THE
R.OoTS
O~
MODERN TASH
too much that this is
SO,
3
it is possible that a view of our historical
situation might lead us to justify the overemphasis, for in the historical
perspective we perceive such a depressing plethora of matter and so
little form. Form suggests a principle of control-I can quite under–
stand that group of my students who have become excited over their
discovery of the old animosity which Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams bear to the iamb, and have come to feel that could
they but break the iambic shackles, the whole of modern culture
could find a true expression.
The value of form must never be denigrated. But
by
a per–
versity of our minds, just as the commitment to a particular matter
of literature is likely to be conceived in terms of hostility to form,
so the devotion to the power of form is likely to
be
conceived in
terms of hostility to matter, to matter
in
its sheer literalness, in its
stubborn denotativeness. The claims of form to pre-eminence always
have a certain advantage because of the feeling I have just referred
to, that the mind's power of shaping is more characteristic of mind
than its power of observation. Certainly the power of shaping
is
more intimately connected with what Plato called the "spirited"
part of man, with the will, while observation may
be
thought of as
springing from the merely "vegetative" part. The eye, it cannot
choose but see, we cannot bid the ear
be
still; things impress them–
selves upon us against or with our will. But the plastic stress of spirit
is of the will in the sense that it strives against resistance, against the
stubbornness of the dull, dense world- it compels "all new succes–
sions to the forms they wear." Shelley's description of the act of
creation suggests that the plastic will does not exercise itself without
the recalcitrance of stupid literal matter. When we consider what is
going on in painting at this moment, we perceive what may happen
in an art when it frees itself entirely from the objective. No doubt the
defense of the legitimacy of non-objective art which is made
by
referring to the right of music to be unindentured to an objective
reality
is
as convincing as it ever was. Yet do we not have the un–
happy sense that sterility
is
overtaking the painters, that by totally
3. Who can imagine any of our critics saying with Ruskin that "No good
work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign
of a misunderstanding of the ends of
art,"
and " . .. no great man ever stops
working till he has reached his point of failure.. . I '?
