[BNP/E3, 31 – 88-89]

Preface to The Mad Fiddler.

When an author puts a preface to a volume of poems, and those poems bow down to a common religious, mystic, or philosophical attitude, every reader will take it to be natural that the intention of the preface is to insist upon that fundamental vision, and to convey in the stricter language of prose reason the message which the bearer of that philosophy conceives himself to have unto the world.

The few readers of this book will receive their first surprise when I inform them that the purpose of this preface is to disclaim any sincerity whatever, or any real belief, in the religiosity underlying these poems, all the sincerity being merely coextensive with the poems as such – that is to say, as ae[s]thetic, and not as philosophic, phenomena.

It is an excusable error if the reader of the foregoing paragraph concludes at once that a mere trifling has been the basis of all these compositions, and that an especially detestable kind of decadent attitude is being insisted upon. Nothing of this, however, is either meant or done. The facts are quite other, and a summary exposition of them will, I hope, render the position clear.

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The activity of an artist, and the work of art it produces, involve the interpenetrated coexistence of three elements, which are the material, the medial and the formal elements of art.

The matter of art is the sensibility of the artist, which is composed of his sensibility proper, of the sensibility superimposed on that by the currents traversing the nation to which he belongs, and of the broader movements underlying the civilizational system in which that nation is integrated. (and of the sensibility cast upon those two by the general principles ruling at the time the civilizational system to which that nation belongs.) It is neither our purpose, nor our necessity, to develop here the various ways in which this intermixture may take place. For the present purpose it is sufficient that we take our stand upon this axiomatic fact – that the artist works upon the sensations, the emotions and the ideas which constitute his personality, or, in other words, that the artist’s sensibility is the matter of his art.

The means of art various with the profession of the artist within art; that is to say, with the form of expression unto which the artist’s temperament was born, accordingly as he is a literary man, a musician, a painter, a sculptor, an architect, or even one of the adepts of the lower forms of art (acting, singing and the dance). 

[89r]

The form of art is invariable, since the Greeks discovered Unity and lapidated (?-) it out of the Egyptian mine in which its original crudeness had lain. The form of art is that principle which underlies all artistic realization, and which analysis will find to be what we may call the threefold law of unity – unity of purpose, unity of structure and unity of development. From this law there can be no swerving that is not at the same a swerving from the beauty which art exists to serve. For any work of art – say a poem – must be a coherent whole, organically sound; it must be structurally a whole, admitting into substance no element, however beautiful in itself, which does not contribute to its unity; and it must be coherently developed, having a length adapted to its subject, a development linked to the underlying emotion, and a {…}

There is only one poet in Christian times who has at all times kept clear before him the formal element of art. It may be not indispensable to add that I refer to Milton. The rest is nothing. Shakespeare violates all the laws of unity, of structure and of development. He is the great decadent, the proper representative of Christian indiscipline and incoherence.

Before we proceed, let us be clear upon this point. The formal element has nothing to do with the material element. The sensibility of the artist may be complex and confused in the extreme; that is his personality. But his control of his sensibility must be definite and clear. That is why Stéphane Mallarmé, the most complex and confused poet of all time, is a great artist. On a basis of sensibility which confines upon the mental activity of the insane, he superimposed a sense of unity of development, of harmony which few poets have had, and which it is extraordinary that one so markedly insane should have been able to possess. The contrary happens with a poet like Victor Hugo. Here we have perfect clearness in expression. But we have, at the same time, a total incompetence in determining the formal elements of a poem. One example will suffice – the poem Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre, near the end of Les Contemplations. A subject which would have been great if compressed into about a third of the space it occupies is nullified by an over-lengthy development with its rhetorical sins and the repetitions which it entails.