THE NEW DISORDER

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 14, 13 August 1945, Page 21

THE NEW DISORDER

By

From a speech made in October, 1941

In every creative writer there is a touch of the poet, the maker, even if his medium is prose ; otherwise, he would not trouble to create. And from the poet-writer’s standpoint all this prevalent talk about a New Order is sheer waste of time. There never will be a new order, and there never has been an old one. The phrases are good enough for statesmen, who identify order with orders and creation with regulations, but the poet-writer must be more accurate than that. Order is something evolved from within, not something imposed from without, it is an internal stability, a vital harmony, and, in the social and political category, it has never existed, except for the convenience of historians. Viewed realistically, the past is merely a series of messes, succeeding one another by discoverable laws no doubt, and certainly marked by an' increasing growth of human interference ; but messes, all the same. And what I hope for and work for ’to-day is for a mess more favourable to artists than is the present one, for a muddle which will provide them with fuller inspirations' and better material conditions. It will not nothing —but there have been some advantageous disorders in the past — for instance, in ancient Athens, in Renaissance Italy, eighteenth-century France, periods in China and Persia—and we may do something surreptitiously to hurry the next one up. But let us not be fooled again, or fix our hearts where true joys are not to be found. We were promised a new order through the League of Nations. It never came, nor will it come after this war, even if this war be followed by anything as old-fashioned as a peace. We must give up this particular illusion. And let us not be abashed by the people who reproach us and themselves for not having tried harder, and who declare that, if we had all played less in the “ twenties ” and theorized less in the “ thirties,” the jelly

of civilization would have slid out of its mould and stood upright in a beautiful shape. These people are suffering from remorsethat “ last infirmity of noble mind ” which can be so trying to a fellow-patient—and they must be left to the ravages of their peculiar disease. Try harder ? Try till you burst. The real trouble lies elsewhere. The trouble has often been diagnosed, but it is always being dodged or minimized by the moralist. It is the implacable offensive of science. We cannot reach social and political stability, for the reason that we continue to make scientific discoveries and to apply them and thus to destroy the arrangements which were based on more elementary discoveries. If science would only discover and never apply, if, in other words, men were more interested in knowledge than in action, mankind would be in a much safer position. The stability statesmen talk about would be possible, there could be a new order, based on vital harmony, and the earthly millennium might approach. But science shows no signs of doing this ; she gives us the internal-combustion engine, and before we have digested it and assimilated it with terrible pains into our system, she will harness the atoms or the tides, and destroy the new order which seemed to be evolving. How can man get into harmony with his surroundings when he is constantly altering them ? The future of our race is, in this particular direction, more unpleasant than we care to admit, and each time Mr. Wells and my other architectural friends anticipate a great outburst of post-war activity and worldplanning, my heart contracts. To me, the best chance for future society lies through apathy, uninventiveness, and inertia. If this war is followed—as it may be—by universal exhaustion, we may get the Change of Heart which is at present so briskly recommended from a thousand pulpits. Universal exhaustion

would be a new experience. The human race has never undergone it, and is still too cocky to admit that it may be coming, and might result in a sprouting of new growths through the dung and spittle. Order, in the social and political category, is unattainable under our present psychology. And it is not inherent in the astronomical category either, though it was for many years relegated there. The stars, the Army of Unalterable Law, with which George Meredith discomfited Lucifer and comforted the Victorians, prove to be a flying rout of suns and galaxies, rushing away from the solar system and from one another, bursting like H.E.s, wobbling like the dollar or the pound, and with orbits as veering as any European frontier. No longer can we find a suitable contrast to chaos in the night sky. The heavens and the earth have become terribly alike during the last twenty years. Nothere appear to be only two possibilities for order in the entire universe. The first of them is the divine order, available for those who can contemplate it. We must admit its possibility, on the evidence of the mystics, and we must believe them when they say that it is attained, if attainable, by prayer. “ O thou who changest not, abide with me ” said one of its poets. “ Ordina questo amor, o tu che m’ami,” said another. Intellectuals are such puritanical devils, that they usually recoil with horror when prayer is mentioned. But to be shocked by prayer is as prudish as to be shocked by sex ; anyhow, I can find nothing scandalous in exploring and practising its technique, as Gerald Heard and others are now doing, although I have no aptitude myself. The second possibility is the aesthetic order- —the order which an artist can create in his own work. A work of art is a unique product. But why ? It is unique not because it is clever or noble or beautiful or enlightened or original or sincere or idealistic or usefulscraps of those qualities lie all over the shop and it may embody any of them —but because it is the only material object in the universe which may possess

internal harmony. All the others have been pressed into shape from outside, and when their mould is removed they collapse. The work of art stands up by itself, and nothing else does. It achieves something which has often been promised by society, but always delusively. Ancient Athens made a messbut the Antigone stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess —but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted ; Louis XIV made a —but there was Phedve ; Louis XV continued it, but Voltaire got his letters written. Art for Art’s sake ? I should just think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden ; c’est le meilleuv temoignage que nous puissions donnev de notve dignite. Consequently, I hold that the artist ought to be an outsider, and that the nineteenth-century conception of him as a Bohemian was a just one. The conception erred in two particulars ; it postulated an economic system where art could be a full-time job, and it stressed idiosyncrasy and waywardness rather than order. But it is a truer conception than the 8.8. C. and M. 0.1. one, which treats the artist as if he were a particularly bright Government advertiser, and encourages him to be friendly and matey with his fellowcitizens and not to give himself airs. Estimable is mateyness, and the man who achieves it gives many a half pint of pleasure to himself and to others. But it has no traceable connection with the creative impulse, and probably acts as an inhibition on it. The artist who is seduced by mateyness may stop himself from doing the one thing which he, and he alone, can do : the making of something out of words or sounds or paint or clay or.steel or film which has internal harmony, and presents order to a permanently disarranged planet. This seems worth doing, even at the cost of being called uppish by journalists. Some months ago, before it was itself eclipsed by the superior opacity of a body called Cassandra,

The Times published an article called “ The Eclipse of the Highbrow,” in which the “ average man ” was exalted, and all contemporary literature was censured, with the exception of Lord Elton. Commenting on this article, Sir Kenneth Clark wrote in a memorable letter : “ The poet and the artist are important precisely because they are not average men ; because in sensibility, intelligence, and power of invention they far exceed the average.” These words of Clark’s, and particularly the words “ power of invention,” are the Bohemian’s passport. Furnished with it, he slinks outside the fortifications of society, saluted now by a brickbat and now by a coin, and accepting either of them with equanimity. He does not consider too anxiously what his relations with the mess inside may be, or listen too intently to the drone of the remorsemongers as they remind him that he is partially to blame. He can hear something more important than that —namely, the invitation to create order—and he knows that he will be better placed for doing it if he attempts detachment. So round and round he slouches, with his hat pulled over his eyes and maybe with a louse in his beard. As our present society disintegrates, this demode figure will become clearer ; the Bohemian, the outsider, the parasite, the ratone of those figures which have at present no function either in a warring

or peaceful world. It is not very dignified to be a rat ; but all the ships are sinking, which is not dignified either —the business men did not build them properly. Myself, I would sooner be a swimming rat than a sinking ship — at all events, I can look around me for a little longer and I remember how one of us, a rat with particularly bright eyes called Shelley, squeaked out, “ Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” before he vanished into the waters of the Mediterranean. What laws did Shelley propose to pass ? None. The legislation of the artist is never formulated at the time, though it is sometimes discerned by future generations. He legislates through creating, and he creates through his sensitiveness and his power to impose form. Without form the sensitiveness perishes. And form is as important to-day, when our tools are blasted and our canvases slashed and our typewriters jammed, as it ever was in those happy days when the earth seemed solid and the stars fixed. Form is not tradition. It alters from generation to generation. Playwrights no longer observe the unities, musicians are no longer interested in composing sonatas. They seek a new technique, and will do so as long as their work excites them. But form of some sort is imperative. It is the surface crust of the internal harmony.