426
PARTISAN REVIEW
not need to make a rational approach to Fascism: when the time comes,
they will accept it emotionally.
•
•
•
•
*
This is a sweeping statement: hut there are moments in history
(•and these few }'ears are such a moment) when pdths are sharply defined
and clear, and wavering inexcusable. There are times when it is good
for many artists to remain detached from politics, in the sense that
if
they were not detached from politics they would not be artists at all:
but the present is not such a time. There are times when an artist's
social ideas are not of first importance, when they do not touch vitally
his art: this is true of some artists today and in the past, but although
we value what they have written and may write, they can look forward
only to a future of diminishing artistic returns. There are times when
it will seem essential to most artists to state clearly on which side of
the fence they stand: and in England and America we live, or we soon
shall live, in such a time. The consequences for the artist of such a
statement are profound, and they may end in the abasement or the
abandonment of his art. Abasement: for to accept
what
is,
and try to
preserve your own virtue in an evil world, is at best sharply to narrow
the range of your writing, to cut yourself off from everything but the
circle of personal experience; at worst to become a paid servant of
the State, retaining no independence of thought or action. Abandonment:
for if we stand on the side of "progress" we may find it necessary (as
William Morris suspected) to resign art altogether. We shall be dis·
satisfied with the art we produce as members, however unwilling, of hour·
geois society: and a Socialist art, we may feel, must be preceded by a
Socialist society.
In Our Time
What
is
to be done?
may then be asked. Is there no hope, some
people will want to know, for writers either progressive or reactionary?
:And would not the artist be better employed in the practice of his art,
worrying as little as possible about this dubious "fence" over which
he is to be compelled in the near future, you tell us, to cock a leg?
Is not the production of creative work an artists's peculiar function?
And do not, the same people might go on, do not the views you are
expressing show a contempt for creative work, are you not making
art itself
the bumboy of a political attitude? There are hundreds of
similar questions: the reader can think up a few of his own.
Such questions are equally banal, disgusting and ridiculous. They
are based on a view of existence that separates the artist's work from
his
life and so from his place in society, that regards "art" as some sort of
quintessential virtue (the "best part" of a man, we hear it said, comes
out in his art) ; the artist is regarded at once as a "personality", and
yet by a paradox that is not in fact at all surprising, as a vehicle that
produces works of art rather than as a human being. This concern
for "art" or "literature" as an essence,
the
ide!l
that
we must
keep
arl
