Cannibalization of Art

...But as critic his whole strategy has been to exploit literature—no doubt for the best of reasons, the wisdom and education of the audience, but exploitation nonetheless...

...The sense of delight in art objects is essential to the initiation of criticism...

...From early Huxley to late Huxley a number of changes in viewpoint occur, but none, it is to be regretted, are a retreat from the cannibalizing of art...

...In these selected essays on art and artists composed over a period of more than 30 years (1923-56), the dominant characteristic is, as Huxley writes in his preface, a tangential concern with the works or subjects under discussion and their conversion to his own interests...

...His early writing displayed a fury at artistic and social corruption, at the loss of human possibilities in art and life...

...insofar as the essence of art is mystical and ineffable, little can be said about it...

...For the responsibilities of criticism, he substitutes the provocations of fiction...

...In 1923 he was unafraid to generalize about art and theory: "A consciously practised theory of art has never spoiled a good artist, has never dammed up inspiration, but rather, and in most cases profitably, canalized it...

...In the treatment of criticism, whether of literature, music or art, Huxley pays a serious price for his discomfiting strategy: The classicists believe nothing to be of value "which is not susceptible of logical analysis...

...But in this respect, a critic who is an artist cannot lose: for every critical fiction that needs to be defeated, there exists a creative fiction appropriate to art...

...The sensitive response of an artist to works of art and artistic problems is always valuable...

...And although one may condemn with Huxley the new world of our time, do we not authorize it by refusing to respect art objects as valuable in and for themselves...

...These fragmentary essays serve purposes quite different from that of critical consistency or inquiry...

...but sharing by using art for his own jumping-off points, by disregarding the quality of the works themselves or the problems themselves and using them to display other issues, other qualities...

...Critical commentary, therefore, quickly leaves the work behind and moves to such other subjects as the writer, the period, etc...

...They possess an exuberance and directness which convey the actual esthetic experience...

...To this tradition Aldous Huxley belongs...

...what he sacrifices is the humility and knowledge necessary to practice criticism...

...The literature and art with which he dealt has resisted his efforts to reduce finished products to the raw material of his commentary...

...For Huxley there has always been a very broad brook between the immediacy of response and the analysis and examination of the work itself...

...His later writings take for granted the rarity of the mystical esthetic experience...

...There is, therefore, a sense in which Huxley has been defeated by his criticism, and the dismay of a sensitive and keen intelligence is always distressing...

...He functions as an ironist, and his strategy is to resist the obvious to keep inquiry alive...

...Huxley is himself an artist, intensely aware of the inadequacies of man in the face of art...

...yet the classicists, both French and English, did believe in a "je ne sais quoi," in "a grace beyond the reach of art...

...And it is a standard which is in the last resort a moral one...

...And Huxley conveys it: never more so than in his travel descriptions or views of art...

...But in 1950 he wrote: "There are no general rules...

...For the delight never extended to more than the beginning of explanation...

...They are, indeed, a constant warning against the staid and sterile responses which masquerade as criticism...

...These are naughty and often nagging statements, and they have behind them the noble fervor of the reformer, but they sometimes have little else...

...The qualities which, in 1927, he was best fitted to understand were "natural, spontaneous and unpretentious grandeur...

...Whether a work is good or bad depends entirely on the quality of the character which expresses itself in the work...

...But the men on whom he chose to discourse during this period were Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Crebillon the Younger, Swift, Baudelaire, Breughel...

...He discusses art in terms of chemical analysis, referring to art as "pure" or "impure...

...Reviewed by Ralph Cohen Associate Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles ALTHOUGH IT IS possible for a writer to be equally proficient as creator and critic—and in our time many poets have been—there is a long tradition in which the writer turned critic merely creates another form of fiction...

...In this sense Huxley's greatest contribution is his undiminished delight in the objects he finds artistic...

...Huxley writes, "There does exist nonetheless, an absolute standard of artistic merit...

...If this rarity is a retreat, then some retreats are not only a necessary but a desirable form of wisdom...

...and so on...

...Even his own descriptions of these men do not attribute to them the grandeur to which he refers...

...he sees man as composed of prejudice-tight compartments making consistency of behavior a fiction and yet, "nothing is irrelevant to anything else...

...Huxley's view of the critical function is to create discomfort with the accepted...

...Not content to delight in literature, he wished others to share it with him...

...He is less interested in the solidity of his research than in the irritability of his comments...

...If art has resisted conversion to something else and has by its independence subdued the pride of the critic, it has nevertheless reaffirmed the importance of its identity and the world of the imagination...

...What one attacks is the social, industrial and educational corruption which nourishes bad art, and bad art is what Huxley's refined and, indeed, highly educated taste cannot endure...

...There is, therefore, a strong sense of an individual mind reacting to art, but without any sense of the precise knowledge necessary to control these reactions...

...In his mystical belief in "a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things," in his experiments in perception, he has retreated to those brief, private, fleetingly aware moments of esthetic experience...

...Huxley considers criticism an appendage to his creative interests and finds criticism incapable of dealing adequately with art...

...For Huxley the explanations of criticism quickly exhaust themselves and the work of art becomes "a jumping-off point for one's own creativity...

...there are only particular cases, and most of these cases exist, so far as we are concerned, in a thick night of ignorance...

...But the quality of the character is precisely what is difficult to discover, and when he finds Piero della Francesca's "Resurrection" the best picture in the world, he does so because "its author possessed more than any other painter those qualities of character which I most admire and because his purely aesthetic preoccupations are of a kind which I am by nature best fitted to understand...

...In converting artistic problems and works to the fervor of the propagandist, Huxley aligns himself with the irritators and educators...

...In the '20s his discussions dealt with the character of the author or the social corruptions of art, but in later years he has moved more and more to the intensive primacy of his own reaction and the disregard of the work...

...His recent statements indicate his sense of frustration in educating the audience or in conveying the complex values of works of art...