It is normal to relate the decline of Christian faith to the Enlightenment. It is not quite so normal to relate the rise of aesthetics to the decline of faith. Nevertheless, as faith became more spectral, beauty took on flesh. The Romantic movement in art and literature, the cult of natural beauty and the picturesque, and the rise of philosophical aesthetics all indicate a fundamental shift in attitude.
Marxists have gone further, dating not merely the concept of the aesthetic to the Enlightenment, but the thing itself. This claim, however, is implausible. The word ‘aesthetic’ was given its modern use in the eighteenth century (by A.G. Baumgarten, a German disciple of Leibniz); but the phenomena which he used it to describe are as old as history, and the problems of aesthetics are discussed (in other terms) by Plato and Aristotle.
Still, something significant happened, shortly after 1750, when Baumgarten published his Aesthetica. Art, music, poetry and natural beauty began to take on the momentous importance in intellectual life that they have retained to this day. The aesthetic began to replace the religious as the central strand in education. Art and literature ceased to be recreations, and became studies, devoted, as divinity had been devoted, to the nurturing and refining of the soul.12
Kant, who wrote the first great modern work of philosophical aesthetics – the Critique of Judgement – went further. He did not merely shift the focus from theology to aesthetics: he actually derived his theology from his aesthetics, using aesthetic judgement as the proof of God. It is through aesthetic contemplation, he suggested, that we confront the aspect of the world which was the traditional concern of theology. We cannot prove by theoretical reasoning that there is a God; nor can we grasp the idea of God, except by a via negativa that forbids us to apply it. Nevertheless, we have intimations of the transcendental. In the sentiment of beauty we feel the purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us, while in the sentiment of the sublime we seem to see beyond the world, to something overwhelming and inexpressible in which it is somehow grounded. Neither sentiment can be translated into a reasoned argument – for such an argument would be natural theology, and natural theology is a thing of the past, believable only in an age of unquestioning faith. All we know is that we can know nothing of the transcendental. But that is not what we feel – and it is in our feeling for beauty that the content, and even the truth, of religious doctrine is strangely and untranslatably intimated to us.
We might put the point thus: knowledge of God is not a knowledge that, nor a knowledge how, but a knowledge what: a knowledge what to feel in the face of nature. That is not Kant’s way of putting it but mine; but it again takes us back to the heart of common culture, and the underlying experience to which even Kant’s supremely enlightened philosophy obliquely points – the experience of the tribe.
The Critique of Judgement situates the aesthetic experience and the religious experience side by side, and tells us that it is the first, and not the second, which is the archetype of revelation. It is aesthetic experience which reveals the sense of the world. Of course, the ‘sense’ turns out to be, for Kant, precisely what religion had assumed it to be. But suppose we do not accept that conclusion? Suppose we look for the meaning of the world in aesthetic experience, while reserving judgement in matters of faith? This would be to give to aesthetic interest an importance comparable to that which once attached to religious worship. And surely, this elevation of the aesthetic to the highest spiritual position is exactly what we find, not only in Kant, but in the long tradition of philosophers, critics and poets which followed in the wake of German romanticism, and which led, in our time, to the invention of English as an academic discipline, and to the modernist movement in the arts.
But what exactly does the word ‘aesthetic’ mean? The question is not just one of definition – it is one of discovery, identification and description. There is a state of mind, an attitude, a stance towards the world, for which we have borrowed, under the influence of Enlightenment philosophers, a Greek word that means something quite different. (Aesthesis denotes sensation or perception.) Why have we singled out this state of mind (if that is what it is)? What is important about it, and why should it have been ennobled by so many artists and thinkers, to sit on a throne archaically devoted to the gods?
Those questions are among the most difficult that philosophers have to confront – which perhaps explains why no philosophers now confront them. You cannot expect an impregnable theory of the aesthetic in two pages. Nevertheless, we need a theory of some kind, and what follows is the best I can do.
Rational activity involves both ends and means. In a technological age we acquire an increasing grasp of the means to our goals, and a decreasing grasp of the reasons why we should pursue them. The clarity of purpose that I observed in Homer’s Odysseus is not a clarity about means: it is a clarity about ends, about the things that are worth doing for their own sake, like grieving and loving and honouring the gods. The mastery of means that emancipated mankind from drudgery has brought with it a mystery of ends – an inability to answer, to one’s own satisfaction, the question what to feel or do. The mystery deepens with the advent of the consumer society, when all the channels of social life are devoted to consumption. For consumption, in its everyday form, is not really an end. It destroys the thing consumed and leaves us empty-handed: the consumer’s goals are perpetually recurring illusions, which vanish at the very moment they loom into view, destroyed by the appetite that seeks them. The consumer society is therefore phantasmagoric, a place in which the ghosts of satisfactions are pursued by the ghosts of real desires.13
In the world of religion all things appear in two guises: as instruments for our uses, and as creations, earthly manifestations of some higher design. The myths and sacred stories shine through their earthly instances, and the ordinary world is transfigured into a realm of miracles. Everything is what it is, while representing something else – the higher form of itself that is narrated in the myth. The world of Odysseus has not been ‘instrumentalised’; it has not yet been enslaved by the imperatives of human desire. Still less is it a world of consumables, to be devoured by relentless and ultimately purposeless appetites. Objects in this world are both instruments and signs: and, in their semantic aspect, they reflect back to the observer a vision of his social life. He confronts in them not objects only, but the eyes of the gods, who remind him of his duties and offer comforting, socially endorsed instructions. In modern jargon, the Greek hero is not alienated from the things he uses, but lives with them on terms of respect, finding in the midst of means, the ends which make them useful.
Take away religion, however, and this easy path to comfort is at once overgrown with doubt and fear and selfishness. Add technological mastery, and nature begins to lose all trace of the divine; the old mysteries and myths give way to the new mystery – the mystery of ends in a world of means. In such a predicament people experience a deep-down need for the thing that is not just desired but valued: the unconsumable thing, wanted not as a means but for its own sake, as an end. The idea of the sacred satisfies that need – but only by requiring faith and devotion. Besides, it is not the sacred object which is the end but the god who shines through it. The peculiarity of the sacred object is that it is a necessary means, one that cannot be replaced or discarded, without fundamentally changing the character of the god to which it is the avenue. Hence sacred objects are filled with an aura of meaning – they are places where calculation stops, where the endless pursuit of means is measured against a value which is not instrumental but intrinsic.
Imagine a sacred statue of the god, placed within its shrine, visited by worshippers who lay their gifts before it. Among the visitors is an enlightened philosopher. He does not worship, since he no longer believes in the god; but he is moved by the reverential atmosphere, by the sublime stillness of the sculpture, and the serene belief to which it testifies. He does not address the image with religious feeling as his neighbours do; he does not treat it as an avenue through which another and higher being can be approached and mollified. His emotion attaches to the image itself. The signifier has become the signified. It is this thing, the statue, which is or contains the meaning of the shrine. The enlightened visitor directs his attention to the stone, to the way it is worked and finished, to the expression on the face of the god, and the breathing limbs of marble. It is an image of the divine, replete with a more than human tenderness and concern. These epithets describe not the god but the statue. The enlightened visitor does not believe the sacred story; so far as he is concerned, the god is a fiction. His awe is not religious, but aesthetic. To put it another way: he rejoices in the statue, not for the god’s sake, but for its own sake. Every meaning that he finds in this marble figure resides, for him, in the figure itself. To the believer the statue is a means to the god; to the philosopher the god is a means to the statue. Yet neither is guilty of idolatry.
I have described there a paradigm case of aesthetic interest. The visitor is interested in the sculpture not as an instrument or a document, but for its own sake. The interest is essentially visual, and bound up with the appearance of what is seen. Aesthetic interest is not cut off from intellectual or spiritual concerns: for these too affect the experience. The god’s face has a serene appearance, and this serenity, which invades the face and shines from it, is part of the way the statue looks. In aesthetic interest appearances become signs – signs of themselves.
Kant described aesthetic interest as ‘disinterested’. This is what I take him to mean:
All animals have interests. They are interested in satisfying their needs and desires, and in gathering the information required for their well-being. Rational beings have such interests, and use their reason in pursuing them. But they also have ‘interests of reason’: interests which arise from their rationality, and which are in no clear way related to desires, needs and appetites. One of these, according to Kant, is morality. Reason motivates us to do our duty, and all other (‘empirical’) interests are discounted in the process. That is what it means for a decision to be a moral one. The interest in doing right is not an interest of mine, but an interest of reason in me.
Reason also has an interest in the sensuous world. When a cow stands in a field ruminating, and turning her eyes to view the horizon, we can say that she is interested in what is going on (and in particular, in the presence of potential threats to her safety), but not that she is interested in the view. A rational being, by contrast, takes pleasure in the mere sight of something: a sublime landscape, a beautiful animal, an intricate flower, or a work of art. This form of pleasure answers to no empirical interest: I satisfy no bodily appetite or need in contemplating the landscape, nor do I merely scan it for useful information. The interest is disinterested – an interest in the landscape for its own sake, for the very thing that it is (or rather, for the very thing that it appears). Disinterestedness is a mark of an ‘interest of reason’. We cannot refer it to our empirical nature, but only to the reason that transcends empirical nature, and which searches the world for a meaning that is more authoritative and more complete than any that flows from desire.
On this account, we should hardly be surprised to discover that the aesthetic is a realm of value. We perceive in the objects of aesthetic interest a meaning beyond the moment – a meaning which also resides in the moment, incarnate, as it were, in a sensory impression. The disinterested observer is haunted by a question: is it right to take pleasure in this? Hence arises the idea of taste. We discriminate between the objects of aesthetic interest, find reasons for and against them, and see in each other’s choice the sign and expression of moral character. A person who needs urgently to cut a rope and therefore takes up the knife that lies beside him, does not, in choosing that instrument, reveal his character. The knife is a means, and it was the best means to hand. The person with no such use for the knife, who nevertheless places it on his desk and endlessly studies it, thereby shows something of himself. Aesthetic interest does not stem from our passing desires: it reveals what we are and what we value. Taste, like style, is the man himself.
The same is true of all experiences and activities in which something is treated not as a means, but as an end in itself. When I work, my activity is generally a means to an end – making money, for example. When I play, however, my activity is an end in itself. Play is not a means to enjoyment; it is the very thing enjoyed. And it provides the archetype of other activities that penetrate and give sense to our adult lives: sport, conversation, socialising, and all that we understand by art. Schiller noticed this, and went so far as to exalt play into the paradigm of intrinsic value. With the useful and the good, he remarked, man is merely in earnest; but with the beautiful he plays. (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.)
There is an element of paradoxism in Schiller’s remark. But you can extract from it a thought that is far from paradoxical, namely this: if every activity is a means to an end, then no activity has intrinsic value. The world is then deprived of its sense. If, however, there are activities that we engage in for their own sake, the world is restored to us and we to it. For of these activities we do not ask what they are for; they are sufficient in themselves. Play is one of them; and its association with childhood reminds us of the essential innocence and exhilaration that attends such ‘disinterested’ activities. If work becomes play – so that the worker is fulfilled in his work, regardless of what results from it – then work ceases to be drudgery, and becomes instead ‘the restoration of man to himself. Those last words are Marx’s, and contain the core of his theory of ‘unalienated labour’ – a theory which derives from Kant, via Schiller and Hegel.
Consider conversation: each utterance calls forth a rejoinder; but in the normal case there is no direction towards which the conversation tends. The participants respond to what they hear with matching remarks, but the conversation proceeds unpredictably and purposelessly, until business interrupts it. Although we gain much information from conversation, this is not its primary purpose. In the normal case, as when people ‘pass the time of day’, conversation is engaged in for its own sake, like play. The same is true of dancing.
These paradigms of the purposeless can be understood only if we take care to distinguish purpose from function. A socio-biologist will insist that play has a function: it is the safest way to explore the world, and to prepare the child for action. But function is not purpose. The child plays in order to play: play is its own purpose. If you make the function into the purpose – playing for the sake of learning, say – then you cease to play. You are now, as Schiller puts it, ‘merely in earnest’. Likewise the urgent person, who converses in order to gain or impart some information, to elicit sympathy or to tell his story, has ceased to converse. Like the Ancient Mariner, he is the death of dialogue.
The same is true of friendship. This too has a function. It binds people together, makes communities strong and durable, brings advantages to those who are joined by it and fortifies them in their endeavours. But make these advantages into your purpose, and the friendship is gone. Friendship is a means to advantage, but only when not treated as a means. The same applies to almost everything worthwhile: education, sport, hiking, fishing, hunting, and art. If we are to live properly, therefore – not merely consuming the world but loving it and valuing it – we must cultivate the art of finding ends where we might have found only means. We must learn when and how to set our interests aside, not out of boredom or disgust, but out of disinterested passion for the thing itself.
Of the greatest importance in our lives, therefore, are festive occasions, when we join with other people in doing purposeless things. Sport – and spectator sport in particular – provides a telling instance of this. Look back to the first flowering of our civilisation in ancient Greece, and you will find sport already in the centre of social life, a focus of loyalties, a rehearsal of military prowess and a pious tribute to the gods. Pindar wrote in praise of winners at the pan-Hellenic games. But his odes are not records of the fleeting victories of the various contestants. They are descriptions of the gods and their stories, invocations of the divine presence in a place and a time, and an exalted celebration of what it means to be a Hellene among Hellenes, sharing language, history, divinities and fate. They show us the spectator as another participant. His excited cheers, we recognise, are brought up from the very depths of his social being, as a contribution to the action and a kind of recreation of the religious sense. Where there is a true common culture, sport is always a central part of it; and the joyful abundance of religious feeling floods over the event: the gods too are present in the hippodrome, eagerly encouraging their favourites.
A modern football match differs from the ancient chariot race in many ways, the most important being the lack of a religious focus. Nevertheless there are important analogies, most readily observable in the American case, with its great hulks fighting each other like armoured knights for every inch of the field, its roaring crowds in their Sabbath humour, its cheer-leaders bouncing and bobbing with choreographed movements and girlish shouts, its jazz groups and marching bands in uniform, its swirling banners and hand-held vacillating flags. In such events we see a kind of collective exultation which is also an exaltation of the community of fans. There is, here, a near return to that experience of membership which I described in Chapter 2, and even if the gods do not take part, you sense them rising in their graves, to peer with shy fascination from behind the screen of our forgetting.
The interest in sport is not yet an aesthetic interest: for there is the unpredictable outcome, the partisanship, the triumph and disaster, towards which all the action is subservient. But it is proximate to the aesthetic, just as it is proximate to the religious. The shared and festive exultation lifts the event high above the world of means, and endows it with a meaning. The game has some of the representational quality of the aesthetic object. It both is itself and stands for itself; once played it becomes a mythic narrative in the annals of the sport, and a tale of heroes. The surplus of interest in the world which spills over in sport is the mark of rational beings, who are satisfied only by supremely useless things.
Still, there is something transient and unfulfilling in even the most exciting football match: the narrative of the match, the myth, can be repeated; but the match, once played, is gone. In aesthetic contemplation, however, we finally step out of the world of perishable things, and find the unconsumable object, which is a value in itself. Such things offer visions of the end of life, emancipated from the means. Some of these objects – landscapes, seascapes and skies – are found. But others are made – and when we make them we are consciously addressing what is most attentive, most searching and most responsive in our nature. When the aesthetic becomes a human goal, therefore, it situates itself of its own accord at the apex of our communicative efforts. We make objects replete with meaning, which present human life in its permanent aspect, through fictions and images that enable us to set aside our interests and take stock of the world.
That brief account of aesthetic interest enables us to cast light on high culture. A high culture is a tradition, in which objects made for aesthetic contemplation renew through their allusive power the experience of membership. Religion may wither and festivals decline without destroying high culture, which creates its own ‘imagined community’, and which offers, through the aesthetic experience, a ‘rite of passage’ into the kingdom of ends.14
Aesthetic objects, when made, invite us to an ‘interest of reason’ – a self-conscious placing of ourselves in relation to the thing considered, and a search for meaning which looks neither for information nor practical utility, but for the insight which religion also promises: insight into the why and whither of our being here. Fiction is of the greatest significance in high culture, for the reason that fictional objects are creatures of the imagination. Hence, by pondering them, we free ourselves from our ordinary interests, and enter a realm where practical questions are not mine or yours or anyone’s, but the imaginary questions of imaginary beings. Myth is the province of religion; but myth is not fiction, since it does not deal in imaginary worlds. It is received as a narrative of this world, but on a higher plane, in which individual characters are dissolved into archetypes, and accidents subsumed by fate. In the mythic narrative everything is typified, and both characters and actions lose their individuality. When the subject of the drama is individualised, myth becomes fiction – the presentation of another world, with all the specificity of this one.
Despite these differences, myth and high culture have much in common. Each is concerned to idealise the human condition, to lift it free from contingencies, and to reveal the inner logic of our passions. Fictional characters are not archetypes but individuals: nevertheless, their characters are filtered through the screen of drama, and only what is typical stands out – typical of that individual, in that predicament. In fiction the dross of contingency is purged, and human life becomes a sign whose meaning is itself. In a high culture, fictional situations and characters are topics of meditation and instruction, as Odysseus was. They create a commentary on this world through thoughts of other worlds, where sympathy runs free. Yet the object of interest is always also here and now – the particular words, sounds, sights and gestures that are brought before us by the work of art. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that there should attach to the products of a high culture the same sense of profound mystery and ineffable meaning that is the daily diet of religion. Our lives are transfigured in art, and redeemed of their arbitrariness, their contingency and littleness. This redemption occurs with no leap into the transcendental, no summoning of the god of the shrine, but simply in a purposeless encounter with a useless object. It therefore haunts us with its familiarity, its this-worldliness, its human pathos.
It seems to me that the art of our high culture – and not only of ours – has drawn upon and amplified the experiences which are given in less conscious form by religion: experiences of the sacred and the profane, of redemption from sin and the immersion in it, of guilt, sorrow and their overcoming through forgiveness and the one-ness of a community restored. Art has grown from the sacred view of life. And that is why art suddenly leapt into prominence at the Enlightenment, with the eclipse of sacred things. Thereafter art became a redeeming enterprise, and the artist stepped into the place vacated by the prophet and the priest. People began to dispute passionately over the difference between good art and bad, and to construct curricula whose sole contents were the masterpieces of a literary, musical or artistic tradition.
At this point you might object to the direction of my argument. Surely, you will say, to place art and religion in such proximity is to ignore their essential rivalry. Religion involves the expression and enforcement of a shared belief. It is a matter of faith and obedience. Art requires no common belief, but only an imaginative involvement with situations, characters, ideas and life-styles that may have no independent appeal. We can find beauty in works which grow from false religions, which express other cultures, and which reflect worldviews remote from ours. Indeed, on one plausible view, it is part of the value of art, that it causes us to widen our emotional horizons, by inducing imaginative sympathy with forms of life that run counter to our expectations. And you might go further, offering as one justification for Western civilisation that – thanks to the Enlightenment – it has emancipated art from religious usage, set it against the reign of prejudice, and created, by means of the imagination, a moral space – a place of freedom and experiment – that has never existed elsewhere.
You might also take exception to my argument from the religious perspective. To narrow the distance between art and religion, you might say, is to run the risk of aestheticising religion, so voiding it of faith and worship. It is to make an idol of art, and to demote the supremely important matter, which is faith and its moral sequel, to a subordinate position in the scheme of things. It is, to borrow Tom Paine’s metaphor, to pity the plumage and forget the dying bird.
Two considerations might neutralise those objections. Faith and worship are the goals of religious practice, and for the believer they are ends in themselves. But to the anthropologist, looking on religion from a point of view outside it, faith and worship are means, not ends. Religion has a twofold social function: to establish the motives on which a community depends; and to teach the art of feeling. By sacralising the core experiences of society, religion eternalises our commitments, makes us admirable to one another, elevates the human person to the summit of creation, and gives sense and direction to our lives. It does this in a unique way, by offering to all-comers, whatever their education, the experience of sacred words and rituals. This experience transfigures human life, and imbues it with a long-term dutiful-ness. But it is available only through faith. It is outside the reach of the anthropologist, whose knowledge of the function of religion sets him at a distance from its doctrines. The function is fulfilled only by those who are ignorant of it, and who devote their attention to the gods.
Art too has a function – and it is closely related. Art ennobles the human spirit, and presents us with a justifying vision of ourselves, as something higher than nature and apart from it. It does this, not as religion does, by demanding belief and worship. For it engages our sympathies without compelling any doctrine. We are not aware of this function, unless subliminally. Nevertheless it informs our judgements, and causes us to evaluate works of art as more or less moving, more or less compelling, more or less serious. When a work of art conveys a view of things, our interest is not in the truth of that view, but in the extent to which it can be incorporated into a life of lasting commitment and serious feeling.
The point was made in other terms by T.S. Eliot, in an early essay on Shelley, and later, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, where he tries to justify his low opinion of Shelley as a poet. Eliot criticises Shelley not for the atheistical views expressed in his poems – much as Eliot disapproved of them – but because these views are entertained in a puerile way. They are not put to the test, not given the kind of poetic examination which would show how a life of serious feeling could be built on them. They lack the seriousness and sincerity that would make them worthy of imaginative endorsement. Such, in a nutshell, is Eliot’s answer to the problem of ‘poetry and belief, and it seems to me to be the right one.
Furthermore, to say that the function of art lies close to that of religion is not to aestheticise religion. It is merely to notice – what is all-important to us, who live in a cynical age – that for those blessed by a high culture it is possible, though with ever-increasing difficulty, to retain the consoling vision which religion grants to all its supplicants. It is possible, through the complicitous web of feeling that a culture keeps in place, to look on the human spirit as a thing redeemed.
If those thoughts are true, then they help to explain the importance of tradition, and of its complement, originality. An artistic tradition is a constantly evolving system of conventions, allusions, cross-references and shared expectations. Themes, forms, ornaments and styles are things both inherited and invented, and the inheritance is part of what makes the invention possible. The successful work of art presents exemplary content in exemplary form; its character as an end implies that it is irreplaceable – there is no other work that will ‘do just as well’, since what it does is itself. Hence it is always there, never surpassed or replaced, always to be revisited. Inevitably, therefore, a high culture involves a repertoire, an accumulation of works of art and exemplary utterances, which create the common ground in which the new and the surprising are planted.
Words in a language owe their meaning to conventions, and we learn the language by internalising the rules. It is a convention of English that chickens are denoted by the word ‘chicken’, and not by ‘poule’ or ‘dajajah’. Once in use, however, a word acquires meaning in another way, through the association of sound and sense, through colliding and consorting with other words in a language, through the literary works which exploit its expressive potential, and so on. Hence the English ‘chicken’ has an aura distinct from Arabic ‘dajajah’, and poems about chickens cannot be translated without loss of meaning from one language to the other.
Meaning in art does not arise from conventions or rules. On the contrary, conventions and rules arise from meaning. The meaning of a chord in music is not arbitrarily assigned like the meaning of a word, but attached by the magnetic force of context. Gradually, as chords are used and re-used, their musical potential becomes standardised; they become mossed over with allusions and reminiscences. It is only then that artistic conventions (like that of the twelve-bar blues) make sense: by exploiting and standardising a meaning that is achieved in another way. Moreover, art, unlike language, is intrinsically suspicious of this standardising process. Convention is tolerable only as a background to other and more individual meanings: if it becomes the foreground of the artistic enterprise, the result is cliché. The constant lapse into cliché, and the fastidious fear of it, are marks of a high culture in decline.
Allusion and elusiveness are as important in high culture as they are in the language and rites of a religion. To explain is to alienate: it is to show something as ‘outside’, observed but not internalised. It is to place conception above experience, as in science or historical research. Nothing is significant aesthetically, unless embodied in, and revealed through, experience. Hence the need for allusion, which imports a reference without describing it, so leaving the thread of pure experience unbroken. Moreover, allusions, unlike explanations, create a social context: common knowledge, common references, common symbols, embodied in an experience assumed also to be common. In grasping an allusion we enter a shared experience and an implied community.
An allusion is designed to be noticed: it expressly summons one work into the orbit of another. Allusions exploit familiarity and also create it, binding the high culture into a many-stranded web. Literary forms are themselves allusive: heroic couplets point the English reader to Pope and Dryden, as does the sonnet to Shakespeare, Donne and Wordsworth, while the unrhymed pentameters of Tennyson stand in the shadow of Wordsworth, looking constantly upwards to that source. The intentions of the author play with the expectations of the reader, and it is thus that a literary culture arises – a complex and communal game, but one of the highest seriousness, whose subject-matter is a shared experience of life.
This self-conscious act of sharing is essentially critical – it both idealises human emotion and also elicits sympathy; it therefore cannot escape judging and being judged. Is it right to sympathise, for example with Othello’s final grief over the woman he has murdered (and in any case, is it really grief over her?)? An artistic tradition is an exercise of imagination; it is also an exercise of taste, which is in turn a meditation on human experience and an attempt to build a shared conception of what is worthy of our concern. The disgusting, the morbid, the banal and the sentimental are avoided, or not avoided only because unnoticed – which itself bespeaks a decline of taste. It is in epochs of cultural decline that criticism becomes important. Criticism is a last ditch attempt to be part of the artistic tradition, to retain the internal perspective on an inherited culture, and to fight off the corruption of sentiment that comes about, when cliché and sentimentality are mistaken for sincere expression. By eliciting sympathy towards empty forms, the cliché impoverishes the emotional life of those who are drawn to it. Hence the extreme vigilance with which modern critics try to draw the line between the genuine and the fake emotion. Whether they can succeed in this, is a question to which I return. Perhaps the distinction between the genuine and the fake is a fake.
Although artists borrow procedures, forms and repertoires, although they are contributing to a continuous and publicly validated enterprise, they can make no impact merely by copying what has already been done. The encounter with the individual is what makes art so supremely interesting: we, the audience, have set our interests aside, in order to open ourselves to what another person is, says and feels. It need not be new; but it must at least be his. A work is original to the extent that it originates in its creator. It shows us the world from his or her perspective, draws us into spheres which are not our own, and enables us to rehearse the possibilities of feeling on which an ideal community – a community of sympathy – is founded. Without originality the high culture will die, drooping into tired gestures and imitative rituals, like the worn-out ceremonies of a religion that is no longer believed.
Originality is not an attempt to capture attention come what may, or to shock or disturb in order to shut out competition from the world. The most original works of art may be genial applications of a well-known vocabulary, like the late quartets of Haydn, or whispered meditations like the Sonnets of Rilke. They may be all but unnoticeable amid the fanfares of contemporary self-advertisement, like the trapped interiors of Vuillard or the tucked-away churches of Borromini. What makes them original is not their defiance of the past or their rude assault on settled expectations, but the element of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of a tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable. Tradition and originality are two components of a single process, whereby the individual makes himself known through his membership of the historical group.
Although the aesthetic experience is central to high culture, it is not the only source upon which a culture draws. Any social in which we strive to give meaning to something as an end attracts to itself the community of sentiment for which we spontaneously hunger. Two significant instances of this are costumes and manners. In a flourishing high culture people dress not only for the utility of dressing, but also as a part of social display, signalling through their costumes their place in an idealised community, and representing their character and their social valency in the forms and colours of their clothes. Manners have a similar meaning: they too are part of representation, and although manners have a function, in binding communities together and smoothing the edges where friction occurs, the function is not the purpose. Only when manners are cultivated for their own sake, for the grace and good nature that are intrinsic to them, do they fulfil their function of oiling the social wheels. And when the function becomes the purpose, as in much modern business, manners become a thin pretence.
Still, it is the work of art which has, since the Enlightenment, provided our paradigm of high culture; and there is a reason for this. When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination. And that, in a nutshell, is why high culture matters.