Arthur Ransome

“ Daudet’s writing was always a means of living for him. His own life could be multiplied indefinitely by the glosses he put upon it. He is not, like Coppée, a disillusioned man remembering dreams, paining himself with the memory of the boy he was. Daudet, far from envying that boy of whom he writes, seems to be still identical with him, and tells his escapades as if they were yesterday’s, as indeed they might be. Even when he tries to write disillusioned novels, he sits in a rosy cloud, and is irrepressibly happy in spite of them. He never knows whether pain or pleasure is the more enjoyable. ”

“ Art for Art’s sake was a battle-cry, and, to understand it, we had to understand what those who used it fought. Art for Life’s sake is also a battle-cry, though it includes in those four words a suggestion not only of the function of art but of its nature. Let us review the enemies we attack with those words upon our lips. What do we fight against? What are the misunderstandings which in our time encourage the production of false, of secondary art, and obscure the excellence of the finest? ”

“ Some preoccupations, however boldly attacked, are not to be conquered at a blow. The preoccupation of sex is unlike that of a theory of art. Conquered again and again by expression, it returns with a new face, a new mystery, a new power of building the intellect, a new Gorgon to be seen in the mirror of art and decapitated. As the man changes so does Medusa vary her attack, and so must he vary the manner of her death. Now he will write a Physique de l’Amour, and, like Schopenhauer, relieve himself of the problem of sex by reducing it to its lowest terms. ”

“ Let us examine from this point of view the fundamental quarrel between the theorists of “Art for Art’s sake” and the moralists. What are their respective beliefs?
The Moralist.—The noblest end of being is to be good. All human activities must serve this end or be pernicious. Art, the most eloquent, the most powerful of pleaders, cannot, without violating the trust that humanity puts in her, turn devil’s advocate. Let the artist be as skilful an artist as he can, but let him make a right use of his excellence. In peace we ask no more of a good shot than that he hit the bull’s eye of a target. ”

“ He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses, and, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in the dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his existence.13 This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world, the universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory, clearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to have a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which itself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. ”

“ The thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more185 important to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured. It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. ”

“ They were written by a man to whom sustained effort was impossible, a man elusive, fugace, who could not settle in one place or in one mood, and perhaps found in these little scraps of goldsmithery the nearest approach to permanence and solidity in his life. He was a hunter of the moment, and these fantasies are the only trophies of his chase. Their form seems made for him and he for it, and he needed no models for the gait of his soul.
Bertrand was not, any more than Leigh Hunt, a great and noble personality. ”

“ And we, reading those words, collaborate with him in the re-creation of the work of art for whose notation they serve, and, with our memories behind us, not his, ourselves win out of the river of unconsciousness such a moment, different a little from his, our own, filled delicately with our vitality, and giving us, for the vitality we have given it, an increased consciousness of the life that is in ourselves. The conscious life of art does not imply what is known with contempt as self-consciousness, which means a hampering inability to forget not self but other people’s eyes. ”

“ Life is very much like one of those Japanese nests of coloured boxes; you open the little round scarlet wooden cylinder, and there is a green one inside. You open that and find a blue.80 Within the blue is a scarlet one again. It is so with life. No state of disillusionment is final. There is always another behind it which will turn what seemed to be an unemotional acceptance of life as it is into a regretted and fantastic dream. Coppée is less conscious of the infinite endurance of mutability than of his regret for particular yesterdays. ”

“ It is a comfort and a joy to a thinker when he can say that a formula of his has almost been proposed by minds that have approached his problem along roads other than his own. When he can find statements, true in themselves but inadequate, pegging out, as it were, the ground from which his formula has been dug, he can feel that it is no mere chance that has given it a momentary appearance of usefulness. He can speak of it with the solid confidence that it has behind it the collaboration of his predecessors. ”

“ There is at the present day a widespread dissatisfaction with historians of literature. It is impossible not to feel that their dicta do not matter, that their sense of perspective is wrong or uncertain, that their books are of no use to us except as bibliographies. A new definition of literature is needed, that shall give them some scale, some standard to which they can refer. For without such standard or scale, they can do no more than gossip, or judge poetry by its passion, by its sense, by its smoothness, or by any other half-remembered scrap from a definition that is no longer adequate. ”

“ To these two we reply, believing that art is for life’s sake.—When a man tells you that his work of art has nothing to do with morality, ask him, With whose morality has it nothing to do? He will be compelled to admit that the morality of which he is thinking is the morality he attributes to somebody else. Morality is a code of values, differing in each individual, and dictated to each individual by his character and his environment. No artist, no human being, escapes morality, and the code of values that is his will be one of the determining influences on an artist’s vision of life. ”

“ I cannot imagine Kant or Berkeley speaking so of their ideas.
Moving now in a smaller circle of consciousness, let us examine Nietzsche’s view of the world and man and man’s activity within this eternally recurring universe. “The world,” he says, “as we know it, is representation and erroneous representation: the world, if we could know it, might well give us a sensation of disillusion, ‘so full of meaning, so deep, so wonderful, bearing happiness and unhappiness in its bosom,’ is the world that we unconsciously create.” ”

“ FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
AN ESSAY IN COMPREHENSION
To I. C. R. Philosophy in the hands of philosophers tends always to hide the tremors of its exciting conception in the dried abstract statements of dialectic. A philosopher’s pride is in the impersonal nature of his thought. It must stand by itself, and work like a piece of machinery, on which the maker’s name is the only sign that it was once a daring, personal adventure of the intellect, the instincts and the senses of the body of a man. ”

“ We have seen the school of art, if we may speak of a school of art, that carried the banner on which those words were inscribed, tire and fall away as the nineteenth century drew to its close, until now the tattered banner, with words almost illegible, is carried only by a schoolboy who joined the procession late and marches on, unconscious that the parade is over, that he is marching alone, and that nobody is looking at him. ”

“ In the fine art of literature, the identity sought between words and meaning is an identity between words and the thing they represent in its private atmosphere, with its particular meaning to the particular mind that thinks it. ”

“ Not the least of its knaveries has been this substitution of a condition of art for the function of art, which, as I hope to show, is life itself. A work of art suggests the achievement of the beautiful. That may be its immediate object. It is not its ultimate object. It may be an essential condition. It is not a function. Art for art’s sake means the substitution of condition for function, and, as the beautiful can never be a function of anything, the implicit denial that art has a function at all. “All art is quite useless.” ”

“ So ended a life that was like a thread blown in the wind, swung this way and that,55 without weight, and at last torn from its weak hold and whirled away over the edge of the world. Bertrand’s life was that of the real Bohemian, whose struggle is not the less difficult because his head is high and his eyes, instead of seeing where he is going, are full of magnificent things. ”

“ He will come out by a different way or not at all. The most powerful Minotaur of our day does not dismay him. Confident in his own probity, he will walk calmly among the men of science and bring an Esthétique de la langue française, or a Physique de l’Amour, meat of unaccustomed richness, to lay before their husk-fed deity.
In criticism, as in creation, he does not like things half-done. ”

“ The formula of kinetic and potential speech illumines not only the critic’s business but also that of the historian. It enables him to link together in a single scheme the prose of Goldsmith with that of Pater and the poetry of the eighteenth century with poetry, like that of the Symbolists of the nineteenth, so different as to seem completely unrelated. It enables him to explain a phenomenon that he has usually alluded to as a mere curious accident, the fact that there have been ages when poetry has been popular and others in which it has been the possession of a few. ”

“ The only safe audience for a writer is that undiscoverable and absolute judge, who, from his niche in our consciousness,69 signs now and again his knowledge that such and such an expression is truly expressed, is really expression and not an incomplete and muffling mask. That other audience, whose lips open, whose eyes smile or weep as we read to them, is not a judge of art. Its values are not aesthetic. Its most obvious criticisms are those of laughter and tears, and these are written too clearly not to become more important to us than they should. ”

“ He is really asking for self-conscious life, for the kind of life that is only given by art, whether by the contemplation of the work of artists or by the private acts of artistic creation, which we all perform, more or less often, and which are indeed processes of becoming conscious acts of scrupulous, observant and comprehensive living. I can think of no book better fitted to lead a student into philosophy, and I am not sure that it is not also the best book with which to begin the study of Walter Pater. It is certainly the book that made the most various demands upon his personality. ”

“ ALPHONSE DAUDET Daudet’s was the scintillant, flamelike vitality that makes its possessor the youngest in whatever company he may find himself. Anatole France writes of him that he believes no human creature ever loved nature and art with a more ardent and more generous affection, or enjoyed the universe with more delight, more force, and more tenderness. ”

“ When a play is not the artist’s learning a moment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building at dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be empty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion. ”

“ No longer hiding our faces from that muddied storm that sweeps irresistibly from the future to the past, a medley of confused figures, a babel of cries of joy, of laughter, of sorrow, of pain, by its means we lift our heads, and, learning from the isolation of moments in eternity, to imagine the isolation of all such moments, we conquer that storm, and accept pain, joy, laughter or sorrow, with equal gratitude, in our continually realised desire to feel ourselves alive. ”

“ That which attracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and hold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad others with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is a moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture, words, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such.14 Two bars are heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a jumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost of an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... ”

“ I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in believing, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion, that all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic conception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation shall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for this reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to himself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be representative of more than one moment, it would be representative of more than one man. ”

“ For us Nietzsche died in January 1889; the ten years through which he lived unconscious of himself were like the months of M. Valdemar. He was a dead man, who felt the cold and the heat, and drank tea with the living. It is usual for his enemies to explain his work by his madness; it is wiser to consider his madness as the result of too much working, to count his life as ended when he lost his sanity, and, remembering the clarity of his last writings, to refuse so easy an escape from the task of appreciation. ”

“ We fight first against a political valuation of art, that imagines poetry, pictures and music as auxiliaries in the reconstruction or conservation of the state, and judges them by their efficiency as political pamphlets.
We fight secondly against an educational valuation of art, that judges works of art by the accuracy of the facts they happen to embody, the accuracy of the pictures they paint of this or that form of life, the clearness with which they illustrate generalisations. ”