Well, does not the moral become clearer and clearer? If art and
literature are to flourish again, artists, writers, nay, the whole
community must regain the sense of power. Therefore, economic
emancipation first!
8
_Leisure and Good Things_
The very greatest danger confronts a people who renounce leisure: that
people will become shallow--just consider England! For of all things
noble it is hard to see the immediate utility: patience and reverence
are needed before one can see in them a meaning at all. Art, literature
and philosophy are not obvious goods: at the first glance they appear
even repellent: alas, then, for them in an age of first glances! In
such an age, it is true, they will not altogether disappear. Something
worse will happen. They will be degraded, made obvious, misunderstood;
in one word, popularized--the fate of our time. Society should be
organized so as to give to its members the maximum of leisure; thus
would the dissemination of art and philosophy be made at least
possible. But society should at the same time provide for a privileged
class of artists and philosophers, with _absolute_ leisure, who would
work only when the inner compulsion made them. The second condition is
at least as important as the first.
9
_Wanted: A History of Hurry_
Is there a critic who wishes to be at once edifying and entertaining?
Let him write a history of hurry in its relation to literature and
art. Has literature decayed as hurry has intensified? Have standards
of balance, repose and leisured grace gradually shrunk since, say, the
Industrial Revolution? Has the curtailment of the realm of literature,
its reduction from the Romantic school to the Victorian circle and
from that to the Decadent clique, been due to the everstrengthening
encroachment of hurry? And has hurry now become finally triumphant so
that our critics and even our artists and savants are nothing more than
journalists? For certainly they seem to be so.
These are questions to be investigated by our historian.
10
_The Sex Novel_
How did the vogue of the sex novel arise? Perhaps from the great
attention which was in the last century given to the sciences of
biology and physiology; and perhaps, more especially from the
popularization of these sciences. Love was, under the spell of science,
translated by the novelists into sex. Not the psychology, but the
physiology of love was found interesting: with the result that for the
production of a modern novel one qualification alone is now necessary:
a "knowledge of the simple facts of physiology," as the primer-writers
say. Well, what is the remedy for this? Not a denial of physiology:
those who have learned it cannot now erase it from their memory and
become voluntarily ignorant. No; let, rather, the opposite course be
taken! Let us popularize psychology as well!
11
_These Advanced People_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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