PARTISAN REVIEW
lenges the form of life of contemporary men at its root and with
energy and passion and on a large scale and sets up other standards–
deriving from different spiritual principles--against the common
lived principles, in every branch of life? The great revolution in our
society which has changed the face of our lands and the character
of our people is the industrial and mechanical revolution. This is
not personal but works on the individual through the mass. It is
not spiritual but so far has depended on an accentuation of material
needs: and it tends to make people units and cogs
in
a mechanical
system. Moreover, it appears to be destructive of the popular basis
of "art" in its effects in so far as it substitutes something else–
machine products.
In what I have said I might appear to be trying absurdly to
make little of the achievement of outstanding contemporary writers
and artists, those who, like James Joyce (or like Picasso, as was
suggested to me after I had finished writing what appears above ) ,
have really mastered the data and the "experience" of our age and
have transformed it into their work-just as their predecessors did
who were "on top" of their time in their turn. There is a kind of
arid criticism which always belittles whatever is contemporary as
compared with earlier standards, just as there is a form of uncritical
acceptance whereby the contemporary worker alone is praised and
the work which has become tradition
is
left alone and forgotten.
But I am not really convinced that we can ever judge the work
of our own time impartially, and I am not even sure what "impartial"
means in this connection.
Perhaps I ought to put the problem now occurring to me in
another way. There are moods when a painting by Picasso or Braque
"says" something more immediate and vital than does the painting
of Raphael. The poetry of Mr. Eliot may evoke a more immediate
response than the poetry of Donne or Milton or Shakespeare. And
I could make a similar parallel for the work of Joyce. Yet am I to
say that Picasso is "greater'' than Raphael or that Joyce is "greater"
than Rabelais? I suspect that much of the confusion comes from the
use of this word "great" whereby we compare achievements of
different times in terms of a single, objective (but also undefined)
standard of "greatness."
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