60
PARTISAN REVIEW
loyalty, tenderness and silence, tangentially used, suggested much; but
now that they are used literally and .directly they say far less than
the situation demands. His stories showed a great effort of com–
prehension and they demand a considerable effort from their readers,
that effort in which lies whatever teaching power there is in art; but
now he is not making an effort to understand but to accept, which
may indeed be the effort of the honest political man but not of
the honest artist.
An
attempt has been made to settle the problem of the artist's
relation to politics by loudly making the requirement that he give
up his base individuality and rescue humanity and his own soul
by becoming the mouthpiece of a party, a movement or a philosophy.
That requirement has demonstrably failed as a solution of the prob–
lem; the problem, however, still remains. It may be, of course, that
politics itself will settle the problem for us; it may be that in our
tragic time art worthy the name cannot be produced and that we
must live with the banalities of
The Fifth Column
or even with less.
However, if the problem will be allowed to exist at all, it will not
be solved in theory and on paper but in practice. And we have, after
all, the practice of the past to guide us at. least with a few tentative
notions. We can · learn to stop pressing the writer with the demand
for contemporaneity when we remember the simple fact that writers
have always written directly to and about the troubles of their own
time and for and about their contemporaries, some in ways to us
more obvious than others but all responding inevitably to what was
happening around them. We can learn too that the relation of an art–
ist to his culture, whether that culture be national or the culture of
a relatively small recusant group, is a complex and even a contra–
dictory relation: the artist must accept his culture and be accepted
by it, but also-so it seems--he must be its critic, correcting and
even rejecting it according to his personal insight; his strength seems
to come from the tension of this ambivalent situation and we must
learn to welcome the ambivalence. Finally, and simplest of all, we
learn not to expect a political, certainly not an immediately· political,
effect from a work of art; and in removing from art a burden of
messianic responsibility which it never has discharged and cannot dis–
charge we may leave it free to do whatever it actually can do.
