Artists of the Right

by Kerry Bolton

  . . . The only justification of your slovenly appearance it is true is that it is perfectly emblematic.[363]

  In 1918, Lewis was commissioned as an official war artist for the Canadian War Records Office. Here some of his paintings are in the Vorticist style, depicting soldiers as machines of the same quality as their artillery. Again, man is shown as an automaton. However, the war destroyed the Vorticist movement, Hulme and Gaudier-Brzeska both succumbing, and Blast did not go beyond two issues.

  The Code of a Herdsman

  Lewis’s neo-Nietzscheanism is succinctly expressed in an essay published in The Little Review in 1917, “The Code of a Herdsman.” Among the 18 points:

  In accusing yourself, stick to the Code of the Mountain. But crime is alien to a Herdsman’s nature. Your self must be your Caste.

  Cherish and develop side by side, your six most constant indications of different personalities. You will then acquire the potentiality of six men . . . Each trench must have another one behind it.

  Spend some of your time every day in hunting your weaknesses caught from commerce with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and vindictively as a monkey his fleas. You will find yourself swarming with them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not bring them up on the mountain . . .

  Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms, or the reverse, for that is a compromise with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine a fine herd though still a herd. There is no fine herd. The cattle that call themselves “gentlemen” you will observe to be a little cleaner. It is merely cunning and produced by a product called soap . . .

  Be on your guard with the small herd of gentlemen. There are very stringent regulations about the herd keeping off the sides of the mountain. In fact your chief function is to prevent their encroaching. Some in moments of boredom or vindictiveness are apt to make rushes for the higher regions. Their instinct fortunately keeps them in crowds or bands, and their trespassing is soon noted. Contradict yourself. In order to live you must remain broken up.

  Above this sad commerce with the herd, let something veritably remain “un peu sur la montagne.” Always come down with masks and thick clothing to the valley where we work. Stagnant gasses from these Yahooesque and rotten herds are more dangerous than the wandering cylinders that emit them. . . . Our sacred hill is a volcanic heaven. But the result of the violence is peace. The unfortunate surge below, even, has moments of peace. [364]

  “The Code of a Herdsman” seems particularly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “Of the Flies of the Market Place” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[365] The credo also indicates why Lewis could not stay an admirer of Fascism or National Socialism for long —“Do not allow yourself to imagine a fine herd though still a herd. There is no fine herd.”—since Fascism and National Socialism elevate the “herd,” culturally, socially, and economically.

  Fascism

  Poverty dogged Lewis all his life. He, like Pound, looked for a society that would honor artists. Like Pound and D. H. Lawrence, he felt that the artist is the natural ruler of humanity, and he resented the degradation of art to a commodity.

  Lewis’s political and social outlook arises from his aesthetics. He was opposed to the primacy of politics and economics over cultural life. His 1926 book The Art of Being Ruled details Lewis’s ideas on politics, including a rejection of democracy and some favorable references to Fascism. Here Lewis condemns the vulgarization of Science as a “popular religion,” conducive to a “revolutionary state of mind,” and the myth of “Progress,”[366] based on the idolization of “mechanical betterment.”[367] The ideal is the “Man in the Street” as “the new Messiah of contemporary religion,” who is continuously being sold the idea of change, or “revolution-as-habit.”[368] Lewis as a revolutionary was concerned with overthrowing “outworn values,” and was antithetical to the “revolution-as-habit” of the stereotypical intellectuals of the Bloomsbury type.[369]

  He also offers a skeptical analysis regarding the purposes of “democracy” where power is exercised behind the illusion of free elections, which are based on the conditioning of the voting mass by the owners of the Press, that is to say, those who have the money:

  The working of the “democratic” electoral system is of course as follows: A person is trained up stringently to certain opinions; then he is given a vote, called a “free” and fully enfranchised person; then he votes (subject, of course, to new and stringent orders from the press, where occasionally his mentor commands him to vote contrary to what he has been taught) strictly in accordance with his training. His support for everything that he has been taught to support can be practically guaranteed. Hence, of course, the vote of the free citizen is a farce: education and suggestion, the imposition of the will of the ruler through the press and other publicity channels, canceling it. So “democratic” government is far more effective than subjugation by physical conquest.[370]

  Support for Fascism was a product of his Classicism—his valorization of the hard, the masculine, the clear, and the exact—as well as his long-held opinions regarding democracy and the masses. This classicism prompted him to applaud the “rigidly organized” fascist state, based on changeless, absolute laws that Lewis applied to the arts, in opposition to the “flux” or changes of romanticism.

  Lewis supported Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Mosley relates in his autobiography how Lewis would secretly arrange to meet him, fearing assassination.[371] However, Lewis was open enough to write an essay on Fascism entitled “Left Wings,” for British Union Quarterly. Here Lewis writes that a nation can be subverted and taken over by numerically small groups. The intelligentsia and the press were doing this work of subversion with a left wing orientation. Lewis was aware of the backing Marxism was receiving from the wealthy, including the millionaire bohemians who patronized the arts. Marxist propaganda in favor of the USSR amounted to vast sums financially. Marxism is a sham, a masquerade in its championship of the poor against the rich.[372] “Russian communism is not a war-to-the-knife of the Rich against the Poor is only too plainly demonstrated by the fact that internationally all the Rich are on its side. All the ‘magnates’ among the nations are for it; all the impoverished communities, all the small peasant States, dread and oppose it.”[373]

  Lewis’s observations on the nature of Marxism were borne out by the anti-Bolshevist stance of Portugal and Spain, which is presumably what he means by the opposition of “small peasant states” to communism. While Bolshevism itself was funded by financial circles in New York, Sweden, and Germany (the Warburgs, Jacob Schiff, and Olaf Aschberg, the so-called “Bolshevik Banker”[374]), hence the claim “the ‘magnates’ amongst the nations are for it.”

  Lewis concludes by declaring Fascism to be the movement that is genuinely for the poor against the rich, for property while the “super-rich” are against property, “since money has merged into power, the concrete into the abstract . . .”

  You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain store; for the peasant against the usurer: for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.[375]

  As indicated by his references to “High Finance” and the “magnates” supporting the Left, Lewis, like Ezra Pound,[376] was aware of the base rot of the financial system founded on usury, writing: “the technique of Credit is an instrument of destruction in comparison with which every other known weapon of offence shrinks into insignificance.”[377]

  Nonetheless, Lewis had reservations about Fascism just as he had reservations about commitment to any doctrine, not only because of the mass—or “herd”—nature of Fascism, but because the principle of action
, of the man of action, becomes too much of a frenzied activity, where stability in the world is needed for the arts to flourish. He states in Time and Western Man that Fascism in Italy stood too much for the past, with emphasis on a resurgence of the Roman imperial splendor and the use of its imagery, rather than the realization of the present.[378] As part of the “Time cult,” it was in the doctrinal stream of action, progress, violence, struggle, of constant flux in the world, that also includes Darwinism and Nietzscheanism despite the continuing influence of the latter on Lewis’s own philosophy.

  Yet when the lines were being drawn for the coming confrontation between Fascism and democracy, Lewis went to the defense of Fascist Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, condemning the League of Nations sanctions against Italy and stating, “that the industrious and ingenious Italian, rather than the lazy, stupid, and predatory Ethiopian, should eventually control Abyssinia is surely not such a tragedy.”[379]

  An early appreciation entitled Hitler was published in 1931, sealing Lewis’s fate as a neglected genius, despite his repudiation of anti-Semitism in The Jews, Are They Human? and National Socialism in The Hitler Cult, both published in 1939.

  Time & Space

  A healthy artistic environment requires order and discipline, not chaos and flux. This is the great conflict between the “romantic” and the “classical” in the arts. This “classical” and “romantic” dichotomy is represented in politics as the difference between the philosophy of “Time” and of “Space,” the former of which is epitomized in the philosophy of Spengler. Unlike many others of the “Right,” Lewis was vehemently opposed to the historical approach of Spengler, critiquing his Decline of the West in Time and Western Man. To Lewis, Spengler and other “Time philosophers” relegated culture to the political sphere. The cyclic and organic interpretations of history are seen as “fatalistic” and demoralizing to the survival of the European race. Lewis summed up Spengler’s thesis as, “you White Peoples are about to be extinguished. It’s all up with you; and I can prove to you on the testimony of my data of research, and according to my new science of history, which is built on the great time-system . . .”[380]

  Lewis claimed that “Time philosophy” is committed to ongoing change and flux, whereas the philosophy of “Space” is committed to form and presence, the foundations of classicism, which Spengler disparaged in favor of the formless infinite yearning of “Faustian” man.[381]

  True art is not revolutionary, but is a “constant stronghold,” that is never in revolt except when art ceases to exist or becomes “spurious and vulgar.” The so-called “revolutionary art” that Lewis observed in his time was “either inferior and stupid, or else consciously political, art.”[382] Lewis writes, furthermore, that: “No artist can ever love democracy or its doctrinaire and more primitive relative, communism.”

  The emotionally-excited, closely-packed, heavily-standardized mass-units, acting in a blind, ecstatic unison, as though in response to the throbbing of some unseen music—of the sovietic . . . fancy—would be the last thing, according to me, for the free democratic West to aim for, if it were free, and if its democracy were of an intelligent order . . .[383]

  Lewis regarded the “revolutionary” movements as regressive, despite their being termed “progressive.” Feminism aims to return to the “supposed conditions of the primitive Matriarchate.” Communism and all revolutionary movements of his time, he regarded as aiming to return to the primitive.[384] On this rationale, one can see why he also condemned D. H. Lawrence. “High Bohemia,” including “the Millionaire World, “especially those centering round feminism and sex-revolt” are symptoms of “Time”; as are technical achievements and commerce; art is “timeless.”[385] What was being promoted as “daring” and “outrageous” art was in Lewis’s view “mild,” “tame,” and “ridiculous,” “nothing that would raise the pulse of a rabbit.”[386] Related to this pseudo-revolution is the “cult of the child” expressed artistically in “the cult of the primitive and the savage,” of Gauguin, for example.[387]

  Democracy

  Lewis’s antipathy towards democracy is rooted in his theory of Time. He writes in Men Without Art, that democracy is hostile to artistic excellence and fosters “box office and library subscription standards.”[388] Art, however, is timeless, classical. Democracy hates and victimizes the intellectual because the “mind” is aristocratic and offensive to the masses. Again, it is the dichotomy of the “romantic versus the classical.” Conjoined with democracy is industrialization, both representing the masses against the solitary genius. The result is the “herding of people into enormous mechanized masses.” The “mass mind . . . is required to gravitate to a standard size to receive the standard idea.”

  Democracy and the advertisement are part and parcel of this debasement, and behind it all stands money, including the “millionaire bohemians” who control the arts. Making a romantic image of the machine, starting in Victorian times, is the product of our “Money-age.” Vorticism, states Lewis, depicts the machine as befits an art that observes the Present, but unlike Futurism, does not idolize it. It is technology that generates change and revolution, but art remains constant; it is not in revolt against anything other than when society promotes conditions where art does not exist, as in democracy.

  In Lewis’s satirizing of the Bloomsbury denizens, he writes of the gulf between the elite and the masses, yet one that is not by necessity malevolent towards these masses:

  The intellect is more removed from the crowd than is anything: but it is not a snobbish withdrawal, but a going aside for the purposes of work, of work not without its utility for the crowd . . . More than the prophet or the religious teacher, [the leader] represents . . . the great unworldly element in the world, and that is the guarantee of his usefulness. And he should be relieved of the futile competition in all sorts of minor fields, so that his purest faculties could be free for the major tasks of intelligent creation.

  Unfortunately, placing one’s ideals onto the plane of activity results in vulgarization, a dilemma that caused Lewis’s reservations towards Nietzsche. In The Art of Being Ruled Lewis writes that of every good thing, there comes its “shadow,” “its ape and familiar.” Lewis was still writing of this dilemma in Rotting Hill during the 1950s: “All the dilemmas of the creative seeking to function socially center upon the nature of action: upon the necessity of crude action, of calling in the barbarian to build a civilization.”[389]

  Revolt of the Primitive

  Lewis’s book Paleface: The Philosophy of the “Melting-Pot,” inspired as a counter-blast to D. H. Lawrence, was written to repudiate the cult of the primitive—the Rousseauian ideal of the “return to nature” and of the “noble savage”—fashionable among the millionaire bohemians, as it had been among the parlor intellectuals of the eighteenth century. Although Lawrence was writing of primitive tribes to inspire a decadent European race to return to its own instinctual being, such “romanticism” is contrary to the classicism of Lewis, with its primacy of reason. Contrary to Lawrence, Lewis states that, “I would rather have an ounce of human consciousness than a universe full of ‘abdominal’ afflatus and hot, unconscious, ‘soulless’ mystical throbbing.”[390]

  In Paleface Lewis calls for a ruling caste of aesthetes, much like his friend Ezra Pound and his philosophical opposite Lawrence:

  We by birth the natural leaders of the white European, are people of no political or public consequence any more . . . We, the natural leaders in the World we live in, are now private citizens in the fullest sense, and that World is, as far as the administration of its traditional law of life is concerned, leaderless. Under these circumstances, its soul, in a generation or so, will be extinct.[391]

  Lewis opposes the “melting pot” where different races and nationalities are becoming indistinguishable. Once again, Lewis’s objections are aesthetic at their foundation. The Negro gift to the white man is ja
zz, “the aesthetic medium of a sort of frantic proletarian subconscious,” degrading and exciting the masses into mindless energy, an “idiot mass sound” that is “Marxistic.” We might reflect now that this was the beginning of the process upon which the modern music industry is largely founded, with “popular” music—the transient music of the mass market—centered around frenetic rhythms accompanied often by a frenzied pseudo-tribal dancing, symptomatic of the return the “cult of the primitive” in the name of “progress.”

  Compulsory Freedom

  By the time Lewis wrote Time and Western Man he believed that people would have to be “compelled” to be free and individualistic. Reversing certain of his views espoused in The Art of Being Ruled, he now no longer believed that the urge of the masses to be enslaved should be organized, but rather that the masses will have to be compelled to be individualistic, writing: “I believe they could with advantage be compelled to remain absolutely alone for several hours every day; and a week’s solitary confinement, under pleasant conditions (say in mountain scenery), every two months, would be an excellent provision. That and other coercive measures of a similar kind, I think, would make them much better people.”[392]