The Artist's Moral Imperative

...Here again, however, he is anxious to prove that conflict is not necessary...

...As for the artist and society, Maritain sees all the dangers inherent in making the creative man subservient to the state or to any social group...

...As men they ought to tend toward moral perfection, to increase their capacity to love their fellows...

...They subordinate the rules of conduct to the rules of creation and grant ethical meaning only to the latter...

...The difficulty in assessing the value of Maritain's book is that so much of its argument depends upon his Thomistic view of man and society...

...On the contrary, charity should improve his work: "What matters most, and is essential, is the fact that love—I don't mean any kind of love, I mean love of charity—when it takes hold of man, makes the entire subjectivity purer, and, consequently, the creative source also purer...

...Yet he suggests that society has a right to, and in fact does, discourage art which it deems vicious and morally subversive...

...As a result, neither their own character development nor their "obligation" to society interests them...

...Referring once more to the manner in which love of charity will purify the artist, he says, "Then the artist need no longer think of the souls of his fellow men...

...The principal value of The Responsibility of the Artist is that it reminds us that the secular-liberal tradition is not the only one theoretically capable of respecting the integrity of the artist...

...He can forget them, forget men and everything...

...The book is less valuable as a guide to how the integrity of art and the artist can be cherished in the modern world...

...In a society in which so many of his fellow men are at odds with each other, with themselves and with him, the artist can love them best in his art, not in the domain of public morality...

...But if we begin by viewing man (and the artist) as caught up in history and dependent for self-realization upon a knowledge of what is possible in this time and place, objections immediately arise...

...Indeed, the more education an individual has, the more likely is he to see some redeeming virtue in a work of art regarded as entirely immoral by the man prompted only by his participation in the "common consciousness...

...Maritain's gentleness and tolerance, on the one hand so attractive, prevent him from asking some hard questions about the psychology of creativity and about the hatred and fear of the new, different and unknown that has always characterized society at large...

...What puts this obligation upon artists is that though the world of art and the world of morality are independent, "the autonomous world of morality is simply superior to (and more inclusive than) the autonomous world of art...

...Before we can speak of the responsibility of the artist, we need a fuller understanding of both the artist and society than Maritain has given us...

...Thus, the artist's prime duty is to foster the growth of charity in his own heart...

...so long as they remain faithful to their art, they feel nothing else can be required of them...

...And what passes for spontaneous conduct arising out of that consciousness is more often the activity of some organized pressure group...

...Maritain sees nothing in this dictum that requires the artist to spoil his art...

...Admitting that many artists who have undergone spiritual conversions have suffered a loss of creativity, he insists that they did so because they failed to make their new experience available to their imaginative powers...

...Reviewed by Norman Kelvin Department of English, City College of New York MANY ARTISTS regard as moral (for themselves) any form of behavior that is good for their art...

...In his art, for example, he can love the racial bigot, while in the public world he is likely to want to take measures, or to cheer when somebody else takes them, against the racial bigot...

...On this issue Maritain is guilty of a wishful theorizing about modern society that does not accord well with his love of reality...

...In the public world, his love of the man he deems evil, or even merely in error, is bound to be imperfect because this is the world of conflict, and conflict, like all action, necessarily brings into play more companents of the human personality than simply the capacity to love...

...The book also performs a service by implicitly telling us that the conflict between art and private morality, as well as between art and society's expectations, is not yet dead, despite pronouncements to the contrary from the middle-brow camp and from even higher quarters...

...Though he agrees, as do Aristotle and Saint Thomas, that "art is concerned with the good of the work, not with the good of the man," and that "the first responsibility of the artist is toward his work," he Teminds artists that they are also men...

...He is careful to disavow the cruder forms of censorship, but he regards it as natural that the community, through education and "the spontaneous pressure of the common consciousness and public opinion," should protect itself against art which incites to "pernicious actions...

...He can do as he pleases, he is sure that his work will lead nobody astray...

...Granted his assumptions, many of his conclusions follow logically...

...As for society's right to inhibit vicious art through both education and "the spontaneous pressure of the common consciousness," the dilemma is that today these two forces seldom lead to agreement about what should be inhibited...

...In his latest book, The Responsibility of the Artist, Jacques Maritain examines this attitude and finds it wanting...

...And he lists a good number of artists, including Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot and Paul Claudel, whose work was not impaired by their conversion and faith...