The world divides itself into people who can discriminate and
people who cannot discriminate. This is the ultimate test of
sensitiveness; and sensitiveness alone separates us and unites us.
We all create, or have created for us by the fatality of our
temperament, a unique and individual universe. It is only by
bringing into light the most secret and subtle elements of this
self-contained system of things that we can find out where our lonely
orbits touch.
Like all primordial aspects of life the situation is double-edged and
contradictory.
The further we emphasise and drag forth, out of their reluctant
twilight, the lurking attractions and antipathies of our destiny, the
nearer, at once, and the more obscure, we find ourselves growing, to
those about us.
And the wisdom of the difficult game we are called upon to play,
lies in just this very antinomy,--in just this very contradiction--that
to make ourselves better understood we have to emphasise our
differences, and to touch the universe of our friend we have to travel
away from him, on a curve of free sky.
The cultivation of what in us is lonely and unique creates of
necessity a perpetual series of shocks and jars. The unruffled nerves
of the lower animals become enviable, and we fall into moods of
malicious reaction and vindictive recoil. And yet,--for Nature makes
use even of what is named evil to pursue her cherished ends--the
very betrayal of our outraged feelings produces no unpleasant effect
upon the minds of others. They know us better so, and the sense of
power in them is delicately gratified by the spectacle of our
weakness; even as ours is by the spectacle of theirs.
The art of discrimination is the art of letting oneself go, more and
more wilfully; letting oneself go along the lines of one's unique
predilections; letting oneself go with the resolute push of the
inquisitive intellect; the intellect whose rôle it is to register--with
just all the preciseness it may--every one of the little discoveries we
make on the long road.
The difference between interesting and uninteresting critics of life,
is just the difference between those who have refused to let
themselves be thus carried away, on the stream of their fatality, and
those who have not refused. That is why in all the really arresting
writers and artists there is something equivocal and disturbing when
we come to know them.
Genius itself, in the last analysis, is not so much the possession of
unusual vision--some of the most powerful geniuses have a vision
quite mediocre and blunt--as the possession of a certain demonic
driving-force, which pushes them on to be themselves, in all the
fatal narrowness and obstinacy, it may be, of their personal
temperament.
The art of discrimination is precisely what such characters are born
with; hence the almost savage manner in which they resent the
beckonings of alien appeals; appeals which would draw them out of
their pre-ordained track.
One can see in the passionate preference displayed by men of real
power for the society of simple and even truculent persons over that
of those who are urbanely plastic and versatile, how true this is.
Between their own creative wilfulness and the more static obstinacy
of these former, there is an instinctive bond; whereas the tolerant
and colourless cleverness of the latter disconcerts and puzzles them.
This is why--led by a profound instinct--the wisest men of genius
select for their female companions the most surprising types, and
submit to the most wretched tyranny. Their craving for the sure
ground of unequivocal naturalness helps them to put up with what
else were quite intolerable.
For it is the typical modern person, of normal culture and playful
expansiveness, who is the mortal enemy of the art of discrimination.
Such a person's shallow cleverness and conventional good-temper is
more withering to the soul of the artist than the blindest bigotry
which has the recklessness of genuine passion behind it.
Not to like or to dislike people and things, but to tolerate and
patronise a thousand passionate universes, is to put yourself out of
the pale of all discrimination. To discriminate is to refine upon one's
passions by the process of bringing them into intelligent
consciousness. The head alone cannot discriminate; no! not with all
the technical knowledge in the world; for the head cannot love nor
hate, it can only observe and register.
Nor can the nerves alone discriminate; for they can only cry aloud
with a blind cry. In the management of this art, what we need is the
nerves and the head together, playing up to one another; and,
between them, carrying further--always a little further--the silent
advance, along the road of experience, of the insatiable soul.
It is indeed only in this way that one comes to recognise what is,
surely, of the essence of all criticism; the fact, namely, that the
artists we care most for are doing just the thing we are doing
ourselves--doing it in their own way and with their own inviolable
secret, but limited, just as we are, by the basic limitations of all flesh.
The art of discrimination is, after all, only the art of appreciation,
applied negatively as well as positively; applied to the flinging away
from us and the reducing to non-existence for us, of all those forms
and modes of being, for which, in the original determination of our
taste, we were not, so to speak, born.
And this is precisely what, in a yet more rigorous manner, the artists
whose original and subtle paths we trace, effected for themselves in
their own explorations.
What is remarkable about this cult of criticism is the way in which it
lands us back, with quite a new angle of interest, at the very point
from which we started; at the point, namely, where Nature in her
indiscriminate richness presents herself at our doors.
It is just here that we find how much we have gained, in delicacy of
inclusion and rejection, by following these high and lonely tracks.
All the materials of art, the littered quarries, so to speak, of its
laborious effects have become, in fact, of new and absorbing interest.
Forms, colours, words, sounds; nay! the very textures and odours of
the visible world, have reduced themselves, even as they lie here, or
toss confusedly together on the waves of the life-stream, into
something curiously suggestive and engaging.
We bend our attention to one and to another. We let them group
themselves casually, as they will, in their random way, writing their
own gnomic hieroglyphics, in their own immense and primeval
language, as the earth-mothers heave them up from the abyss or
draw them down; but we are no more confined to this stunned and
bewildered apprehension.
We can isolate, distinguish, contrast.
We can take up and put down each delicate fragment of potential
artistry; and linger at leisure in the work-shop of the immortal gods.
Discrimination of the most personal and vehement kind in its
relation to human works of art, may grow largely and indolently
receptive when dealing with the scattered materials of such works,
spread out through the teeming world.
Just here lies the point of separation between the poetic and the
artistic temper. The artist or the art-critic, discriminating still, even
among these raw materials of human creation, derives an elaborate
and subtle delight from the suggestiveness of their colours, their
odours, and their fabrics--conscious all the while of wondrous and
visionary evocations, wherein they take their place.
The poetical temper, on the other hand, lets itself go with a more
passive receptivity; and permits the formless, wordless brooding of
the vast earthpower to work its magic upon it, in its own place and
season. Not, however, in any destruction of the defining and
registering functions of the intellect does this take place.
Even in the vaguest obsessions of the poetical mind the intellect is
present, watching, noting, weighing, and, if you will, discriminating.
For, after all, poetry, though completely different in its methods, its
aims, and its effects from the other arts, is itself the greatest of all
the arts and must be profoundly aware, just as they are aware, of the
actual sense-impressions which produce its inspiration.
The difference, perhaps, is that, whereas the materials for the other
arts become most suggestive when isolated and disentangled from
the mass, the materials of poetry, though bringing with them, in this
case or in the other, their particular sense-accompaniment, must be
left free to flow organically together, and to produce their effect in
that primeval wanton carelessness, wherein the gods themselves
may be supposed to walk about the world.
One thing at least is clear. The more we acquire a genuine art of
discrimination amid the subtler processes of the mind the less we
come to deal in formulated or rationalistic theory.
The chief rôle of the intellect in criticism is to protect us from the
intellect; to protect us from those tiresome and unprofitable
"principles of art" which in everything that gives us thrilling
pleasure are found to be magnificently contradicted!
Criticism, whether of literature or art, is but a dead hand laid upon a
living thing, unless it is genuine response, to the object criticised, of
something reciprocal in us. Criticism in fact, to be of any value,
must be a stretching out of our whole organic nature, a sort of
sacramental partaking, with both senses and soul, of the bread and
wine of the "new ritual."
The actual written or spoken word in explanation of what we have
come to feel about the thing offered, is after all a mere subordinate
issue.
The essential matter is that what we experience in regard to the new
touch, the new style, should be a personal and absorbing plunge into
an element which we feel at once to have been, as it were, "waiting"
to receive us with a predestined harmony.
The point I am seeking to make is that what is called the "critical
attitude" towards new experiments in art is the extreme opposite of
the mood required in genuine criticism.
That negation of interest in any given new thing which is not only
allowable but commendable, if we are to preserve the outlines of our
identity from the violence of alien intrusion, becomes a sheer waste
of energy when it is transmuted into ponderous principles of
rejection.
Give us, ye gods, full liberty to pass on our way indifferent. Give us
even the illuminating insight of unbounded hate. But deliver us--that
at least we pray--from the hypocrisy of judicial condemnation!
More and more does it become necessary, as the fashion of new
things presses insolently upon us, to clear up once for all and in a
largely generous manner, the difficult question of the relation of
experiment to tradition.
The number of shallow and insensitive spirits who make use of the
existence of these new forms, to display--as if it were a proof of
aesthetic superiority--their contempt for all that is old, should alone
lead us to pause and consider.
Such persons are as a rule quite as dull to real subtleties of thought
and feeling as any absolute Philistine; and yet they are the ones who
with their fuss about what they call "creative art" do so much to
make reasonable and natural the ordinary person's prejudices against
the whole business.
They actually have the audacity to claim as a mark of higher
aesthetic taste their inability to appreciate traditional beauty. They
make their ignorance their virtue; and because they are dull to the
delicate things that have charmed the centuries, they clamorously
acclaim the latest sensational novelty, as though it had altered the
very nature of our human senses.
One feels instinctive suspicion of this wholesale way of going to
work, this root and branch elimination of what has come down to us
from the past. It is right and proper--heaven knows--for each
individual to have his preferences and his exclusions. He has not,
one may be quite sure, found himself if he lacks these. But to have
as one's basic preference a relinquishing in the lump of all that is old,
and a swallowing in the lump of all that is new, is carrying things
suspiciously far.
One begins to surmise that a person of this brand is not a rebel or a
revolutionary, but quite simply a thick-skin; a thick-skin endowed
with that insolence of cleverness which is the enemy of genius and
all its works.
True discrimination does not ride rough-shod over the past like this.
It has felt the past too deeply. It has too much of the past in its own
blood. What it does, allowing for a thousand differences of
temperament, is to move slowly and warily forward, appropriating
the new and assimilating, in an organic manner, the material it offers;
but never turning round upon the old with savage and ignorant
spleen.
But it is hard, even in these most extreme cases, to draw rigorous
conclusions.
Life is full of surprises, of particular and exceptional instances. The
abnormal is the normal; and the most thrilling moments some of us
know are the moments when we snatch an inspiration from a quarter
outside our allotted circle.
There are certain strangely constituted ones in our midst whose
natural world, it might seem, existed hundreds or even thousands of
years ago. Bewildered and harassed they move through our modern
streets; puzzled and sad they gaze out from our modern windows.
They seem, in their wistful way, hardly conscious of the movements
about them, and all our stirring appeals leave them wearily cold.
It is with the very wantonness of ironic insult that our novelty-mongers
come to these, bringing fantastic inventions. What is it to them,
children of a nobler past, that this or the other newly botched-up
caprice should catch for an hour the plaudits of the mob?
On the other hand, one comes now and again, though rarely enough,
upon exceptional natures whose proper and predestined habitation
seems to be rather with our children's children than with us.
The word has gone forth touching what is called super-man; but the
natures I speak of are not precisely that.
Rather are they devoid in some strange manner of the gross weapons,
the protective skin, adapted to the shocks and jolts of our rough and
tumble civilisation. They seem prepared and designed to exist in a
finer, a more elaborate, in a sense a more luxurious world, than the
one we live in.
Their passions are not our passions; nor is their scorn our scorn. If
the magic of the past leaves them indifferent, the glamour of the
present finds them antipathetic and resentful. With glacial coldness
they survey both past and present, and the frosty fire of their
devotion is for what, as yet, is not.
Dull indeed should we be, if in the search of finer and more delicate
discriminations in the region of art, we grew blunt and blind to the
subtle-edged pathos of all these delicate differences between man
and man.
It is by making our excursions in the aesthetic world thus entirely
personal and idiosyncratic that we are best spared from the bitter
remorse implicit in any blunders in this more complex sphere.
We have learned to avoid the banality of the judicial decisions in the
matter of what is called beautiful. We come to learn their even
greater uselessness in the matter of what is called the good.
To discriminate, to discriminate endlessly, between types we adore
and types we suspect, this is well and wise; but in the long result we
are driven, whether it is pleasant to our prejudices or not that it
should be so, crushingly to recognise that in the world of human
character there are really no types at all; only tragic and lonely
figures; figures unable to express what they want of the universe, of
us, of themselves; figures that can never, in all the aeons of time, be
repeated again; figures in whose obliquities and ambiguities the
mysteries of all the laws and all the prophets are transcended!