The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In the affluent countries today, thanks to the high per capita income, small houses and scarcity of domestic servants, there is one art in which we probably excel all other societies that ever existed, the art of cooking. (It is the one art which Man the Laborer regards as sacred.) If the world population con­tinues to increase at its present rate, this cultural glory will be short-lived, and it may well be that future historians will look nostalgically back to the years 1950-1975 as The Golden Age of Cuisine. It is difficult to imagine a haute cuisine based on algae and chemically treated grass.

A poet, painter or musician has to accept the divorce in his art between the gratuitous and the utile as a fact for, if he rebels, he is liable to fall into error.

Had Tolstoi, when he wrote What Is Art?, been content with the proposition, 'When the gratuitious and the utile are divorced from each other, there can be no art," one might have disagreed with him, but he would have been difficult to refute. But he was unwilling to say that, if Shakespeare and himself were not artists, there was no modern art. Instead he tried to persuade himself that utility alone, a spiritual utility maybe, but still utility without gratuity, was sufficient to pro­duce art, and this compelled him to be dishonest and praise works which aesthetically he must have despised. The notion of I'art engage and art as propaganda are extensions of this heresy, and when poets fall into it, the cause, I fear, is less their social conscience than their vanity; they are nostalgic for a past when poets had a public status. The opposite heresy is to endow the gratuitous with a magic utility of its own, so that the poet comes to think of himself as the god who creates his subjective universe out of nothing—to him the visible material universe is nothing. Mallarme, who planned to write the sacred book of a new universal religion, and Rilke with his notion of Qesang ist Dasein, are heresiarchs of this type. Both were geniuses but, admire them as one may and must, one's final impression of their work is of something false and unreal. As Erich Heller says of Rilke:

In the great poetry of the European tradition, the emo­tions do not interpret; they respond to the interpreted world: in Rilke's mature poetry the emotions do the in­terpreting and then respond to their own interpretation.

In all societies, educational facilities are limited to those ac­tivities and habits of behavior which a particular society con­siders important. In a culture like that of Wales in the Middle Ages, which regarded poets as socially important, a would-be poet, like a would-be dentist in our own culture, was sys­tematically trained and admitted to the rank of poet only after meeting high professional standards.

In our culture a would-be poet has to educate himself; he may be in the position to go to a first-class school and univer­sity, but such places can only contribute to his poetic educa­tion by accident, not by design. This has its drawbacks; a good deal of modern poetry, even some of the best, shows just that uncertainty of taste, crankiness and egoism which self-edu­cated people so often exhibit.

A metropolis can be a wonderful place for a mature artist to live in, but, unless his parents are very poor, it is a dangerous place for a would-be artist to grow up in; he is confronted with too much of the best in art too soon. This is like having a liaison with a wise and beautiful woman twenty years older than himself; all too often his fate is that of Cheri.

In my daydream College for Bards, the curriculum would be as follows:

O In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

2,) Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.

The library would contain no books of literary criti­cism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.

Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philol­ogy would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgies, cooking.

Every student would be required to look after a do­mestic animal and cultivate a garden plot.