78
PARTISAN REVIEW
we do?" what else can I answer but "Nothing"? There is nothing to do
different from what we already do: if poets write poems and readers
read them, each as best they can-if they try to live not as soldiers or
voters or intellectuals or economic men, but as human beings-they are
doing all that can be done. But to expect them-by, say, reciting one–
syllable poems over the radio-to bring back that Yesterday in which
people stood on chairs to look at Lord T ennyson, is to believe that
General Motors can bring back "the tradition of craftsmanship" by giv–
ing, as it does, prizes to Boy Scouts for their scale-models of Napoleonic
coaches; that the manners of the past can be restored by encouraging
country people to say
Gruss Gott
or
Howdy, stranger
to the tourists they
meet along summer lanes.
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament
and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is
life itself. From Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the
truth, the truth will set us free: art is indispensable because so much
of this truth can be learned through works of art and through works
of art alone--for which of us could have learned for himself what
Proust and Chekhov, Hardy and Yeats and Rilkc, Shakespeare and
Homer learned for us? and in what other way could they have made
us see the truths which they themselves saw, those differing and con–
tradictory truths which seem nevertheless, to the mind that contains
them, in some sense a single truth? And all these things, by their very
nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these thing5
ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do
not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as
surely as anything can.
If
while most of our people (the descendants of
those who, ordinarily, listened to Grimm's Tales and the ballads and
the Bible; who, exceptionally, listened to Aeschylus and Shakespeare)
listen not to simple or naive art, but to an elaborate and sophisticated
substitute for art, an immediate and infallible synthetic as effective and
terrifying as advertisements or the speeches of Hitler-if, knowing all
this, we say:
Art has
a~ways
been a matter of a few,
we are using a
truism to hide a disaster. One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly
conclusive attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that
through it not only material but also spiritual goods can be shared:
that in a democracy bread and justice, education and art, will be acces–
sible to everybody.
If
a democracy should offer its citizens a show of
education, a sham art, a literacy more dangerous than their old il–
literacy, then we should have to say that it is not a democracy at all,
but one more variant of those "People's Democracies" which share
