The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Comment (July 1923)
COMMENT
BY repeating over and over again some set lines from a poet, we find that they cease to be an illumination and become simply sheep jumping over the fence. A great deal of aesthetic rebellion has been based upon this simple principle. The brain had been lulled; the lines repeated themselves mechanically; when lo! some "colossal genius" came along to discover what had been going on, and a new generation set in.
Not only the message, but also the method, can lose its kick in this manner. Subjects become more recherché with the passing of time, and the antics of execution more strained. Until finally each artist must discover some remote virgin territory much as the engineer discovers another oil pocket. All sorts of inventions are brought in, the field is exploited, the vein is exhausted—art passes elsewhere. Huysmans is an especially poignant instance of this procedure which, waiving all connotations aside for the moment, we recognize as decadence. Les Soeurs Vâtard, A Vau l'Eau, A Rebours, Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale—each one of these books is the discovery and the sucking dry of a territory. Like modern business, Huysmans' energy had to find new channels continually, or perish. This, then, is the distinguishing mark of a decadence: that each man has his own little corner; each man is his own John Jones and Company; each man hunts out his own spiritual markets.
Decadence is that stage in the history of art wherein nothing can be built upon anything preceding. There is nothing beyond A Rebours—there can only be something different. Similarly, Joyce's Ulysses marks the snapping of a contact. A second Joyce could merely prospect for the meagre watery oil which is left.
Decadence, then, leaves us with a choice between Ersatz and retour. Ersatz demands ingenuity, and there is much ingenious work being done. Retour means classicism. It is not unlikely that the next phase of European thought will be a classical era, a turn away from the recent religion of "pure creation." A classical era, roughly, is one which strives to organize what resources are at hand, rather than find new resources. And returning to the matter of the kick, perhaps we have been specializing in the recherché 0for so long that our kick can be gotten only by a deeper examination into those facts which are immediately before our eyes—we having o'erleapt ourselves and fallen on t'other.
Are we not already beginning to find that the intelligence required in inventing something is much lower than the intelligence required in using the invention properly? Similarly, a truly classical age, devoted to dropping everything into its just place, must begin by attacking the national religion of creative "energy" and putting in its place a religion of minimal productiveness. In literature this involves the simple heresy against Bergsonism that it is more blessed to read a book than to write one.
The peculiarly disheartening paradox, however, is this: classical eras heretofore have always glorified the powers that be. Yet in these gnarled times, the classical spirit would be so inimical to the spirit of modern business that when all its ramifications have been followed through we learn that classicism would be nothing other than howling rebellion. A religion of minimal productiveness and maximal order would, in the present state of society, be much more radical than Bolshevism. Whereat we begin to suspect that the world to-day, in its commercial code, is so thoroughly anti-classical that a truly classical movement in art and letters would have to be pursued in the catacombs.