MODERN AS VISION
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scientific thinking, are felt to have altered the texture of living. Every–
day language and taste reflect these changes, even though the image
they mirror is ugly. It is only art that remains archaic, forcing its
ideas into forms and manners that are outmoded. Therefore artists
have to learn the idiom of changed speech, vision and hearing, and
mold the modern experience into forms either revolutionized or
modified.
The outstanding characteristic of realization is, then, the great
attention paid to inventing an idiom which responds to the tone of
voice of contemporaries, the changed vision of a world of machines
and speed, the rhythms of an altered contemporary tempo, the new
voice of a humanity at times when the old social hierarchies are
breaking down.
The street speaks the idiom and the idiom,
in
the mind of the
artist, invents the form. Joyce and Eliot in their early work are
realizers of the modern idiom in their poetry and their poetic prose.
In music, Alban Berg's
Woueck
is a classic example of the realiza–
tion of the 1920's in Germany as idiom. In
his
Blue Period, Picasso
had supremely this quality of realization, like the Eliot of
Preludes:
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling;
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
The human element is often reduced to pathos, clownishness, in
Wozzek,
Blue Period Picasso, the early Eliot. In Apollinaire as in
some of the German Expressionists, this clownishness acquires a
quality of touching and nobly absurd heroism.
2. By the pattern of hope, I mean-and
this
certainly
will
seem
an unfashionable view today-the idea that modern art might
transform the contemporary environment, and hence, by pacifying
and ennobling its inhabitants, revolutionize the world (there is, surely,
a pun on
this
idea in the program of Eugene Jolas in
his
magazine
transition-"the
revolution of the word").
The word
hope
has to be understood seriously, as Malraux still
intended it when he entitled his Spanish civil war novel
Espoir.
Early in the century, hope was based on the international inter-arts
