11. Art and the Artist's "Citizenship"

11 Art and the Artist's ~~Citizenship" ELISEO VIVAS To have turned down the Legion d'Honneur is not enough. One should never have deserved it. Erik Satie I One of the defects of our society is its failure to take art seriously. Americans do not believe art has the power to influ ence either thought or conduct. And yet, in a vague way, it is regarded as valuable. It is considered to be part of culture, though of culture, not in any of the sociological senses of this polysemic term, but in the honorific sense according to which one is cultured if one has a number of adornments that one can put on or not without essentially changing one's. true being. Among us, quite often, art is confused with education. Because it is also considered valuable, although not taken seriously, just as every member of society is thought to have a birthright to as much education as "society" can possibly put into him, people are felt to be in need of a certain amount of "art." Thus, art, it seems, must be produced, fostered, and distributed by ever more public action very much in the way education is. But art and education are not the same, nor is the artist as likely to be benefited from intensified benevolence on the part of the public 216 Art and the Artist's UCitizenship" 217 sector as the teacher is supposed to be-and even in the latter's case, it is a matter of doubt.

In contradiction to this generalization, it may be urged that some artists, numerous critics, and even some aestheticians who ought to know better, write eloquently about the truths art conveys. "We go to the great writers for the truth. Or for what ever reason we go to them, it is for the truth we return to them again and again." 1 No great effort would be required to cull endless quantities of such rhetoric from critics, poets, and even aestheticians. The same claim has been made, not only for imaginative writers, as regards whose work the statement is not completely hermetic, but even for composers, as regards whose work the meaning of the statement, to put it moderately, is somewhat inaccessible. Let me give but one bit of evidence that I have used on a previous occasion-apologizing in passing for my fondness for a statement too useful to let lie idle. A well-known historian of music, Cecil Grey, quotes Schweitzer with approval as saying of Bach "that the dogma of the Trinity 'can be expressed more clearly and satisfactorily in music than in verbal formulae,' and consequently that music is capable of being a vehicle for the presentation of religious truth or phil osophic concepts." 2 It is also true that the efforts of the Com stocks, nearly always bungling and unintelligent, to censor the arts seem to constitute evidence of the public's implicit belief in the power of art.

But neither the systematic confusion of knowledge with art nor the endemic nature of Comstockery constitutes evidence that, when examined, invalidates the generalization offered in the first paragraph of these notes. As for the confusion, it is cherished by a minority of a minority-a minority among artists, critics and aestheticians; and they are as ineffectual as they are wrong. Indeed, as should be evident from the thesis developed in this paper, while trying to save art from the trivialities of aestheticism, those who confuse art with knowledge fail to do justice to the unique role art plays in human life. The influence of art is much more radical and much more subtle, because indirect, than its capacity to convey conceptually formulable 218 The New Argument in Economics statements. As for the meddling Cams tacks, a number of con siderations are pertinent: The first is the fact that in the last decades they have been put to flight by the same forces that are helping to disintegrate the morale of our society. The second is that they represent only a minority that makes up for the lack of influence by the noise it manages to make. And the third is that they constitute evidence, not of the censor's intelligent grasp of the influence of art on life, but of something totally different. For the Cams tacks, the term "morality" refers only to sexual conduct. It follows that one achieves perfection-irre spective of what kind of man one is-when one conforms to the censor's sexual mores. What Comstockery furnishes evidence of, then, is the narrowness of its conception of the good life and of the erosion to which language is subject by a kind of Lyellian uniformitarianism.

Let me say, in passing, that my disapproval of the censors does not entail an always favorable judgment of the works they censor. But why do we fail to take art seriously?' There are many answers to this question, and no doubt the social historian could furnish us with some of them. But one of them, for our purposes the most important, is that we simply do not know what art is and what effects it has on our lives.3 If we did, we would not feel as superior as we do to Plato for planning the expulsion of the poets from his city. What, then, is art? Let me attempt to answer as succinctly as I can a difficult question that would call for protracted effort. Art is a development into refined and deliberate activity of two capacities we human beings have that seem to be unique pos sessions of ours: the capacity to grasp the objective and the inner world in an identifiable manner and the capacity to em body in a system of symbolic forms the objects we identify perceptually. Whether these activities are only one or two we need not inquire. The capacity to grasp the furniture of the world by means of symbols, to be able to identify its objects in an ordered manner, is the aesthetic capacity-employing the term "aesthetic" in its etymological sense. As a condition of this Art and the Artises UCitizenship" 219 capacity, we have the power of disengaging ourselves from the objects we identify, of retarding or even altogether suspending the satisfaction of our urges. We can suspend activity, but we suspend it without falling into a phantasmagoric reverie, into the booming, buzzing confusion of indistinct images, into which animals fall when not bent on the fulfillment of a biologic urge -into which we also fall, perhaps more frequently than our vanity would allow us to acknowledge. But often we step back, so to speak, merely to look, to hear or touch, to sense discriminatively in any of the modes that are given to us to sense, identifying the objects of our sensing more or less accurately and in relation to an implicit and more or less ordered field of perception to which we turn explicitly when the identification is for some reason not satisfactory.' I am suggesting that originally the animal that was later to become human responded as all animals do.

Action in answer to biologic needs, phantasmagoric reverie, and physical play was all he was capable of. Having killed and eaten, having satisfied his sexual drive, he returned to the chaos of images and affective confusion that was his, mental life, until need drove him to action once more. But something happened to his physiology-his brain, his hands: there is much specula tion about this point-and when it happened, or perhaps" as it happened, a new activity intruded itself between action and chaotic reverie: in a confused way at first, things began to stand out by themselves when they were neither wanted nor eschewed, and the world~a world of objects and events that until then had functioned only as a source of stimuli-stood off and, with the aid of a developing power of symbolization, became more or less distinctly recognizable as populous with objects of intermittent attention. The upshot of the physiological modifications that made pos sible the appearance of a symbolic process was that the animal that was becoming man as a result of such an appearance began to perceive, to distinguish, to grasp, at first vaguely and in confusion, and gradually more distinctly, an objective or outer and a subjective or inner world in which he could identify numerous fixities because he could lift them from the flux and 220 The New Argument in Economzcs detain them symbolically. And at first he must have been un· aware of the strange effect that his use of symbols had on his companions: it produced on them an act of aesthesis similar to that which things produced in him, leading them to make the same discriminations that the user of the symbols made. In other words, the time came when signals became symbols, and to the capacity to communicate by means that were mere stimuli was added the act of communion-if I may borrow Allen Tate's profound and pregnant distinction, reinterpreting it for my purposes, perhaps beyond recognition. 4 The human group was no longer an animal pack.

In so far as this holds, it follows that perception is not the mere passive response Locke took it to be, but a searching that is an inventing, a receiving of sensa that goes pari passu with an addition and creative elaboration of what is received. In idealis tic jargon, mind is constitutive of the world. But not wholly so, not entirely out of its own unaided resources. The world fur nishes it with its data, with that which it gives the mind and which only up to a point the mind can shape creatively. But to leave the creative element out of account is to miss the role art plays in the formation of culture and to lack solid ground for what ought to be our proper high esteem of art. For man was not satisfied to symbolize in an unsystematic manner, doing so as the occasion offered itself for the use of his new faculty, and solely for utilitarian reasons. Perhaps from the very beginning of his use of his new virtue, he began to refine his symbolic product, to elaborate it, to complicate it and burden it, in response to the exigencies of form, unity, and comprehensive intelligibility. And the result of his activity is art as we know it today. Hence the role art plays in our life.

It is the means of our central grasp of the inner and outer world of our experience. As Jaspers puts it, almost in passing, in his essay "On the Tragic," we see things in the manner in which the artist teaches us to see. This is not a discovery of Jaspers or Cassirer, or Elijah Jordan, each of whom assigns to the constitutive activity of the mind a basic role in his aesthetic. It is the idealistic minimum that modern philosophy traces to Art and the Artist's ((Citizenship" 221 Kant and back of him to Leibniz. But whatever its source, it is true that the world in which we live, the world of reality, as we tend to think of it, has the modicum of order and the identifi able concreteness it has because the artist has taught us to see. Note, however, that in so far as the ordering of the world constitutes a process that puts at our disposal a concrete dramatic world, it is both a creative and an arresting, a conservative force.

It is the artist, then, who first discovers and presents through his creative gifts the values and the meanings by which men live. And it is he who maintains them in their freshness. The paradox involved in asserting that the artist both creates and discovers I have sought to elucidate elsewhere. 5 Here it is desirable to emphasize that the creative activity not only involves the intro duction into culture of new values and meanings, but the maintenance, in a viable, quick condition, of those values and meanings that already make up the substance of the culture. To the extent that the symbolic capacity has begun to be exercised by the animal, he has begun to create culture: he has begun to develop, however rudimentarily, knowledge, morality, and religion, and whatever other procedures and institutions he requires for a distinctly human life. Back of culture we find, then, as a necessary, but far from sufficient, condition the symbolic ordering and fixing of the stream of experience that is the fruit of our aesthetic capacity.

II We have now laid the groundwork for examining the private versus the public sector in art. If the role art plays in human society depends on the creativity of the artist, it follows that any action on the part of society that interferes with the artist's creativity, any imposition of external control, any effort to guide the artist against his inner needs, may be expected to have adverse consequences for his work. And the consequences are not only adverse for the artist's work, but, through it, for the society in which he functions. It is, of course, a question of degree: the artist will always be 222 The New Argument in Economics restrained to some extent in some way that is pernicious to the extent that it is effective. But only to the extent that he is free from external restraints is he capable of functioning as an artist. Other factors are involved in his activity, but this one is a sine qua non) and for our purpose the most important.

An essay several thousand words in length would be required to state the qualifications that this statement, though true in general, calls for in order to make it adequate to the complexities of the actual facts. Only two observations can be made here and, even so, only in a very sketchy manner. The first is that the artist, alas, is a man, as human as any other man, no more and no less; which is to say that he is as burdened as the rest of us with the ills the flesh and the spirit if I may be allowed the archaic word---:are heirs to. But we do not know enough about the way the human psyche responds to external and internal forces to decide with confidence whether what seems to help the proper development of the artist does indeed help, what seems to hinder does indeed hinder. I hope it is not because of the limitations of my reading that I have come malgre moi to a discouraging conclusion: the assured knowledge that depth psychology gives us adds up to the impor tant but very limited insight that the human psyche, in its com plexity, is subject to malforming forces from the moment of birth on. But we are still very much in the dark as to what these forces actually are. If we ask a member of one school, we get a categorical answer. Here, we sigh in relief, is a man who knows. But if, on turning the corner, we run into a member of another school and ask him for confirmation, we get an equally categorical answer contradictory of the first and a con temptuous dismissal of the first expert. These answers are of great interest-to those who, like the writer, are interested in such subjects.

The second observation is that thinking Americans incline to the belief-a comforting one, it must be acknowledged that the creative mind functions best in a politically free society and cannot function at all under conditions of despotism. We seem to have what appears to be two decisive pieces of evidence Art and the Artist's "Citizenship" 223 for our opinion. The arts did not flourish under the Nazi heel, and Russian painting, the "socialist realism" for which the Russians must be grateful to Comrade Stalin and his successors, and the Pasternak affair and what it isa sample of-do not these two cases constitute evidence for the opinion that the lack of political freedom is fatal to the arts? Not at all. We are indulging in an extreme oversimplification. All these two cases prove. is that the commissar's loving kiss, to the muses is as deadly as was Hitler's hatred of Kultur-Bolshev'ismus. 6 But if we cannot say anything with confidence about the psychological factors that maintain the artist's creativity, and if he can flourish under political despotism, what will endanger his power? I have never come across a satisfactory discussion of this puzzling problem, and the large number of variables that are involved in an account of the emergence' of cultures in which art has flourished, and the heterogeneity of these cultures, make general answers suspect. Let us therefore narrow the ques tion to manageable terms. Many unanswered questions within the narrowed area will remain even then. But let us turn to our own day. And let us not ask what factors account for the burst of artistic activity in the nation in the last fifty years. L,et us ask, rather, "What ominous factors threaten the continued crea tivity of the artist in the United States today?"

Two prefatory remarks are called for. The first' is that a discussion that pretends to be more than an extremely tentative, hesitant opiniop, instinct with dubiety is, for obvious reasons, inadmissible. The second is that I know of no time in the history of American art that was less propitious than the present for asking what factors are inimical to its blossoming. Whatever our attitude toward contemporary art, ours is an age of tremen douscreativity in the arts. I write these lines two days after Hemingway's death and less than a week after reading in Time the account of the collection of the Chase Manhattan Bank. I cannot review the evidence, but anyone acquainted with Ameri can art today can hardly be expected to take seriously a pessi mistic attitude toward it. Whether we like what the artists are making or not, the assertion cannot be denied. Just about fifteen 224 The New Argument in Economics years ago it was still possible to argue that there was no such thing as American painting, although many Americans were painting-French paintings with American subjects. This is no longer true. American painting, sculpture, and literature are exercising a powerful influence on artists and writers outside the United States, and the reason for their impact is their daring creative vitality. As regards the other arts there may be room for honest disagreement. But it is not possible to deny that, whatever their quality compared to the European product, they are active and vigorous. True, in literature we must go back a couple of decades to encounter the masters-to the genera tion of Hemingway. Les jeunes) alas, are feeble, rachitic epigoni.

But the old ones are not all dead, and what is more important, their art is not dead-not yet. To those aware of this fact, a discussion of threats to the con tinued flourishing of contemporary art must appear to be a purely academic exercise. Let it be. The question is still worth dis cussing, even if at the moment there is not much of a present danger. I shall take up two negative factors in the remainder of this section. The first of these is represented by the proposal of federal aid to the arts. For the data, I refer to a transcript of a television discussion that took place February 11, 1961, in an NBC program entitled "The Nation's Future." Engaged in the discussion were Russell Lynes, managing editor of Harper's magazine, and Professor John Kenneth Galbraith. I need not remind my readers that on the etymological mean ing of the word "economics," Professor Galbraith can hardly be called an "economist," for what he preaches is mismanage ment: he is a propagandist for increased federal aid to all that flies, walks, crawls, or creeps, above the surface of the earth, on it, or under it. As for federal aid to the arts, he is, of course, all for it. And he reminded his audience, the night of his dis cussion with Mr. Lynes, that the Federal Government already aids the arts, since it is "involved" with them in "a dozen different ways." What he is for is "the final step," by which he means the recognition that the artist is a "first-class citizen," and that Art and the Artist's "Citizenship" 225 art is "one of the great and respectable resources of our society."

He is therefore for another government bureau-although the word "bureau," I need hardly remind the reader, is no more mentioned among proponents of federal aid than, as Spaniards say, the word "rope" in the home of the man who was hanged. This bureau-or, as the emancipator of the artist prefers to call it, "council" -would fully exploit-and I follow the tran script au pied de la lettre-the opportunities of the Federal Government to help the artist and to make the best possible use of our artistic resources. Professor Galbraith assures us that the cost in money would be very small. It is worth while to stop a moment to notice the language Professor Galbraith uses to speak of the arts, because it does not lead one to believe that he is seriously concerned with art. For Galbraith, the arts are one of the resources of our society, and a new bureau needs to be created---I beg your pardon, a council-"to bring the artist to the highest level of government."

I have pondered this euphemism, and regretfully have come to the decision that a translation of it, uncouth but exact, is "to give the artist a place at the trough." My reason is that we are told that this "council" would "see that the opportunities of the Federal Government to help the artist and to make the best possible use of our artistic resources would be fully exploited." While the language betrays the philistinism of the man who would make "free loading" the basic principle of national government, it would be unfair to him to overlook the superiority of his expression to the famous formula used by the social worker who once controlled the systematic plundering of our affluence. Harry Hopkins would spend and spend and spend for reasons given and with money from sources stated. Our academic liberal will do the same thing, but he is at least free, let us be thankful, from the cynicism of his nonacademic arche type. He does not propose that we spend. He would merely "exploit to the full the opportunities of the Federal Government g '1 There is a difference. Or is there?

It is reassuring to be told that the cost in money to bring the artist to the highest level of government. would not be large.

226 The New Argument in Economics For this means that Professor Galbraith does not intend to turn Blair House into an asylum for artists. I am not interested, how ever, in the economic aspects of the problem, nor in the place of the artist's citizenship in the order of rank. I do not even know what the critic of our affluence means by this generous rhetorical flourish. It probably has to do with the frequency of haircuts. But is Professor Galbraith altogether certain that the artist is dissatisfied with his citizenship? I have been in intimate relation ship with artists since the early, my own early, twenties. I claim firsthand knowledge of this subject. The great majority of artists, painters, sculptors" writers, and little-magazine critics I have known and now know-at least until the academic migration began-did not and do not yet make a living by their work. I heard Merce Cunningham some time ago state in a lecture that his audiences are very small. But I never noticed that artists suffered from an inferiority complex because of their citizen ship. Indeed, the very contrary was and still is the case: the artist is afraid of what Professor Galbraith means by "first-class citizenship"-affluence cum what for the artist is the effluence of respectability. He would not mind a place at the trough. He remembers the halcyon days of WPA with deep nostalgia. And, rightly so. Most of my friends, who starved through the twenties, did pretty well through the thirties on twenty-three dollars a week. But "first-class citizenship," bless his incorruptible bohe mian soul, the artist is deeply afraid of. And I think he is right in being afraid of it.

But why the concern with the artist at a time when art is doing as well as it is now? The answer, I think, is obvious: Bureaucracy is on the march. It seeks new areas of national activity to conquer. Under the guise of emancipating the artist, it will rule him in the same way it is ruling so much of our national life. Even if the bureaucrat could make room at the trough for the artist without endangering the quality of his work, there would be reasons enough for objecting to the move: the reasons against the enlargement of statism. But the person concerned with art has his own worries. And these Mr. Lynes put beyond improvement when he said in his opening statement that he was Art and the Artist's "Citizenship" 227 not afraid of creeping socialism, but of creeping philistinism, creeping mediocrity in· the arts. This is my central concern. Mr. Lynes' fears cannot be disposed of by calling attention to the fact that so far as we know, the arts have always been the object of patronage: in Greece, by the city; in Rome, by the emperors and aristocratic families like that of Maecenas; in the Middle Ages, by bishops and nobility; in the Renaissance, by despots, popes, bishops, merchant princes; and since, and u.ntil our own day, by the moneyed bourgeoisie. These patrons were individualists, to some extent at least, and some of them were extreme individualists. Under the old patronage, the artist, by and large, could count on the acceptance of his talent, if not by one patron then by another, if not here then there. There was competition for artistic talent among patrons. Take only one instance: Benvenuto Cellini is a good example because he was not one of the very greatest of artists in his day. Yet two popes patronized him and a number of cardinals. He was patron ized by Francis I, and he could have gone to England to work for Henry the-many-wived, but he would not take residence among "devils" and "beasts," whom he thought the English to be. Once, when he had to flee because of one of the many murders he committed, two cardinals-who had then the right of sanctuary-disputed the privilege of protecting so talented a criminal. In short, while the artist might have been treated as Mozart or Dr. Johnson was-and I do not know whether he was -the patronage of which he was the object brought him some thing infinitely more valuable to him than the effluence of Professor Galbraith's citizenship. It brought him freedom to be himself. Of Washington the same can be said that Prokofiev said of Russia, where the most tone-deaf commissar unhesitat ingly calls the tune. Federal aid means federal cQntro~ of any thing the federal bureaucrat puts his power-greedy paw on.

This is a coarser, but I suspect a more adequate, formulation of Mason's Law than Commissioner Mason's own. 7 Give the Washington bureaucrat power over the artist, and he may give the artist a first-class citizenship. That kind of citizenship is entirely in his power to give or to withhold. But the artist will 228 The New Argument in Economics produce what is called "art" because words have an unlimited coefficient of elasticity. What he will produce will have as much resemblance in quality to what the murderous Italian braggart left us,.-the saltcellar in the Metropolitan, the Perseus,-as a Washington bureaucrat has to a statesman. 8 The second negative factor to be considered is a relatively recent development in our society~ I refer to the symbiotic relationship that has developed in the last two decades-give or take ten years-between artists and universities: versifiers, novelists, painters in residence, higher degrees in creative writ ing and finger painting, and, for all I know, doctoral degrees on the hula hula in the University of Hawaii and the cha cha at Rio Piedras, P. R. And last, because to me most astonishing, the successful beachheads gained by the soi-disant "new critics"

in some of the universities of the land. It is usually taken for granted that the rapprochement between creative artists and critics, on the one hand, and the universities, on the other, is a good thing for both. I recently heard a speech by Harlan Hatcher, president of the University of Michigan, on the develop ment of the arts in the United States in the last century-remem bering that, as Gertrude Stein defined it, a century is one hundred years more or less. The speech was based on the assump tion that the recognition of the creative artist by the universities was one of the desirable features of the development. Let us put aside the problems stemming from the fact that this development is possible because the function of the university has gradually been corrupted, or, if you prefer, has changed without our being aware of what has been taking place. Aca demic institutions could lay claim once upon a time to being universities. But they have gradually become pluri-versities) where anything that can be taught, as well as much that cannot or ought not to be, has become a legitimate-which is to say, an entrenched-part of the curriculum. Let us rather focus on the assumption that the symbiosis is a desirable state of affairs.

Now, I am perfectly certain that this development is a good thing for the university community, by which I mean, for us Art and the Artist's uCitizenship" 229 teachers and for our lords and masters. But is it necessarily a good thing for the work that is done or ought to be done in the institution? And is it a good thing for the artist? And is it good for art? Above all, is it good for art? For what it may be worth, let me offer my answer to this question in the form of a report of an encounter told me by my friend, De Bossu, professor of romance languages, at the moment doing time at Midwest Uni versity. The meeting took place just before the last national conventions. De Bossu was introduced to a newly 'appointed painter, coming to Midwest as assistant professor. After the pleasantries of the introduction, De Bossu told me, the young man, for a reason he could not recall, said defiantly: "I'll be damned if I am going to glorify General Motors or Nixon."

Amused by the naivete of the fellow, De Bossu answered, "Oh no, no one is going to ask you to do that. You'll be able to paint what you like, as you like. What's more, all but four of your colleagues will think all the better of you if you do a vitriolic caricature of Nixon." 9 "Well," reiterated the painter with an edge in his voice, "I'm not going to become a whore." "Look," said De Bossu, "your colleagues are all liberals except four. They'll fight to the death for your right to paint what you like and as you like-so long as you do not glorify General Motors, Nixon, or J. Edgar Hoover." "I won't do it." Clearly the fellow seemed to be girding him self for a battle with the giants of reaction. But De Bossu is a bit of a ham and not altogether free from a touch of sadism. In his most dramatic, Ancient Mariner man ner, he held the painter with his glittering eye, and let him have it: "No, thaes not the way we are going to get you."

Panic turned to bewilderment. "How are they going to get me?" the other asked weakly. The incorrigible old ham, pretending to feel very sad for the poor fellow, said slowly, "We) not they. But we won't doa thing 230 The New Argument in Economics to you, nary a thing. Before long, however, you'll be wanting a haircut every four weeks. They say in Spanish that criminals begin by killing flies. Just think of it, thirteen haircuts a year! And before you know it, it'll be every three weeks. That's only the flies. Before long, your wife will want a new stove, like the one she saw at the home of Mrs. Nachbar. She's tired of the old one. It's no longer flies, see? And by and by, you'll want a new station wagon. The professor of art history has one. You need one much more than he does-to take your pictures to the open air show next summer. It's not even insects any more. You're killing heap big animals already. That's how we are going to get you..... "

Diminuendo, now, since his Wedding Guest was standing still, listening like a three years' child, Mariner de Bossu went on: "But don't worry. The treatment is painless. And it has its rewards. A salary all year round; tenure in seven years if you don't pinch the wrong coeds; steaks Saturdays in the back yard from late spring to early fall. True, you won't make as much as a plumber. But what do you want, breakfast in bed? So you see, it is much more deadly than if we were to ask you to glorify Nixon, which no one here but three of the four conservatives would care to see you do. Because I would never ask you to glorify Nixon." De Bossu is likely to let himself be carried away by what he takes to be his humor, for which he has unconcealed admiration. "Come to think of it," he added, "you may be asked to glamorize Eleanor, although the job .... " His voice trailed off in a cloud of doubt. "No, I don't think so. Your colleagues are reasonable liberals."

"I wouldn't even do that. I won't paint to order." You could almost see the stamping foot. "Don't worry," said my friend, reassuringly. "You'll never know what's happening to you. And neither will your wife no tice that your voice will be going up in pitch-the change will be so gradual that she won't notice it." De Bossu is certain that he failed to convey his intention to Art and the Artist's "Citizenship" 231 the young pa~nter; as they parted he was still worrying about Nixon. And I suspect that were these notes to enjoy the unde served honor of falling under the eyes of the great critic of our afHuence, that eminent man would not understand the danger e.ither. NOTES I. John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear (London, n.d.; originally published in 1956), p. 15. 2. Cecil Grey, The History of Music (New York, 1931), p. 270. 3. I shall have to let this statement stand without support. The evidence for it consists of citations from the work of critics, aestheticians, and artists, with appropriate analysis and commentary. This task is outside the scope of this paper.

4. Allen Tate, The Forlorn Demon (Chicago, 1953), "The Man of Letters in the Modern World," particularly pp. 11 If. 5. Creation and Discovery: Essays in Literary Criticism and Aesthetics (New York, 1955), particularly Pt. II. 6. This is not true of the old Bolsheviks. Trotsky, Litvinov, and others of their generation were neither ignorant nor uncouth in matters of art. Whether the same qualification must be made for some of the Nazis, I do not know. Goering, perhaps? 7. See the brilliant formulation of Mason's Law in The Language of Dis sent (Cleveland and New York, 1959), pp. 31-61. 8. Can we take the same attitude toward state backing of the arts in Europe? What of state museums, subsidized theatre, the dance? I would answer this question with the statement that, in my opinion, Erik Satie's devastating dictum, used as the epigraph of this essay, sufficiently dis poses of the problem. But, of course, Satie and I are speaking of the arts; not of what goes by the name of art in official and dominant circles.

9. It should be explained that De Bossu and three other members of the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences were named as the only conservatives at Midwest in an article that appeared in a local news paper. Search for other members of the species reveals that they are even more rare and in a more serious danger of extinction than the whooping crane.