ART AND FORTUNE
the old margin no longer exists; the facade is down; society's resistance
to the discovery of depravity has ceased; now everyone knows that
Thackeray was wrong, Jonathan Swift right. The world and the soul
have split open of themselves and are
all
agape for our revolted in–
spection. The simple eye of the camera shows us, at Belsen and
Buchenwald, horrors that quite surpass Swift's powers, a vision of
life turned back to its corrupted elements which is more disgusting
than any that Shakespeare could contrive, a cannibalism more literal
and fantastic than that which Montaigne ascribed to organized
society. A characteristic activity of mind is therefore no longer needed.
Indeed, before what we now know the mind stops--the great psycho–
logical fact of our · time which we all observe with baffled wonder
and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to Belsen
and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before the incommuni–
cability of man's suffering.
This may help to explain the general deterioration of our intel–
lectual life. It may also help to explain an attitude to our life in
general. Twenty-five years ago Ortega spoke of the "dehumanization"
of modem
art.
Much of what he said about the nature of modem
art has, by modem
art,
been proved wrong, or was wrong even when
he said it. But Ortega was right in observing of modem
art
that it
expresses a dislike of holding in the mind the human fact and the
human condition, that it shows "a real loathing of living forms and
living beings," a disgust with the "rounded and soft forms of living
bodies" ;
and that together with this revulsion, or expressed by
it,
we
find a disgust with history and society and the state. Human life as
an aesthetic object can perhaps no longer command our best attention;
the day seems to have gone when the artist who dealt in representa–
tion could catch our interest almost by the mere listing of the ordi–
nary details of human existence; and the most extreme and complex
of human dilemmas now surely seem to many to have lost their
power of interest. This seems to be supported by evidence from those
arts for which a conscious exaltation of humanistic values is stock-in–
trade-! mean advertising and our middling novels, which, almost
in
the degree that they celebrate the human, falsify and abstract it;
in
the very business of expressing adoration of the rounded and soft
forms of living bodies they expose the disgust which they really feel.
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