Art and mutability

It is all too easy in our times, and just looking back in time, to see humanity as a blot on the landscape, our history a story of crime. The twentieth century, in spite of ideas of human progress, brought the two most terrible wars we have known. And now we are faced with new unprecedented ecological and economic disaster. What have we done, what are we doing, to the Earth and to each other? Yet, how resilient we are, how essentially loving and creative we can be, ceaselessly rebuilding in the face of all odds, creating too in the arts in spite of or perhaps because of the odds.

It has always struck me, when looking at our artistic creations, how exciting this human adventure is, and has always been, how courageous and often so beautiful. We should sometimes stop the self-flagellation and condemnation, and look at our 'monuments of magnificence', the wonder of our creations. 

Never one for seeing things in categories, I think nevertheless it is difficult not to make out grand movements, and overarching tendencies, or yearnings. Above all, the human spirit battles on: ‘I will not cease from Mental Fight’, said Blake. There may be differing, even conflicting schools of thought, points of view, especially in modern times, when unity of culture can seem all but gone. Yet we look back at the Renaissance, the Romantics and what they tried to do in all their indefinable complexity, then the Victorians, and the Modernists of the last century, each moment often opposing and upturning what had gone before - and what abundant creation resulted for us all! Often at great personal cost for the artists. But what was going on, what were the undercurrents bringing such upheavals in style, in vision? What has happened to us, what meandering, daring often tortuous paths have we taken? I am not sure, today, we are quite aware of what they exactly have been - these paths, and why we have taken them - from the isolated fragmented perspective of our time, which more than any other time in history is cut off, divorced from the traditions which have upheld our civilisation for millennia. 

What has happened for us to move from a poet speaking like this, in a world of ordered Medieval values :

"A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,

That fro the tyme that he first bigan

To riden out, he loved chivalrie,

Trouthe and honóur, fredom and curteisie.

Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,

And thereto hadde he riden, no man ferre,

As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse,

And evere honóured for his worthynesse."

(Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales)

to Shakespeare’s flowing, more modern tones,

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."

(from As You Like It)

to the Romantic Coleridge’s musings:

"A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

         A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

         Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

                In word, or sigh, or tear—

O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,

To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,

         All this long eve, so balmy and serene,

Have I been gazing on the western sky,

         And its peculiar tint of yellow green:

And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!"

And then, the twentieth century, and the great voice of 20^th century poetry, ushering in the modern world. What a shake-up! What does this mean?

“Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;...”

(T.S. Eliot)

Just some reflections, then, which I would like to develop in the next day or two by putting on line some related thoughts by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He looks with much clarity at these great changes, what brought them about and what they might mean.