Literary Giants Literary Catholics (52 page)

     
Jackson: Truth and falsehood in the abstract do not exist
.

     Chesterton: Then nothing else does.

     
Jackson: Truth is one’s own conception of things
.

     Chesterton: The Big Blunder. All thought is an attempt to discover if one’s own conception is true or not.

     
Jackson: Negations without affirmations are worthless
.

     Chesterton: And impossible.

     
Jackson: No opinion matters finally: except your own
.

     Chesterton: Said the man who thought he was a rabbit.

Chesterton, the absolutist, is absolutely right; Jackson, the relativist, is more than relatively wrong.

What, however, has this to do with Shakespeare? I will answer, if I may, with a further peripatetic aside, this time in the form of a cautionary tale.

I was born with the proverbial plastic spoon in my mouth and endured the worst of educations in an east London comprehensive school (which shall remain nameless). This citadel of secularism was full of the sort of relativist and “multicultural” nonsense that, with reference and deference to the dialogue quoted above, could be called almost “Jacksonian” in its inanity. Now, this school had, as its motto, emblazoned above the assembly hall, the Shakespearean epithet “This above all: To thine own self be true.” As a youth, steeped in an unconscious agnosticism and entirely ignorant of Christian orthodoxy, I took this motto very seriously. It became, in fact, and in the absence of a creed, my own personal motto. I even claimed, somewhat whimsically and a trifle unjustly, that it was the only useful thing I ever learned at school.

Why, one wonders, did such a school choose such a motto? The answer, of course, is that it is safe. It cannot offend anyone, regardless of his faith or lack thereof. It smacks of relativism. It reminds us of Jackson’s trite trifles, posing as philosophy.
Truth is one’s own conception of things . . . No opinion matters finally: except your own
. . . It is a short step from these self-centered notions of truth to the Shakespearean version of the same:
This above all: To thine own self be true
. Can this not be paraphrased or interpreted as “Be true to thine own selfishness”; or “Be true to thyself, to hell with the rest”; or, more blasphemously, “I am the way and the truth (not anyone else, including God)”?

What does all this mean? Does it mean, horror of horrors, that Shakespeare was a protosecularist or a protorelativist? Certainly many secularist critics would have us believe so. They are, however, wrong. Shakespeare was possibly, perhaps probably, a Catholic. He was certainly a believing and profoundly orthodox Christian whose plays were full of profoundly Christocentric perceptions of life.

Yet, if this is so, where does it leave our cautionary tale? How do we explain the apparent secularism of the Shakespearean epithet quoted above? The answer, of course, is that the words are not Shakespeare’s at all; or rather, they are words that Shakespeare placed into the mouth of someone else. They were uttered by a character in one of his plays and, as such, represent the beliefs of the character, not necessarily the beliefs of the poet who enabled him to speak. The character in question is Polonius, the well-meaning, bungling and ultimately shallow adviser to King Claudius in
Hamlet
. The words are spoken as part of Polonius’ famous advice to his son, Laertes, a monologue that can be seen as a secularist discourse, more sublime in expression than Jackson’s platitudes but ultimately almost as banal. Shakespeare paints Polonius as a meddling and blundering buffoon, as facile and impotent in life as he is fatuous in philosophy. In short, Polonius looks as silly in the hands of Shakespeare as does Jackson in the hands of Chesterton. In both cases, the folly of falsehood is exposed by a master of truth.

In the words of the Bard himself, life in the fallen world might continue to be a comedy of errors, but all’s well that ends well!

61

_____

Friend or Foe
?

I
S MODERN ART MERELY A LOAD
of old rubbish—or, rather, a load of old new rubbish? Certainly much that passes as “art” in our muddled modern world is not worthy of the name. Take, for instance, the garbage posing as art during an exhibition of the shortlisted “artists” for the 2004 Beck’s Futures Prize at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Among the finalists for the £20,000 prize was a British “artist” who had produced a video of two Cilla Black impersonators singing the star’s first big hit,
Anyone Who Had a Heart
. Another finalist, who described himself as an avid train spotter, had produced a twenty-seven-minute video of a freight train. The winner, however, was a Brazilian “artist” who specialized in making sculptures of animals by scraping fluff from new carpets.

Meanwhile, in Cardiff, the Artes Mundi prize, worth £40,000, was won by a Chinese “artist” who had gathered dust from the ruins of the World Trade Center and had scattered it on the floor before tracing a short verse about dust in the dust. Works of “art” honored with major prizes in previous years include piles of bricks, soiled nappies (or soiled diapers for our American readers), an unmade bed decorated with debris such as condoms, dead animals, “sculptures” made by urinating in snow, and the work of an “artist” who specialized in sewing things to the soles of his feet.
Et cetera ad nauseam
.

The exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) opened a few hours before the millionaire collector and patron of modern “art”, Charles Saatchi, threw a celebrity-thronged party at his private gallery to launch a new exhibition, titled
New Blood
, which also professed to champion the avant-garde. The exhibition was greeted with howls of derision by Saatchi’s rivals at the ICA. “We’re showing the new blood. Saatchi’s got old blood”, sneered a spokesman for the ICA. Philip Dodd, the ICA’s director, added that “the nicest thing to say about Charles is that several artists in his show were in our Beck’s exhibition a year ago.” In dismissing his rival, Dodd had also unwittingly dismissed himself, and the so-called “art” he promotes, to the dustbin of history. As his comments make abundantly clear, this sort of self-styled modern “art” is not about quality but novelty. It’s not about how good it is but how new it is. This year’s artists are better than last year’s artists purely because they are this year’s artists. Last year’s artists are already
passe
. It is, therefore, easy to dismiss this sort of “art” as nothing but dust and fluff that will be blown away by the winds of fashion. After all, as C. S. Lewis quipped, fashions are always coming and going . . . but mostly going.

So much for fashion and the false “art” it promotes. What about real modern art? What about art that is truly modern and truly art? Is such art a friend or foe of the Faith? Should Christians be suspicious of such art? Should we trust it?

Such questions cannot be answered—and should not even be asked—until we have asked and answered the more fundamental and radical question
What is modern art
? And, as is so often the case, it is best to begin by asking what a thing is not before we proceed to a discussion of what it is.

The first thing to be understood is that modern art is not particularly “modern”. In the same way that modern history begins several centuries ago, modern art is already many centuries old. It is, in fact, impossible to point definitively to a particular moment when art became modern. The departure from iconography was “modern”; the science of perspective was “modern”. Giotto was “modern” in the fourteenth century; Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael were “modern” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If “modern” means up-to-date or innovative within the context of one’s own time, these artists qualify in every respect as “modern”. Paradoxically, they are permanently modern, in the sense that the freshness of their vision is perennial. Their art is fresh because it is incorruptible. One can hardly say the same of soiled nappies, condom-strewn beds or carpet fluff. In this sense, Giotto, Leonardo and Raphael have far more claim to being modern than have the nameless and soon-to-be-forgotten “artists” of today. And, of course, they have a far better claim to being artists.

If we move our discussion of modern art to the nineteenth century, we can see the paradoxes and the tensions at the heart of any discussion of art and modernity. Impressionism, for instance, was perceived as very avant-garde, even dangerously so. According to G. K. Chesterton, a critic who should never be taken lightly, impressionism was the product of philosophical relativism, the absence of definition in the former being the result of the absence of definitive objectivity in the latter. One can see Chesterton’s point, and even agree with it, but are we to conclude that there was no good impressionist art? Surely not.
Pace
Chesterton, we cannot see Monet’s masterful vision of Rouen Cathedral in full sunlight as anything but sublime. Similarly, the protoimpressionism of J. M. W. Turner was truly “modern” in the sense of being avant-garde or ahead of its time. Although one critic dismissed a particularly monochromatic Turner seascape as nothing but “soap-suds”, it is the artist and not the critic who has stood the test of time or, more correctly, the test of timelessness. It is indeed a paradox worthy of note that Turner’s greatest champion among his contemporaries was John Ruskin, who, as both artist and critic, is better known as a neomedievalist who championed Gothic “tradition” than as an advocate of modern concepts of “impressionism”. It is, in fact, an even greater paradox that Ruskin’s championing of another artistic movement, the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, exhibited the surprising fact that even tradition can be modern.

The Pre-Raphaelites, as their name suggests, sought a return to the purity of a medieval vision of art. In contradistinction to the pastel haze of the impressionists, the Pre-Raphaelites painted in the bold daylight of primary splendor. Their subjects were often taken from literature and myth and were imbued with neomedievalist romanticism. It is a medieval victory
over
Victorianism, and yet it is also medievalism modified and modernized
by
Victorianism. And herein lies the dynamism of the paradox. Neomedievalism is both
new
and
medieval
. It is the light of tradition seen through the telescope of modernity.

And so to the twentieth century.

Arguably, of all centuries, the last was the worst—at least in terms of the divorce of modernity from tradition. And if this is true of culture in general, it is certainly true of art in particular.

Perhaps Pablo Picasso is more culpable than most for the divorce. He was certainly guilty of adultery, in the sense of the adulteration of the gifts he was given. Unlike many of the modern “artists” who followed his example, Picasso could paint beautifully. The problem is that he ceased to do so. Having established a solid reputation, he sullied himself with inferior “primitive” experiments utterly unworthy of his talent. This, in itself, might not have mattered too much except for the fact that a legion of disciples who, unlike their master, could not paint, crept wormlike through the crevices of credulity that the weight of Picasso’s fallen talent had caused. The result was an artistic revolution as nihilistic and destructive as were the political revolutions of the century. The cubist castration of art heralded the omnipotence of impotence made manifest in the dust and fluff of today’s artless moderns.

It is not all bad news, however. Much art of real stature has emerged in the twentieth century. The art of Otto Dix is as gruesome as Grünewald in its graphic depiction of the ugliness of sin, and the surrealist symbolism of Salvador Dali has more in common with the artistic vision of Hieronymus Bosch than with the heinous bosh of “postmodern” pretentiousness. Unlike many of their contemporaries, Dali and Dix have retained the critical connection with tradition that is essential to all true art. Their art is the product of the marriage of tradition and modernity and, in consequence, will survive alongside the modern art of previous centuries. The rest of the ephemera masquerading as “art” will decay in the putridness of its own corruption. Will anyone remember the nameless Brazilian artist who creates “art” from fluff in a century or so, or next year for that matter? Of course not. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . . Will genuine art, modern or otherwise, survive the test of timelessness? Of course it will.
Vincit omnia veritas
.

62

_____

From Freud to Faith

Around Dali everything is real except myself.

—Salvador Dali

S
ALVADOR DALI IS AN ENIGMA
. He is such an enigma that it is almost trite to describe him as such. He is as elusive as a butterfly—infuriatingly so, self-contradictorily so. He is so elusive, flittering from one flippant frivolity to another, that the pursuivant’s sadistic curiosity desires to pin him down and, like a lepidopterist, examine the colorful concoction of beauty and ugliness with which he revealed himself to, and concealed himself from, the world.

It is never possible satisfactorily to explain a man, least of all a man of Dali’s contradictions, through a process of biographical vivisection whereby the investigator seeks to dissect his subject’s secrets with the scalpel of subjectivism and the forceps of Freudian self-deception. It is, however, possible to arrive at sensible conclusions through a process of good solid detective work. In the case of one as self-consciously elusive and artfully deceptive as Dali, it becomes more necessary than ever to stick resolutely to the facts and not to fly off in pursuit of Dali’s flights of fancy. Such flights will simply lead to the pursuit of the elusive butterfly with no hope of pinning him down. Instead, the Dali detective must keep his feet on the ground and his eyes on the facts, remembering in true surrealist fashion that red herrings can fly Salvador Dali was born in 1904 in Figueres on the plains of Andalusia in northern Spain. From 1921 until his expulsion in 1926, he studied at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. During his period as a student, he became attracted, albeit briefly, to revolutionary politics and was jailed for thirty-five days for anarchistic tendencies. His early paintings were somewhat eclectic, vacillating between the traditional and the avant-garde and betraying the influence of artists as diverse as Jan Vermeer, Francisco de Zurbaran and Pablo Picasso. His artistic identity attained coherence, or at any rate cohesion, following his joining of the surrealist movement in the summer of 1929. Thereafter, the bizarre dreamscapes awash with the remnants of Freudian psychoanalysis became the hallmark with which he attained global prominence.