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Painting will sink. Photography has deprived it of many of its attractions. Futility or silliness has deprived it of almost all the rest. What was left has been spoiled by American collectors. A great painting means a thing which a rich American wants to buy because other people would like to buy it if they could. Thus paintings are set on a parallel, not with poems or novels, but with the first editions of certain poems and novels. The museum becomes a thing parallel, not to the library, but to the bibliophile’s library. The appreciation of painting becomes a parallel, not to the appreciation of literature, but to the appreciation of editions. Art criticism falls gradually into the hands of dealers in antiques.
Architecture becomes a minor aspect of civil engineering.
Only music and literature remain.
Literature is the intellectual way of dispensing with all the other arts. A poem, which is a musical picture of ideas, makes us free, through the understanding of it, to see what we want and to hear what we want. All statues and paintings, all songs and symphonies, are tyrannous in comparison with this. In a poem, we must understand what the poet wants, but we may feel what we like.
Not sincerity in the absolute, but some sort of sincerity, is required in art, that it may be art. A man can write a good love sonnet in two conditions—because he is greatly in love, or because he is greatly in art. He must be sincere in the love or in the art; he cannot be great in either, or in anything, otherwise. He may burn inwardly, not thinking of the sonnet he is writing; he may burn outwardly, not thinking of the love he is figuring. But he must be on fire somewhere. Otherwise he will not cook the goose of his human inferiority.
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Professional improbity and inefficiency are perhaps the distinctive characteristics of our age. The old artificer had to do work; the present workman has to make a machine work. He is a mere slave-driver of metals; he becomes as coarse-grained as a driver of slaves, but less interesting, because he cannot even be called a tyrant.
As the slave-driver becomes a slave to slave-driving and so gets the mind of a slave, though of a luckier slave, so the machine-driver becomes a mere biotic lever, a sort of starting arrangement tagged on to an engine. Taking part in mass production may leave a man a decent human being; it really is so low a thing that he need not be affected by it. But taking part in mass production does not leave a man a decent human workman.
Efficiency is less complex today. Inefficiency can therefore easily pass as efficiency, and be, indeed, efficient.
The only arts and crafts in which we see some striving after perfection or achievement are the absence of arts and crafts—that is to say, those activities which are called sports and games and used to be considered, not as things in which to strive for something, but as things in which to rest from striving. It is futile to cite the Greeks. The Greeks strove to be perfect in everything they did—in sports and games because also in poetry and reasoning. Our poets write poetry anyhow; our reasoners think anyhow. Only our runners really run, because they are running nowhere. The Greeks lusted for fame in sports because they lusted for fame in everything; we lust for fame in sports and hobbies because we can lust for fame in nothing else. The exuberant activity of a child has no resemblance to the exuberant activity of acute mania.
There are only two types of constant mood with which life is worth living—with the noble joy of a religion, or with the noble sorrow of having lost one. The rest is vegetation, and only a psychological botany can take interest in such diluted mankind.
Yet it is admissible to think that there is one sort of greatness in Erostratus—a greatness which he does not share with lesser crashers into fame. He, a Greek, may be conceived as having that delicate perception and calm delirium of beauty which distinguishes still the memory of his giant clan. He may therefore be conceived as burning Diana’s temple in an ecstasy of sorrow, part of him being burnt in the fury of his wrong endeavor. We may fitly conceive him as having overcome the toils of a remorse of the future, and facing a horror within himself for the stalwartness of fame. His act may be compared, in a way, to that terrible element of the initiation of the Templars, who, being first proven absolute believers in Christ—both as Christians in the general tradition of the Church, and as occult Gnostics and therefore in the great particular tradition of Christianity—had to spit upon the Crucifix in their initiation. The act may seem no more than humanly revolting from a modern standpoint, for we are not believers, and when, since the Romantics, we defy God and hell, [we] defy things which for us are dead and thus send challenges to corpses. But no human courage, in any field or sea where men are brave with mere daring, can compare with the horror of that initiation. The God they spat upon was the holy substance of Redemption. They looked into hell when their mouths watered with the necessary blasphemy. Thus may be conceived Erostratus, save that the stress of the love of beauty is a lesser thing than the conviction of a sentimental truth. Thus let us conceive him, that we may justify the remembrance.
For if Erostratus did this, he comes at once into the company of all men who have become great by the power of their individuality. He makes that sacrifice of feeling, of passion, ...... which distinguishes the path to immortality. He suffers like Christ, who dies as the man that he may prove himself the Word.
Anyone who is in any way a poet knows very well how much easier it is to write a good poem (if good poems lie in the man’s power) about a woman who interests him very much than about a woman he is deeply in love with. The best sort of love poem is generally written about an abstract woman.
A great emotion is too selfish; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotions produce great poetry—strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance a long time after; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.
The great general who would win a battle for the empire of his country and the history of his people does not wish—he cannot wish—to have many of his soldiers slain. Yet, once he has entered into the contemplation of his strategy, he will choose (without a thought of his men) the better stroke, though it lose him a hundred thousand men, rather than the worse or even but the slower action, which may leave him nine tenths of those men he fights with and for, and whom he generally loves. He becomes an artist for the sake of his fellow countrymen and he mows down his fellow countrymen for their strategical sake.
He may not be intelligent, but he must be intellectual.
Art is the intellectualization of sensation through expression. The intellectualization is given in, by, and through the expression itself. That is why great artists—even great artists in literature, which is the most intellectual of the arts—are so often unintelligent persons.
We shall move from private poets to public anthologies. Tennyson, as a useless whole, occupies nearly a thousand double-column pages. How much Tennyson will occupy the perhaps less than a thousand simple pages of the future complete English Anthology?
One thing that will happen, unless, with the progress of popular education (democracy), we grow progressively less rational, is the careful sifting, generation after generation, of absolute from relative values. One kind of relative value dies by [natural] death—the relative value that is absolute with respect to its own age. We have spoken of it already. But there is another, and a subtler, kind of relative value—it is the relative value which is absolute outside its own age. A man who, in the eighteenth century, happened, by some unknown mental trick, to write something like bad Tennyson or worse Mallarmé, would be an astonishing phenomenon in his time. He (ignored as a genius in his age) would attract our present historical attention by virtue of that extraordinary departure from his times; he would be called a genius and a forerunner, and perhaps he would have the legitimate right* to both titles
. But bad Tennyson or worse Mallarmé would become bad Tennyson and worse Mallarmé as soon as there were a Tennyson and a Mallarmé, and the relative value would be flagrantly relative; it would become historical and not poetical. What would be such a man’s position in the final scheme of celebrity? He would have done an easy thing when it was difficult—that is all. But a genius is a man who does a difficult thing, even when it is easy.
The central thing about really great geniuses is that they are not forerunners. The very instance that the word arouses defines the case: that John the Baptist was Christ’s forerunner means that he was unimportant in comparison with Christ. John the Baptist is a historical figure (whether he existed or not); Christ is a living figure (subject to the same useless reservation).
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There is hardly any, if any, great artist in the world for whom a definite forerunner cannot be found. Each artist has a typical style; yet in almost every case, if not in every one, that typical style was already shadowed in a former artist of no importance. Whether there was a vague influence in the undercurrents of the age, which the first caught vaguely and the second clearly; whether there was a chance inspiration, like an outward thing in the former, which the latter, by direct contact, wakened in his temperamental brain into a definite inner inspiration; whether the two cases were consubstantial—not one of the three hypotheses matters, except historically. The genius will be the final product; and he will be final, even if he comes afterwards.
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Nothing worth expressing ever remains unexpressed; it is against the nature of things that it should remain so. We think that Coleridge had in him great things he never told the world; yet he told them in the “Mariner” and “Kubla Khan,” which contain the metaphysics that is not there, the fancies they omit and the speculations nowhere to be found. Coleridge could never have written those poems if there had not been that in him that the poems do not express by what they say, but by the mere fact that they exist.
Each man has very little to express, and the sum of a whole life of feeling and thought can sometimes bear total in an eight-line poem. If Shakespeare had written nothing but Ariel’s song to Ferdinand, he would not indeed have been the Shakespeare he was—for he did write more—but there would have been enough of him to show that he was a greater poet than Tennyson.
Each of us has perhaps much to say, but there is little to say about that much. Posterity wants us to be short and precise. Faguet said excellently that posterity likes only concise writers.*
Variety is the only excuse for abundance. No man should leave twenty different books unless he can write like twenty different men. Victor Hugo’s works fill fifty large volumes, yet each volume, each page almost, contains all Victor Hugo. The other pages add up as pages, not as genius. There was in him no productivity, but prolixity. He wasted his time as a genius, however little he may have wasted it as a writer. Goethe’s judgment on him remains supreme, early as it was given, and a great lesson to all artists. “He should write less and work more,” he said. This is, in its distinction between real work, which is non-extended, and fictitious work which takes up space (for pages are no more than space), one of the great critical sayings of the world.
If he can write like twenty different men, he is twenty different men, however that may be, and his twenty books are in order.
ON THE LITERARY ART AND ITS ARTISTS
[The Task of Modern Poetry]
The province of modern poetry seems to me to be twofold, according as we consider its [subject] matter, or the form that shapes that matter.
It is the task of every modern poet to extend, complicate, and in-tellectualize his sensibility, to become, as completely as possible, a resonateur for all the forces of the universe, of life, and of the mind. The palace of his inspiration should have open windows on all four walls, whether looking to the North of Mysticism, to the East of Simplicity, to the West of Decadence, or to the South of ever-growing Life.
There are three reasons why this should be so. Our age is one in which, to the initial subjectivity created by the Christian attitude, there have been added the pagan impulse of the Renaissance, the Individualism of the Nineteenth Century, and the cross-currents and swelling forces which the growth of commerce and of industry have thrust upon the Twentieth.
Besides this, our age is one in which civilization has not only thus gone deeper into the soul than in others, but it has gone wider in the world: we are the first really cosmopolitan civilization that the world has seen, for the increased facilities for communication and intercourse, and the further facilities, mental now and spiritual, which have resulted from that very intercourse, have linked to an astonishing degree nations and peoples as separate* as earth can separate. All the world is Europe now, Australia more so than most European villages. The railway, the steamship, the telegraph, and the wireless inventions have thrown the shadow of their lines into our minds, and a telepathy has grown up among all the peoples of the world; we become open members of a freemasonry of sensibility whose symbol is Electricity.
In any London street you meet the whole world.
And, further than this, not only have the facilities of communication made the world smaller and all the earth a large city, civitas Dei in the Devil’s land, but the growth of culture and of curiosity, the increase of investigation, has packed all past times into the consciousness of the present. Unknown breaths, unreleased as yet from the Aeolian cave* of past civilizations, have been let free upon the world. The dead glories, and something of the ever-living lore, of the Egyptians and of the Chaldeans, of the old Chinese and of the buried ancestors of Peru, have come into our mental vision, as if from over a remote line of a horizon our eyes grow quick to examine. All these things, impinging upon our sensibility, must widen it, complicate it, and intercriticize it. The man who would limit his receptivity to this goes into the convent of himself, self-sequestered from his multiplied age.
Only one poet, Walt Whitman, has appeared with a sensibility large enough to embrace the passive opportunities of the mind before this enlarged world. But he lacked the element that should control this excess of feeling things, and reduce it to that unity [which it behooves]* anything that is a personality to impose upon its impressions.
And by these considerations we arrive at the other element, the formal one, in the poetry of today.
The phenomenon called balance, or equilibrium, is [in] no way so finely represented, when we deal with life—which, being dynamic, not static, cannot be compared to a perfectly still body—than by the oscillation of a pendulum. It is the very essential thing in this oscillation, and the natural thing, that it should go as far in one direction as in the opposite one. The growth of sensibility, the increase of receptivity must therefore* be corrected, balanced, and unified by an increase in the faculties which constitute inhibition and self-control. A sensibility which circumstances both of time and of place compel to be so much richer than the Greek one must be reined in by a controlling intellect far stronger than the Greek one, which was very strong. The increased pace of the courser that leads us to the Future must be balanced by a tighter hold on the reins that guide it. If we are dragged along, let us be self-dragged along.
The great sin of Christian civilization is that, while it has constantly increased the passive elements of the mind, it has concomitantly undermined the active ones—that our increased ability to feel and analyze has not been accompanied by an equally increased ability to think and synthesize. This is not growth, it is merely increase. It is not development, but decadence. All Christian civilization, when it emerged from being barbarian, jumped at once into being decadent. Simple natures are easiest corrupted.
The monstrous phenomenon called Shakespeare is typical of the intellectual results of Christian civilization. The man who is the greatest sensibility in the world was incapable of self-discipline and self-control, could not create an ordered whole. The greatest poet in the ancient world was also its greatest artist. The greatest po
et in the modern world is one of its least artists.
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Shakespeare
The fundamental defects of the Christian attitude towards life can be seen in the greatest poet it has produced typical of itself. The plays and poems of Shakespeare are, from the pure artistic standpoint, the greatest failure that the world has ever looked on. Never have such elements been gathered in one mind as were found in the mind of Shakespeare. He had, in a degree never surpassed, the lyrical gift in all its modes (except one); he had, in a degree never surpassed, the intuition of character and the broad-hearted comprehension of humanity; he had, in a degree never surpassed, the arts of diction and of expression. But he lacked one thing: balance, sanity, discipline. The fact that he entered into states of mind as far apart as the abstract spirituality of Ariel and the coarse humanity of Falstaff did to some extent create a balance in his unbalance. But at bottom he is not sane nor balanced. Incapable of constructing, of developing, of balancing one thing against another, he stands forth to us as the incarnate example of Christian deficiencies.
If he be compared with Milton, the deficiencies become glaring. Shakespeare’s lack of a sense of proportion, of a sense of unity, and of a sense of development and interaction are as extraordinary as the fact that they happen to a Christian poet is ordinary.*
Our civilization, so rich and so complex, has produced extraordinary lyrics, unparalleled in range, depth, and comprehension and subtlety. It has not produced any supreme achievement in constructive poetry and literature.
[On Blank Verse and Paradise Lost]
Blank verse, the one so called, is an extremely dull medium to write in. Only the subtlest rhythmical faculty can ward off flatness, and it cannot ward off flatness for a long time. Perfect poems can be written in blank verse, that is to say, poems which can be read with interest and attention, and will fulfill and satisfy; but they must be short—“Tithonus,” or “Ulysses” or “Oenone”* and the like. When not short, or not sufficiently short, they can hold themselves up only by strong interest, and it is very difficult, except in drama, to carry strong interest along the desert of blank verses. Blank verse is the ideal medium for an unreadable epic poem. All the metrical science of Milton, and it was very great, cannot make of Paradise Lost anything but a dull poem. It is dull, and we must not lie to our souls by denying it. (...)
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 24
