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Suggested by a sentence in Ifor Evans’ book Portrait of English Literature.
Gentlemen,
A
cloud of dust is in the StrandWhere students march and raise a hand;
They stop the traffic, block the road
And roar with all the might of God.
Their banners and their shouts declare
The apotheosis of hot air,
And uncouth dress and surly ways
Are loci where the state decays.
They treat the people in the streets
As little more than bourgeois cheats,
Though in the respite of a pause
They claim they share a common cause.
Policemen herd them to the kerb
Where someone flings a basic verb,
And ushered on in disarray
They curse the night and damn the day.
(A lonely creature in his sleep
Hobbes turns and shudders all the deep:
The pages of Leviathan
Tremble for the fate of man.)
I came my way through the East End
Where the right price will sell a friend,
Where those who use coherent words
Are suspect like exotic birds,
And the local style is populist –
Which means that people use their fists.
Quarrels spike the muggy air
And someone rages, “I don’t care”;
A reasonable request is turned
Into an order duly spurned,
And deference, the social key,
Becomes a thing of history.
Unhappiness and pointlessness
Drape Aldgate High Street like a dress,
And the old woman in her room
Fears a sudden, bloody doom
While outside like a metaphor
The ceaseless lorries roar and roar.
And through the West End then I came
Where breeding and the family name
Exist with greasy fivers in
A speculative stake in tin;
Where ancient legs at half-past three
Stroll down to Claridge’s for tea,
And those with little else to do
Worry about who might be who,
And burrow in the deadwood of
The nation they profess to love.
And so I came to Piccadilly
Where tradesmen’s vans and taxis shrilly
Make the streets a Dantesque hell
To drown the gloomy passing bell;
Where gentlemen were clubbable
And good port very probable,
Where now the movies and the shops
Peddle a certain kind of slops.
I passed the drunken and the lost,
Those who failed to count the cost,
The young, the foreign and debarred,
Their minds destroyed and forearms scarred,
Who loll beneath a saddened Eros
Perched above the steaming fosse.
So on a day grown warm and sunny
I come to parley grants of money.
There
was a time when those like me
Spent
all their efforts being free,When Goldsmith dined on smoke and air,
And Gay surfeited on a pear;
When, if one must, one might descend
To take a patron as a friend,
And though one said the work was his
It only meant he paid the price.
But sensibility was then
A common measure among men,
And use of private means was still
A free act of their owners’ will.
Across the pathway of the state
Time closed and barred a sturdy gate,
And the aristocratic way
Stumbled to its close of day.
The middle men who made the soap,
The bricks, the iron, and the rope,
In Manchester began to think
And search for pennies in the sink;
Then, Lo! the cry was shortly up –
“Take from the rich their gilded cup,
We have a right to wet our lips,
Though artisans must drink in sips.”
But nothing stops the rolling stone
And soon the masses made their moan,
And “One for all and all for one”
Became the call beneath the sun:
“Egalité” was all the cry
But not, my friend, for you nor I.
For we continued to declare
That culture was a strange affair
And could not be reduced to what
Was pondered by the meanest sot.
But now the pundits are afoot,
Spreading their universal “tut”,
And approbation has become
A gift to madmen when they hum;
And worth is not of any worth,
And individual greatness, dearth;
And all the paltry and the dire
Steal the books to stoke their fire.
The new persuasion lays it down
That art must be for all the town,
But since we have no patrons left
To pay the artist when bereft
The state must move a lazy leg
To succour those who need to beg.
But now the arbiters of taste
Are neither furies nor the chaste
But lesser bureaucrats who are
As feeble as a faded star:
The artist-publisher-director
Manqués of the public sector.
Now it’s a rule that’s plain to see
That bureaucrats don’t like to be
The self-effacing servants who
Do what they are told to do;
They have no doubt about their role
To keep the artist in control
And far from simply serving others,
Or even giving jobs to brothers,
They start to gather in their fist
The levers that we somehow missed,
Until you find you cannot move
If one or two do not approve.
And then the monster starts to spawn,
No longer happy just to fawn:
It gives a deal of money to
The chosen and the very few
But keeps the rest to clear the field
Where one day it has hopes to build,
And starts delightedly to take
The bread, the coffee and the cake.
But though the bureaucrats are faceless
This does not mean that they are tasteless
(I do not mean their taste is fine
But that they know what’s “thine” and “mine”)
And so appears the orthodox,
Exciting as a pair of socks –
Invalid as all forced tastes are
Which have not simmered year by year –
Tended by gentlemen who sit
Behind the desks they barely fit.
So we return in bastard-form
To the eighteenth-century norm,
Except instead of separate taste
Which tells the marble from the waste,
Instead of Johnson at his page
We have the Walpoles of the age,
A pygmy breed with second sight
Which helps them to avoid the right;
Who sometimes have been known to boast
That X will never eat his toast,
While Y who’s been half-cut for years
Will get his grant and still more cheers.
Today
(it’s really always true)
Artistic
worth is for the few,But whereas in the past this was
A thing of small concern because
The few were situated where
The power and the privilege were,
Today our taste and intellect
Assume the nature of a sect
And mass-enjoyment now extends
Like a serial which never ends.
The unformed likes of any fool
Are taken as a golden rule,
And squandered on such petty taste
Many a talent goes to waste.
But if the artist cannot live
By the one thing he has to give
Then he must somehow compromise
And try to live with all the lies –
To join a current coterie
Where talent may be much less free,
Say writing for the radio
Or TV ads about BO,
But coteries because their aim
Is dazzling people with their fame
Are not elites and cannot form
The taste which makes of art a norm.
If, though, the artist lives alone
And in his spare time chews his bone,
Like Havergal Brian he may find
That writing for the deaf and blind
Twists you gradually from the true
And makes distorted fun of you.
But since we must make do without
A system which ignores the rout
We have to ponder by what part
We might restore the health of art.
It may be that we don’t need cash
To save the artist from the lash
And artificially foist him on
An unresponding million,
But rather must in education
Seek a sort of reparation.
But education has become
A badly mis-divided sum,
In which those who do not earn
Choose which way they shall not learn,
And any day in any street
You may hear the vicious bleat
As products of academies
Make their demands in jargonese.
I
am a fretful Irishman
Who
eats his roast beef while he can,Who looks around for mindful rigour
And finds a people lacking vigour;
Who notes with not a little scorn
That many of the softly born
(Whilst not renouncing any wealth)
Care not about the nation’s health.
I’ve lived through decades when it’s been
The fashion loudly to be seen
Chanting hatred at the state
Which feeds us from a well-stocked plate
And not to be embarrassed when
We take the food from other men.
This curse afflicts a certain sort
Of the more improperly taught,
Those who march in stern alliance
With iron laws from social science,
Who overthrow the social modes
Replacing them with honour codes,
Who love the workers and grow warm
That poor folk suffer as a norm.
They try to be demotic to
The milkman on his business who,
Theory tells them, stumbles in
A race which only winners win;
And though they can’t recall his name
They call him “comrade” just the same.
Their marriages soon fall apart –
Though they are experts on the heart;
They’re failures when it comes to bed –
But recommend the books they’ve read;
And proud to show their tolerance
Know all the names for deviance.
They’ll pointedly engage for lunch
A wacky parti-coloured bunch,
Though through a friend they’ll calm a fear
They’re not too mad, too louche, too queer.
And soon when the expropriation
Is visited upon the nation,
And all the dreadful, classy snobs
Lose their trappings and their jobs,
They’ll rest assured that evened out
Between their uses and the rout
The new permitted income will
Answer nicely to their bill,
For though they ponder deeply on
Relative deprivation
They all assume that what they need
To buy their Gucci, drink and feed
Is what the toilers down the drive
Will happily agree to give.
Against
the constant public mutter
And
the vandalistic clutterOf their ragged points-of-view,
The artist tries to collar you
And say “I beg you look at this,
Complete and tender as a kiss,
I made it on a winter’s day,
Why? I doubt if I could say,
But in it is a certain word
Which you may wish you had not heard,
For though art is not policy
It helps the unfree taste the free.”
But no, the educated mind
Has found a vision in the blind,
And castes aside its ancient fruits
To clamber into denim suits,
And when it reads, reads only those
Who introduce it to a pose.
The artist is not now a bard,
Nor a patron’s visiting card;
He loiters with his wares in hand
To meet the few who understand
That nations who decline the word
Must end in living by the sword.
But since the poet is not blest,
A man apart from all the rest,
He suffers from the narrow rage
Of this exhorting, careless age;
Indeed, there’s many who adopt
The manners of the pert abrupt –
Poets who would not recognise
An iamb stuck between their eyes,
Who think intelligence is fit
Only for those who live by it,
Who care not for tradition nor
Know what craftsmanship is for;
Hence, “making” now is out of bounds,
“Expressing” is what makes the rounds,
And poets have “expressed” themselves
Onto the remainder shelves.
New work is only useful for
The book reviewers’ daily chore,
Who classify and summarize
In an attempt to criticize,
For academic nicety
Has displaced creativity.
Professors, tutors, all the dons
Now promulgate where Grub Street once
At least ensured that where was strife
Was something like a little life.
But we are Alexandrians
Who parley with barbarians –
A counting and collating age
Afraid to lose a single page,
Which much prefers to save the small
Than ask a question of the All.
The emphasis is put upon
What, tomorrow, will be gone,
And names and reputations are
As fragile as ephemera.
And if you say it, say it soft –
The Faber list is looking lost;
Packed with fumbling Irishmen
Who weakly maunder with a pen,
Who disarray the wordhoard for
Americans enthralled by “lore”,
Who cannot write a proper line
And so are praised as very fine,
And who in an intense concern
To catch the mist upon the fern
Make a virtue of the glum,
The effort to profoundly plumb
The fundamental shallows of
Irish hatred, Irish love –
A people who will not be seen
To worship at the golden mean.
Meanwhile, the few who have not stepped
The way of the inert-inept
Busy themselves in rented rooms
And think upon their various dooms.
The radio is quick to shout
Details of who’s in, who’s out,
This life which constantly appals
With all its petty pointless squalls;
And since the emphasis is given
To those who legislate a heaven,
It is not easy to ignore
Their claim to know what life is for;
And this incessant push and shove
Is where the arts must daily move.
The
artist does what he must do,
Obstinate
to see it through,Though publication’s not the aim,
Still less a journalistic fame;
He tramps along the utmost border
And writes out of a sense of order,
Reporting to himself on what
He finds to be the human lot.
Did Solzhenitsyn when released
From the Gulag’s grudging feast
Seek subvention so that he
Might reconstruct the polity?
He took a job like other men
And wrote his novels as and when
He could, and as his faith in what
He did increased he cut the knot
Which tied him to the daily round
And made his own way, pound by pound.
But now we have a system of
Writers drip-fed from above –
Grants and prizes, too much money
Which swills around like tainted honey,
Assisting the production of
Books which may be works of love
But which, since no one wants to read them,
Decay in piles like souls in Bedlam.
The truly adequate will make
Its own way for its own sake,
And what a nation needs are some
To tell it of itself – and one
Who sees the picture whole and not
His own foreshortened partial spot;
And if there’s one to do this job
We need not pay the scribbling mob;
Indeed the mind recoils from some
Utopia of the mad, the dumb,
All blithely putting pen to verse –
I cannot think what might be worse.
The world is an ironic place
Which mocks a well-intentioned face,
And standing at the head of queues
For money to express their views
Are some who with a brutal hope
Would hang the state with its own rope –
I mean the sort who claim to be
The writer as adversary.
This stems from the romantic tosh
That artists, poor but rather posh,
Are hounded on their lonely eyries
By ignorant and mocking flunkeys.
To this was added later on
The artist as the people’s man,
Representing stifled sorts
Against the system’s “do’s” and “oughts”.
Because this fake dichotomy
Confirmed his dour autonomy,
He found he had no further need
For the transmitted word and deed
Of what a culture chose to call
Work it thought the best of all.
He stumbled into minor modes
And wrote about the mean abodes,
Grew uninformed of what was done
By prior civilization
And claimed the sole importance for
His feelings and his little saw.
But misconceptions though they be
The stuff of notoriety
Treat their victims like the fly
Which by the evening has to die.
Who the betrayer, who betrayed
When for a theory all he made
Was some poor handful of the sound
Which soon was lost on stony ground?
The artist is concelebrant
Between
the altar and the fontWithout whose independent voice
The future is an unsound choice;
For nations in their greatest hour
Who have not arts to match their power
Are shams and cold bureaucracies,
Ruled by stern autocracies.
Such a one is Russia now,
The growing empire of the sow,
Doomed to tear itself apart
Because it speaks not to the heart.
The artist working from a conscience
Needs a certain independence
And should not wallow in the arms
Of a state department’s charms
But take whatever blows might come
And live by a sort of rule of thumb,
Aware of what a vicious farce
Threatens the saving civitas.
Our modern men with their concern
To seek out something they can spurn
Know not how close both you and I
Are brought by them to anarchy.
They are the sort who make the truth
Susceptible to party proof,
But art though it reports the fire
Does not wallow in the mire:
Mozart kept his dirty cracks
For letters to his fellow hacks;
And when I read I want to find
Proof of the affirming mind.
Our business is to renovate
The crumbling props of Learning’s gate
Through which all should pass to find
A common standard for the mind;
Something which allows each one
To do as he feels must be done
But which by an agreed external
Tells the weevil from the kernel.
But understand that though art can
Be open-armed to every man
It is not something to be fed
Into a doubtful, sullen head,
But rather it should underlie
All that a pupil learns and why,
And should be seen as an example –
The proper standard of the ample.
For what is needed in our day,
Now everyone must have his say,
Is something to denounce the dense
And teach us when we talk non-sense.
But bureaucratic persons who
Do the worst that they can do
Change the arts till they become
Concerned with the essentially dumb –
With buildings, PR, admin men,
And pliant pushers of the pen,
And nonsense with its moony face
Is proudly given pride of place;
(Behind the throne the placemen cheer
And grin their envy, ear to ear:
The satisfied Director-General
Accepts petitions, noting several...).
When art is mooted by committee
And votes are taken on the witty
Then Flecknoe and his ragged son
Have dealt with Dryden and have won.
The
honour lies in having tried
And
not been small nor having lied,In having seen the struggle through
Which those like Brian had to do;
For art knows not servility
But cultivates humility.
The artist through the trees can see
The distant hills of history,
And is not loud nor clamorous
Nor makes an ego-centred fuss
But rather with a gentle grace
Pursues his art at his own pace.
Therefore, I go just as I came
With little money, still less fame,
Having no need to claim a dole
To help me shape a vital whole.
As long as I can see the sky
To prompt the simple question “why?”
And see the people in the street
As various as dogs in heat,
I have no need to bend the knee
And shout at someone, “look at me,”
For art is made and lost and made:
Virgil on his deathbed prayed
That those about him might obey
His edict on his final day
And give the Aeneid to the flame
That both their fates might be the same –
And what survives is attitude,
Which thing is fruitfully imbued
By anyone who finds in art
The painful glory of his heart:
He has no need to have command
Over a purse or open hand.
In vanity we walk this earth,
A cocksure species from our birth,
But if you find the truth of art
(It starts from where all morals start)
You will have learnt to dwell upon
The sense of the sufficient One;
Your mind become a grateful lee,
The one sure place where Man is free.
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© April-May 1980. Revised May 2013