AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
suggested no alternative to Pritchett's definition of society-"people
bound together for an end, who are making a future"-let us accept
that. Though I'm not quite happy about it. We are each, however
anarchistically and individually, making a future, or else the future,
as I prefer to think, is making us-the death we are each going to
die controlling our activities now, like a sheepdog, so that we may with
least trouble be got through that gate.
As
for "people bound together
for an end," the phrase does, of course, accurately describe those un–
fortunate prisoners of the French revolution of whom Swinburne
wrote in
Les Noyades:
they were flung, you remember, naked in pairs
into the Loire, but I don't think Pritchett had that incident conscious–
ly in mind.
The artist is even more difficult to define: in most cases only time
defines him, and I think for the purposes of this argument we should
write only of the novelist, perhaps only of the novelist like ourselves,
for obviously Wells will be out of place in any argument based on,
say, Virginia Woolf. The word artist is too inclusive: it is impossible
to make generalizations which will be true for Van Gogh, Burke, Henry
James, Yeats and Beethoven.
If
a man sets up to be a teacher, he
has duties and responsibilities to those he teaches, whether he is a
novelist, a political writer or a philosopher,
a~d
I would like to exclude
the teacher from the discussion. In the long run we are forced back to
the egotistical "I": we can't shelter behind the great dead. What
in
my
opinion, can society demand of
me?
What have I got to
render to Caesar?
.;
<;
First I would say there are certain human duties I owe in com–
mon with the greengrocer or the clerk-that of supporting my family
if I have a family, of not robbing the poor, the blind, the widow
or the orphan, of dying if the authorities demand it (it is the only
way to remain independent: the conscientious objector is forced to
become a teacher in order to ju:odfy himself). These are our primitive
duties as human beings. In spite of the fashionable example of Gau–
guin, I would say that if we do less than these, we are so much the
less human beings and therefore so much the less likely to be artists.
But are there any special duties I owe to my fellow victims bound
for the Loire? I would like to imagine there are none, but I fear there
are at least two duties the novelist owes-to tell the truth as he sees
it and to accept no special privileges from the state.
1187
