Notes Towards an Aesthetic

In paradise Orpheus the poet and Prometheus the father of all technicians lived at peace together. Prometheus made little water-wheels and Orpheus imitated the sound of their turning on his tortoise-shell lute. Their labours were equally useless and equally blessed. But after their expulsion Prometheus, craving temporal power, made himself a stone club as well as the necessary plough. Orpheus for love of praise memorised his own songs. Since then each has pretended that their disagreement is not an inevitable result of the Fall, but the fault of the other. When they meet they hiss at one another – ‘Pansy intellectual!’ – ‘Bourgeois clod!’

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A good poem is a love letter to the world, or rather that feminine part of it which permits the poet’s flattery but cannot be possessed. Like any love letter it is full of private endearments, protestations, swearwords and complaints.

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When Eurydice, stung by the serpent of forgetfulness, descended mourning into Hades, Orpheus was away from home at a choral recital of his own verse. When he heard the news he ran bellowing to his brother Prometheus. For economy’s sake she had been the wife of both. ‘Alas, brother!’ he cried. ‘Our dear wife is dead and gone to Hades.’

‘So you say,’ answered Prometheus without raising his eyes from his test- tubes. ‘But you always exaggerate. She’s probably just gone to have a siesta. But even if she’s dead, there’s no need to be troubled. Look what I’ve made for the two of us’ – and he pointed to the figure of a woman, made of clay and ivory. ‘She can sweep floors, make beds and play the ukulele. Her conversation is limited. A perfect wife. Her only flaw is that she can’t have children; but I’m working on a glandular extract which may remedy that.’

The image creaked in the workshop corner. ‘Kiss me, sugar daddy,’ it squawked. Orpheus went to the door and vomited among the hydrangeas. Prometheus ran after him shouting – ‘You are a constitutional psychopath!’

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Oscar Wilde made at his trial one truthful and profound statement. On being asked whether he considered a certain work of art immoral, he replied – ‘It is worse. It is bad art.’

This was thought to be the typical remark of a poseur. But he was right. A pornographic, a sentimental, or a propagandist poem is a lying oracle.

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It persuades that all is well when all is not well, and substitutes a drugged response for the true labour of poet and reader. Yet every poem inevitably contains some thread of lying.

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Coarseness is another matter. The obscene (in the Greek sense) mysteries of sex and death menace the shivering ghost of Adam. Rob him of his coarseness and you rob him of his courage.

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When Prometheus asks the meaning of Orpheus’ song, Orpheus replies – ‘Listen again.’

‘But,’ says Prometheus, ‘does it incite men to the practice of virtue?’ ‘No, it restores to them the freedom to do good and evil.’

‘Then it is not ethical.’

‘No. But if you want a sermon, the churches are open.’

‘I was going there in any case; but I wanted to hear from your own lips the proof of your immorality.’

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Even if Mendelssohn had put A.M.D.G. at the top of every page of his MS book, it would not have enabled him to compose the Brandenburg Concerto.

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It is recorded that the legendary Orpheus met the Bacchanals as they combed the Thracian hills, raging drunk and stark naked. They proposed that he should have intercourse with them. He declined their invitation on the ground of his recent bereavement. Angry at the slight, they tore him limb from limb – and his marble head was carried down the Hebrus, the cold mouth still crying ‘Eurydice!’

Various interpretations of this legend are possible. But it seems most likely that the Bacchanals were Furies in disguise, those ungovernable passions whom Orpheus had dislodged from Hades by his unexpected irruption there. In this matter he was the archetype of the bohemian artist. But though devoured by them, he knew they were brutish and unsatisfactory partners and still languished for Eurydice. This accentuated their ferocity.

Prometheus dealt with the Bacchanals more reasonably. He installed them in State-appointed brothels, and when they had grown pale andpage 129 diseased he converted them without difficulty to a more socially suitable way of life.

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Buck Rogers is a Promethean hero: he can do anything and nothing. Charlie Chaplin perhaps is Orpheus, the clown’s mask crying ‘Eurydice!’ as it falls down the climbing escalator.

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The punishment of Prometheus for his attempt to conquer the spiritual world by technical devices is represented inaccurately in the original legend. Nothing so natural as a vulture was sent to prey on his liver. He was left alone in a wilderness of oil derricks and chromium-plated beerpumps, with the pain caused by Eurydice’s absence but with no knowledge of its cause; his sole consolation the thud of falling markets and the louder and louder explosions of atomic physics.

He requests Orpheus to exercise his magic and dispel his abominable ennui. But the magic of Orpheus resides in the truth of his song. Prometheus asks for some gentle pastoral music; and hears a lament which reflects accurately the voice of the wind among bombed cathedrals, the weeping of ulcered children, and the anvil chorus of the pimp and D.P. So Prometheus sacks Orpheus from his job of Court poet and builds a bigger and better juke-box.

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Orpheus has one song only: that which he sings in Hades to rescue his soul, Eurydice, from the chasm of non-being and causality.

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Orpheus can never see Eurydice face to face. His descent and his song are endless. Yet the sight even of her damned shade wrings tears from his eyes and music from his harp.

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The pale moon is setting beyond the white wave
And time is setting wi’ me O.

Into whose mouth does Burns put these prodigious lines? Into the mouth ofpage 130 a drunk against whom his wife had barred the door on a frosty night. The moralist’s version of the tale would run something like this:

When Paddy McGurk came home one night,
Lord save us, he was shockingly tight!
Against him the door was locked and barred
So he slept on the stones of the cold cowyard.
The moon went down and the sun came up,
But Paddy lay stiff as a poisoned pup –
Which only goes to show, dear friend,
That booze will catch you out in the end.

Many people expect all artists to be virtuous in their lives. There is an error here. That Wilde was a sodomite and died of drink; that Villon was a whoremaster and thief condemned for sacrilege – these facts were of the deepest importance to themselves, their friends, the police and God. That is to say, they lived under the same Moral Law as other people. But their work was a creative recognition of precisely those situations which their vices had helped to create. Villon expressed the disgust of a whoremaster for his trade, the fear of the gibbet experienced by a thief, and the remorse of a man who fears damnation. Wilde in the unexpurgated ‘De Profundis’ faces quite genuinely a nasty crack up. Their gifts and not their morals make them remembered.

The demand, properly stated, should be: All people should be virtuous in their lives. Which we know already.

Orpheus is not robbed of hope by the death of Eurydice – for that came about by the agency of the undying serpent. But the moment is terrible when, after turning aside from his search to lie down in some stale tavern, he wakes to find the deceiving images of the night turned to sacks of rotting straw, and her stone blind face staring from under a rafter.

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The original Macpherson of Burns’ poem ‘Macpherson’s Farewell’ was a cattle-thief who showed an appropriate and humble spirit at the time of his execution. But Burns did not allow him to die thus. Instead –

O what is death but parting breath!
On many a bluidy plain
I’ve dared his face, and in this place
I’ll dare it once again.

See rantingly, sae vauntingly,
Sae dauntingly gaed he,
page 131 He played a spring and danced it round
Below the gallows tree.

It is the chant of Orpheus-Macpherson, who in his heroic response to the event forgets that not song but prayer is suitable at such a time.

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To ask that every work of art should be founded upon humility is much like asking that the sexual act should be performed in a position of prayer. Both acts, however, require guts, enthusiasm, and immediate attention to the job being done.

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Each man is both Orpheus and Prometheus. No man has ever yet successfully played one role without botching the other. Thus the poet dreams of unpaid bills; and the illiterate film tycoon sends his daughter to the best schools to acquire culture. Unfortunately Orpheus must rely on Prometheus for a job; so his anxiety is the greater.

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The chief folly of Prometheus is to suppose that his technical gifts are a substitute for gnosis; of Orpheus, to suppose that by his song he can bribe the Fates to overlook his misdemeanours and prevent their inevitable consequences.

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The angels that sing Holy, Holy, Holy before the throne of the Lamb cannot understand the song of Orpheus; for they have never known the pain of separation from that inward bride which is self and not-self and carries at its centre the light of the dayspring.

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Statements about faith and morals are charts of that spiritual country in which we live – ragged, mountainous, and by reason of the Fall frequently inaccessible. The statements of aesthetic humanism are travellers’ reports. Neither can supply the place of the other. A man may have climbed among glaciers and crevasses, or visited the swamp-dwellers at the delta of some great river. His notes are fragmentary and his memory inaccurate. If all travellers’page 132 tales were sifted and the results codified, one might obtain a rather slovenly copy of the master chart, which is revealed religion. But this would not provide the unique and moving account of the eye-witness, which is valuable because we are men and a man wrote it.

Religious quarrels are quarrels about the value and proper interpretation of the master chart. Aesthetic quarrels are quarrels about the veracity and style of a given report.

It is quite improper for a moralist or theologian to demand that a report should be pruned to fit his particular interpretation of the master chart. A traveller himself, who knows the chart, may find that the two versions differ. But if he is intelligent he will say to himself – ‘The country is large and the chart, though accurate, does not show every creek and goat track: very likely I have found some of the unmarked features. Or perhaps my findings are incorrect. But I know that I was in some place and set down to the best of my ability what I saw and what occurred there. That is all I can ever hope to do.’

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