31 Different Tastes In Literature
31 DIFFERENT TASTES IN LITERATURE
I have been thinking once again about the troublesome problem of differences in what is called Taste, though the implications of the word Taste, if taken seriously, would leave us with no problem. If we really thought that a man's choice between Miss Ruby M. Ayres and Tolstoy were quite on all fours with his choice between mild and bitter beer, we should not discuss it, or not seriously. But, in fact, we do not really think so. We may say so, in the heat of argument, but we don't believe it. The idea that some preferences in art are really better than others cannot be got rid of and this idea, brought into conflict with the fact that there seem to be no objective tests, engenders the problem.
Now, without supposing that I am going to solve that problem in an article, I have been seriously wondering of late, whether we do not make it unnecessarily difficult by an initial misstatement. Again and again, one finds a writer assuming at the outset that some people like bad art in just the same way as others like good art. This is what I question. I am going to submit that, in a certain recognisable sense, bad art never succeeds with anyone.
But I must first explain what I mean by bad art. If by bad art you mean, say, The Niblung's Ring, Marmion and Sullivan, then admittedly the theory I am going to advance will not work. You must pitch your standard a good deal lower than that. You must mean by bad art the things which are not even considered among people who discuss the question seriously at all, but which blare from every radio, pour from every circulating library, and hang on the wall of every hotel. The misstatement I am attacking is the statement that those things are, by some people, enjoyed as much as good art is enjoyed by others - things like the poetry of Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox or the latest popular hit in music. I would include certain posters but by no means all.
There is, of course, no doubt that these things are liked in some way. The wireless is turned on, the novels circulate, the poems are bought. But have we evidence that they fill in anyone's life the place that good art fills in the lives of those who love it? Look at the man who enjoys bad music, while he is enjoying it. His appetite is indeed hearty. He is prepared to hear his favourite any number of times a day. But he does not necessarily stop talking while it is going on. He joins in. He whistles, beats time with his feet, dances round the room, or uses his cigarette or mug as a conductor's baton. And when it is over, or before it is over, he will be talking to you about something else. I mean when the actual performance is over; when it is 'over' in another sense, when that song or dance has gone out of fashion, he never thinks of it again except perhaps as a curiosity.
In literature the characteristics of the 'consumer' of bad art are even easier to define. He (or she) may want her weekly ration of fiction very badly indeed, may be miserable if denied it. But he never re-reads. There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterday's newspaper. One may have some hopes of a man who has never read the Odyssey, or Malory, or Boswell, or Pickwick: but none (as regards literature) of the man who tells you he has read them, and thinks that settles the matter. It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk. Whether the bad poetry is re-read or not (it gravitates suspiciously towards the spare bedroom) I do not know. But the very fact that we do not know is significant. It does not creep into the conversation of those who buy it. One never finds two of its lovers capping quotations and settling down to a good evening's talk about their favourite. So with the bad picture. The purchaser says, no doubt sincerely, that he finds it lovely, sweet, beautiful, charming or (more probably,) 'nice'. But he hangs it where it cannot be seen and never looks at it again.
In all this, surely, we find the symptoms of a real want for bad art, but of a want which is not even in the same species with men's want for good art. What the patrons of the bad art clearly desire - and get - is a pleasant background to life, a something that will fill up odd moments, 'packing' for the mental trunk or 'roughage' for the mental stomach. There is really no question of joy: of an experience with a razor's edge which remakes the whole mind, which produces 'the holy spectral shiver', which can make a man (as the 'wind musique' made Pepys) feel 'really sick - just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife'. The pleasure in bad art is not an occurrence, in unfortunate context, of the same pleasure men take in good art. The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
Hence, one's first experiences of real joy in the arts did not appear as rivals to one's previous humdrum pleasures. When as a boy I passed from Lays of Ancient Rome (which are not nearly bad enough to make the point clear, but will have to serve - my father's shelves were deficient in really bad books) to Sohrab and Rustum, I did not in the least feel that I was getting in more quantity or better quality a pleasure I had already known. It was more as if a cupboard which one had hitherto valued as a place for hanging coats proved one day, when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides: as if a food one had enjoyed for the taste proved one day to enable you (like dragon's blood) to understand the speech of birds: as if water, besides quenching your thirst, suddenly became an intoxicant. One discovered that the old, familiar phenomenon 'Poetry' could be used, insisted on being used, for a wholly new purpose. Such transitions are simply misrepresented by saying 'the boy began to like poetry', or 'began to like better poetry'. What really happens is that something which has lain in the background as one of the minor pleasures of life - not radically different from toffee - leaps forward and envelopes you till you are (in Pepys's sense) 'really sick', till you tremble and grow hot and cold like a lover.
I suspect, therefore, that we must never say, simply, that some men like good art and some men like bad. The error here lurks in the verb like. You might as well infer from the French uses of aimer that a man 'loves' a woman as he 'loves' golf and start trying to compare these two 'loves' in terms of better and worse 'taste'. We have, in fact, been the victims of a pun. The proper statement is that some men like bad art: but that good art produces a response for which 'liking' is the wrong word. And this other response has, perhaps, never been produced in anyone by bad art.
Never? Are there not books which produced in us the very ecstasy I have described (in youth) and which we now judge to be bad? There are two answers. In the first place, if the theory I am suggesting works for most cases, it is worth considering whether the apparent exceptions may not be only apparent. Perhaps any book which has really excoriated any reader, however young, has some real good in it, and secondly - but that, I must postpone till next week.
I was suggesting last week that bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only 'liked': it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive. Now if I say that, I come up against a difficulty. It has never been better put than by that fine and neglected artist, Mr Forrest Reid. In the little autobiography called Apostate he describes his delight, as a boy, in Miss Marie Corelli's Ardath. Even at that age the last part seemed to him 'so bad that it weakened the impression of what had gone before'. But that earlier impression remained. Perhaps wisely Mr Reid has not risked an adult re-reading. He has feared that 'its gorgeousness would all too likely strike me as vulgarity, its passionate adventure as melodrama, its poetry as a crude straining after effect.' But none the less, adds Mr Reid (who is as little likely as any man alive to be deceived in such a matter), there is no use in 'pretending that the old pleasure was not an aesthetic pleasure at all. It was. That is the whole point', and he contributes the important suggestion: 'What I got then probably was the Ardath of Miss Corelli's imagination; what I should get now would be the very much less splendid Ardath of her actual achievement.'
This diagnosis may not be correct. Mr Reid may have got the Ardath of the author's imagination, or he may have got the Ardath of his own: that is, he may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book. But it is not necessary to decide between these two possibilities. The point is that, on either view, he was enjoying the book not for what it really was but for what it was not. And this sort of thing very often happens when the reader is imaginatively superior to the author, and is also young and uncritical. Thus for a boy in the first bloom of his imagination the crudest picture of a galleon under sail may do all that is necessary. Indeed he hardly seer the picture at all. At the first hint he is a thousand miles away, the brine is on his lips, her head rising and falling, and gulls have come to show that undiscovered country is near.
What I will not admit is that this overthrows, in general, the principle that bad art never enraptures. It may overthrow the ready application of that principle as a measuring rod. So much the better. We want to be sure that there is a real distinction between good and bad, that what we call advances in our own taste are not mere valueless fluctuations. It is not equally necessary, it may not even be desirable, that we should know with certainty, in any particular instance, who is wrong and who is right. Now the existence of mirages (such as that which, for Mr Reid, did not result from but rested on the words of Miss Corelli) does not overthrow the principle. In the mirage we enjoy what is not there - what we are making for ourselves or, it may be, remembering from other and better works of which the work before us is a reminder. And this is something quite distinct from the great mass of 'liking' or 'appreciation' for bad art. The patrons of sentimental poetry, bad novels, bad pictures, and merely catchy tunes are usually enjoying precisely what is there. And their enjoyment, as I have argued, is not in any way comparable to the enjoyment that other people derive from good art.
It is tepid, trivial, marginal, habitual. It does not trouble them, nor haunt them. To call it, and a man's rapture in great tragedy or exquisite music, by the same name, enjoyment, is little more than a pun. I still maintain that what enraptures and transports is always good. In the mirages, this good thing is not where we suppose it to be, namely, in the book or picture. But it may be good in itself - just as an oasis is a good thing though it exists a hundred miles away and not, as the desert traveller sees it, in the next valley. We have still no evidence that the qualities really present in bad art can do for anyone what good art does for some. Not because bad art gives pleasure, but because it gives a wholly different kind. Let us not be sidetracked by asking whether the distinction is between 'aesthetic' pleasure and some other kind. By certain philosophical definitions both are probably aesthetic. The point is that no one cares about bad art in the same way as some care about good.
If this is so then we are not really presented with rival experiences in art between which we have to choose in order to 'form a good taste' - or not on the level which I am considering. Beyond that level, when we eliminated what is admitted to be bad by everyone who criticises at all, the critical problem may break out. You may decide that Berlioz is inferior to Bach or Shelley to Crashaw. But I suggest that any work which has ever produced intense and ecstatic delight in anyone - which has ever really mattered has got inside the ring fence, and that most of what we call 'popular' art has never been a candidate for entry. It was not trying to do that: its patrons didn't want it to do that: had never conceived that art could do that or was meant to.
The criterion of good art would on this view be purely empirical. There is no external test: but there is also no mistaking it. And I would go further. I would suggest that the subtler critical discriminations - the ones that only begin inside the ring fence - always (and quite rightly) involve more than aesthetic criteria. Thus you tell me that what I experienced on first hearing the Prelude to Parsifal was inferior to what you experience in hearing Bach's Passion Music. I am sure you are right. But I do not think you mean, or ought to mean, that Wagner is bad art in the sense in which much popular music is bad art. It is inside the ring fence. The musical comedy tunes which I hummed as a boy were not valued by me in the same sort of way as Parsifal. There was never any possibility of competition. And when you go on to call Wagner 'bad' (in a much higher and subtler sense) you always bring in what are really either technical or moral considerations - the latter, in artistic circles, being often veiled from those who use them. Thus you condemn the Wagner as banal, or obvious, or facile (which are technical), or as vulgar, or sensual, or barbarous (which are moral). And I think you proceed quite rightly. I only plead that none of these criteria is needed, or is ever in fact used, in our preliminary distinction between 'real' or 'good' or 'serious' art and what is obviously 'bad' or (merely) 'popular' art. This was never a competitor. Wagner is 'good' by the mere fact that he can become the most important thing in life to a boy for a whole year or more. After that, decide as you please. 'Goodness' in the sense which I am referring to is established.
Some muddled people cannot understand how an axiom (say, that about things which are equal to the same thing) can be known to be true. It could not if the mind found, on this subject, any alternative proposition. But there is no alternative proposition: there is a sentence which looks (grammatically) like a proposition but is not one - for if you pronounce it nothing happens in your mind. In the same way, there is no experience alternative to that of good art. The experiences offered by bad art are not of the same sort. The world is not full of people who get out of The Monarch of the Glen what you get out of Tintoretto, any more than it is full of people who get drunk on water. I might as well suppose that the transitory flicker of curiosity with which I pause, passing a cricket field, to see the next ball bowled is the same as the delirious interest of a crowd at a football match.