where to find all the best things.
45 The wisdom of tradition
The soul is too shallow to harbour the huge bulk of a work of art. It must moor out in the broad sea of tradition.
Nine tenths of a great book is lost on its readers, as it was no doubt lost on its writer. A great work is a permanent possibility of wonders which must be preserved in a tradition. And the tradition doesn’t know anything at all.
A book acts like a virus which must infect a long column of unaffected carriers till it latches on to the one victim that it was meant for.
As art tells the truest lies, so tradition is the most sagacious foolishness. Tradition is priceless, though all traditions are worthless.
A great book is so rich, because a long tradition of form and thought has had a share in writing it. But most books are so poor, because they have been made to please so many consumers, trends and fads.
The dead make up the most vital community, because they are not a community at all. And posterity frames the best consensus, since it is made with no need of agreement.
Tradition works like love. Your deeds come to mean something by their communion with the ones whom time has made dear to you.
A healthy tradition must have the strength to excrete as well as to absorb, to forget as well as to retain.
46 Tradition and individual taste
Tradition is all, the individual nothing. ‘The richness of a work, of a generation,’ Pavese wrote, ‘is in all cases due to how much of the past it contains.’ But to save the past alive, artists must act as if they were all and the past nothing. ‘Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead,’ as Blake urged. All good comes by the tyranny of tradition and by the wilful audacity of the few who fight to depose it. Creators cherish it only if they hope to join its lists. But how can they enrich it but by being unequivocally of their own time?
Artists make a god of beauty. But they want to smash its old images and set up their own on the unfilled pedestals. They are at once idolaters and iconoclasts, lawmakers and lawbreakers. ‘Each act of creation,’ Picasso said, ‘is first of all an act of destruction.’
A painter hates art museums, and wants to be hung in every one of them.
Tradition used to be the care of a whole class. Now it is the endangered possession of a scatter of rare men and women swamped by the heedless greed of the giddy crowd.
All are born heirs to the past’s inexhaustible bequest, but you must labour for long years to make it your own. ‘What you have inherited from your antecedents,’ Goethe said, ‘you must first win for your own use.’
PERIODS
47 The arts are not one
The muses don’t dance in unison, as Degas points out, or grow at the same rate, or age in the same way. Though of one sisterhood, they don’t have much in common. And though they form one family, they each keep their own characteristics. Each obeys its own laws, and takes its own course of growth. ‘That urge to find counterparts and analogues in the various arts gives rise to queer blunders,’ as Baudelaire points out. Music had its rebirth long after the renaissance of poetry and the visual arts.
Where all the arts are one, and all are forms of storytelling, there is no art at all.
A period has a paradigm form rather than a common style. Classicism is at its best an architectural and sculptural style, baroque a musical one, romanticism a literary one, and modernism a painterly one.
The english and russians can write great books but not make great paintings. The french can paint and write but not make music. Germans can write and make music but can’t paint. Italians can paint and make music but not literature. The irish can write but can’t paint or compose. The english put all of their music into their poetry. And the french put all of their music into their prose.
48 Degenerate art
All great art is degenerate. And all healthy art is kitsch. By the time art was born, culture was already in decay, as images had come to seem more alluring than the real thing. ‘How sickly seem all things that grow,’ as Trakl wrote. Each advance is a step on the road to decadence. ‘All mortal greatness is but disease,’ as Melville said. A decadent is one who has gone further and seen more than the sound upright soul would dare to. And human kind owes all its creative force to its maimed, abortive, accursed specimens. So don’t look for a cure for your malaise, but for a form to make it fecund.
49 Decadent civilization
There has never been an artistic epoch, as Mallarmé said, and if there had, it would have been too weak to make great works of art.
Every civilization, no matter how ancient, is decadent. It is a fruit that as soon as it’s ripe is already near rotten. Babylon and Egypt are not part of the childhood of the race but of its old age. And civilization itself is a long march of decadence, in which intellect and technique more and more oust instinct and custom.
A civilization has no springtime. It’s the autumnal fruit of the old age of a late species.
Art is a fruit that grows on the tree of knowledge, not on the tree of life.
A sick society makes its artists weak. But a strong artist does not make society healthy.
The eighteenth century was still flushed with the health that it was squandering. Its elegance and sprightliness was the lively flush in the cheek of the dying consumptive.
50 The greeks
The greeks were teenagers, beautiful, sad, lost, dangerous, but not very deep. They were shallow enough to see a lot of things clearly. They might have rescued us from our false complexities by escorting us back to a bright simplicity and surface, ‘the whole Olympus of appearance,’ as Nietzsche termed it. But now that we know them better, we can’t glean a thing from them. Sculptors, not psychologists, they carved the embodied abstractions of architecture, geometry and myth. So they kept their gaze fixed on the plastic and formal. Their eyes looked outwards to the serene shape, not inwards to the chaos of the soul. ‘For us greeks,’ as Valéry wrote of them, ‘all things are forms.’
The hallmark of the greek and latin classics is how overwritten they are. They found the most complex forms to phrase quite simple thoughts. They had too much ingenuity and too little imagination. Their prose is turgid and baroque, and their verse is literal and declamatory. It is rhetoric in metrical form. They are models of how not to do it.
Homer and Plato are the only two top-rank greek writers, Homer because he embodies the greek spirit, and Plato because he negates it.
51 Classic and romantic taste
Classicism is obedience. Romanticism is rebellion.
Classicism is a shallow pond. Imagination is a shoreless ocean. Classicism cramps art by trussing it in organic form and subjecting its exuberant parts to a dulling coherence.
A classic age spends its time fussily reworking the tropes that have been passed down to it from an earlier heroic age. That is to say, a classic age is a decadent age.
Classicism was a stiffening of the joints. Romanticism was a softening of the brain.
Unrivalled artists, such as Velasquez or Shakespeare, Bach or Dostoyevsky, are no more classic or romantic then the tallest peaks are tropical or temperate. Their weather is made not by the latitude which they share with the surrounding countryside but by their own lone altitude.
Paganism was a boon for painting and sculpture, because it was so picturesque. And christianity was a boon for literature and psychology, because it was so perverse.
Raphael’s pictures, Mozart’s music and Austen’s prose are three miracles of transcendent worldliness. Like Palladio, Rossini or Emerson, they fashion a sane classic art for those who are born for joy.
The old classicism was olympian, the new classicism is industrial.
52 The rupture of the modern
Discontinuity is the essence of modernity and the mainspring of all modern art, as quantized energy is the basis of the new physics. It works by dissonance not harmony, by multifariousness not oneness, by fragmentation not by integrity, through the elementary particles of unpredictable imagination. The modern artist must use the fragment as the sole weapon with which to combat kitsch and the whole. ‘Unity,’ as Blake wrote, ‘is the cloak of folly.’
In a traditional culture the first duty is filial piety. To be modern is to kill the father, the source and symbol of all brainless authority.
53 The styles of modernism
There were two strains of modernism. The first, the modernism of order, that of Hemingway, Cocteau, Mondrian, Brancusi, Mies van der Rohe or Schoenberg, was a clean white apartment. It pared back reality to uncluttered, austere and angular shapes, sleek and metallic. The second, the experimental modernism of Joyce, Faulkner, Le Corbusier, Kandinsky, Miró, Pollock or Stravinsky, enriched and complicated it with bold, eclectic, liquid and lyrical forms.
The arts grew modern by battling their own history. So painting, in its struggle to break loose from its past, came to be more and more abstract, and so more like what it essentially is. But music, which was already abstract, came to sound less and less like music. By trying to raise it to its quintessence, composers reduced it to noise.
The impressionists had dematerialized the subject-matter of painting. The modernists rematerialized the medium of paint.
Modern novelists refurbished the great house of form, but for clerks and salesmen to lodge in.
Most recent verse is cryptic yet prosaic, mystification illuminated by flashes of cliché. Poetry used to be the verbal audacity that you couldn’t risk in prose. Now it’s the local and autobiographical inanities that you couldn’t get away with in prose. It’s a reel of trite riddling anecdotes that lacks a sustained narrative.
BEAUTY
54 Beauty
Beauty lives solely in its proper element. A swan out of water is a clumsy duck.
Beauty is the most seductive lure to life, and the saddest memento mori.
Nudity may be beautiful, dress is at best decorative. Clothes are a needless adornment of beauty, and a vain disguise of unshapeliness.
When a girl speaks, her voice smiles. When she sings, it desires.
Beauty is not a line that streaks straight to a goal. It snakes like a sinuous curve. A tune is the most roundabout way to get from c to c.
There are a hundred ways to look beautiful, but a thousand to look unattractive. There are a hundred ways to write well, but a thousand to write lamely, a hundred of reasoning right, but a thousand that miss the mark.
The body is a sturdy prose. The face is an enchanting poetry.
55 The mystery
What could be more tangible or more mysterious than beauty? You may enfold it in your arms, but you can’t grasp it with your mind. Nothing is more firm to the touch or more elusive to thought. It is perfectly rational and yet quite incomprehensible. It sparks an epiphany which discloses nothing but its own sweet self. You glimpse in a flash what you still fail to compass after years of exploration.
The least disturbance of the configuration of a face may make it unsightly, but one lovely touch is enough to make it adorable. It doesn’t take much. A quite ordinary miracle will do it.
Beauty is a complex equation which the senses solve in the blink of an eye.
Only love beauty, and the world turns to an endlessly varying wonder.
Beauty falls like rain on a soul that has been parched by truth.
The constant miracle of beauty is the sole force that can wake you from the daze which the profusion of everyday beauty has lulled you into. ‘The mist of familiarity,’ as Shelley wrote, ‘obscures from us the wonder of our being.’ The world spoils you with its never-ending, ever-changing shows of loveliness.
56 The shock of beauty
Beauty is a perfect poise which throws you off balance when you meet it. ‘Every angel is terrible,’ as Rilke wrote. Beauty is the serene form that still shocks us, no matter how habituated to it we may have grown. And it would take more than one life to get used to the beauty that meets you each day.
Beauty is a temporary tyrant. It commands all eyes, but only for a season. Each lovely thing that you see banishes for a trice all rival kinds of loveliness, as a strong writer’s style blanks out for a short spell all the rest, and lends you the key to tune all the discords of the world.
57 The taste of beauty
We pass our youth in a delicious sickness of tremulous desire. We burn with beauty’s voluptuous fever. Artists are prone to this infection their life long. It will not let them rest, till they have made some offering worthy of the god that plagues them. It is the sweetest addiction.
The lightning strike of beauty first stuns, then illuminates.
The length of Cleopatra’s nose may not have changed the face of the earth, as Pascal claimed. But the curve of a lip may change your life, or at least make you live to rue that you didn’t let it do so.
Love beauty, and the world will make plain to you how ugly it is. Love truth, and it will show itself to be a lie.
Beauty should shock us out of our habitual ways of perceiving. But often it hardens us in our habitual ways of desiring.
58 Lift up your eyes
The indifferent sky with its azure bounty and its shifting theatre of clouds should be enough to gladden us. But we won’t lift our eyes from the crawling miseries and cravings of this blighted earth. The crystal heaven has nothing that I want, besides a lofty peace. So I fuss and bustle through the world, blinded to all its glory by all my greed to grab my slice of it. The only beauty that we care for is the beauty that we own or hope to make our own, not for its own sake, but so that it might lend a gloss to our own image.
Epiphanies of beauty come to us at every moment, and we are looking away. And truth hovers round us, and we have our minds on other things.
People rarely glance at the sky, but what would they not do to buy an exclusive view of it, if they knew that others set a high price on it.
We long to grab hold of beauty, but we have no time to savour it. And our lust of possession makes the world uglier by the day.
A thing of beauty is a joy for the first ten minutes that you’ve got it in your hands. After that your eyes swivel to the next thing of beauty that you want to hunt down.
59 Spoilt beauty
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and what all beholders find beautiful is their own image radiating from the objects they have got.
Beauty is a rare visitor from the realm of being to our world of time and becoming. No sooner has it entered our corrupting air but it starts to sicken and decay. It is a spark of eternity, which soon sputters and goes out in our thick and filthy air.
We have a disgusting bent for manufacturing ugliness where there was once beauty, and a charming gift for reclaiming frail redoubts of beauty in face of the encroaching filth. How much loveliness we found, and how much ugliness we made.
The world craves beauty, and wants to lay hold of as much of it as it can, so that it can drag it through the mire.
Ugliness is a far more solid and lasting quality than beauty.
60 Generic beauty
Beauty is exemplary not original. It is neither particular nor abstract but generic. It is not a universal platonic form, nor can we judge it in isolation from the class of beings to which it belongs. So you have to learn it by experience. You can’t deduce it from reason. And it comes to seem unique by perfecting the traits of the class of which it is a member. You can’t grade the loveliness of an individual till you have seen more samples of its type. We get to know the features of its class by induction from its examples, and then we love the class in each of its embodiments.
If beauty were proportionality of parts, then each of the animals, which are all so beautiful, would share the same ratio. How could a horse and a giraffe both be handsome? The proportions of a flamingo would look out of place in an eagle, and the plumage of a peacock would spoil a swan.
The three markers of beauty of face and figure are slimness, shapeliness and smoothness. And our unattainable ideal of beauty is the slenderness of a girl filled out by the shapeliness of a woman.
61 Type and exceptions
Ours is an ugly species which is full of breathtakingly lovely individuals. And a human being is beautiful because for a few short years she possesses in an abnormal degree those traits that typify the human form but which most humans are deficient in.
Human kind is at once the ugliest and the most beautiful species. The rest of the animals are beautiful in the type, and ugly in the botched exceptions. Humans are ugly as a rule, and beautiful only as rarities, and that for such a short season. They are unsightly in the aggregate, though enchanting in the individual.
What is the difference between good looks and ugliness? A few grams more or less of fat, and ten years more or less of time.
62 Beauty recalled
‘All our tastes,’ as Lamartine said, ‘are but reminiscences.’ This present angel shape ravishes you now because it brings before your eyes its lost twin from the past. And it prefigures one which will someday enthrall you when it calls back this one here in front of you. Beauty is old wine in new skins.
The resemblance may catch your eye, but it’s the contrast that rends your heart. Everyone reminds me of her. No one is like her. Soon she too won’t be. But she will live on as a pale remembrancer of what she once so radiantly was. ‘Like, but oh, how different,’ as Wordsworth lamented.
Beauty ravishes our memory just as it’s on the verge of evanescing. Formed by the past and promising the future, it stands apart from both and lives eternally in its own ever-vanishing present. It is the one carnal god that can resurrect our buried hearts. Each lovely thing enjoys a timeless bloom which is prey to all the sad injuries of time.
In order to take in the full radiance of beauty, you have to feel the ecstasy of its presence and preview the desolation of its fading.
63 The aging butterfly
So much beauty is botched by the very process that should perfect it. Adolescence is a potter’s kiln. It mars most of the shapely figures that time puts in it to finish. They go in so fine, they come out so pocked and sallow and flabby. Beauty is the light that youth gives off as it burns itself out.
The human butterfly, as Chekhov said, turns back into a repulsive grub. Beauty’s lease is up almost as soon as it’s moved in. Why does our species age more hideously than all the rest? Is it gravitation paying us back for presuming to walk erect and renounce the reticence of fur? Or is gluttony distending our flesh to force us to share its own overfed and florid likeness?
If the story of our life writes itself on our face as we age, what an unedifying one it must have been.
If God made us in his own image, what an ugly devil he must be.
Beauty is an aristocrat, but the body is a leveller.
64 Time’s war on beauty
The young have all had a taste of what it is to possess beauty and what it means to lose it. They have all known the delight of the body and the sadness of the flesh. As they age, their face parts with its pure and clean contours, and folds back to an unreadable map of experience. The young have classic profiles but romantic souls, like Canova’s statues or Baudelaire’s verse. And their lineaments must subside to romantic ruins before they can grow classic and harmonious souls.
In childhood and youth beauty is a free gift. After that it is a rare and arduous feat.
To be beautiful is like being rich in a country with ruinously high taxation. The vainest girl doesn’t know how beautiful she is, or how much she will soon be losing.
Beauty’s season is as brief and brilliant as a nordic summer.
The young and lovely troop into the future like the unending waves of a russian brigade, soon to be mown down and replaced by those in the rear.