410
PARTISAN REVIEW
mitted to worldly verification. The
Paradiso
was replaced by The
Song
of
the Earth.
The values of positivism and science are evident in their practi–
cal bearing, and we are indebted to them for better health, more
convenient forms of transportation, and a thousand such blessings, but se–
rious literature can hardly be content with those values inasmuch as they
claim to be comprehensive. Literature is inclined to say to adepts of En–
lightenment, positivism, and science: I appreciate what you are doing, but
don't be so sure that your sense of life comprehends life; there is more to
it than you know. Isn't it possible that the order you have prescribed on
the authority of reason is only a particular exemplar of order in general?
Aren't there other forms of order, economies not at all linear, consecu–
tive, deductive; forms - as in modern art and music and literature - in
which one constituent goes with another because of esoteric consan–
guinities which can't be predicted but by the same token can't be refuted?
I should try to say what forms the artistic revolt against man's fate has
taken. I begin with an obvious one; that genuine artists mind their own
business rather than the world's business. They stick to their job, as Eliot
said in praise of the particular form of "art for art's sake" practiced by
Flaubert and Henry James. They stand apart from the hubbub of daily
life, at least to the extent of pursuing the values of their craft, which are
rarely those of the marketplace.
In
The
Renaissance
Walter Pater paid the
highest tribute to Raphael's artistic conscientiousness by saying that he
"stood still to live upon himsel(,' One of Henry James's parables of the
same conscientiousness is a short story called "The Next Time" in which
a professional novelist, Ray Limbert, tries year by year to write a popular
novel, in an effort to support his family, only to find himself failing
through the insistence of his artistic conscience.
In
the end he gives up
the attempt and floats away "into a grand indifference, into a reckless
consciousness of art." What had happened was "that he had quite forgot–
ten whether he had generally sold or not." He had merely woken up one
morning again "in the country of the blue and had stayed there with a
good conscience...." The country of the blue is the place an imagina–
tion consulting its own desires invents for itsel(
It
is the space that artists
and visionaries invent, where they can stand still for the time being to live
upon themselves. Yeats imagines such a space, and the power of mind to
hold it, in these lines and the refrain from "Long-Legged Fly":
That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post.
Our master Caesar is in the tent
