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PARTISAN REVIEW
arts-especially in the form of easel painting and statuary-tried
to win admission to its domain. Although this does not account
completely for the decline of those arts during this period, it seems
to have been the form of that decline. Decline it was, compared to
what had taken place in Italy, Flanders, Spain and Germany the
century before. Good artists, it is true, continue to appear-1 do
not have to exaggerate the depression to make my point-but not
good
schools
of art, not good followers. The circumstances sur·
rounding the appearance of the individual great artists seem to
make them almost all exceptions; we think of them as great artists
"in spite of." There is a scarcity of distinguished small talents.
And the very level of greatness sinks by comparison to the work
of the past.
In general, painting and sculpture in the hands of the lesser
talents-and this is what tells the story-become nothing more
than ghosts and "stooges" of literature. All emphasis is taken
away from the medium and transferred to subject matter. It is no
longer a question even of realistic imitation, since that is taken
for granted, but of the artist's ability to interpret subject matter
for poetic effects and so forth.
We ourselves, even today, are too close to literature to appre·
ciate its status as a dominant art. Perhaps an example of the con·
verse will make clearer what I mean. In China, I believe, painting
and sculpture became in the course of the development of culture
the dominant arts. There we see poetry given a role subordinate to
them, and consequently assuming their limitations: the poem con–
fines itself to the single moment of painting and to an emphasis
upon visual details. The Chinese even require visual delight from
the handwriting in which the poem is set down. And by comparison
to their pictorial and decorative arts doesn't the later poetry of the
Chinese seem rather thin and monotonous?
Lessing, in his
Laokoon
written in the 1760s, recognized the
presence of a practical as well as a theoretical confusion of the
arts. But he saw its ill effects exclusively in terms of literature,
and his opinions on plastic art only exemplify the typical miscon–
ceptions of his age. He attacked the descriptive verse of poets like
James Thomson as an invasion of the domain of landscape paint·
ing, but all he could find to say about painting's invasion of poetry
was to object to allegorical pictures which required an explanation,
