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CONTENTS
NOTEBOOKS HAVE THEIR
USES
PROGRESS
HERE AND HEREAFTER
HELLS AND HEAVENS
SATIATION
GOOD PLUS EVIL AND THE
GERMANS
THE GATE KEEPERS
AGAIN THE GERMANS
THE FALSE MASK
MILTON
HOMOSEXUALITY
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
WHERE YEATS GOT HIS
CONCEPT OF THE TWO MASKS
STATIC MAN
ATLANTIS
POSTSCRIPT TO THE FOREGOING
THESIS ON ATLANTIS
PERIODIC CATACLYSM
A PROSAIC BUSINESS
CREATION’S DEBT TO
DESTRUCTION
NECESSITY VERSUS
CHANCE AND ACCIDENT
THE REVOLUTIONARY
ART’S PRIME ESSENTIAL
TWO TIME FACTORS IN
ONE
AND ENERGY WAS
RESTORED
THE AMERICAN NOVEL
THE NEGRO
HALF A CENTURY OF THE
NOVEL
PORNOGRAPHY VERSUS
BAWDY
POST-MORTEM ON
POST-IMPRESSIONISM
INEVITABILITY
FORECASTED
AND WHAT NOW?
FOREWORD
When I began this book, I had no intention
of publishing it. The urge to scribble was no more than a device for using up
useless time. But I found, as I went on writing, that my thoughts insisted on
coalescing into two definite themes. Those are (a) that the conflict principle
between energy and inertia is that which holds Man and Matter in an equilibrium
which only universal cataclysm can throw off balance, and that (b) there is a
guided principle behind the slow progressive action of creative art which has
enlarged human consciousness from that of primitive man to his status as a
civilised being. And that consciousness, so developed, is the imperative
compulsion for the existence of human life on this earth.
But I found, also, that in arriving at
these conclusions, I had been forced to assume the intrusion of certain
ultramundane powers in active operation on our affairs here, and assumptions of
that sort are apt to bring down on themselves the stigmata of occultism, and it
was funk at having that bludgeon applied to my cranium that was behind my
reluctance to publish this book.
But as I have never made any concessions to
popular opinion over my pictorial works, I have decided to abide by that rule
in my writings, and to publish this book.
Norman Lindsay
NOTEBOOKS HAVE THEIR USES
Having just come across this virgin
notebook among a muddle of MSS. where I toss such things, it invites me to
indulge an uninspired urge to scribble.
For the last few years, the urge to
entertain myself by writing novels and short stories has dried up. Yet that
same urge to seek self-expression in words still nags at me, and the only
release I have for it is in writing letters to the very few friends whose
letters to me I value highly. I count them the one genuine pleasure remaining
to me at this final stage of existence. I am 84 years old, and can’t expect to
be kept hanging about much longer on this earth’s crust. Nor do I desire any
further extension of useless time. My major resource for using it up has always
been the production of those art wares by which I have made a living, and
thereby exercised whatever may be of a special faculty for their creation. It
has been a driven business; a satanic obsession, under the most damnable of all
imperatives; that of seeking an unattainable objective, essentially
unattainable. If it could be attained, we would reach satiation point with the
desire for further effort, with the desire for life itself.
And this I conceive to be the imperative
under which all consciousness exists, both on this earth, and on all the
infinite stages of existence elsewhere in space.
First Causes! That is the carrot dangled
eternally beyond the reach of both asses and human beings.
All muddled thinking begins with them. The
creation of something out of nothing has maddened whatever powers of
ratiocination mankind has exercised, be it those of the primitive savage or
those of the product of what we call civilisation.
For myself, I consider that the enigma of
life itself never will be explained. Never can be explained. No matter to what
lofty heights of speculation the power of ratiocination may attain in its
progress through higher and more exalted conditions of space, it will still be
questioning that elusive enigma. At the same time, it will doubtless have
plenty of other fascinating subjects of speculation in the conditions under
which it exists to keep it interested and active on precisely the same terms as
we on this earth are kept busy and interested.
For no doubt this earth is a microcosm of
all other conditions in space on which human consciousness exists. In fact, we
have on it all stages of that consciousness from the most primitive savage to
its highest development in the creative powers of a Shakespeare, a Beethoven,
or a Rubens—those who have carried self-expression in the Word, the Sound and
the Form to a supreme standard of achievement. For with those three mediums of
expression developed out of the meagre allowance of our five senses, the human
mind has been built.
There is certainly no enigma about a
reason for the existence of this earth. It is a preparatory school for the
development of all special faculties. There are many of those, and they cover
all human activities in the creation of a civilisation. We have under our eyes
an exact documentation of the procedure which developed this present episode of
civilisation, from its dawn with Homer and the later Greeks, and which passed
from them to the Romans, down to this present moment.
No matter with what madhouse the conflict
by war among the peoples of this earth may have disrupted the continuity of
civilisation, its principles, devised by those two peoples, have lever ceased
to function.
Wherever there is high thinking, high
creativeness in the Arts, the Greek is still in action. Whenever there is good
government, and constructiveness in the creation of civilised conditions of
existence, the Roman still dominates. Geographic localities no longer have any
significance in these relations. Minds generated by the two great initial
episodes of civilisation have penetrated all the Western nations of this earth,
for there is a division between them and the Eastern peoples which is as
absolute as a wall of brass. India is not included in that division between
East and West, for the high-class Indian races derive from the same source as
that of the Greeks and Romans. The three great genetic languages, Greek, Latin
and Sanskrit, are evidence of that, but here I am not going into the problem of
those migrations from the North which carried with them such perfectly
constructed languages that only a high civilisation could have created them.
There is plenty of evidence that such a civilisation perished by cataclysm
about fifteen thousand years ago. The Chinese, and other Oriental peoples
racially related to them, were never reached by the sources of Western
civilisation.
They devised their own sources and, such
as they were, they were sufficient for the peculiar psychology of the Oriental
mind. Only quite recently, during my own lifetime, the Western principles of a
civilisation have reached the Chinese and Japanese. Whether they are going to
have any effect on the Oriental mentality remains to be seen.
There are many special faculties secreted
in Man’s mental processes, but those who exercise them are very few. About two
per cent of the whole population of our earth, I assume. The mass of that
population is static, intent only on securing the means of existence. It is
still palaeolithic man, who must wait for countless centuries the arrival of
neolithic man; the metal-worker, weaver, potter and maker of artifacts, agriculturist,
pastoralist, shipbuilder, navigator, and finally thinker, lawgiver, city
builder, and creative expressionist in the Word, the Form and the Sound.
Civilisations are created by a very small,
central core of the creators, and those alone have powers of movement in time
and space. The great mass of mankind exists on a pendulum swing from life to
death and back to life again. Doubtless it is the same mass. The principle of
fecundity which has produced it is not going to the needless exertion of
creating a fresh mass with every generation of the world’s population. That
population increases or decreases in relation to the supply of food available
for it. If it overtakes the food supply, then such devices as war, epidemics or
cataclysm are resorted to in order to get rid of its surplus of bellies. We
appear to be facing some such crisis in this present age, judging by the way
sanitary measures and prophylactics in the prevention of disease have
quadruplicated the birth-rate in the last fifty years. Nature, however, is apt
to ignore these evidences of human ingenuity when any stress is put on its
economics.
My idle meditations here are not concerned
with nature’s dramatisations of the struggle for existence, but with what may
be observed from this vantage point in space—of mankind’s evolution from the
primitive savage to the status of a civilised being. His own efforts to try to
account for his arrival at that status have remained at a conflict of opinion
on two presumptions—Predestination or Freewill.
The ferocity with which these
presumptions, or assumptions (I’ve never been able to discover what variation
of meaning there may be between these two terms), have been contested has been
based on the fatuity of insisting that one irrevocable law must govern the
psychological compulsions of all mankind. Those compulsions are as variable as
there are variations of type, class, personality and mentality in the human
species, and each moves and has its being under the terms imposed on it by
those variations.
For palaeolithic man, predestination is
the only law under which he can exist. It is governed by the simple needs of
his existence, which are food, protection from the weather, and the procreation
of his species, and these he can satisfy equally by chewing raw meat in a cave,
or eating it cooked in a present-day custom-built house. The act of procreation
is common to all classes of mankind, low, medium or high.
It is the possession of a special faculty
of mind which enforces on higher man a self-elected destiny. The individual who
possesses such a faculty will choose the time of his arrival on earth which
will give him the best conditions for exercising it. He will even select his
parents for the same reason, and because they or their progenitors have already
experimented with his special faculty. The tracing of genealogies will evidence
its reappearance in members of the same family, past or present. We say that
he, the present exponent of it, throws back to this or that past progenitor.
Maybe he is that past progenitor returning for a fresh exercise in the faculty;
though, in most cases where the creative faculty is a highly developed one, the
faculty may be carried from one generation to another by all sorts of devious
changes in ancestry, till the original exponent of it can no longer be traced.
In any case he has no need for a fresh exercise of it on earth. He has gone
elsewhere, to fresh developments of his whole mental equipment, having left
behind him the essential mental and physical equipment of hand and eye and
auditory nerves, and a trained sensory perceptivity of the conditions which
surround him for a fresh achievement in creative effort.
PROGRESS
And here alone the word Progress can have
a meaning. Both Homer and Shakespeare are of the same high standard of that
creative achievement. Its theme is Man, and the direction of his soul, to use
Da Vinci’s authoritative definition of the function of art. But Homer had to
select his subject matter from a less complex state of social and intellectual
conditions than that from which Shakespeare derived his material. Homer’s
forerunners were the folk balladists and mythologists who prepared the way for
all fresh expressions in the arts. He took war and love for his central theme,
and dramatised it by drawing together all the salient types of human identity.
From Homer, the great Greek dramatists
derived their subject matter, adding to it subtleties of psychological revelation
in human behaviour which Homer had already sensitised man to be aware of.
These, slowly permeating the higher
consciousness of mankind, through all those nationalities which have been given
the impetus of civilisation from the Greeks and Romans, with the mixture of
races by war and conflict, not only created a vast mass of new material for
Shakespeare’s use, but built up for him a language which gave him the richest
vocabulary ever awarded to poetry, and which allowed him to elaborate the
subtleties of revelation in human behaviour at the point where Homer and the
Greek dramatists had left them.
Browning is the next great poet to pick up
those subtleties from Shakespeare and add to them much that the later behaviour
of mankind had exposed. But it was Browning’s misfortune that he arrived in a
mean age, which had clamped down on all freedom of expression in the arts, and
therefore made the wars of this present century an inevitability.
For if art does not release the emotional
expressions of mankind, by forcing it to realise and understand the compulsions
which beget them, they are driven inward till they reach combustion-point, and
that must mean the violence of social cataclysm by war and revolution.
For all the crippling effect of his age in
free expression, Browning did cover the full gamut of human passion for good or
evil in his poetry, and with that passed on to the present age a fresh poetic
idiom, that of words used in the order in which they are spoken.
And our poets in this country—those who
have written major poetry—have picked up where Browning left off, and have
added to that material derived from the terrific brutality and violence of this
past half century of war and revolution. Time will vindicate the quality of the
poetry written here in the terms by which I don’t hesitate to acclaim it, which
is that it comes in succession to the great tradition established by Homer. And
that is Progress.
HERE AND HEREAFTER
But I prefer to amuse myself with these
scribblings, which assist to keep boredom at bay, at least while scribbling.
And one of the speculations which often entertains me is that which deals with
our departure for unknown spaces elsewhere. I assume, if anybody ever reads
them, that the reader will be one who has disposed of any quavering doubts
about our survival after the undertaker has done his little job on our used up
carcase. My conviction on this score is absolute, and has nothing to do with
evidential phenomena as claimed by the Spook Mongers. That can never be established.
For that matter, it must not be established, if it could be—it would demoralise
concentration on existence here, and that is the whole reason for which we are
here. No, my conviction is based on the simple premise that the universe could
not exist unless we were aware of its existence. If any goon of a scientist
prefers to conceive it as a sentient mass of atomic matter whirling on
endlessly in space by some automatic momentum begotten by itself, he is welcome
to obfuscate his mental processes by such an imbecility. What its mechanics may
be does not interest me. That it does exist because I am aware of it is
sufficient for me. And such microcosms as this earth—and there must be many of
them—exist for the prime purpose of generating consciousness of all existing
phenomena including ourselves. And what quality of consciousness we thereby
generate becomes the momentum of a fresh adventure in consciousness elsewhere.
That destination is already generated in
ourselves. We go to what we are. We have recklessly indulged in an act of
self-creation and now must face the consequences. I can’t say I find the
prospect alluring. I go all the way with that son of Darwin’s who, when
expostulated with by a friend for not desiring immortality, said “Well, I don’t
like being myself much as I am, and I can’t bear the idea of going on being
myself for ever.”
By what special faculty I possess, I am an
artist. I have worked like hell all my life to develop that faculty. I have
tried my hand at all the mediums; pen and ink, etching, water colours, oils,
lithography, and even wood engravings. I have done the work of two life-times
in one, and that by economising time. In the normal divisions of time in a
working life, a third is passed in sleep, a third in making a living, and a
third in resting, idling or seeking entertainment.
I cut out that last third, and tacked it
on to my working third, and observed a rigid rule of never allowing any
intrusion on my studio, save that of the model. When the episode of youth was
over, and I had garnered all the experience I needed in mixing at large with
all sorts and conditions of human beings, men and women (and as a working
journalist, that covered all classes), I settled down to work in my early
thirties, and with only one bad break in my fifties, when inspiration dried up
in me because I had worked it to death (and I recaptured it only after an
interval of some four or five years), I have continued to work on the same
principle of excluding all intrusion on my working hours. I still work, but
that is rather one of the desperation devices for killing time.
The truth is, I have reached satiation
point with my chosen métier. Who could say he liked a métier which enforced an intense physical and mental concentration on hand and
eye for hours at a time. There were times when etching—or the sort of etchings
I did, demanding a meticulous technique—inflicted on me the blackest
depression. Whenever I pulled a first proof, I could only spit venom at it. I
had been working for days on that plate, in and out of the acid, without
knowing what was really happening to it till the proof was pulled. And that was
never what I had hoped it to be. Water colour is the kindest of all mediums,
because, while the wash runs, one can see what is happening to it. One can’t
dawdle over a water colour, if one mixes the variations of colour on the paper
while it is still wet. If the first wash does not come right, one throws it
aside, and no harm is done. With oils—a “pissy medium” as Delacroix called it—covering
a canvas is a slow process, and, if it is a large one, there are months of work
on it sometimes. I hate the damned medium and for that reason I have been
constantly driven to exploit it.
With all this in mind, therefore, I do not
look forward to beginning again at the point where I leave off here. For it is
one of my convictions that all the special faculties which are developed on
this earth are needed elsewhere. And if the same sort of driven
compulsion to do the sort of work one has elected to do here operates over
there, I suppose I’m in for another life sentence to start all over again with
the same old business.
Still, I have one possible alternative up
my sleeve. I like writing. I’ve written some fairly competent novels, and at
least two little works which have become classics in my own lifetime. At least,
in this country. The one is a story for kids called The Magic Pudding,
and the other a story about kids called Saturdee. And I
like the company of writers, while I can’t stand that of artists. They have
blocked-in minds. What thinking faculties they have never go beyond the
present-moment “movement” in painting, and what technicalities that may be
garnered from it of use to their own work. Otherwise, they are desperately
concerned with the selling of their art wares, and suffer the torments of
jealousy for those whose works sell well. The whole world of ideas is a blank
to them. I never knew one artist who was a reader. Courbet voiced their attitude
to literature by saying that he hated the sight of a book, while he denounced
anyone who listened to music as a feckless dilettante. In the whole range of
the art world, there are only three artists who left behind them evidence of
having highly cultivated minds, and those are Da Vinci, Rubens, and Delacroix.
Pirkheimer, Dürer’s friend, credits him with having been able to meet the best
scholars and thinkers of his time on equal terms, but he left no evidence of
that behind him in his writings.
It is a self-evident commonplace to say
that, unless a man has covered all that is greatest in the world of literature,
he has not got a truly civilised mind. I will concede to the wretched artist
that he, of all exponents of the other arts, has been given the most severe
ordeal in mastering his medium, which is a training of the hand and eye to act
in unison. No matter what high faculty an artist may arrive with, he must sweat
over its technical expression for years before he can claim to have mastered
it. Once a poet has acquired a vocabulary, which is an automatic procedure in
merely growing up, he can write poetry of quality in his teens. A composer of
music has merely to master the simple rules of counterpoint and he can start
off writing competent music in his youth. But a painter must put in at least
ten years’ hard study before he can master his brush or his pencil. I chose pen
and ink in my youth as my special medium, and it took me twenty years to have
full control of the pen. One begins that exercise by resting the hand on the
paper, which gives one a radius of about three inches in which to swing a
stroke. Gradually one learns to lift the hand and work from the elbow, which
gives one an area of about a foot to play about with. With me, finally, I could
work at arm’s length, muscles of the fingers, wrist and arm all working in
unison. And, be it noted, to maintain that dexterity I had to practise as
assiduously as a pianist to keep a limber control over my hand and arm. For
that reason, I kept on turning out pen drawings for The Bulletin long
after I had no need for the money earned by them, which was a trifle to the
income my art wares returned me. At this date, when I have long given over pen
and ink work, I could not turn out even a tolerable drawing in that medium. And
that returns me to the intolerable notion of starting off for another exercise
in the control of that most exacting and difficult of all art tools of trade,
the pen. I won’t do any such thing—that’s that.
Of course, I know very well why that special
faculty is being trained in the art world here, and that is to develop the
constructive sense of form. Whatever civilisations this earth has seen have
been based on that same constructive faculty, and I assume that civilisations
elsewhere will need it also. They don’t want the job of training a lot of
bungling beginners in the practice of constructive form. They! And who are
They? I prefer Yeats’ label for them, “The Gate Keepers” who are the daemonic
controllers of all high creative efforts. Opposing them, he has their
destructive complement of “The Frustrators.” Of those I will have to say more
later. For they define the two compensating principles we have to struggle with
on this earth, and both, it is obvious, continue the same conflict elsewhere.
HELLS AND HEAVENS
And that brings these idle maunderings to
the contemplation of the people’s pantomime Hells and Heavens. Those fanatic
loons, the Hebrew prophets, perpetrated the most satanic of all jokes on the
inhabitants of this earth with their anthropomorphic Jew God sitting in
judgment on them and apportioning each to whatever Hell or Heaven he has
devised for their accommodation.
It is so damned funny—so supremely inane
that it would exhaust the exercise of sense of humour but for one significance
involved in it, and that is the construction of the human body.
It was devised with, or had devised for
itself, an extreme sensitivity to physical pain. We realise the law of
necessity which is responsible for that device. Man could never have become a
civilised creature without it. To the physiologist, of course, it is a
protective mechanism, warning man against taking risks with his tender
epidermis. It can kill itself with the greatest ease, but in reality it is not
the body, but the mind, which is sensitive to pain. Hypnotise the mind, and you
can cut the body’s leg off without the mind being aware of it. But the mind, on
leaving the body, does not carry its wretched mechanism with it. It acquires
another body, drawn from the elements and substances of the area in space it
now inhabits, just as it clothes itself in the elements and substances of this
earth on arriving in it. Doubtless it leaves the body en a tangible substance
of some sort, probably extracted from the glandular secretions. That, under
certain conditions, this substance may attain a degree of visibility accounts
for the spooks and phantasms, which are definitely a physical phenomenon, and
not an hallucination of the onlooker’s senses.
There is only one event in this separation
of mind and body in which the body can exact a terrible nemesis in the mind,
and that is the act of suicide. For suicide is the only act of will which
brings two degrees of time, the present and the future, into an instant and
violent conflict. A resolution of the will is projected into the future.
However short the time-space may be between that projection and the act which
accomplishes, it compacts both living and dying into one instant crisis, which
is to try to accomplish the impossible feat of taking a step forward and a step
backward simultaneously. Thus the suicider remains suspended in the act of
suicide.
Man has always been aware intuitively, or
by some inherited knowledge secreted in his subconscious, that suicide is no
escape from the ills and evils of existence on earth. If escape were as easy as
that, there would be no moral problem in the endurance test of facing them.
There is no divine law of retribution involved in Man’s eternal vacillations
between good and evil, as human law adjudicates on such extremes in human
behaviour. Man himself is the only adjudicator, for he carries his own little
hells and heavens with him wherever he goes in time and space. He goes to what
he is.
And that makes a supreme joke of all the
threats of hellfire by which priestcraft tries to scare the human herd into
subjection to its religious doctrines and codes of behaviour by suspending it
on a finality between eternal damnation or eternal bliss. I have no quarrel
with priestcraft on that score, for the herd must be given some sort of solvent
to its terror of the unknown by handing it over to the authority of its priest,
who thereby relieves it of any further responsibility for thinking about the
damned business. But where priestcraft seeks to intrude on my earth, which is
one of self-expression in the arts, and impose on them its own interdictions
and anathemas, then I am at war with it. As all who seek self-creation have
been.
Otherwise I get a good deal of
entertainment out of speculating on what sort of a shock the priestly mentality
is going to get when it arrives over the border of that space immediately in
conjunction with this earth, and finds that all those fulminations of hellfire
and eternal bliss are a phantasm of its own begetting. Possibly, they may still
present themselves to the priest and his flock as a phantasm in being and, as
one, so far a reality to his perception of them. There is no limit to the human
capacity for self-hypnotism.
But disillusion, or illusion, or an
acceptance of reality as it appears to us, are processes that all must
experience on an adventure into the unknown. I can conceive the space in
immediate relation to this earth, a sort of outer circle to it, to be a
sorting-out place for all the variations in human mentality—and there must be
as many variations in space as there are in those of the human ego, and the
sorting-out place must be a purely mental experience, permeated by matter which
is responsive to mental vibrations, so that all sorts of illusions are possible
in it. Some such tenuous matter, invisible to us, must also penetrate matter
here, else there is no other explanation for the phenomenon of hypnotic vision,
which is a mental image projected outwards, with a definite locality in space.
In these speculations, I have adduced
nothing that is not fundamentally a condition already existing on earth. And
many experiences awaiting our departure from it are already forecast here as an
inevitability. And not at all a pleasing one to contemplate—such as that ordeal
which enforces itself on us in the dead, dark silence of the night, when sleep
evades us, and all the petty, silly, mean, malicious and ignominious things we
have said and done gibber at us and refuse to be exorcised. We know already
that we secrete in our brain cells a perfected sequence in memory of the whole
course of our lives from birth to death. In action here, we use only a very
small portion of it; that portion we need as the stored material for work, and
for dealing with its repetition by experience in the action of affairs. But the
damned thing is there, waiting to unroll its record with a ruthless clarity
from which there is no escape.
Oh, yes, I daresay there are also some
very pleasing experiences waiting for us, such as we have already experienced
on earth. The best of those was, and is, the meeting of minds congenial to our
own. Possibly a reunion with some that we have already met here, but I’m damned
if I can think of many people I’ve known here that I would care to meet again.
Communion with even the best minds I have known has its limits of desirability,
because we very soon exhaust subject matter in the exchange of opinion and
ideas, and need an interval before we have garnered a fresh supply of talkable material.
This is the case in maturity, anyway. I’m always glad to meet one of the few
friends I greatly esteem, but I’m also glad to see them go. From my early
youth, I’ve always bound isolation, when it can be obtained, the most pleasing
state of existence. Pleasing is not the right word. Tolerable is, perhaps, the
right one. But even in isolation I have now, and till have, my worst bouts of
the intolerable, for there is no escape from the evils of thinking when one is
alone. I do not wonder that man in the mass seeks to submerge himself in the mass,
for thereby he escapes the curse of being alone with himself, and those are
times when I am fit for no company, especially my own. I say hurriedly here
that never in my life have I shown that black side of myself to others.
Self-esteem demands that one puts on an act of impersonating oneself in the
character of a cheerful fellow. I hold it to be an unpardonable action to
inflict states of depression on others.
There is only one association in which
that is permissible, and that is with one’s wife, because, in any case, she
knows one too well to be duped by any act of false impersonation one may put
on. That is the case with myself and my wife, Rose. And I will add that she is
just as free from false impersonations of herself as I am, when we are
together. We have ways slanged each other viciously as a release from the tension
of nerves, and that is the very good thing that marriage lows us to do. Behind
it all, she respects my work, and I respect her integrity of mind and her
amazing capacity to handle all the affairs it has involved, a thing I am
incapable of doing. There never has been any sentimentality involved in our
relations, barring the initial period of lyricism in youth. In that damnable
period of middle age when emotional and mental sterilisation sets in, and one
must either resign oneself to a moribund existence or else smash it and make a
desperate effort to start again, our marriage did smash up for a period, and we
parted, to go separate ways till I found my way back to work again, with a
fresh inspiration to its attack, and Rose returned to join up with me and take
charge of its action, as she had done in the past.
In that event, one sees a man and a woman
responding to the universal law under which mankind exists, and that is the one
of Smash and Build. When any sterilisation of effort sets in among the peoples
of this earth, and there is a universal discontent with the conditions of
existence, an excuse is found to bring those to a crisis of action, which means
war and revolution; and, with the powers of destruction war has today, the
smash-up is pretty devastating. But when all the uproar is over, the peoples
begin building up again with fresh optimism and energy, assuring themselves
that this is the last time they’ll ever be fools enough to start another
smashing procedure. But of course, they will.
No, I’m not going to start prophesying
here. It will be sufficient if the world is given an interlude of peace to
allow creative energy in the arts to manifest itself.
SATIATION
I note that in the foregoing I slipped
into the autobiographical, but that concerns me only where my experience of a
long life here may indicate premonitions of another experience elsewhere.
And one thing I cannot conceive there is a
state of bliss. The human ego is not constituted to endure prolonged bliss
without becoming bored to hell with it. To be bliss it must have its
compensating principle of some disruptive element in conflict with it. I dare
say it is possible that in a much more highly cultivated state of existence we
may develop a much more sensitive sensory equipment, which will include our
sense of sexual pleasure also. On earth, the pistol-flash of the orgasm is not
much to make a fuss about, but if that were too prolonged we would very soon
arrive at satiation point with it. And that refers to all our responses to
physical and mental phenomena. The most potent of our sensory equipment are the
auditory nerves, but those can only respond for a brief period to even the
highest creations in music, Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s operas. Three
hours is the limit of my ability to sustain a full appreciation of their tonic
and melodic harmonics. With poetry, that also is about the time-limit of our
intellectual responses. As for pictorial art, that uses them up very swiftly.
Prose is the one art which does not put much stress on a sustained interest.
Today, when age has greatly debilitated my emotional responses to both life and
art, prose is the one art, if it is good prose, which does not put any stress
on those responses. Quite otherwise: it sustains and refreshes them. But I am
not on oath any longer about the higher values in any of the arts. All I demand
is entertainment value, and I get that best from literature. And not always the
best literature. I can claim to have read all that is best in the world’s
literature, from the Greeks down to the present day. Not much of a claim, after
all, for the best makes up a very small proportion of the vast mass of the
written and preserved word. And ephemeral as that mass must be, it does produce
a good deal of entertaining matter. And that suffices as the most satisfactory
means of getting through useless time.
GOOD PLUS EVIL AND THE GERMANS
And, still striving to conceive what may
be the compensating principles between the desirable and the damnable in other
conditions of space from the view point of this earth, there are those which
come under the headings of Good and Evil.
Given as understood that Good can’t exist
as a thing in itself, for if it tried to do that it must arrive at inertia, it
must have Evil as the conflict content to energise it. It is interesting, then,
to apply that essential conflict between energy and inertia as practised on
this earth, and I take as a firsthand evidence of that conflict the phenomenon
of the man Hitler.
I have had under inspection half a century
of one of the most disrupted periods this earth has ever had inflicted on it,
and the core of that disruption has been the German people.
That people unquestionably becomes at
intervals surcharged with a universal blood lust; a need to go forth and kill.
From the dawn of history, they have manifested that imperative urge to see
blood flow—their own, as well as that of others. Once that urge is satiated,
they become a seemingly peaceable people, friendly, industrious and hospitable,
but only subjective to one sort of government among themselves, and that is a
species of serfdom under the leadership of an Imperator who selects his
governing class from the military caste, which makes a complete obeisance to
his arbitrary rule, and which constitutes its own power over the people at
large.
In short, the earliest and most primitive
system of government—necessary under primitive conditions, but impossible when
surrounded by the more civilised nations, who have constituted the only
practical system of government tolerable to all classes, which is to elect
their own parliaments, and those elect their own Prime Ministers. While there
were still Royalties functioning as national figureheads, but without powers of
interference with their governments, it was still possible for the nations to
get along with Germany by the influence of marriage among all the European
Royal families, but with the 1914 war all that went by the board. Most of the
nations deposed their Royalties by revolutions; the Russians murdered theirs,
and those of Germany (including that ass of an Emperor who had caused all the
uproar) were ostracised and went into hiding.
All the nations involved in that war,
except Russia, restored the normal conditions of government, but Germany was
left with an army of occupation and no resources whatever for self-government.
The Germans could only think of government under an Imperator, and they hadn’t
got one.
We know why the Germans remained the most
politically backward of the nations. The Romans had never been there. When the
Romans decided on the limitations of their Empire, they left Germany out of it.
They had enough trouble on their lands keeping order in those nations in which
they had instituted their own sound system of government, and refused to take
over that vast horde of semi-barbarians, the Germanic peoples, leaving that as
an Imperial legacy for this present century to grapple with.
THE GATE KEEPERS
And here I must return to Yeats’ Gate
Keepers, for what part it seems feasible to assume that they take in this
world’s affairs.
By Yeats’ account, the Gate Keepers are an
organisation of adepts who function as guides, inspirers and protectors of all
those gifted with the higher creative faculties in the arts. There is no
assumption of anything divine or omniscient in their constitution. They are the
product of great past civilisations which have flourished and perished in the
timelessness of this earth’s periodic pendulum swing between continental
security and cataclysmic chaos, the evidence of which is written on its strata;
its mountains which have been sea-bottoms, and which have been heaved up again
to become mountains, while all life generated has returned to its initial
protoplasm and germinations, there to await another slow progression from the
reptile to the human body again. That done, Mind from other spaces returns to
inhabit the body, developing it from that of a mindless animal to that of a
civilised being.
We know all about that procedure.
Industrious investigation by trained observers of all natural phenomena has
documented the whole evolutionary process, while geologists and astronomers
have given up the desperate proposal to estimate time-factors and light years
and have flatly accepted the term Eternity to cover both.
I think all that sort of thing is
interesting but not very important. If it helps to enlarge the perceptive faculties,
so much the better, but our main business on this earth is to enlarge the human
ego in all that pertains to self-creation, and that is the function of creative
art, which also includes the thinking processes.
The Gate Keepers have nothing to do with
Man in the mass and the turmoil of conflict under which he exists. Their only
concern with that is to select periods which will dramatise the best spectacle
of life as material for creative effort, for that material, provided by Man,
will be returned to him in terms which will clarify his understanding of his
own motives and actions, and that is the procedure by which a civilisation is
created.
There is only one other faculty in which
the Gate Keepers are concerned, and that is Perception.
Perception is the other half of creation.
Neither could exist without the other.
There is nothing very esoteric about the
function of the Gate Keepers. It is only a more subtle and rarefied procedure
which is also practised in the same terms on earth. We know that, whenever a
new expression in Creative Word, Form or Sound has appeared, there has always
been a small minority of perceptive minds to recognise and acclaim its quality.
I have seen this happen in several notable instances, and have marvelled at the
instant and assured valuation of a novel, a poem, or a picture, or a piece of
music, by that small group of perceptive minds, which may take years, in some
instances, before it is an established precedent in the world of aesthetics.
That influence by the Gate Keepers is
limited in its action to what effect chance and accident have on it, and to
what extent free will in their own people may respond to or reject it.
For the equipment of the creative faculty
is defined by Yeats under these headings: The Body of Fate, The Creative Mind,
The True Mask and The False Mask.
The Body of Fate is predetermined by the
psychological and emotional contents of the Creative Mind. It will react
inevitably to the conditions of existence by the constitution of its being,
mental and physical. Its physical constitution is a fixed quality, already
stamped on the palms of its hands. Its mental reaction to the conditions under
which it must do its work will be defined by the integrity with which it seeks
self-expression, in whatever art it has elected for the exercise of the special
faculty. It will have made that compact of integrity with itself before it ever
arrives on this earth. Therefore conscience must be deeply involved in the
terms under which it fulfils that compact.
These are the conditions of its
fulfilment. He who possesses this creative faculty must lead a full life, else
he will not have the materials for self-expression. He must, in youth, charge
the adventure of existence with a disregard for the poltroonery of that slogan
of “Safety First.” He must experience at first hand all that is desirable and
damnable in it. He must know love and hate, desire and disgust, all that is
petty as well as all that may be dignified. He must, in short, be Man in order
to understand man, and the gamut of passions and aspirations which drive him
into action.
He must refuse to make any concessions to
what may be popular morality or popular aesthetics, or to any of the taboos and
interdictions against free expression in his art which Man in the mass may seek
to impose on it. And Man in the mass has always sought to impose these on the
integrity of free expression in the individual mind, and has not hesitated to
use his powers, secular and religious, to incriminate and suppress it. If the
individual mind retains its integrity, it will be wearing what Yeats calls its
True Mask, and that will ensure the protection of the Gate Keepers as far as
that may function in the crude struggle for existence in a man-made earth. All
through the whole proceeding, the Creative Mind must never cease to struggle
with the technical difficulties imposed in its métier. That
must be a life-long obsession, incessantly exercised, incessantly seeking that
impossible objective, Perfection. And for what little exultation achievement in
a métier may award it, it must plumb an abyss of the
blackest depression.
In that queer book of his, A Vision, Yeats uses the twenty-eight Phases of the Moon to define the phases of
mind which the creative faculty must go through if it is wearing its True Mask,
and those cover the whole experience of human life in all that is desirable and
damnable in it.
But if the endurance test becomes too much
for it to face, then it resorts to the False Mask as an escape from further
stress.
Under the False Mask, it is no longer on
oath to the integrity of self-expression. It no longer defies the forces of a
man-made earth to make it submit to their cults, taboos and ordinances. It
makes all concessions demanded of it by popular morality and popular social
ethics. It may even go over to what may be the popular movement in its art. And
at last it is reprieved from the eternal struggle with its métier.
In reversing its mask, it will reverse its
personality, and its behaviour in the action of affairs. And the Gate Keepers
can do nothing whatever to try to restore the True Mask to this renegade. He
vindicates the evidence of Free Will in this reversal of Masks; the will to
self-creation and the will to self-destruction. In short, he vindicates a
universal law common to all mankind. There can be no other moral problem than
the vacillation of the human will between creative and destructive forces.
AGAIN THE GERMANS
And that brings me back to the German
people, for they evidence destructive forces in the mass action of world
affairs which play hell under the function of the Gate Keepers in their efforts
to protect their own people on earth in the madhouse of war and revolution in
which they must be involved. Here the whole thing is handed over to the man of
action—the Soldier, the Statesman, the Organiser—and to the pugnacity of the
peoples who rush to defend their countries from attack. All that stands for
what we call civilisation must go by the board, or into hiding, till the
inferno of killing has exhausted itself, and the forces of destruction are
arrested.
At the same time, the Gate Keepers send
their people to earth during such explosions of violence, for out of those they
garner their best material, in the revelation of all that is worst and best in
the constitution of Man. While the world is in a state of turmoil, it is not
worth while sending the works of their people into action; that must wait for
the interlude of peace that follows to be established.
Well, we, in this age, have looked on at
the spectacle of social and political cataclysm for half a century, and such of
us who have the creative faculty have extracted all the material we need from
it. Only one thing threatens its future, and that is another upsurge of
violence from the German people. But that has been attended to effectively, I
think. The man Hitler was essential to the procedure of civilising Germany
politically. His function was to show the German people that their serfdom to
an Imperator must cease, by the crude brutality in which he enforced it on
them. A smart little Italian journalist named Mussolini had shown him how to
gain power in a period of political unrest, and this was no more than the
principle of gangsterism—blackmail by the intimidation of an armed mob.
The fear of Communist Russia made the
moneyed powers turn to the gangster for protection, and in a very short time
Mussolini and his gang were ruling Italy.
And, in an equally short time, Hitler and
his gang were ruling Germany. And what a gang! A house-painter, a fowl-breeder,
a wine-salesman, a club-footed journalist and a drug-sodden airman. Under the
slogan of Protection against Communism, they took over control of industries,
using an armed mob to beat up any opposition to their tactics. The Military
Caste, still powerful in beaten Germany, were seduced into submission to the
gangsters by reinstatement in their professional function of building up an
army.
And the rest of Europe looked on, dazed at
the spectacle of Germany restored to its status of a fully armed power, and
unable to do anything about it without resorting to war.
And of course war eventuated, forced on
the nations by the now megalomaniac Hitler, drunk with the concept of himself
as a modern Genghis Khan, conquering the whole world. . . . And it took all the
powers and potentialities of the free Western world, Britain and America, to
quell the brute, allied as he was with the Japanese, the most powerfully armed
Eastern people, and dragging the unfortunate Italian people along with him—for
there, by an exquisite irony, Mussolini was bludgeoned into subjection by the
German gangsters; creatures begotten by his own political sapience.
Now that it is all over and peace
restored, Roman rule has at last reached Germany by an English and American
army of occupation and English and American jurisprudence, instructing it in
the only possible precedent for sound government, that which the Greeks
inaugurated, and the Romans established among the other European peoples. And
the German people, terrified at last by their own potentialities of raising
hell, have rushed to affirm the political evangel of Democracy. And Hitler’s
last act was to eliminate its most dangerous potentiality, the Prussian
military caste. By its failure to eliminate him with a bomb, he wiped
out the whole of the Prussian aristocracy at a stroke.
Can we see the sound logic of predestined
events behind the rise and fall of Hitler and its finality in the end of the
last of the Imperators, Stalin? I, at least, think so. I do not assume that the
Gate Keepers had anything to do with it. They never meddle in Man’s affairs.
There was no need for them to do so, for those can always be left to their own
enemies, the Frustrators. And those have had a high old time this last fifty
years, stirring up disruption in their chosen people, the discontented,
the frustrated, the revolts in all states of being, political, social and
aesthetic. And a very effective job they made of it, having the perfect
instrument at hand in the moral collapse of the French people, whose leaders
went on their bellies to Hitler—and the German forces took over France.
But France had never morally survived the
first world war of 1914. It ravaged their country as far as the Germans
penetrated it. Only the indomitable resolution of the British fighting forces
kept the French forces in action till the Americans entered the war.
But it left the French people demoralised.
If this sort of thing could happen to them, then to hell with all established
values, human and aesthetic, which they held as being responsible for the whole
debacle. Life itself was a fraud—a dirty trick perpetrated on them by cosmic
malice. Let us retort the joke on life then, said the Parisian studio world, and
hold up to derision all established precedents in the arts; all its dictums in
the control of human behaviour. From the dawn of the nineteenth century, Paris
has taken over from Rome its claim to be the dominating centre of the Art
world. That claim was justified by its writers and artists; Balzac and Hugo and
a brilliant group of lesser poets and prose writers in literature, with Ingres
and Delacroix as leaders of the two schools of paintings, the Classic and
Romantic. And that claim to leadership in the arts was still potent up to the
1914 war, and the world in general still endorsed it, even in the face of that
lunatic reversal of all values, the Post-Impressionist Movement, which has
thrown the whole art world into chaos for over fifty years.
But no movement in the arts, good or bad,
survives the generation that inaugurated it. At this focal point in time, the
whole movement of what has been labelled Modernistic or Contemporary Art, has
come to a dead end with the Abstractionists. The very selection of that label
is its final confession to defeat.
What now, then? An interlude of peace has
already endured for two decades, and the nations involved in the last war have
rebuilt their destroyed cities and established order in their affairs. I can
only ask myself the question—will the Gate Keepers consider that the time is
now propitious to set in action such creative works as have been in abeyance
since the first world war, and to stimulate fresh creative efforts to come?
There are only two alternatives for them to choose. Another episode in
civilisation, or chaos. For, if they are not going to exert what powers they
have to restore energy and values to the Arts, then the Frustrators will take
over, and Man has now devised for their use terrific potentialities for his own
destruction. The Scientist now dominates world affairs, and a more dangerous
species of Homo Sapiens it would be hard to find. For the Scientist, working on
a thesis which has to do with natural forces, cannot forecast the effect of his
experiments till he has seen the effect of one in action. The man who
constructed the Hiroshima bomb committed suicide, faced with unendurable horror
of his own begetting. The present day Scientist, still at work creating bigger
and better bombs, has a pretty good notion of what to expect when one of them
is exploded, and he is now seeking to contrive a defence against it, but he has
no notion whether that may be effective. The only possible defence is the
universal terror of the atomic bomb, which may create a stalemate in a resort
to it. A pretty thin defence to trust to, in my opinion.
Anyway, the Gate Keepers know already what
is to happen in the future, for the cause of that happening is already in
action at this moment. Even here, on earth, it is possible to forecast future events
on the evidence of the present moment’s actions. I have done a little of that
myself, in a modest way. In a novel that I wrote during the 1914 war, I
forecast the atomic bomb; and that on the present-moment evidence that a
reckless scientist had set up a cone in Sheffield in which he proposed to split
the atom. I never read a hint anywhere that the scientific mind had foreseen
that to devise a means of disintegrating the force which held all matter in a
state of integration was to let loose a force which could explode this fragile
earth like a rotten tomato. Again, in 1923, I wrote an article in a publication
called Art in Australia, which forecast all that was to happen in the
second world war. All that was apparent to me in the action of present-moment
conditions of conflict in abeyance between the nations.
If one can do that sort of thing while
stranded on the surface of this earth, how simple it must be from an altitude
which can overlook everything of significance which is happening on it. So, if
it is any consolation to those who are given to meditating on possible future
events already destined to happen by present-moment actions, we can either
expect lather episode of civilisation or resign ourselves to a cataclysm which
will defer its survival to uncountable centuries. Time on earth is a continuity
in eternal recurrence. All higher altitudes of space are timeless.
If I irritate any possible reader of these
random meditations by stating opinions in them without such reservations as “It
may be assumed,” or, “It is permissible to suppose,” it is because I prefer to
state opinion in terms of conviction, however wrong it may be.
* * *
Yeats’ theory of the effect the Gate
Keepers have on the lives of their people on earth is that they are utterly
ruthless in forcing them to undergo any experience which is essential to expression
of it in Art. Under that assumption, they inflict deafness and syphilis on
Beethoven so that, once he has assimilated the full gamut of the tone scale in
sounds, and all keys in which that scale may most effectively interpret a theme,
they shut up the whole garnering of material in his mind, so that no creations
by other composers may intrude on it and unconsciously impose plagiarism on the
stark originality his own compositions. As for syphilis, that cut him off from
spiritual release of a love-affair. He had had affairs with women, but the one
woman he loved deeply he had to resign, that resignation extorted from him one
of the greatest feats creative music, “The Apassionata.” Man’s conflict with
Fate, and his defiance of its efforts to corrupt his will, are the basic motif
of all his music, and his Fate—or rather his “Body of Fate” to use Yeats’ term
for an earth-experience of life—inflicted on him every experience of the
damnable in order to rut his powers of endurance, while giving a fresh impetus to
his defiance of its malice. It never succeeded in weakening the resolution of
his spirit, and his last and greatest work, the Ninth Symphony, is a paean of
exultation for the creation of life itself.
For myself, I refuse to endorse Yeats’
assumption that the Gate Keepers deliberately enforced on Beethoven such a
bloody awful existence as an endurance test, and as subject-matter for his art.
That is to belittle the whole concept of Free Will. The Creator, wearing his
True Mask, seeks every experience which will give him a full gamut of the
emotional intensity essential to its expression in Art. Beethoven is the
perfect example of self-ruthlessness in seeking the experience he needed. And
if that expression needs an experience the very opposite of that sought by
Beethoven, the Creator will seek it, and get it, if it is essential to his
self-expression and the métier which defines it. Rubens is an example of such
a self-sought existence, and one which was already prepared for his arrival on
earth. From the start he mixed on equal terms with kings, princes and nobles.
Only their palaces could house the splendour of his paintings; only all that
was rich in concept and subject-matter could supply the material for his superb
draughtsmanship, his power over constructive composition, and the fluent sweep
of his brushwork. He lived like a prince himself, and was given the status of
ambassador in exchanges between princes.
Again, as evidence that the Creator seeks
the sort of existence he needs for his work, take Rembrandt, who lived in the
same town with Rubens. He started off with smooth brushwork and was rewarded by
the rich burghers whose portraits he painted. But that sort of brushwork, and
painting group portraits of fat and opulent citizens, was not either the métier or the material he needed for his special faculty as a painter. So he
squandered the money he earned, throwing it away by handfuls, and quarrelled
with the fat citizens, and deliberately reduced himself to poverty, living in
the slums and painting their denizens with a loaded paintbrush and in a
penumbra that simplified the play of light and shadow, focussing attention only
on the face, and sinking all other details in the general key of penumbra from
which the figure emerged, and so created the greatest exhibits of portraiture
ever contrived out of a few earth pigments applied to canvas.
One could multiply these contrasts in a
self-sought existence by those gifted with the creative faculty. Chaucer and
Villon supply an instructive example, for both were forerunners preparing the
way for others in subject-matter and expression. Here, that involved a
transfiguration of the written word in two different languages—English and
French.
Chaucer, forerunner to Shakespeare, needed
a wide area of types and characters of all classes, high, middle and low, for
his gay bawdy stories in verse, and for the march of his Canterbury Pilgrims
across the England of his time, while building into his narrative all the
polyglot amalgam of racial tongues which to this day makes English the richest
of all spoken and written languages. His union of them compacted the spoils of
sixteen centuries in the metier of words and gave Shakespeare the perfect
medium for his poetry, which he also enlarged, and with it covered a survey of
the whole mass of humanity as that is typified in its speech, actions,
psychological compulsions and idiosyncratic identity.
Villon chose quite a different stratum of
humanity for his material, that of the students, thieves, whores and scallywags
of the slums of old Paris. The respectable classes were no use to him. He
wanted life in the raw, speech without reticence on the crude factualities of
existence. A reckless fellow, taking the adventure of life at all odds against
the mean slogan of “Safety First,” and abolishing at a stroke with his
sparkling verses all that dull medieval pedantry and tapestry-patterned poetry
of the Roman de La Rose order, prinking on tiptoe over the mud of earth
with its lovelorn knights and ladies and its castles of plaisance.
Greatest achievement of all, by his presentation of life in the raw he
liberated the way for that roar of laughter that we call Rabelais; the man
taking the title of the works he created.
No, the Gate Keepers did not throw Villon
into a dank, underground, bottle-shaped prison, which wrecked what physical
constitution he had left from liquor, malnutrition and a poverty-stricken
existence. He had to know what thieves and ruffians know, when the law catches
up with them and strings them up like carrion on a gallows. He got that
tremendous ballad out of it which envisioned himself on the gallows, in which
every line quivers with the intensity of its preconception. And he also got out
of it the well-deserved reward of an early death. Why hang about in a state of
excessive physical discomfort once one’s job is done?
Byron and Burns are other examples of
extremes in a self-elected Body of Fate, the one as an aristocrat and the other
as a peasant, Byron needed a sophisticated social idiom for his poetry, and
Burns the racy, vigorous Scotch dialect for his. They, it may be added, got out
early, having done their best work in both mediums.
There is not much to be said for the
adventure of life on earth unless it has been an act of Free Will, and the
destiny it forecasts is a self-elected one. To be taken by the scruff of the
neck and tossed into the muddled mass of mankind by an ultramundane power is to
degrade the whole business. I refer only to those who have developed a special
faculty of some sort, covering all the crafts, professions and intellectual
specialities. I have dealt with instances relating to the Arts because my own
special faculty has to do with them. For the mass of mankind, the biological
function alone suffices to account for its arrivals and departures, but
wherever there is a special faculty involved an act of will is involved also.
When the struggle for existence, the ills
of life and its eternal threat and suspense become unbearable, it is a common
device among the weak-willed and the depressed to shove the whole thing on to
their parents who have imposed it on them without their consent.
A pusillanimous howl! They probably
imposed themselves on the parents without their consent.
* * *
It is apparent that the Gate Keepers have
considerable powers of telepathic communication with their people on earth,
from which, I suspect, a good deal of what we call inspiration comes. Also,
they are able to protect us to a certain extent when we come into conflict with
mankind’s interdictions against a freed expression in the mediums of forms and
words. Music can say what it pleases without Man being aware of it, other than
the emotional responses it evokes in him. If he knew what some of Wagner’s
music was saying in Tristan and
Isolde, he would howl for
its suppression. For man in the mass, who has been taught only to ape the
externals of a civilised being, must walk in a straitjacket of the creeds and
codes of behaviour, and his highest standard of morality and conduct is that he
does not rob, murder, rape, and leave his poor old mother to starve. He is
dimly aware that higher man, who has powers of ratiocination over
self-knowledge, does not need any straitjacket to cramp his freedom of thought
and action, and for that reason man is always seeking to impose his own little
narrow creeds and codes on all freedom of self-expression in both life and art.
If he only knew it, he is taking a considerable risk when he carries his
witch-hunting activities too far, for the Gate Keepers are not above applying a
bludgeon to his silly cranium when he tries to suppress or incriminate one of
their people. It always gives me pleasure to recall Mencken’s comment on the
fate of some of the pests who tried to obstruct his splendid achievement in
clearing the road for a freed literature in his country “We killed the son of a
bitch,” he would remark with a chuckle. . . .
THE FALSE MASK
I have dealt so far only with those
creators who sustained their True Mask in the struggle to achieve. So what
about those who reversed their Masks in that struggle, or those who from the
start rejected it and lived their lives through under cover of False Masks?
This is a depressing subject and presents its investigation as one morally
castigating others for what may have been a lapse of integrity in himself, for
no man can know whether he has truly fulfilled that compact made with his own
conscience, which is that he will make no concessions to any interdiction by
man against a free expression of his concept of life in art.
Some reversions from the True to the False
Mask in painters are so apparent that even critical opinion on earth has
commented on them. The case of Millais is starkly apparent. He arrived on earth
fully equipped for expression in his special faculty, the difficult medium of
oil painting. Even in youth he was a finished painter. The preliminary struggle
to master his medium was not enforced on him. And the paintings he turned out
in his early period of the Pre-Raphaelite movement are masterly. But when that
movement was attacked by the obtuse critical pedantry of his day, matured by
the stale conventions of a moribund period in the arts, he submitted to funk,
and went over to the popular demand for false sentiment in subject-matter and
an uninspired technique which turned out the sort of potboilers the public
demanded, and by which he made a fortune.
Another painter of his generation,
Leighton, remains an enigma. We do not know whether lie ever had a True Mask,
or whether he imposed the False Mask on himself from the first.
His enigma involves also a portent of the
first importance, and that is the function of the Nude in Art. From the start,
Greek art was based on the naked human figure, male or female. Its symbol
remains to us as a freed mind in a freed body. By the proportions of the human
body, as the most perfect of all forms, it dictated the principle of beauty
even in architecture. And the poets and dramatists took over that principle in
the beauty and power of words to reveal all the emotional potentialities of the
human ego, and thereby evoke the first of all moral obligations, “Know thyself.”
Leighton arrived at an age when the Nude
in Art had petered out into the pretty-pretty little shepherds and
shepherdesses of the eighteenth century as painted by Fragonard and Boucher.
Pleasing enough, but they evoke no imagery of passion and desire.
By the way the Victorian age sought to
interdict all freedom of expression in the arts and anathematised even the
mention of sex, it is a wonder that a painter so lacking in seeming pugnacity
as Etty survived and continued quietly to paint the Nude with the true sense of
its limber modulations, its reality, and with great charm of colour. He was
attacked, of course, but all he said in retort was that he painted the nude
feminine figure because it was the most beautiful of all created images, and so
continued to paint it in old age, still working as an academy student among
students. As a student of the Nude he remained, because he lacked any
conceptual power in a large sense. For that reason he remained an isolate in
the art world of his era, the greatest creations of which were in landscape,
with Turner as its greatest master. And he still remains its greatest master—the
Homer of landscape painting.
We know how Dickens and the novelists were
infected by false sentiment and prudery in any presentation of the feminine in
relation to sex, and the popular painters went a stage lower, in the sickly
sentimentality of the cheap suburbs, and with Nudes made by some pink substance
stuffed with cotton wool. “Purity” was the sneaking excuse under which they
fabricated those products of the people’s world, and for that reason they are
of no account. Only one painter of that era got reality into his Nudes—Solomon
J. Solomon—but he did not have enough conceptual power to dominate a period and
give it a fresh impetus where it was needed most. And that was in the Nude.
And it seems clear enough that Leighton
did have that conceptual power. He was a fine draughtsman, and the Nude, male
or female, was the inspirational source of nearly all his compositions. Yet
they remain static, passionless works, sterilised of all emotional appeal. And
the man himself, as far as his life has been investigated, was as sexually
sterilised as his work. Even his brushwork partook of this same lack of
emotional vitality. He was born in the thirties of last century, yet the fiery
energy with which Delacroix’s brush inspired the art of that era in his own
country left Leighton untouched. His pictures are machine-made and the creative
gifts with which he was endowed went for nothing.
If one could only detect some evidence of
bad conscience behind the conscious façade which produced those works, we might
arrive at some evidence of the Mask under which they were conceived, but we
never get a hint of any such thing. A bland air of complacence covered the whole
performance, and (as evidence of the sterility of his work) the age made
obeisance to him as a great man. He made a large fortune, built a palatial
residence and was ennobled by Royalty.
But this much must be said in accusation
of him. As with all sterilisers, the evil he did to the Nude lived after him. I
can give firsthand evidence of that, by the stigma of “indecency” I had hurled
at me over my own nudes. Whistler, and the Impressionist movement he led in
England in rebellion against Leighton, never tackled the Nude. They were no use
at all to my effort in seeking to restore the feminine image to its place in
Art. Nor was there any lead elsewhere to stimulate that effort. It was the same
public created by Leighton and his kind in this country which would have
inflicted a gaol sentence on me, if it could have brought it about. It came
near to doing that once.
But to the devil with autobiographical
splenetics. I am not concerned with them here, though I came up against an
instance of them once, over a little gentleman in the arts who had reversed his
True for his False Mask with disastrous effects to himself. That was Orpen, the
portrait-painter.
Orpen’s portraits painted prior to the
1914 war were some of the most subtle psychological revelations of personality
that ever emanated from a painter’s brush. They were also brilliantly painted,
with a complete mastery over draughtsmanship and technical excellence.
And Orpen himself was designed physically
and mentally with a perfect disguise for luring the sitter into a sense of
security against all detection. He was a stunted little man with the ugly mug
of an Irish peasant, and apparently with the sort of mental equivalent to his
externals, for he was inarticulate, spoke with a brogue, and could crack only simple
low comedian jokes. Also, he had a modest estimate of his own capacities as a
painter.
In short, the sitter’s consciousness of
immense superiority to this little buffoon allowed him to relax on all postures
of superiority. There was no need for such defences here. And the subtlety of
the whole proceeding was that Orpen was also the dupe of his own mental
processes, such as they were. The sitters could make a fool of those, for he
was amazingly wrong in the conscious estimate he made of their psychological
makeup. That is revealed in a little book of reminiscences he wrote, and
anybody who reads it will be entertained by his innocent comments on the people
he painted. But his eye and his hand never made any mistake about them.
It was apparently the 1914 war which threw
him off balance and made him reverse his True Mask for a very crude False one.
From being modest and reticent, he became arrogant and noisy, and he took to
booze with such intemperance that he became a hopeless alcoholic. And his portraits,
which had dwelt in their canvases as in an airy room, came to the surface with
a brassy finish against airless black backgrounds. They were colour-photographs
seen with a sharp focus, under a hard, artificial light. When I looked at some
colour-reproductions of his later portraits of women, I took them for
colour-photographs, and could not believe the evidence of my eyes when I
recalled such lovely creations of femininity as those of the young girl in the
blue hat, marvelling that paint could recreate the tender sweetness of such
lips and skin and eyes.
Orpen’s end was deplorable. In that phrase
which is the epitaph of all despairing and frightened little frustrates, he
“went over to the Catholic Church.” He had an altar built in his house and
wallowed in abasement to the joss of the Virgin Mother of a communist Jew named
Jesus. He even did a painting of that Jew mounted on an ass—a painting so bad
that it evidenced the death of all virtuosity in what had once been the brush
of a master-painter.
I have referred to coming up against
Orpen’s False Mask in personal terms, and that was over an exhibition of
Australian Art in London in the year 1924, in which was a selected exhibit of
my work. For six months before this exhibition was sent, the whole press and
public in this country went into an hysterical frenzy, execrating my works and
demanding that the authorities here, police and politicians, debar them from
inclusion in the exhibition. But they were included, and the same hysterical
opposition was aroused against them by the English Press, and the English art
world. And the loudest howl there came from Orpen, who ordered the public to
ignore my work—they were not even to look at it.
Orpen’s intellectual status may be
estimated by that imbecile attack. It operated on the public curiosity as a
powerful stimulant which crowded the Gallery daily. And I sold every exhibit.
On hearing that, poor Orpen burst into tears, tears of self-pity.
* * *
In literature, it is harder to adduce
evidence of a reversion to the False Mask, because an assured command of words
may hide in the writer what the brush of a painter starkly exposes. I will take
only two apparent instances of the False Mask in literature, and the first of
these is Sam Johnson, the great lexicographer.
The variation between True and False Masks
in Sam Johnson is apparent in his written and spoken words.
The spoken words, where those deal with
the spectacle of life and the constitution of Man, derive from a sardonic mind,
richly endowed with a knowledge of human behaviour and all that is fraudulent
between its intentions and pretensions; its claims to virtue where those mask
its vices, and all its devices for maintaining a reputable front behind which
to practise its chicaneries and false pretences to generous emotion. A lady,
alarmed by some of Johnson’s strictures on mankind in general, asked, “Is no
man born good?” “No, Madam, no more than a dog is born good.”
I quote from memory, since it is too much
trouble to look up Boswell’s “Life,” but those are the valid terms of that
brief exchange, which are the key to Johnson’s viewpoint on the human ego.
Indeed, all his talk is in the same vigorous key; compact, epigrammatic, lucid,
and without qualification on the opinion stated.
In short, all that is best in good prose
and good, decisive thinking. Put such an idiom into the written word, and the
result would be to startle and alarm attention in the whole literary, social
and political world of the day. And in doing that, to arouse violent
antagonisms against the iconoclast who had disturbed its complaisance and
violated its self-esteem.
The late Eighteenth Century needed such a
disturbance of its inertia. It was an era of postures, stylisms, sentimentality
and unreality in its whole concept of life as that is defined in the arts.
Worst of all in England, its literature was clogged with sermons, the worst
exhibits of crooked thinking and false dialectics ever imposed on the printed
word, and everybody read the damned things. They were what are called today
“best sellers.” The whole literary world discussed their writers’ qualities of
style, eloquence and theological subtlety, crowding the churches for
entertainment in the pragmatical art of pulpit oratory.
But already there was evidence of a
restless spirit of revolt against this domination by the church. Swift had
ejected at it his vitriolic Tale of a Tub, and at mankind his Gulliver’s
Travels, a vicious travesty on man’s pretensions to be a civilised
creature. Fielding had restored reality to the novel in the picaresque key of Don
Quixote. In a frivolous way, Sterne had satirised sentimentally in his Sentimental
Journey. Hogarth, in art, had bludgeoned the perfumed world of perukes and
lace ruffles with his brutal presentation of life in the raw. All that these
stirrings of a new spirit needed was a leader; a mind which could synthesise
them into a concerted movement and attack all retrogressive opposition to it.
Johnson was perfectly designed for such a
job. He was pugnacious and courageous, mentally and physically. He had great
powers of ratiocination. He had voracious powers of absorbing knowledge from
all aspects. He was early tossed into a rough struggle for existence, a most
essential experience which gives its subject a viewpoint from which to scan the
spectacle of life without illusion. In journalism, he already had the best
medium for the exercise of his special faculty, which was designed for incisive
criticism of the whole social and cultural structure of his period, and for
attack on all that he conceived to be rotten in it. We know by his talk how
magnificently he could have done that job and cleared the way for a fresh
impetus in civilisation. That was his True Mask, as Boswell’s ruthless
inspection of him in unbuttoned moments reveals to us. And he staggers us with
the spectacle of Johnson turning right about in his tracks and reversing every
facet of his special faculty; affirming everything that it was designed to
attack, and attacking everything it was designed to affirm.
The very style of his writing is evidence
of this antithetical conflict between the written and the spoken word. A worse
style was never evolved, for it evaded all precision of statement by
equivocation and imposed a qualification on every equivocation. It rolls along
with a ponderous monotony, evoking a maddening reiteration in the reader’s
mind, till it throws up the job of keeping attention on it, craving for some
simple, clarified statement evidencing resolution of thought.
And its subject-matter—little moral essays
in the idiom of the pulpit sermon. And, while exhausting eulogy on sermons
themselves, he attacked every free expression of thought in such fine thinkers
as Hume and Gibbon, every fine creative expression in literature which has
endured to this day, that of Swift, Sterne and Fielding, while praising all
that was worst in it, from Richardson to Fanny Burney.
Why go on with the lamentable spectacle of
Johnson bun-thundering the drivel imposed on him by his False Mask? His True
Mask constituted the same special faculty as that of Voltaire’s—and what superb
exercise Voltaire made of it? He was given the same difficult task as Johnson;
that of clearing the way for a new and vital episode of civilisation; and, by
observing the superb way he did it, we have in precise terms the evidence of
all Johnson did not do.
That new movement of energy in a
stagnating world was timed to arrive at full expression in the Nineteenth
Century, both in France and England. Its avatars in England were Burns, Byron,
Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge in poetry, with Scott and Dickens
in the novel, with Constable and Turner in landscape. In France, poetry has
never been a major national expression. France’s contributions to civilisation
have been in the mediums of prose and painting. In both countries, these
dominants energised a big movement in the arts, but where in France Voltaire
had clarified the whole concept of life for them, in England the avatars were
left floundering in a fog of confused aesthetic and ethical values. None of
them, except perhaps Burns, can be said to have achieved full expression
without some corrupting taint from the preceding century and Byron, in his
great free novel in verse, Don Juan. Keats threw up his job from the
start, after a few minor poems which evidence the power of his creative
faculty. Coleridge, with greater gifts than Keats, produced only one narrative
poem and the fragment of another and then took to drugs for the rest of his
life. Byron had to fight his way through a jungle of false starts before he
arrived at full expression with Don Juan. Wordsworth did arrive at major
poetry at his best, though with some deplorable experiments to find the key he
was searching for. As for Scott and Dickens, they never freed themselves from
prudery and false sentiment in any relation of sex to the theme of a novel—though
between them they created the greatest gallery of what the petty spite of minor
novelists has called “minor characters” in the whole tradition of the novel. We
have only to glance at what Balzac did with his women to face the melancholy
spectacle of what Scott and Dickens did, and did not do, with theirs.
And all the muddle and struggle and false
values in the literature of the Nineteenth Century because Johnson did not
clarify the spectacle of life for it by clearing away all the dead rubbish
which accumulates at the petering out of a century!
A damnable accusation to hurl at any man,
and one which must be qualified. If Johnson was the destined forerunner to the
Nineteenth Century, he himself was given no forerunner; or no such forerunners
as Voltaire was given. Voltaire was preceded by two of the clearest thinkers
who have ever contemplated a man-made spectacle of life—Rabelais and Montaigne.
The Roman Catholic Church, and priestcraft in general, never regained any power
in France after Rabelais had slaughtered it with laughter, while all the
psychological pedantry of today has never reached the subtlety with which
Montaigne revealed the driving compulsions of the human ego.
All Johnson was given were the tired and
ineffectual essays by Bacon, which have never to this day had any effect on the
English intellectual world. For an obvious reason. Bacon was a homosexual, and
no homosexual can make a constructive unity in any form of self-expression. But
that peculiar disruption of the bi-sexual constitution of man must be deferred
for investigation elsewhere, Hobbes’ Leviathan was
not much use to Johnson. It was too laborious and obtuse to have carried
further than the few intellectuals of its own generation who read it, and no
creative expression can have any effect on civilisation unless it can penetrate
that content of all periods, the intellectual minority. It must be expressed in
terms intelligible to both simple and subtle minds, and that enforces on the
creator one of his most infernal technical problems in lucidity, whether his
medium be the form, the sound or the word.
No doubt, when Johnson contemplated the
amount of pick and shovel work he would have to do in clearing a way through
the accumulated rubbish of two centuries, his courage fainted. He lacked faith
in the métier of words to perform such a gargantuan task,
for all that he was gifted with a potent armament of them with which to make
his attack on it. And that armament he squandered on the puerile exercise of
compiling a dictionary; a hack job which any little group of philologists could
have done better.
Enough of stating the case against
Johnson’s failure to do his job. He paid a heavy price for that failure, for he
was the most unhappy of men, tormented by bad conscience, which took the form
of a terror of death.
And a terror of loneliness. That terror he
sought to submerge in the sound of his own voice, talk, talk, talking; talking
about anything or nothing, in a selected group of intimates and sycophants. He
was an inveterate diner-out and a tremendous gourmand. As the great Panjandrum of
Literature, his company was much sought, and he wallowed in any social function
in which he could hide from himself and do all the talking. If anyone
controverted an opinion, he roared him down. Fright was the impetus of his
pugnacity; he dared not listen to anything which might twitch the False Mask
off his face and expose him to the taunting derision of his True Mask. In his
own house, he harboured a number of squabbling old women, and pensioned a
little quack doctor to dwell with him; desperate devices to stall off the
terror of being alone.
And I conceive that the Gate Keepers
looked on at the whole procedure of escapism in a considerable state of
exasperation, for it is clear that Johnson defeated whatever efforts they may
have made to make him adjust his True Mask and get on with his job. But at
least it evidences free will in Johnson, and that at least dignifies the
castigation he inflicted on himself for having renegaded against a self-created
destiny. An infernal business, from whatever aspect one views it, but at least
it does dispose of any ultramundane omnipotence working its will on human
affairs, either for good or evil. Let the mass of mankind by all means throw
off responsibility for its affairs on omnipotence, but for us, who seek
self-expression in a self-created adventure on earth, there can be no
comfortable evasion of responsibility. Within us, we have a recording machine
which never ceases clicking a documentary of our whole antics, from the cradle
to the grave, and it is quite impervious to any feelings we may have about its
exposures and revelations. We can’t excuse any painful or ignominious
experience by accusing others of having inflicted it on us, for it is unaware
of the existence of any other entity but ourselves.
Looking back as far as my memory may be
relied on, the only virtue I can claim is that I worked hard and gave myself up
to the best exercises in my special faculty that I was capable of performing.
But I am quite incapable of placing a valuation on the work produced, or what
evasions I may have made in the integrity of its expression. I never have any
difficulty in seeing what is bad technically in a work, but what may be good in
its achievement evades me.
I don’t know, for instance, whether it may
be a good or a bad thing to be writing down this concept of the conditions
under which our work is done here, and its implication of ultramundane entities
intruding on its action, doing the best they can to stimulate and protect us on
the one hand, while entities in opposition to them do everything they can to
frustrate and bedevil the whole procedure.
What I have written about it may be
scoffed at as fantasy-mongering or, worse still, occultism. If that is the
case, I have failed to make clear that there is nothing either esoteric or
occult in my concept of those ultramundane entities whom I conceive to be as
human as ourselves, and who have at one time had a full experience of life on
earth, and have dedicated themselves to its service as exemplified by our
works. Those are Yeats’ Gate Keepers. The Frustrators are also those who have
been through the gamut of an earth-life and have become vicious and embittered
by failure to achieve self-expression or the development of a special faculty,
and so have dedicated themselves to playing hell with it while it is still
struggling for achievement on earth.
Nothing very occult about that conflict of
forces. We see it going on here, under our noses, in every procedure of human
endeavour. And the Frustrators perform an essential office in providing that
conflict of forces which tests out endurance and invigorates energy in the
struggle to achieve. Inertia is the prime evil of all states of being. And let
it be said that, if the Gate Keepers did a superb job in assisting Shakespeare
to carry through the creation of his poetry, the Frustrators did an equally
efficient job with their special minion, Milton, who was the destructive
opposition to the creation of Shakespeare’s concept of life, with its blaze of
enlightenment on every passion and aspiration which drive mankind on into the
adventure of self-creation in the seeming mad inconsequence of an earthly
existence.
MILTON
And Milton, let it also be said here,
imposed on Sam Johnson his most infernal quandary, for Milton had at his time
almost ousted Shakespeare as the dominant revelation of human consciousness.
Certainly he had done that evil thing to the English people.
Milton was that anomaly in the world of
art, a man gifted with the idiom of self-expression but not the conceptual
faculty on which to express it. His early poems reveal his sense of the melodic
rhythm of vocal sounds and the majestic march of words—but, when he looked
about for a big theme on which to exploit his technical efficiency, he could
not find one. An arrogant isolate, he lacked any ease of communion with man or
woman, and so had no means of extracting from them the material of creative
poetry. A rancid Puritan driven by lust, he hated woman, yet could not do
without one. Having possessed her sexually, he loathed her. Out of such a
conflict between desire and disgust, the sexual sadist is born.
He thought of taking Macbeth for a theme
in poetic drama, in competition with Shakespeare, which gives us the measure of
his insensate pride. Only the highest must be selected to take a second place
to himself. Whatever experiments he tried with Macbeth, nothing came of them.
Leaving England, he wandered off to Italy, and there lighted on a poetic drama
by a competent dramatist, its theme being the ejection of Adam and Eve from
Paradise.
Milton stole not only the theme but the
Italian poet’s use of it, for he paraphrased large sections of it into his own Paradise
Lost. His frustrated sex-life had already made him a hater of life—a hater
of all great creative expression beyond his powers to compete with it. Hate
became the driving compulsion of his being, and the only vital figure in his Paradise
Lost is Satan, an idealised self-portrait. In the action of life, he found
a release for the stultifications of hate in the underworld Puritan revolution,
which for a short time established a military autocracy—and, as such
autocracies must do, arrested all cultural activity in the country till it was
overthrown. While it lasted, Milton, the favoured minion of Cromwell, wrote
such pamphlets as Killing no Murder, and screamed gutter abuse at any
controversial opinion on them. Read the printed record of that abuse and
discover what a mean and petty little mind may lurk under the command of a rich
and rolling poetic rhetoric.
If it had only ended there, it merely
meant that a couple of long and boring metaphysical works had been imposed on
English literature. But it did not end there. Puritanism is the national vice
of the English people, and Milton’s poetry was read with avidity. Its
abstractions for all human passions and aspirations displaced the terminology
of reality—displaced Shakespeare’s richly coloured pageantry of human life in
all its manifestations, and in all possible facets of human personality,
touching on every profundity which can startle self-knowledge in the human
mind, the most vital impetus ever given to the human consciousness. All that in
exchange for a metaphysical squabble over the stalest of all themes, Good and
Evil as conceived by a primitive Hebrew people, with their anthropomorphic God
opposed to priestcraft’s pantomime concept of the devil as the Prince of Evil.
Nietzsche defined Christianity as the one
immortal folly of mankind. And I think that the blind pedantry of a people
which to this day ranks the abominable Milton on equal terms with Shakespeare,
as their next greatest poet, outmatches Nietzsche’s concept of an immortal
folly for its rank imbecility.
It took two centuries to eliminate from
English poetry the evil Milton did to it, and even with the dawn of the next
great movement in poetry after that of the Elizabethans, the virus of Milton
was still at work, muddling both Keats and Byron, and infecting Shelley with
all his off-the-earth fantasies. It had sterilised and stylised all eighteenth
century poetry. Even if Sam Johnson had done his job in clearing away other
stultifications to a fresh movement in poetry, I doubt if he could have shifted
the dead weight of Milton off the national mind. Even his modified attack on
Milton as a man raised howls of indignation. And his own poetry, such as it
was, was badly infected by Miltonic abstract terminologies.
HOMOSEXUALITY
That reference to Bacon in the foregoing
recalls me to the destructive effect homosexuality has on the creative faculty.
It is based on the unisexuality of the homosexual—he is either all man, or all
woman, no matter what his external sex implies.
Normally sexed men and women are bi-sexual;
each is both man and woman. It is this duality in sex which makes the sex union
between them possible, because it makes for a mutual understanding of each
other, quite apart from the embrace of bodies. It is the content of femininity
in the male which makes a bridge of understanding with the woman, and the
content of masculinity in the woman makes the same sympathetic bridge with the
man. Thus each is able to dramatise internally all the external exchanges
between them. Applied to the creative problem, it means that Shakespeare can be
both Antony and Cleopatra as he reveals the emotional and mental states of each
in their speech and actions.
In the Greek concept of bi-sexuality, the
Daemon of the man is feminine, and the Daemon of the woman masculine. With
Socrates, the Daemon is a living entity; an invisible presence, coming to his
aid when a decision must be made in the conflict of existence. With modern
psychology the Daemon is the subconscious. I prefer to affirm the Greek concept
of this guiding principle, not only because it confirms that of Yeats’ Gate
Keepers but because I utterly reject the Freudian concept of the subconscious
dominating the action of the conscious. Only a Jew could have conceived such a
transfiguration of the Hebrew God, Jehovah, for it transfers omnipotence to the
subconscious, making the conscious its feeble subjective, no longer morally responsible
for its behaviour. Worse even than that, it gave its authority to the
underworld of art in its attack on all established values in creative art; the
most salient evidence of the Dark Age we have endured for half a century.
The homosexual has no Daemon, being either
all man or all woman. He has no power therefore to dramatise internal conflict,
from which all creative concept of life is derived. He can only strive to
externalise that conflict by play-acting the parts of male and female, but
intensity of emotion can’t be inspired from such a febrile source. A homosexual
may have technical excellence in the practice of an art, but he has no power to
weld all its component parts into a symphonic unity.
This incompetence has been exemplified in
the two greatest homosexuals in the history of art, Leonardo da Vinci and
Michael Angelo.
Da Vinci, who had by far the greater mind
of the two, left behind him only one portrait of a woman, one composition, and
a few fragments of drawings and paintings. For the rest, he idled a long life
away in the investigation of natural phenomena, or experiments in mathematics.
What a waste of life, what a loss to us in what might have been achieved, given
the conceptual faculty! He sought to find some principle of construction in
geometry, which was the device of desperation. His one composition is based on
the equilateral triangle. After that one experiment he gave it up.
Michael Angelo was a very different
species of homosexual, violent, rough-tongued, ultra-male. His gigantesque
painting of the Last Judgment is a patent exposure of his lack of that
constructional faculty which makes a completed unity of a work of art. It is
just an explosion of forms, thrown here, there and anywhere on the wall,
without sequence in relation to each other and with no rhythms drawing the eye
to a focal point.
His single figure sculptures are his best
work, but those, again, evidence the lack of any conceptual faculty in him.
Most of them were designed to decorate a Pope’s tomb, but when it came to
designing the tomb even mechanical invention failed him. All he could think of
was a square box with a figure dumped at each corner. The tomb never was
completed.
But one very important distinction must be
made between Da Vinci and Angelo. Da Vinci grappled so far with his unfortunate
homosexuality in his love for the beauty of women. The heads he left of them
are of an infinite tenderness.
Angelo hated the feminine form. He created
only one that has some sex allure, his “Leda and the Swan,” but even she had
more substratum of male than female in her body. All the rest of his women are
just hulking males with a disgusting pair of flabby breasts stuck on anyhow.
Sex allure for him was the adolescent boy, and he squandered them all over the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, suspending his immature but lovingly painted
sexual parts over the heads of the devout.
A crude fellow, who probably got his
broken nose in a tavern brawl.
The problem of the True and False Mask
does not touch the homosexual, since he has no power of choice between them. A
lack of the conceptual faculty denies him that choice. All he can do is exercise
his technical equipment and leave it at that. And that would imply that
homosexuality was not his choice but was due to some crisis of conflict between
his parents during the moment of his conception. If he is the ultra-feminine,
he certainly arrives at birth as a homosexual. But where the ultra-male is
dominant the practice of homosexuality may be deferred for a time. Many of
these ultra-males marry and have children, but the marriage never endures for
long. While it does endure, they sometimes show some evidence of the
constructive faculty, if they seek self-expression in the arts. But once they
turn from women to their own sex, or at least its externality in the pretty
boy, the constructive faculty dies. I have seen evidence of this myself.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Before leaving those two dominant figures of the Renaissance, Da Vinci and Angelo, something must be said of the effect