Sentences

By Michael Curran

Thoughts and aphorisms on art and style, taste, self-knowledge, psychology, religion, happiness, self-interest, pride, self-reliance, vices and virtues, politics, thinking and genius, illusion, and the purpose of life and death. Influenced by thinkers such as Pascal and Nietzsche, this collection of brief maxims and longer paragraphs argues for energy and order, imagination and tradition, and self-reliance within strong institutions, and attacks the facile humanism, optimism, progress, levelling, technophilia and rationalism of the Enlightenment. Includes a wealth of quotes from writers such as Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Dr Johnson, Emerson and Wilde.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Curran
• Release date: May 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301651429

Michael Curran

I was born in 1963 and live in Sydney. I studied classics at university, which was an excellent preparation for permanent unemployment.

Book preview

Sentences

Michael Curran

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Michael Curran

CONTENTS

Art

Taste and tradition

Style

Know yourself

Psychology

Religion

Happiness

Self-interest

Success and failure

Pride

Vanity

Praise

Shame and modesty

Work and independence

Vices

Virtues

Pity

Conscience

Politics

The end

We don’t think

Thinking

Cynicism

Genius

Illusions

Imitations

Kitsch

Goodness, truth and beauty

The purpose of life

Time and death

ART

Contents

Order and imagination

Causes of art

Effects of art

Amorality of art

ORDER AND IMAGINATION

1 Order and energy

Energy and order are the two great things in both art and life.

Order is frugal, chaste and sober. Energy is irregular, promiscuous and self-delighting.

Art must fix its energies in form, and free its order by imagination. The energies of art are at once anarchic and organizing.

Writers spend half their strength to discipline their energies, but then they have to spend half their discipline to temper their discipline, to make words sing in their chains. The artist may be exuberant, but beauty is calmness and control. And yet control may be so confident that it looks like exuberance, as it does in Matisse. Intensity makes one sort of force, and restraint another, and power is manifest in both.

Imagination is electricity, order is gravity. Order builds in stone. Imagination writes in flame. It is the god that answers by fire. It knows the joy of speed. But beauty has the serene dignity of stillness.

Energy is at its maximum in the most orderly, least entropic, states.

Orderliness, grown to an excess, stiffens into autism. Imagination riots into schizophrenia. Form congeals into ritual, force flares into rapture.

Energy is harder to attain but easier to forge than form. So we are left with the restless fever of this exhausted age.

2 Imagination

In art energy is imagination, and order is form. A great work is imaginative force organized into permanent shape.

Imagination breeds thoughts that are worth remembering, and form stamps them in the memory.

‘Write the vision, make it plain.’ A visionary imaginer, such as Dante, Bunyan, Blake or Yeats, must keep to the simplest style, as Coleridge said. A verbal imaginer, such as Shakespeare, Melville or Conrad, frames a varied, profuse and highly-wrought dialect.

Writers who have a painter’s eye, such as Blake, Lawrence or Valéry, have a clarity of thought and style. Those, like Milton, Browning or Joyce, who have a musician’s ear, weave a baroque and intricate harmony.

Break the capacious vessel of tradition, and the wine of imagination spills out wasted. Its fruit buds and ripens on the tall tree of form. But we have now sawn this down, since it stood in the way of our automated ascent. Nothing without imagination, but no imagination without tradition.

Imagination is the wings which we have not yet grown.

Imagination must be compacted in form, and form expands imagination.

3 Angels of order, demons of imagination

‘Good is the passive that obeys reason,’ Blake says. ‘Evil is the active springing from energy.’ God works by order, and the devil by energy. And whoever lives by imagination can’t help being of the devil’s party. ‘Order,’ as Pope wrote, ‘is heaven’s first law.’

Some of the angels of order were the egyptians, the greeks, Johnson, Mozart, Cézanne, Mies van der Rohe and Brancusi. And some of the demonic imaginers are Milton, Melville, Hugo, Beethoven, Pollock, Le Corbusier. Shakespeare was unique in his blending of controlling form and uncontainable verbal force.

Disruptive imagination springs from the downtrodden celts and gauls. Regulation is enforced by the legions of Rome.

Some art is charged with a stored potential energy, which strains with a vast pent force, though outwardly mild and sedate. And some has a kinetic power, erupting into excess, gushing and tumbling like a waterfall of delirious volubility, as it does in Milton, Hopkins, Faulkner or Joyce.

4 Pattern and variation

Pattern and repetition are the heart of beauty. And variation and strangeness are the root of originality. Coloured writing must make good its exacting strangeness by its lush suggestions. And plain writing must make good its plainness by the grand truths that it brings to light. Similarity makes plain the form, difference discloses the sense. Form iterates, force varies.

Form shines clearest where it shapes plain patterns out of what is similar. But it works most potently where it frames dappled patterns out what is different.

The mind delights in similarity of structure and diverseness of hue. It loves forms when they are repeated, and colours when they are varied.

Nature and art love imperfect symmetries. Awkwardness is at times the height of artistry, and roughness may be the most exacting precision. And some superlative works, such as the Bible or Dickinson’s poems, hold us in the toils of an ungainly grace.

Art, like nature, is force made form. It calls on disorderly imagination to rival the earth’s feckless prodigality. But it subjects it to laws just as stern and fixed.

Intelligence beams like white light, pure and limpid. Imagination shivers into the rainbow’s scattered hues. The intellect works by fission. Imagination works by fusion.

A word gains its force by its repetition or by its rarity.

5 The part is greater than the whole

Only a dull work adds up to more than the sum of its parts. The fragment means more than the whole. Better then to preserve only the fragments, and not pretend that they make a whole.

Shakespeare, like the Bible and all true poets, is great sentence by sentence, line by line, phrase by phrase, and not by his overarching plots and designs, which he stole from others. As a storyteller he is derivative, contrived, naive and inefficient. As a poet he is deep, new and all-knowing. So Emerson wrote, ‘Every poem must be made up of lines that are poems.’

Order coheres and unifies, imagination disunites and disaggregates. Mental play is a centrifugal force that spurts out in a myriad sparkling fragments which never coalesce to form an unbroken whole. Why else would Shakespeare’s plays be such prodigal medleys of lushly embroidered episodes? A single page of a great writer’s book is worth as much as the whole, and its sidelights disclose as much as its centre. ‘Digressions,’ Sterne says, ‘incontestably, are the sunshine, they are the life, the soul of reading.’

6 Structure and lexis

Imagination is lexical, order is syntactic.

Some authors write with words, and some with sentences. The best do both at once.

Shape sets out plain symmetrical motifs. Imagination plays with a lavish palette of effulgent colours.

Greek and roman writers used a convoluted syntax but a penurious vocabulary. The hebrew Bible used the plainest diction and syntax to make a rough music. French writers have stripped and planed both their vocabulary and their syntax. English ones have set the most copious lexicon in the simplest structures.

The best sentences would fuse the crisp syntax of french prose with the exuberant vocabulary of english verse.

Whitman’s verse has a flat democratic syntax and an inclusive pluralistic diction.

7 Art is imagination not observation

Artists don’t see what no one else has seen. They make what no one else could make. They are fabricators, not observers. So the poet is a sayer, not a seer, a voice, not an eye. They throw a cloak of words over things that we can’t see, so that we can make out their essential form.

‘The imagination,’ Joubert says, ‘has made more discoveries than the eye.’ It lends a brief reality to unreal things, so as to show them as they are at their most real. Artists don’t glimpse similarities that no one has glimpsed before. They shape things that contrast with those that have been shaped before. They don’t find beauty, they find formlessness, and make of it a lovely work.

8 Metaphor

A metaphor doesn’t bring out the latent analogies that link two objects. It applies the words used of one to enrich the other. It’s not discovered but invented. It does not assimilate things, but differences language. It is a substitution, not of one thing for another, but of a fresh set of words for a familiar one. It’s the verbal energy that is unloosed when one entity is forced to take on the form of another. It doesn’t show that one reality is like some other, but transfigures speech so that it resembles no other. It’s not a new way of viewing the world, but a new way of using words.

A metaphor does not fuse things. It multiplies points of view. It doesn’t clarify but complicates. All metaphors are mixed.

We owe to our flair for substitutions both our craziest swervings from what is and our most fertile dreams of what might be.

Mathematics proves rigorous equivalences between interchangeable quantities. Metaphor spins improbable parallels between incommensurable qualities. ‘Each thought,’ Nietzsche says, ‘originates through equating the unequal.’

To avoid clichéd collocations, some writers smash them and build up their language from the most basic elements, and some substitute their own new compounds of metaphor.

Other languages use metaphors as embroidery. In english they are the warp and weft of the cloth itself.

9 Art is imagination not invention

Most people take imagination to be nothing more than invention, visualization or empathy. But these are its mongrel likenesses which are prized by those who lack the real thing.

‘Imagination, not invention,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is the supreme master of art as of life.’ Invention is the arid substitute for the free play of the mind. And our age is so frenetically inventive because it has no vision. Both naturalism and fantasy are sure signs of its atrophy.

True writers don’t dream up new worlds. They recast speech to bring out the richness of this one. They make form strange and truth vivid. It’s not the world but words that a text makes strange and luminous.

Most tales of fantasy lay bare how poor and grasping our fantasies are.

To imagine is not to make up things that might take place in real life. It is to see through to truths that are obscured by real life.

If God had had more imagination, he would have had no need to make a world.

Inventiveness mints new stories, but it requires a visionary power to raise their plain prose to poetry. Invention belongs to the mere tale, imagination to the telling. And the tale is all that most of us can take in.

10 The tropes of realism

Literature begins as ritual and myth, and it ends as fantasy and realism.

Romanticism and realism have combined to corrupt all our precepts and practices of art. They have dissolved form, which alone can inspire rich thoughts, and have put emotion, imitation and spectacle in its place.

A great artist shapes a world as rich and inexhaustible as the medium. A poor realist makes one as thin and meretricious as life.

The one style for which we now have any relish is a debased democratic realism. And so we can’t praise Shakespeare except by demoting him to a democrat and obsequious realist. But the few times that he brought commoners on stage it was to make them the butt of a joke. And his aim in writing was not to crack the canonical mould of form by forcing it to make room for real life. He took it over and filled it with more and more imagination.

Realism has starved art till it has grown as bloated and hollow as life itself. It is the style of a world emptied of meaning but crammed with stuff.

When painters figured out how to use perspective, the end of art was in sight.

11 Art is not reportage

People treat a fiction as if it were a guidebook to another time and place, a historical document or an archaeological artefact. So they deal with it as they would with a record of real acts and persons, on which they must pass moral judgment. And they call it complex if it poses a moral conundrum in which there is some right on each side. They enjoy it as if it were a piece of gossip about neighbours who lead slightly more exciting and scandalous lives. Those who have no imagination respond to fictions as if they were recitations of real life.

12 Art is not dream

Those who hatch no rich thoughts while they’re awake don’t doubt that they do so when they are asleep. Dreams come to us through the low gateway of ivory, imagination’s true visions through the lofty portals of horn. Sleep is the mind’s idiot amusement park. We may seem most like artists when we dream, but that is when they are least like artists. ‘A dreamer,’ Cocteau says, ‘is always a bad poet,’ as a madman is a bad actor who has lost all sense of self-mockery.

Art and thought have gained far more from the vacancy of sloth and tedium than from the gaudy hyperactivity of dreams. Dreams and wish-fulfilments are the type not of art but of kitsch.

We confuse art, the most formed and considered thing, with dreams, the most unformed and random one.

Dreams are like cheap novels, with too much story-content and too little form. In a great fiction form overshadows story.

Dreams are phantasmal but not imaginative. Art is imaginative but not fantastic.

13 The emptiness of invention

Good fictions draw their plots from life or else make them up from scratch. Great ones take them readymade from previous fictions. Shakespeare was able to find fresh words for all things, because he felt no urge to frame new stories. He sourced his plots from second-rate historians, chroniclers and romancers. He turned sows’ ears into silk purses, which his commentators turn back into sows’ ears. Only his words are his own. If the making up of stories is the test of originality, then he is the least original of writers. But now storytellers have to surprise us with their sharp plot twists, because they lack the capacity to reimagine their form. ‘It is,’ Wilde says, ‘only the unimaginative who ever invent.’

The task of art is not to give shape to life, but to give life to shape.

Good writers amuse us with their intricate tales. Great writers awe us with their rich truths. They forgo the crude and evanescent shocks of plotting for the enduring marvel of fresh insights.

14 Imagination is beyond belief

Belief petrifies imagination, and paralyses reason. What is faith but frozen vision? The mind is at its best when it flies out into the possible. But it is at its stupidest when it stays fixed in its beliefs. The mind at play can dare to tell the truth, because it has no desire to be believed.

Truth has one god, poetry a whole pantheon, ‘many gods and many voices.’ There are a plethora of gods, and Shakespeare is their prophet. ‘What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet.’ A poem glows, not by virtue of the one meaning that it states, but by the hundred that it darkly hints.

Shakespeare had the most realistic grasp of human life, because he knew that it was no more real than a play.

The tribute due to beauty is not love but admiration. And the tribute due to truth is not belief but comprehension.

15 Ideas are the enemies of art

Only the immature live their mental lives through the intermediary of ideas. These are the hard cash of the intellect. And a thinker, like a great speculator, works with a currency much richer and more abstract.

A well thought out worldview is a lead weight in a work of art, as Lucretius or Dante show. Shakespeare could find words for everything, because he believed in nothing. And he is free to dally with all views, because he is wedded to none of them.

Romantic writers aim to make you feel. Realistic writers aim to make you see. But the best rouse you to imagine. Yet they use a means other than ideas to do so. Most novels of ideas, such as those of Anatole France, Mann or Bellow, are novels of second-hand and second-class ideas. Shaw was an intellectual shopkeeper, retailing coarse copies of continental dainties to the english suburban trading class.

If a work of fiction has a worldview, then its author has not thought deeply enough.

16 The eternal beings of the mind

‘For the life after death,’ Butler says, ‘it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.’ To the imaginative mind existence is the drabbest attribute that a creature can possess. The gods, like the rest of the beings of fiction, mean no less for never having lived. A literary persona, like a deity, has life but stays free of the taint of being real and human. The figures of art, like those on Keats’s urn, win the one brief immortality that this world can grant. The work of art is the city that Tennyson wrote of, which ‘is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever.’

God and nature are both dead. But their names are still as useful as ever for poets to invoke.

17 Art against the creeds

The gods were one of our most fertile fictions, but one of our most fallow convictions.

Before the gods came there was art. And now that they have gone there will be nothing but kitsch. The stage of our dreams shrinks when they cease to play on it.

Art comes out of the decomposition of belief, when the old gods are departing, but reason has not yet arrived to fill their thrones. ‘Art rears its head where creeds relax,’ as Nietzsche said. It is a gas exhaled by decaying faith, and the christian one festered more luxuriantly than the rest.

Philosophers dissolve faith with their corrosive doubts, and art eludes it by its imaginative plenitude.

18 The dance of ravishment and disillusion

Art is a dance of ravishment and disillusion. Poets dream visions as sensual and tormenting as an unrequited lover’s. They imagine as aboundingly as they think severely and stringently. Their task is to make us drunk with their pure and fresh distillations, while sobering us from the flat confections of life. They dry up our trust in the lies by which we live. They don’t have enough faith to doubt, but we lack the mental daring to be disabused.

Some writers rouse you from your sleep, and some call you back to dream again. They wake your mind to its proper glory, and show you a new world of thought.

Only an audience of infants suspends its disbelief, and is transported out of its own place, and thinks it can play a part in the show.

CAUSES OF ART

19 Art does not come from the whole

The part is worth more than the whole. The effect is worth more than the cause. And the object is worth more than the being who makes it. Art is richer than the culture that gives birth to it.

A great work of art is not the product of a whole person, much less of a whole people. And great thoughts are not the work of a whole mind. They are the outcome of the symbolic codes in which they are conceived. The english are the least poetical people on earth, yet the english tongue has made the richest poetry.

20 The savage god

For lack of brutality art will die. ‘The modern artist must live by craft and violence,’ Pound wrote. ‘His gods are violent gods.’ Like some savage idol, art will have blood. The consummate artist would devote one half of life to making music and the rest to making war. Such a fierce creator would be half dandy and half thug, not an artistic Socrates, as Nietzsche claimed, but an artistic Caesar, still at work in art’s old vocation of decorating the slaughterhouse, and singing a song ‘as if he had a sword upstairs.’ Art is a priesthood, as Cézanne said. But it is a blood-steeped priesthood which still practises human sacrifice.

The sacraments of great art are valid, no matter how flawed the ministrant might be. But none of its sacraments are efficacious, however attentive the congregants might be.

No kingdom has been the source of more art and thought and science than the worldly kingdom of Christ, since none has been rent by such gory civil brawls. It gave rise to the finest works of the mind, as dung breeds the sweetest roses and lilies.

21 All things adverse

How but in fret and tumult could you shape an art of calm and poise? The one place you can write from is the end of your tether. The mind works most forcefully not in rest and composure, but in weariness and despair. It must come to the brink of disintegration, before it can build up a whole. Insomnia keeps a fatiguing but instructive night school. And debt has been the relentless muse of some of the best writers, such as Balzac, Dostoyevsky or Scott, chivvying them into inspiration.

Why would a soul that bathed in a tranquil bliss feel the need to make beauty or to find truth? Art thrives on all things adverse. If you would set the artist going, make their lot a touch less propitious. Dante was reborn by his banishment, and Machiavelli by his fall.

Paradise is decked with the works that artists make in their purgatory. The art ascends to a cool Elysium. The artist stays below in the flames, burning and unregenerate.

Neglect and obscurity, though they mar the artist, make the art, which blooms in the shade, where the artist would wilt and wither. The artist works, as Proust said, in the abyss of the primeval fears of silence, solitude and the dark.

22 The art of loss

Art is what we make of what we’ve lost. The work preys on the artist, to feed the art. A flawless piece grows up on the wreck of a life. And the success of a work of art is the sum of its maker’s failures. ‘Misfortune is the midwife of genius,’ wrote Napoleon.

The writer is a sponge, from which language squeezes all the thoughts it can, and then throws away.

If it weren’t for all our failures, we could grow no larger than our success.

The artist is content to be a fool, that the work might grow wise.

Life hates artists and thinkers, because they strip bare its secrets. But it is so stupid, that it makes them reveal even more by torturing them.

You earn perfection extremely cheap, at the mere cost of your life. A choice work is made not by the life but by the days, and not by the days but by the hours. The days and hours make the work. The life is a poor offering that is burnt up in its service.

There’s no need for the artist to have lived through a catastrophe. Life itself is all the catastrophe they need. Each cruel day takes from the artist and adds to the art. And for both of these the artist gives thanks. The work gains for all that its sad maker has lost.

23 Art is deliberate not unconscious

The unconscious is not an artist but an automaton. If the unconscious were creative, the beasts would be the best artists. And an artist makes art, not by descending into the unconscious, but by climbing to the most perfect consciousness of art. And in order to take in the fullness of art, you have to be as conscious and deliberate as the artist who made it. As Thoreau wrote, ‘We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.’

Art works by a studied mastery of deliberate form, not by the momentary indulgence of unrehearsed feeling. The spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion breaks out not in poetry but in pop tunes and kitsch.

A feather falls as fast as a cannonball. To fly, you need weight and effort.

The best authors may write from the subconscious, but so do the worst.

No art is dionysian, either in its inspiration or in its effects. Dionysus is the god of kitsch. Art does not well up from the oceanic, chthonic and orgiastic. It must be drawn out by solitude, patience and conscious craft.

Creators are sure that what they make is such a miracle, that they must disclaim their authorship of it and shyly ascribe it to some higher power, such as a god, or to some deeper source, such as the id.

24 Inspired trash

An artist must keep vigilantly on the watch for inspiration, and just as vigilantly on the watch against it. Beware that your brains don’t melt in its white heat. We might have more faith in it, if it were not so undiscriminating. It throws up all the duds as well as all the marvels. Scribblers of the most dull-witted ditties or chirpy lyrics don’t doubt that a trance takes hold of their soul when the muse visits. In those rare and blessed hours when the flame of inspiration hovers over me, all I make is lacquered trash.

It feels as delightful to be inspired as it does to be drunk, and it’s just as likely to lead you to the truth. Artists lay claim to inspiration, to validate what they make by the state of mind in which they made it. But how does the warmth that you feel when you form a thought vouch for its truth? Is the bliss of conceiving a child a pledge that it will tell no lies?

The constant rapture of inspiration is what keeps artists at work in spite of all the dispiriting dross that inspiration loads them with.

Inspiration is like a parasite that must paralyze the judgment before it lays its eggs in the mind, so that it won’t kill them before they have hatched. But it lays far more than are fit to live, and once out of its shell each must fight to prove its worth.

25 Art is made by form not feeling

An age of great poetry is not an age of strong feeling but an age of rich forms. ‘All that is beautiful and noble,’ Baudelaire says, ‘is the product of reason and calculation.’ Strenuous form counts for far more than slack sincerity.

Inspiration is the ease and fertility that comes with the prolonged application of a tensed will. Centuries of inherited practice steer the spontaneous strokes of all true designers. They owe their instant inspiration to the long craft and tradition which they boast it lifts them above. They carefully fill a pot with water, light a fire under it, and then call it inspiration when it boils.

Inspirations rain down on earth as thick as neutrinos. But they pass straight through most of us. They are detected only when they strike a genius.

Most of us speak with glib and hackneyed candour as poets create with glib and vivid artifice. They think as frivolously as the poem thinks profoundly. But by patient craft they raise their shallow frankness to the dispassionate veracity of art.

26 Inspiration is the consequence of creation not its cause

Poets don’t write because they have rich thoughts, they have rich thoughts because they write. They don’t create because they are inspired, they grow inspired by creating. Inspiration, as Renard said, is ‘the joy of writing. It does not come before writing.’ It is the bait that the muse lays to lure you to keep working.

A poet comes to be a poet by the habit of composing poems. The poem is the parent of the poet. ‘That which is creative,’ Keats said, ‘must create itself.’

You don’t write because you need to, you write because others have written. And then you go on writing because you have written. ‘All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate,’ Wilde wrote. ‘No poet sings because he must sing.’

EFFECTS OF ART

27 The effects of art

There are four great heresies of aesthetics. First we assume that style ought to try to look like its content. Secondly we hold that the meaning of a fiction is the tale that it tells, as the meaning of a painting is the scene that it depicts. Thirdly we are sure that great art must have strong emotional effects or ought to have a strong moral effect. And lastly we hold that a work of art should spring from the artist’s whole self.

People pay choice art the tribute of tawdry emotion which is the due of cheap soap opera. Like Proust’s Madame Verdurin, they greet with unearned feeling works which were conceived with rich poetic fire. And they deem that they thus confer on them the highest praise.

If great works of art touch deep chords in us, it is by playing on the most tenuous strings.

Great books live on in spite of the lack of interest of those who don’t read them and the misuse of them by those who do.

We don’t laugh at great comedies. We don’t sob at great tragedies. ‘The wittiest authors,’ Nietzsche says, ‘elicit a scarcely noticeable smirk.’ But the most asinine farce whips up gales of hilarity.

The spectators go through a far more impressive range of passions at a football game than they would at a play or piece of music.

28 The effects of art are cognitive

The effects of art are cognitive and not emotional. But it has so little cognitive effect on most of us, that we conclude that its function must be to stir our feelings. If a work touches us through our emotions, it must be kitsch.

Artists make such shrewd use of emotion, that they take it that the real goal of art must be to rouse strong emotions.

We take it that the purpose of art must be to move us. But who now cares enough for art to be moved by it? And kitsch treats us to such lavish feasts of feeling, what need have we of art?

Most people presuppose that art at its most potent should work on them like an emotional pornography, titillating them with an unceasing arousal of their worthy passions and climaxing in some happy ending. But even this would seem too bland if there weren’t some villain caught in the cogs of its moral machinery.

Art holds out to you nothing but the frail and makeshift comforts of perfect and permanent form. It falls short of our pretend praise, but outstrips our real one.

Our reception of a work of art is at best a pallid shadow of the radiance of its own vision.

29 The best art has the feeblest effects

We don’t doubt that what is precious, good or beautiful must touch the bottom of our hearts, and that if it fails to touch the bottom of our hearts then it can’t be precious, good or beautiful. But the impact of a work of art is in inverse proportion to its quality. We know a profound work by how insipidly it affects us, a genuine work by how spuriously it affects us, and a priceless one by how cheaply it affects us. You can tell a strong work by how limply it moves you, and a slipshod melodrama by how evocative it seems. Don’t the hollowest tales stir in us the most piquant effusions, be they tears or laughter, horror or condolence? A good book knows how to play on our feelings, a great one doesn’t care to.

The greatest works of art are those that give the smallest amount of pleasure to the smallest number of people.

The distillations of pure thought or pure poetry leave us stone-cold sober.

Poetry is a liquor which fails to intoxicate even the few who have a taste for it. Poetry is that which even those who love it care for least in a poem.

30 The impotence of art

To hear people blather about how profoundly art moves them, you would expect galleries, concert halls and theatres to be full of people blubbering or cackling, in shock or bliss, pale with terror, or flushed with compassion.

No work of art is able to do what the sublime is reputed to do. It cannot dizzy us with unbounded vistas, or sink us in unscaleable darkness, or frighten us with tempestuous violence. Nor can it curdle our blood with uncanny horrors, or melt our hearts with compassion, or prostrate us before unimaginable grandeurs, or plunge us in deep glooms, or send our minds reeling into fathomless voids. And great art is the furthest from being sublime, since it can find adequate forms for all it has to say. Its vision does not dimly make out things that are beyond its form to lend shape to.

The martyr dies for dogmas that will save no one. The artist works for effects which will impress no one. Renard in his last days voiced the double despair of all who have lived for their art. ‘I could begin all over again, and do it better. But no one would notice the difference.’

Most witty writing, such as Dorothy Parker’s, is too palpably pleased with its own wit to please us much.

31 Fake art has real effects

Art is the most genuine thing that we have, and so most of our responses to it are fake.

The most calculated pretences of feeling go straight to our hearts.

For every one who has been touched by a poem, there are a thousand whose souls have been saved by a pop song. And they learn how to live from comic book superheroes. In dark times they don’t turn to art to show them hard truths. They turn to kitsch to amuse and divert them.

Music is better at calling up a fake grief than at assuaging a real one. And if it does console us, it does so by distracting us.

We are soothed or roused by mere dross, and thrilled by the shoddiest tricks.

Life stirs us so much more feelingly than art. Life is pressing and personal, while art is cool and ageless. We are untouched by art’s bland perfections. But we delight in life’s squalid gaudiness.

It is hack style that stirs us, dull art that improves us, and phony affects that fire the soul. The one kind of verse that calls forth instant tears or smiles is on greeting cards.

People need to have everything adulterated for them. In its pure state it would have no effect on them at all. They don’t need a thing diluted so that they can bear its potency. They need to have it artificially flavoured so that they can taste it at all.

What impotent books ravished our youth.

32 Art does not remake us

We don’t grasp how rich a work of art is till it has remade us, and that would take more than a whole life.

How mortifying, that a great book finds me so facile, trite and forgettable when it reads me. And I don’t improve on a second reading. This book deserved a better reader than me. I shall strive to become that reader.

Great books are fastidious, and have no desire to read most people.

Cheap minds must cheapen a great work in order to make it their own, by sentimentalizing and simplifying it.

Culture calls many to the feast of great works of art, but it’s the works themselves that choose the few who are worthy of them.

You must be blind indeed, if you need a painting to teach you how to see, or a book to teach you what to feel. It’s not art but kitsch that makes us see or hear the world in a new way. Art does so only if it gets turned into an advertisement. If art could change the way we view the world, it would make artists of us all. Art doesn’t modify how you see anything save art, and then solely if you are an artist. A painter looks at each thing with the cold impassioned eye of a professional, on the alert for what might be of use for art.

33 Surprise

Real surprises go on astonishing us over and over. Yet they don’t show us things that we have never seen, but pour new light on what we see each day.

Surprise is to wonder as lust is to love. Surprise craves unremitting variation, wonder is content with the simple and unshifting. Ignorance loves to be surprised, but only knowledge can feel wonder. So surprise fades with familiarity, but wonder grows more bright.

The one kind of surprise that none of us likes is a new truth.

We keep on the watch for surprises, since they corroborate our stock views, which prime us to keep on the watch for surprises. ‘In the playhouse,’ Tristan Bernard says, ‘the onlookers want to be surprised, but by what they expect.’

34 Bright surfaces, false depth

‘It is only shallow people,’ as Wilde says, ‘who do not judge by appearances.’ Why are we so reluctant to rest our senses on the surface where surfaces are grace? Why prefer treacherous clefts to translucent shallows? Surfaces alone are fathomless. ‘The less it means,’ as Warhol said, ‘the more beautiful it is.’

What a rich text unfolds each time you read it is not more depth but a more lush and complex surface.

Form rescues us from the depths. And yet in order to love art, we feel we must act as if art goes deep. A painting or a piece of music may seem to mean something, but don’t they mean only on the outside? Deep within they are pure form. This is their true meaning, and this is why it is so hard to make out what it means. ‘Form and colour,’ as Wilde says, ‘tell us of form and colour. That is all.’ But we are too shallow to see the wonders that stare us in the face.

Beauty does not dive to an unplumbed depth. It basks on a boundless surface which dazzles our eyes. Beauty is skin deep, ugliness is soul deep. What heart is as handsome as a handsome face? What soul is as beautiful as a beautiful body and its lovely covering of flesh?

If beauty comes from within, is it any wonder we humans are such ugly sods?

THE AMORALITY OF ART

35 Art is an antinomian

Imagination, like the body, is free from sin because it has no conscience.

True artificers treat the moral code of the age as a kind of furniture. They may note how ugly it is, but they don’t try to reform it. It’s those who don’t know their own trade that try to renovate or reconfigure it. Moral seriousness in a work of art would be a frivolous shirking of the real seriousness of art. Yet this is the sole kind of seriousness that most of us know or care for. ‘The morality of art,’ Wilde says, ‘consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.’ Right and wrong are nets that enmesh small souls.

Creation is love. Criticism is justice.

It’s hard to tell whether studying literature for the sake of the morals it instils would do more harm to literature or to morals.

Shakespeare was a moral and religious idiot, which is a clear mark of a great artist. He used the moral notions of his time and place as theatrical props, and he could scarcely keep in mind which of his puppets were supposed to be pagans or christians.

36 Artists don’t forgive, they justify

The creatures of fiction inhabit a spacious country of the mind. So why do we persist in judging them by the stifling moral protocols of the low cavern in which we lodge? Pious writers pardon their villains, to tout their own good heart, and to show that the villains have not earned it. Peerless writers, like Shakespeare, Milton or Dostoyevsky, don’t indulge their malefactors with cheap clemency. They charge them with their own demoniac force. They send their rain on the just and on the unjust. Thus they show us kinds of justice more capacious than our suburban codes of right and wrong.

Shakespeare gives the devil his due, not because he cares for justice, but because he knows that he can count on the devil to repay him by acting as a conduit for some of his best verse.

Moralizing writers such as Dickens draw much more vivid and complex villains than heroes, since they feel no temptation to turn them into whitewashed portraits of themselves. But when honest and unsparing writers portray rogues and monsters, they use themselves as models.

37 Bad art, good intentions

Only secondary artists care so much for the world that they want to reform it, though some of the best, like Picasso, still fancy that they do.

‘All bad art,’ as Wilde said, ‘is the result of good intentions.’ Art is strong enough to rise above its producer’s best purposes or worst prejudices. But it can’t fulfil the former or fix the latter. Art cares too little about our prejudices to want to overthrow them. And our prejudices are too coarse to be touched by art.

A strong poet such as Milton dares to assert as an artist the same overweening pride that he damns in Lucifer.

38 Sermons in story

Any glib storyteller can make the good prevail, but only one as fine as Austen can make it fascinating.

People relish fictions that show the triumph of the fine qualities that they don’t doubt they possess. I am touched by tales of people like me, who choose love and integrity instead of lucre, and are then recompensed with a fortune. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ And when they are added unto us, we take this as a sign that we must have found the kingdom.

Sermonizing writers, like Dickens, sense that a bald moral victory will not do. They must show you the good gaining the world, and wrongdoers forfeiting their loot as well as their souls. They guarantee that if you leave off jostling to get what you want, it’s sure to fall in your lap. Though excoriating greed, they take care to make their heroes millionaires. And they rail at vengefulness, while arranging a crafty retribution for the culpable. And though they paint hypocrisy as the one unforgivable sin, their own art works by devious indirection. Their narration makes use of all the wiles for which they so righteously condemn their villains.

Fictions never tire of warning their readers of the dangers of taking fiction as a guide to life.

39 Art does not improve the world

The world is in such a mess, that if poets are in fact its unacknowledged legislators, would we not do well to burn their books?

Only dull artists could improve us and crop us to the shape of the latest moral stamp.

The only writers who have any influence in the real world are those that are as shallow, vulgar and mediocre as the real world.

A poem that could change the world would have to be doggerel.

I have no doubt that it’s myself that art improves, and my neighbours that it needs to.

Authors can’t set the world to rights by their scrupulous use of language. They can’t even set language to rights. The corruption of language is not the cause of corruption in society or thought. It is not even an effect of it. If the misuse of language caused the ruin of the state, why when language was pristine were states brutal and obscurantist autocracies?

40 The egoism of the artist

Art is indirect, egotistical and devouring. It acts more like vindictiveness than pity.

Arctic hearts have ardent imaginations. Those who live for art, as Keats says, ‘must have self-concentration.’ They conceive so fervently, because they sympathize so coolly. What sets them on is not a generous and dissipating compassion, but an omnivorous and focused self-will. Their sympathies are both profligate and thrifty, on the watch for any scenes that might fertilize their art, or for any feeling that they might milk for a cheap effect.

As a payload, the ego is a deadweight for artists. But it’s a good propellant to fuel their explorations.

The iron integrity of an artist is one sort of ordinary egoism. They take ‘as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.’ They create without risk, and destroy without responsibility. Their hearts are at once unworldly and unscrupulous. ‘I value people for what I can get out of them,’ said the sainted Beethoven. They have an icy fascination with the lives of others, and we mistake their fascination for pity and their iciness for impartiality.

We take it that the task of art must be to celebrate ordinary lives. But Stevens, when asked what set him off as a poet from an ordinary man, sanguinely retorted ‘inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man.’

41 Art is irresponsible

Art gazes like an imperturbable olympian on the inferno of this world. Like the deities of Epicurus, it sits blank and uncaring. And its makers are like the bright gods, moral infants with more than mortal capabilities. The few who aspire to build a work for the ages must, like the ages, be unhasting and inexorable. The finest, as Flaubert said, are calm and pitiless.

We are now so incurably ill, that we mistake artists for healers, and look to them to relieve us. But they have the ruddy carelessness of the hearty, while those who write for therapy make their readers sick.

The artist’s thought is as apt to flash out in playful cruelty as in heart-rending pity. In his scenes of deepest pathos, Shakespeare is laughing at his puppets, at us, and at himself. He could see the jocular side of Gloucester’s blinding as well as its horrors. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be.’

42 We care for the characters of fiction

The sterile sympathies of art don’t rouse us to share the sorrows of live men and women. I gorge myself on pity in literature, as I would choke on it in life. Have we learnt to pity by simulating bad art? Or have bad artists grown maudlin by mimicking us? We think that we feel for figures in books because they seem real. But it may be that we feel for people in life because we look on them as if they were figures in books and suffered from the same kind of troubles. We are vigilant to see justice done at every turn, save where it might do some real good. History or fiction lack the power to make you care for what lies outside them. They may move you to feel for others, but only for the others of history or of fiction.

The true pathos we feel for great characters comes not from our belief that they are like people in real life but from our knowledge that life holds no place for such as they. They belong to an eternal country.

43 Art fails to make us feel for others

Why do we assume that artists have no better use for their imagination than to train it to view the world as the rest of us who are not artists and have no imagination view it? Their task is not to feel the same as us. It is to think quite differently from us, and they have a gift for fashioning forms which we would be at a loss to frame. They must work not by empathy, which stays behind to nurse aching hearts, but by audacity, which dares to press on and leave them uncared for. Sympathy sees likenesses, art makes differences. Empathy is a mirror, imagination is a torch.

By reading fiction we don’t learn to pity the afflicted. We learn to feel that we must be as grand and as significant as its heroes, and that the rest of humankind are as unreal and as marginal as the bit parts. Keep clear of people who have formed their moral sensibility on the pattern of great novels. They are prone to be self-righteous, pharisaic, devious, mawkish, malevolent and cruel.

Art does not enlarge our sympathies. It plays on them. But it flatters us that it has only brought out their real strength.

44 The infernal method

Art owes more to evil than to good, both for its content and for the alienated energies which goad those who frame it.

Scrupulous writers don’t waste their evil or their truth on life. They save their justice for their style, and their mischief for their thoughts. They teach their malice to think, and their virtues to dance.

The artist moulds celestial shapes from infernal fires, marrying calm harmony and wild fantasy.

Sin is both the motive and the material of art. There would be no art, if we had stayed in Eden.

A work of art, like the resurrected flesh, ‘is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption.’ How is it born, but by debauching innocence? An artist is an undiscovered traitor. They are so eloquent in broadcasting their love for our sad dust because they have left it so far behind them. The only pacts they make are with the prince of sin.

45 The corrupt creator

The artist stems from a long and august lineage of magicians, mountebanks, pimps, quacks, counterfeiters, loafers, spongers, grifters, forgers, thieves and liars. Great writers may have the traits that go to make a great banker, as Stendhal claimed. But don’t they need still more the traits that make a great bankrupt, reckless audacity and a carelessness with truth? ‘I have heard of no crime that I should be incapable of committing,’ as Goethe said.

Writers are the sort of people who would eavesdrop at keyholes and then make up what they have heard. They choose to lie even when they would be safe in telling the truth, and they insist on telling the truth where we want them to lie.

The artist is a liar that art makes use of to show us the truth.

Wordsworth, who wrote so tenderly of leech gatherers and idiot boys, joined in a scam to profit from actuarial computations of the lifespan of old men. Faulkner said that, in order to win the time to write, ‘a writer would rob his mother. The Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.’

Hold fast to your integrity, but don’t let it taint your work. As Catullus wrote, singers ought to be chaste, but not their song. ‘Art,’ Picasso said, ‘is never chaste.’

TASTE AND TRADITION

Contents

Tastes

Standards

The medium

Forms and genres

Tradition

Periods

Beauty

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.

Let pleasure guide what you read, but only if you have first learnt to read for some worthier end than pleasure.

‘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.

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.

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 the money to buy.

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.

Anyone poorer than me must lack the sense to know how to get money, and anyone wealthier lacks 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.

The bad taste we are born with craves what is false and spurious, while the only taste that we learn is to disguise or deck out the vulgarity that we are born with.

8 Good taste must be learnt

Bad taste is born, good taste is made. Nature will supply you with your 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