52 The true scientist never dismisses, depreciates, or condescends to art; I consider this an almost fundamental definition of him. And conversely, of the true artist.
53 Already, in America especially, we see the attempt to turn art into a kind of pseudo-technology. In the hideously misnamed ‘creative writing’ courses the notion is spread that it is sufficient to learn the technique to achieve the value, and there are now increasing hosts of writers and painters characterized by a very distinctive pseudo-technological hollowness.
54 Their artefacts are cleverly assembled and fashionably neat, neatly fashionable, and yet the whole is never more than the sum of the parts. When the technique is praised, everything is praised. There is a spotless eggshell, but no meat.
55 Of course most good and all great artists show skill at techniques. But the pseudo-technological artist is like an angler who thinks the essential is to be able to handle a rod and bait a hook; but the true essential is to know a river to fish in. The thing comes first, then its expression; and today we are faced with an army of cleverly-trained expressers all in pursuit of something to express; a crowd of expert anglers futilely casting in the middle of a ploughed field.
56 A counter argument is this: granted that the ability to express is not the same as the expression of something valuable, a person trained to express is still better equipped to perceive the valuably expressible than an untrained one. I believe the contrary: that the teaching of command of special techniques limits vision rather than extends it. If you train someone to be an angler using special techniques, he will see the world in terms of angling by those special techniques.
57 A young would-be artist trained to ‘create’ in the style of this or that successful modern artist will begin to gain that artist’s sensibility as well as his techniques; and this always present but never so probable prospect of being endlessly imitated, of endlessly imposing his sensibilities and views of life on impressible young ‘trained’ minds, must seem one of the most disagreeable facing the genuinely serious and gifted artist.
58 Being an artist is first discovering the self and then stating the self in self-chosen terms. The proper school of any art should have two courses: a museum course and a craft course. The museum course simply teaches the history of the art and the monuments (all past masters) of the art; the craft course teaches the basic practical essentials, the syntax, grammar, prosody, paint mixing, academic draughtsmanship, harmony, instrumental ranges, and the rest. All teaching or advocating of a style, a sensibility, a philosophy, is pernicious; is pseudo-technology, not art.
59 Show the young sailor how to sail; but don’t so falsify the compass and the chart that he can sail only in one direction.
60 To be an artist is not to be a member of a secret society; it is not an activity inscrutably forbidden to the majority of mankind. Even the clumsiest, ugliest and most ignorant lovers make love; and what is important is the oneness of man in making artefacts, not the abyss said to exist between a Leonardo and the average of mankind. We are not all to be Leonardos; but of the same kind as Leonardo, for genius is only one end of the scale. I climbed Parnassus once, and between the mundane village of Arachova at the foot and the lovely summit, quite as lovely as the poets have always had it to be, there is nothing but a slope; no abyss, no cliff, no place where wings are necessary!
61 A child is not excused from games and physical training because he is not brilliant at them. Only one child in ten cannot be taught music. Poetry has nothing to do with recitation, with learning by heart or reading texts for examination purposes. Poetry is saying what you are in words in rhythmic patterns. Visual art is the same, but in shapes and colours instead of words.
62 An artist, as we understand the word today, is someone who does by nature what we should all do by education. But all our modern technology-biased systems of education concentrate far too much on the science of art, that is, art history and art categorization and art appreciation, and far too little on the personal creation of artefacts; as if diagrams, discussions, photographs and films of games and physical exercise were an adequate substitute for the real thing. It is useless to provide endless facilities for the enjoyment of other people’s art unless there are corresponding facilities for creating one’s own.
63 Freedom is inherent in the best art, as it is in the best science. Both are essentially demolishers of tyranny and dogma; are melters of petrifaction, breakers of the iron situation. To begin with, an artist may oppose merely because he has the power to express opposition; and then one day his own expressed opposition expresses him. His art enlists him. The poem I write today writes me tomorrow. I find the scientific law; and then the law finds me.
GAMES
64 Games, sports and pastimes that require rules and social contact have become increasingly significant in the last century. It was calculated that something like one hundred and fifty million people watched on television the final of the football World Cup in 1966. As with art, we may tend to regard games as a rather unimportant leisure activity. But as leisure increases, so does their influence on our fives.
65 Games are far more important to us, and in far deeper ways, than we like to admit. Some psychologists explain all the symbolic values we attach to games, and to losing and winning them, in Freudian terms. Football consists of twenty-two penises in pursuit of a vagina; a golf club is a steel-shafted phallus; the chess king and queen are Laius and Jocasta; all winning is a form either of evacuation or of ejaculation; and so on. Such explanations may or may not have value in discussing the origin of the game. But for most players and spectators a much more plausible explanation is the Adlerian one, that a game is a system for achieving superiority. It is moreover a system (like money getting) that is to a certain extent a human answer to the inhuman hazard of the cosmic lottery; to be able to win at a game compensates the winner for not being able to win outside the context of the game. This raison d’etre of the game is most clearly seen in the games of pure chance; but many other games have deliberate hazards; and even in games technically free of hazards the bounce, the lie, the fly in the eye exist. The evil is this: from instituting this system of equalizing hazard man soon moves to regarding the winner in it as not merely lucky but in some way excellent; just as he now comes to regard the rich man as in some way intrinsically excellent.*
66 The prestige coveters have always tried to seize sport as their province. This is especially so in times of peace. Much has been made of the nobility of the early Olympic Games, in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, and of their later corruption under the Romans. But the sprig of olive was already too large a prize. Competition, the need to keep equal and the drive to do better, haunts mankind. But there are plenty of real fields for competition without inventing artificial ones.
67 Sport is an opportunity for personal pleasure, a situation where beauty may arise. But what is being contested is never prestige. Simply the game. The winner has more skill or more luck; by winning he is not in any sense in any game necessarily a better human being than the loser.
68 Almost all the great popular sports of the world come from Britain. But what Britain has not been able to export is the amateur ethos of the game. Most foreigners, and now many Britons, want to win at any cost within the rules; and they keep to the rules only because a game without rules is war.