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wholly in practice since it seemed to deny what was self-evidently
undeniable: the intelligence of the artist - his realistic understanding
of the value and practical uses of
his
inspiration - and the whole
drab, boring labor of creativity. Hence the excesses of Romanticism
were continually counterbalanced by the criterion which Matthew
Arnold, Flaubert, James, Eliot and Joyce made so much of: that of
the artist as disembodied, utterly detached creator whose work is ob–
jective, autonymous, "containing in itself," in Coleridge's words, "the
reason why it is so and not otherwise." These Arnoldian concepts
acted as a substitute classicism which defended the best nine–
teenth- and twentieth-century artists against the weaknesses, conceit
and often downright silliness inherent in their beliefs, from that split
between feeling and intelligence which has bedeviled decadent Ro–
manticism from Shelley to Ginsberg.
The opposite of all this is the post-Arnold, post-Eliot art we have
now, where the work
is
not set off on its own, a law unto itself, but
is, instead, in a continual, cross-fertilizing relationship with the art–
ist's life. The existence of the work of art, that is, is contingent, provi–
sional; it fixes the energy, appetites, moods and confusions of ex–
perience in the most lucid possible terms so as to create a temporary
clearing of calm, and then moves on, or back, into autobiography.
Camus first hinted at this in
The
Myth
of Sisyphus
when he sug–
gested that a man's works "derive their definitive significance" only
from his death: "They receive their most obvious light from the very
life of their author. At the moment of death, the succession of his
works
is
but a collection of failures. But
if
those failures
all
have the
same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of
his
own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he
p0s–
sesses." This idea was taken up by the American poet, Hayden Car–
ruth, and applied eloquently to the situation of the arts now:
In its authenticity life is our own interpretation and re-organization
of experience, structured metaphorically. It is the result of succes–
sive imaginative acts - it is a work of art! By conversion, a work of
art is life,
provided it be true to the experiential core.
Thus in a
century artists had moved from an Arnoldian criticism of life
to
an Existential creation of life, and both the gains and the losses
were immense.
The biggest loss perhaps was a large part of what
we
thought we
had known about art. For now we saw in exactly what ·way art
is
limitless. It is limitless because it
is
free and responsible: it is a life.
