ART AND HISTORY
275
What may seem to be a hatred of history or a repudiation, such
as characterizes our own time and
in
one way or another the entire
American experience and its historical bases, is more often than not
a willed freedom from particular histories rather than a relinquishing
of the habit of casting experience
into
historical molds. When such a
relinquishing does occur,
it
is almost always in association with the
aesthetic as the principle of deliverance. But this
is
most frequently
a matter not of art as aesthetic creation but as dream, myth, a poten–
tial way of nonhistorical life, such as is appropriated by bohemians at
all
times.
But the true relation of art to the historical
is
usually no
better understood by bohemians than by anybody else.
Art is the only unbetrayable revolution, the only one that does
not restore history in a new guise. And one must argue that behind
all
particular revolutions
in
the arts
is
a culminating sense of history
as an occlusion, a maker of impasses, a narrowing light. For the
artist, history, the history of his own art, is reassuring only at the
beginning, when it grants him a provisional identity as a worker in
.its line, an apprentice, and provides him with indications of what is
to be done. But the artist finds (and it can be at once, like Rimbaud
at fifteen, or quite late, like Yeats at forty-five) that he has to resist
the temptation and pressure to draw from a bag of tricks which have
all been used before - history is what has been used before - and
that to be an artist means nothing less than to invent, to "come upon"
what has not yet existed.
"Everything the artist invents is true," Flaubert said, a more
profound remark than it might appear. For it is extraordinarily dif–
ficult really to invent, against the multiplicity of patents taken out by
previous artists. But that
is
what has to be done, menacing as it will
always seem to all strategies of continuity, and indistinguishable as it
will often appear from a quest for mere novelty. Art has even had
to invent its apparent disgust and even its seeming death, in order to
make of its gestures new parabolas, new connections between the
imagination and the materials life presents to it for reconstitution. To
revolt
is
to invent at full speed, to seek new and unprecedented as–
surance in an act of creation whose one gift is its own appearance,
its demonstration that it continues to be possible for men to shape
realities outside history.
The contemporary crisis as it concerns art lies just there: we do
