There are some words that have a particular authority: words such as ‘love’, ‘honour’, ‘friendship’, ‘truth’. When a writer employs such words he can legitimately arouse the hopes, fears, anger, excitement and pity of his readers. However, the words are only an excuse to create: there are many other ways in which that which is unspeakable can reach and affect an audience.
The artist is not an oracle, a magician, a saviour for society. When artists pretend to be, like the religious leaders or the politicians, then the public is betrayed. Artists must never be put in the place of a saviour.
Writers, musicians, and painters should not give us explanations or analyses – we don’t need them. There can be all kinds of answers, explanations and analyses, or there might be nothing. In the final analysis, art justifies itself, else it is of no account.
As soon as we approach a subject philosophically – as art history, biography, or literary criticism – and begin to ask what this or that work means, art and thought are inevitably separated. This is no place for a biographical study; the poet is not here to be interrogated as to the circumstances of his birth or personal experience. No one has a right to demand that writers justify or explain what inspires their inspiration. The artist is not some wise old man – and we certainly don’t want to go on about how his inspiration comes from beyond mortal ken, a mana descended from the Muses. In my view, the most important thing for him to know is that he doesn’t have to justify what motivates him. In my view, writing is an act not of self-expression but of self-transcendence: through his pen, the artist reaches the limits of what he is. As soon as a writer or painter does not express an internal need he becomes corrupt – even if that need comes from his unconscious, even if he isn’t aware of it himself, for without that, he will not be able to reach beyond the limits of what he is. I believe that a painter or writer who wants to satisfy us must put the question to himself of what gives him strength.
Art gives a special power – what kind of power is hard to say – it enables men to be a little nearer, at times, to what I would see as the mysterious source of things. The artist must feel himself at one and the same time on the crest and in the depth of Time, and I think that’s why most authors feel a certain amount of insecurity. Art as it exists at the present time can be described as the result of all the previous experience of humanity, a crystallization of the human experience recorded in works of art heretofore. This, however, leads to many contradictory conceptions of art, to several different schools and, consequently, all art of the present age suffers from a lack of precision. The artist, regardless of what era he calls his own, is always caught in a struggle between the concrete reality of the past and the tradition from which he draws, and the ambiguity of his aims. No one can command the course of this development. It is only by seizing upon that deep inner need, that the artist can become- precise. Art does not ‘make man’, it ‘redeems’ man – what it requires is spiritual clarity.
Art is never to be found as a rule. There are no art dealers in whose shops we can purchase it. We search and search, year after year, in books and galleries, but our search always takes us in exactly the same direction, and never reaches what we really want. Not so very long ago artists in Europe and America spoke about art as a means for personal self-expression, and that was something positive; they wrote poems about everything under the sun: ‘Joy’, ‘Passion’, ‘Freedom’, ‘Love’, ‘Justice’, but art is not a question of sentiment and in their hands the meaning of words lost its importance, and artists became mere wordsmiths, infected by a sterility of vision. This is why it is so vital for a writer to be completely free in relation to the possible ‘meaning’ of his work. Not in its form, of course – that is dictated by the language available to him at a given moment; not by his personal history, either. But in a very profound sense a writer must be totally free in his relations to the world, so that he may be able to enter into those relations on behalf of the things that mean the most to him. Art does not have its roots in reality, it emerges out of reality, as an overflow and a rebellion – the artist has but to express a little thing that has broken away from his heart, and in that instigates the unassailable development of the creative impulse within himself.
The artist requires two things equally rare: the courage to express himself, and the courage to keep silent.
The artist must not seek to be heard with such desperation, least of all by as many people as possible. The only art worth calling art was, and still is, that which, for better or worse, is understood only by a minority. I believe that a genuine talent is born in isolation among things unknown.
But neither should the artist seek to be heard by none but himself, recondite and alone. At some time or other a person of sensibility realizes that he will never be able to express his sensations directly, and so turns to art – he then speaks to people in a more or less metaphorical, symbolic language. The poet, with his secret key – that is, his artistic code, his new language, finds it to be a great joy that others too can adopt that language and speak through him. He discovers a sense of fulfillment in feeling that what was once ‘utterly private’ and inaccessible is now available. An artist whose work is purely personal is to some degree inescapably limited, for there does indeed exist a need of ‘universal man’ which his works cannot completely dispel. Therefore the artist is bound – without of course relinquishing himself – to see his work as the manifestation of a collective myth to which he feels an allegiance and respect. Art is not so fragile and evanescent as the human heart, the works of genius not so transitory as our pains and joys: thus we ‘die but unto the dead’, and cast ourselves upon the potsherds of history, the works of the artists, because we seek to find the source from which to continue searching for ourselves.
At a certain point the artist realises that life lies more on the side of pain than contentment, less in delight, than in sorrow. The ineluctable misfortune of man seems more and more an evil beyond remedy, and the only consolation that can give him courage in the midst of that omen of universal pain and distress brought by the encroachment of Time is the knowledge that, if only he holds himself to it firmly enough, if no lasting joy, something eternal can at least be glimpsed in his ‘visio’ and attempted Paradise, though his garden fails to root in this middle world. Art means revelation. Art has to express both pain and rapture, the most profound affliction and the purest lightness, as well as the contradiction between them which, through every stage or evolution, forms, deep down, some kind of structure, the spiritual reality of man, the substance from which the artist has taken his beginnings. For pain? Pain always demands some form of expiation; art expresses this longing for expiation through beauty, to which mankind at times responds spontaneously in all humility, submissiveness and gratitude: all art is, at some level, a kind of prayer. Only under those conditions, to borrow the language of the old hymn, will art become ‘a house not made by hand’ – a temple.
‘Innocente e felice: nella sua innocenza, languido e stanco in paradiso’. To an artist, nothing is more harmful than a little success: it is a temptation, an impediment. Art must remain founded upon an inner crisis and doubt, as it is for those who see art, not as a means to pleasure or success or love, but as man’s only way of coming face-to-face with the essential questions. Indeed, the greatest and the most immediate danger for any artist is that this prayer is ‘answered’, that is, the search he undertakes is somehow reduced to an attempt to find in the outer world the confirmation of a hope in which his imagination deludes itself, so as to justify himself to himself: here he loses that great inner need I have discussed as well. One must pursue the realities of outer existence only to gain that within which, though it cannot last, the soul has the courage to give birth, and so induce the movement toward the still more deeply inner.
Ere long, the inner need will be revealed by the outer. The works of art that have remained in some way significant and important are the works which have not surrendered themselves fully to the demands of external life, but have sought to remain faithful to the ineluctable spiritual movement within themselves, and to that which has emerged from that movement. For the common lot fill their bellies before their eyes, and that is the avarice they close their eyes to; but the artist knows to what extent he must deny himself satisfaction, in order to maintain his sense for beauty. If we are able to maintain within ourselves that sense of Beauty, then that is the measure of our ‘inner riches’.
Death was not enough
To do our worst amends. 'Twould be no marvel, though our hope
Took refuge in the infinite,
Yet would have found the void unendurable:
Is the soul absolute in itself,
A naked life, and pure intelligence?
Has she not feeling too?
In the dark grave, whence she was drawn, was she
Unconscious? or possessed of light, to know
The bliss she then enjoyed?
Is the good she thinks of, aught but herself?
Must not the good she thinks of be herself?
Must not the good be pure, and absolute as Thought?
No wonder in our hearts that light and glory
So far exceed all things of flesh and blood;
Nor that our souls seek something beyond
The sight of sense, the hearing of the ear.
They have no colour and no perfume;
They do not move our spirits to their sway,
And yet their beauty outgoes our belief.
Thy Thoughts and what are thence to spring,
Of outward sense a shadow only make!
What hand can write
Upon the eye, the sense? and not from it descend
Thy quick vitality by breath of knowledge? nor
With mightier force endowing it so strongly
Beget some finer world with mightier soul.
Misgivings for no arts of our own,
That in the heart of nature lies
The mystery of art that in them dies.
But whither stray mine wandering wits and fly away
To regions that may seem fantastic quite
Unlawful, though at worst no folly-- that have place
When men are at their wits’ end.
The thing is quite simple when it gets clearly faced
What the wise knew, but did with courage and
Knowledge, I do with distaste-
A grain too little fails the glory o’ertaken
of what no man’s unknowing shall save;
Too little makes the blow uneven:
To know, not keep, that is
Not vanity.
But for thy art whose kindest inconstancy
Compares all former steps and halts with thee:
In all the world, no place can I find
Which is not, in its being, drest with thought
And brightened, or else made dark by Mind.
All that in scope of Nature veers or fades
To the soul’s sight in the revolving year,
Doth either quicken, or with doubl’d weight
Of feeling, in this dulled and heavy clod
Of matter, stamp the form of what it is
In her quick dream, or a tremulant ether,
Create and frame it to her own conceit,
As if it were indeed a thing of flesh.
And thou thyself must alter, if thou stay;
And, stay, if thyself must be altered too.
Vain repetition stiffs a wax in mannish moulding,
Ere that the form may find itself a fit,
To show more beautiful by breaking through
To what it should comport: it keeps the form,
But melts the dignity. So runneth time,
E’en Nature’s self doth, and doth worse confound:
Not with an idle wind Herself anoints,
Strews, and plays withal, and then lets fall the leaf,
To be with it put out and worn away,
And to tire in her own performance; but
With still and sure improvement to the aim,
And better instruments to do the task.
Her own shape changeth in various moulds;
But when herself intends, and means to last,
Herself doth to her own purpose season
Her grain for winter; as our lives we spend,
So ours for age’s and death’s extremities,
Prepares and fits us, to the utmost thread
The Hours borne upon the spindle, keeps
A portion of our strength to secret use
,And that’s enough; for when the spindle breaks,
We have a reversion in remainder,
To be enjoyed when we have given way
To Time’s swift pace, whose privilege and joy
Is to outrun our memory; then comes,
As most inured, the sweet, cool evening-nigh,
With whom we say, good night; which is to spend
The little time we have to time misspent.
What are our lives, we would enquire? A stormy flux;
From morning’s rising to the noon, through day,
Through afternoon to moonlight, to the stars,
And still to their dissolution: in their turn,
They fall asleep, the lights of life all blown;
And so do we. The world we live in
Tasteth itself, and to that end, it runneth over in perpetual rounds;
And of each thing and season it devours
Its own, to nourish in the self-same parts,
The whole round, of which it is the centre.
And it doth but in circles move; and so,
It makes no stand: 'tis all a whirling line:
Time is the fire that knits up the ages into one;
Into what pattern, then, shall we cast our mould?
So let me learn of thee, NATURA,
Whether this life of mine might not by art
Be fairer made, and not so subject to thy change:
Thou and the heavens that gild the life of men,
If I to them in love might so employ
My soul as it may, the body, and the sense
Which is the servant of the life within,
Should with a double beauty shine so bright,
And stand in a more seemly majesty,
Then this that is but half the earthly light
Returns, even as the firmament
Gives to the earth her light, the earth gives back
Transformed to her by that light in sheath,
In sheath enchased, with so rich a chain
Of precious things; the moon in watery sign,
And the fixed stars, all the middle world’s
Delights, and the greater subterranea
Beneath, a store of alum and precious stones
Forged in the fiery center of the earth. Aye, when I see
The wondrous frame of things in their effect,
To boast of knowledge were a vain conceit.
