We are about to consider the eternal – and eternally vexed – question of propaganda by means of the Arts, whether literary, plastic, polyphonic or applied. For myself I hold so profoundly the view that the moment an artist introduces propaganda of whatever kind into his works of art he ceases to be an artist; and I have so many reasons for holding that belief that I do not propose to waste time on doing any more than make the assertion. It is the merest common sense.
No sane member of the USSR would ask of the blacksmith that he should make all his ploughshares look like sickles or bid the baker form all his loaves in the shape of hammers; neither would any sane supporter of MM. Hitler or Mussolini insist that the wheelwright should build all his wheels untrue to the greater glory of fascist government. The baker, the blacksmith, the wheelwright would be told to reserve their political activities for the marketplace, the rostrum or the ballot box. And a propagandist work of art is as dangerous a vehicle as one that should have all its wheels untrue. It will exaggerate, and the reaction from exaggeration is nausea; it will over-stimulate, and the reaction from over-stimulation is indifference. The result of all the artists in Anglo-Saxondom from Mr Kipling downward thundering or cat-calling for the late World War has been a resultant and complete indifference to the aims of that War or even a rapprochement with the late Enemy Countries. The wise leader of states or of political movements is he who leaves his propaganda in the hands of pamphleteers, political journalists, caricaturists, military song-writers – and the more temperate, documented and moderate he can persuade them to make their statements, the more lasting will be the effects that they will produce. That again is the merest common sense.
It is unfortunately a common sense that is shared in only by the very few.
The imaginative artist like every other proper man owes a twofold duty – to his art, his craft, his vocation, and then to his State. His duty to himself and to his art is the distillation of emotions from his own time, whether he deal in words, in instrumental or vocal music or in plastic materials. Whilst he is in his workroom, his study or his studio he has no other duty.
Outside his workshop he may be a citizen like the blacksmith, the baker or the wheelwright; he may vote, persuade others to vote in his sense; he may enlist in the armies of his state; he may sail the seas or what he will. But whilst he is at work his mind must be set solely on the production of pretty pictures, enthralling narratives, music that shall move you to tears, armchairs whose very lines suggest repose of the mind, gardens that shall make the day seem brighter, horse-trappings that shall on the highroads delight the eye. His work must first please himself; then it must arouse emotions in his fellow-citizens. He may there rest his case…. Obviously, like other men, he must sell his products so as to live.
But how should the Republic regard these, its citizens? How shall it most benefit from their labours?
The body politic needs proper men. They used to say – as I am never tired of recording – that the proper man was one who had built a house, planted a tree, written a book and begotten a child. Figuratively that is good enough. That proper man has written a book, so he is literate; he has built a house, so he is a man of action; he has planted a tree, contributing thus to lessening the cost of living; he has begotten a child and to that extent has contributed to the perpetuation of his State without causing over-population. You could obviously change his activities. He might have painted a house, written a fugue, laid down a tennis court or advanced the study of birth-control. But as long as he is well educated, to some extent instructed and physically efficient he is good stuff out of which to build up a state. For in statecraft three things abide – Education, Instruction and Physical Efficiency.
The greatest of these is education since only the educated man is capable of so developing the other attributes that he shall not be a danger to the State. Without education the instructed colossus is a mere blond beast. His sole social or cultural expedients will consist in the burning of books and standing up against a wall all who mock at him or diminish his profits.
Your only educators are the Arts. The biologist, the technocrat, the encyclopaedist, the mathematician, the philatelist – all these may instruct; priests and moralists may inculcate their varying and conflicting codes; the statistician may indoctrinate you with the economic theory that is for the moment the mode. But whereas instruction is a pumping in of records of facts, education consists in the opening of men’s minds to the perception of fitnesses. That can only come from the consumption, from subjection to the influences, of the arts. The humaner letters are so called because gradually their assimilation differentiates man from the beast that perishes and causes to perish.
A man may be a very proper man, a good citizen, neighbour, father or small producer and may yet know nothing of any science whatever or have had only the most rudimentary mechanico-technical instruction. But without contacts with one or the other of the arts his ideals will be those of the savage who dines off the thighbones of those he has preallably set up against walls and decorates with trophies of their skulls his public galleries or ancestral tombs. Of such you can build no lasting bodies politic.
The function of the arts in the Republic is then educational and they have there no other functions.
I am aware that I am sending forth on behalf of the artist a manifesto that will, as to every word of it, be contested by auto- and technocrats, by the priest, the business man, the American – not the Russian – communist and by the immense majority of the painters, sculptors, architects, writers, composers, painter-etchers, executant musicians and fine printers of Anglo-Saxondom. The autocrat considers that the musician is born to compose and execute marches that shall quicken the step of his troops; the business man, if he considers the arts at all, considers that the function of writer, designer and – over the radio – of the musician, is to aid him in putting over his goods. The priest calls on all three to do nothing but celebrate the glories of his merchandise by promoting the spread of his particular form of bogey-worship: the American communist who is before all things sacerdotal, thinks like the priest. The technocrat proclaims that the artist, along with all the other small producers whom he finds detrimental, shall be set up against walls, five deep and blown out of the world by his latest explosives. And of their bones and flesh he shall manufacture further high explosives that shall finally lead to the world-empire of the twenty to thirty technocrats who alone shall be permitted to survive that Armageddon.
We come then to the hardest knot of all. It is that of the Anglo-Saxon artist himself. That poor fellow can never be brought to see that the mere practice of his art will make him be regarded as any thing but a social castrato. In the English branch he mishandles his work forever in order to be acknowledged a country gentleman, a member of the Fabian society, a philanthropist, a Tory member of parliament, a reformer, or in the last resort a vestryman or member of a parish council. He will profess to be what you will so only he may be relieved of the names of inkslinger, dauber or catgut tormentor.
The American artist, on the other hand, tended till lately to aspire to the state of the he-man baring his breast to the Arctic tempest. He would hitchhike, break clinkers, shoot mountain lions, fight bulls, live with Indians…. There would be no end to his semi-public, male exacerbations or derivatives and if you should whisper to him ne sutor ultra crepidam1 he would strike you to the ground with the jawbone of a bull moose.
It is hard for the Anglo-Saxon artist to stick to his mahlstick or his portable typewriter. The climate is against it. And, of late the social revolution has seemed to give him the chance of male-ly opening his lungs and advocating the setting against walls and massacring of innumerable fellow-citizens. To do that renders you all one, at least, with army officers. You may command troops to shed blood. Uniforms and decorations and the adoration accorded to heroes shall follow. The American Communist Party on the other hand, for whom the American artist is almost too willing to propagandize, distrusts the workings of the imaginative parts of artists. At any moment they may go off the handle and lead the party into the arms of the small producer. So you have the spectacle of practitioners of the arts standing on party platforms, spouting propaganda and afterwards constrained publicly to confess that they are not members of the party because the party will not let them be.
I am no politician – or I am a member of a party that never was on land or sea2 but that may rule the world when Arthur shall come again. And, if I were dictator of the world tomorrow I do not think that I should decree that all gubernatorial and administrative posts must be filled by artists. The artist is needed for other things. Nevertheless the spectacle of the artist thus blinking timidly on the platforms of the ingrate is one to make the blood boil and to cause the ironic cachinnations of the gods to shake the welkin…. There was never a time when humanity so needed the inculcation of the gift of sympathetic insight; yet, Rome being already a-burning, the artist is to become the platform protagonist of any bloodthirsty party in the State.
France before all others is the country of the small producer and the artist, he being the only member of the human comity who cannot mass-produce and France was the first amongst the nations to declare that her books were her best ambassadors. And we have just been confronted with the spectacle of France being represented at the White House by the most elegantly distinguished of her poets3 whilst this country was represented at the Quai d’Orsay by the most elegantly distinguished of her department store proprietors.4 This country nevertheless is represented at the Kremlin by a novelist – and between Franklin, Hawthorne and Mr Bullitt as many American writers have diplomatically represented this country abroad as has been the case with France.5 And these artist-ambassadors have been as successful as the career-diplomatists of other countries…. And even England, in the person of Bulwer Lytton6 once had a novelist for ambassador – without fatal results, though the work of Lytton made a queer appearance at the turning point of the history of the modern world.
That turning point when the blond-beast tradition of applied sciences and mechanics registered its first immense victory over the Latin tradition of the humaner letters occurred at the battle of Sedan. And, on the night after that battle, when he had surrendered his person, but had not yet formally abdicated his power into the hands of the Prussians, Napoleon III passed his sleepless hours reading The Last of the Barons by Bulwer Lytton…. You may read allegories into that – the Latin tradition, culture and civilization failing in the dawnlight of the slaughterhouse-materialism that today reigns almost unchallenged in the chancelleries of nearly all the nations the world over.
An allegory indeed – the spectacle of that poor champion of an old faith – for that was how Napoleon saw himself and no doubt was – lying, racked with the pains of gallstones and the despair of his lost cause, on the ground of a hut on the battlefield whilst outside tramped the footsteps of his Prussian gaolers. And he reading one of the worst novels that even official Britain ever produced from the pen-end of a British novelist-diplomat.
The moral is perhaps that if you wish to retain your Empire you should not read bad novels. But that is not the main deduction that I wish here to make. Artist-diplomatists make no worse representatives of their countries than trained diplomats – and no better. That being the case it is useless to waste them on jobs that anyone can perform and it is better to concentrate on the educative function of the artist in the Republic and to accentuate the fact that the educative function has in it nothing of the instructional.
Instruction consists in the introduction of always more facts into the memory of a man and facts are of no educative value. That the new Ecuador stamp is magenta in colour and, when it is of the face value of twenty pesetas shows a streamlined wing as a device; that, according to Dr Whitney, electricity may be called a flow of electrons; that from the pheno-phenyl ring an infinite number of synthetic products may be obtained… all these statements and an infinite number of others gathered from the biologist and the rest are of no educative value. They have of course an applied usefulness as often destructive as constructional, but the human imagination got on very well without them for millions of years and will one day have to get on without them again.
But education provides not for the stuffing but for the enlarging of the human perception. It acts on the mind of man as the light of the sun on the petals of an unclosing water-lily and, since the arts of our day can refresh their traditions from the arts of empires that fell in ruins thousands of years ago, the stream of the arts is for ever broadening. And, most urgent of all, whereas instruction sets barriers between the races of mankind, education alone conduces to their union. Your nation of ideally instructed human beings would be one whose chief executive could exterminate all the other races of the globe by the touching of a button so that all those races of the globe should become the helots of that ideal race – for fear the button should be touched…. But as against that your ideally educated world would be one in which a ubiquitously heard and perfect performance of the Matthew Passion7 would carry humanity a little further towards mutual benevolence, comprehension and union…. Those are the alternatives.
The ideally educated citizen of an ideal Republic is one whose emotions have been sufficiently often stirred to let him control them in face of outbursts of public passion – and merely passing your time amongst the manifestations of the arts by so much puts off the approach of Armageddon. That is what education is and that its purpose. A day devoted to the reading of the Greek Anthology in the shadow of the wings of the Victory of Samothrace will be a day saved from the promptings to bloodshed that are the most distinctive feature of the psychology of today. That at least is time gained. On the other hand, if you spend, as I did lately, a whole day listening to the sadist objurgations of a technocrat leader who desired to see the massacre of all Belgians, the sterilization of all Frenchwomen, the razing from the earth of all such Italian buildings as contained works of ancient art – who called for the expulsion from the United States, or the standing-up against a wall of all Jews, Catholics, Communists, Slavs, Wallachs, Mongols and Englishmen – if you pass a day listening to such doctrine you may be the mildest of men but the odds are that, as you retire to bed, you will be wondering what throats you yourself might order to be cut… to show your manhood! And it is today difficult to go anywhere in the world – I do not mean merely in these United States – without hearing similarly frenetic outpourings of hate… for hate’s sake.
In face of that are you really going to advocate the enlistment of the imaginative arts which can forge weapons terrible enough for incitement to short madnesses … are you really going to advocate their enlistment in this struggle of sadist maniacs?
Let us recapitulate…. The duty of the artist towards himself is once more, to produce pretty pictures, lovely music, thrilling stories, golden spires, horse-trappings that, on roads, shall delight the eye. The duty of the State is so to utilize such products of the arts of escape that its citizens may not have before them forever promptings to gain by butchery.
Education by the arts proceeds in this way. They do not instruct: they sensitize. Let your mind dwell for a moment on the recollection of the passage in literature that most permanently has impressed itself on your personality; go to see the picture you esteem the most beautiful in the world or the building that seems to you the most tranquil of mighty things and spend some time in front of them. Or merely examine for a long time a curious and beautiful piece of craftsmanship. You will ensure in yourself a certain change. You will ensure for yourself a moment of silence and in that your perceptions of human values will become more clear in your subconsciouness. For the immediate effect of the contemplation of matchless things is a marking time of the spirit, a deep oblivion of the material passions of the world surrounding you. Read Lear; come suddenly upon the Winged Victory on the top of her staircase on the Louvre; upon the Maison Carrée amongst the turmoil of the streets at Nimes; on the Déjeuner sur l’herbe of Manet…. And there is nothing to say. There is no comment. The leaven of education is at work; the mind is unclosing a little. Liszt records that after he had one day made what he considered to be a matchless rendering of the Appassionata, for two minutes there was not a movement in all his audience, till they went away in silence; and when King René of Provence first threw back the wings of Fromentin’s triptych of the Adoration of the Shepherds no man of his court spoke for a long time.
It makes no odds to what school your masterpiece belongs. The lines of verse that most search my own person are these:
Less than a God they said there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell
That spoke so sweetly and so well …8
and the four lines of Catullus that begin Te spectem suprema mihi quum venerit hora.9 The single clause of prose that to me has been most surprising and most educative is from the passage about the hat of Charles Bovary … une de ces pauvres choses dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression comme le visage d’un imbécile. Or if I want to remember a magic verbal projection of the concrete there is the picture of the boy Alyusha and the rushes and the horses in the firelight of Turgenev’s Byelshin Prairie which, in its entirety seems and has always seemed to me to be the most marvellous poem in the world. Or for simplicity or direct statement there is Conrad’s ‘“It has set at last,” said Nina’, or James’s ‘We were alone with the quiet day and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped’, or poor Stevie’s: ‘The waves were barbarous and abrupt.’ … oh, and the Coronation of the Virgin in Heaven of Enguerrand Quarton at Villeneuve les Avignon and the Baigneur of Cézanne. And I hope that when I am dying someone may be playing the second movement of the Concerto for Two Violins….10
But it makes no odds what it is. You may – and some very good people do – prefer the livelier first part of the Bach piece; or the paintings of Correggio, or ‘Ulalume’; or passages of Stendhal or Dostoevsky, or the projection of the river at night from the Mississippi Pilot or Cavalry Crossing a Ford or Simone Martini’s Annunciation or something written yesterday or composed four years ago. It is all one. You will know the magic of such remembrances and they will have opened, to the measure of the light vouchsafed,11 your feelings of perception of the harmonies of the universe. There is hardly a human being so low as has not experienced that change. I met one day a man who was one of the business autocrats of this country. He said that, he being one night a guest on a dahabeah on the Nile, his host who was going ashore had given him one of his matchless cigars and one of my novels. He said he had never known such pleasure as in that smoking and that reading. He said he had never read a novel before or since but he distinctly remembered that it had made him feel a better man.
I could not explain why a phrase about Charles Bovary’s hat should so profoundly move me – though the phrase is very famous and has similarly moved many thousands of people, mostly writers. And neither could you explain what it is that moves you in the pictures or symphonies that your subconsciousness chooses shall remain for ever in your memory. It has nothing to do with context, subject, ethics. It has nothing to do with reason or the idea of immortality. It is the rake-off that Providence vouchsafes to mankind in order that, in a world that is a maze of murderous walls, he may maintain within his heart a faint glimmer of sanity.
The preservation of that Promethean spark is, it must be evident, more precious to man than the prevalence of any one creed, of any single party, of any disputed economic doctrine. And it is equally evident that if mankind is to be preserved, the note of sadist slaughter that underlies the doctrines of all the parties of all the states of today must be qualified by the spirit that has inspired the humaner letters and the finer arts.
It would be a good thing therefore if the leaders of temporal parties would adopt the doctrine: Hands off the Arts.
American Mercury, 34 (April 1935), 402–8.
1 [A variant on the footnote from Pliny, ‘sutor, ne supra crepidam indicabet’, let the cobbler stick to his last.]
2 [Alludes to Wordsworth’s ‘Elegaic Stanzas’ on Peele Castle.]
3 [Paul Claudel (1868–1955), diplomat, poet and dramatist, was ambassador to the USA from 1927 to 1933.]
4 [The US ambassador to France from 1933 to 1936 was Jesse Isidor Straus. His father, Isidor Straus, was one of the owners of the R.H. Macy & Co. department store in New York.]
5[Benjamin Franklin was sent on diplomatic missions to England and France. Hawthorne was consul at Liverpool. Ford’s friend William C. Bullitt was the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and later to France.]
6 [Actually his son, Lord Lytton, who wrote under the name of ‘Owen Meredith’, and was Viceroy of India and French ambassador. Bulwer Lytton was an MP, but not a diplomat.]
7 [Bach’s St Matthew Passion.]
8 [Dryden, ‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day’.]
9 [In fact Tibullus, I.i.59: ‘te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora’ – let me see you when my last hour comes.]
10 [Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part 1, ch. 1; Turgenev, Sportsman’s Sketches; Conrad, Almayer’s Folly, opening of ch. 10; James, conclusion of The Turn of the Screw; Stephen Crane, ‘The Open Boat’; Bach’s Concerto for two violins.]
11 [Another allusion to Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven’.]