62
PARTISAN REVIEW
artist has no claim upon his contemporaries, but merely to bring out
the absurdity of embodying the complexities of the case in the pos–
sessive adjective, no matter which way it points. As long as we use
it, the danger is that the indignation we feel about the lot of the
artist will be misdirected; it will be the indignation of cheap melo–
drama, which contrasts the artist-hero pursuing truth with the villain
society pursuing the Almighty Dollar. The fact is that the artist is a
part of the society we incriminate, and if we wish to improve his lot,
he must have dollars too.
Society taken in the lump does not systematically reject or
divorce the artist. It is for the most part unaware that any marriage
or engagement has taken place. Society possesses no single mind and
will, and we must not impute one for the mere satisfaction of cast–
ing blame; any more than we must fancy, for the pleasure of praise, a
society with the mind and will of a cultivated art-collector. All the
nonsense written and spoken about the blessed unity of the thirteenth
century, or about the Greeks being "a people of artists," is sheer
illusion and
sehnsucht- a
mirage, and as such dangerous, because
it leads away from real oases.
In other words, any serious discussion of art and society must
clearly conceive the two things whose relation it treats of, and it
must refine upon each conception as required. Society at large exists
to secure the simplest needs of man-food, clothing, shelter-and
the overwhelming majority of men in every known society have been,
and continue to be, so beset by the hardships of maintaining and
perpetuating their kind that art for them does not exist. It is perfectly
proper that they should feel so. Life, as the ancients said, comes first,
then philosophy. Life first and then art. This is not a matter of
taste.
It
is a necessity, and it turns out on examination that this
necessity
in
all its aspects is the very subject matter of art. That is
why we dare to take pleasure in the spectacle of Henry James or
Proust or Melville pitting his mind and hardening his will against
the works of man and God, against society or the universe : we respond
because we feel at once the primacy of life and the clutch of neces–
sity. In Paradise or Utopia there is no need of art because there reality
is synonymous with perfect design.
Now an imperfect society must be in part prosperous before
it can spend any large sum on maintaining its design-makers whom
