Alex Comfort

I believe that in essence art is the act of standing aside from society, with certain important qualifications. (I ask my critics to abstain from quoting this until they have heard the rest of the story.) Herbert Read has pointed out that in truly free communities art is a general activity, far more cognate with craft than it can ever be in contemporary organised life, and he consigns the professional artist to his father the devil. I accept the proposition: it seems to be merely another statement of the hostility between barbarism and humanity which I have described. A state of affairs in which art could become a part of all daily activity, and in which all activity was potentially creative, would free community, and not a society — that is, a personified body treated as though it were an entity in itself — of the kind I have attacked. Art, when it is professionalised, consists in standing aside.

But it is essential that there should be no bitterness in the action. It may take any form, from the pure escape of decoration to the analysis of dreams and impulses in the myth, and to the most savage denunciations. But there must be no bitterness against humanity, or the artist defeats his own end. Neither must there be an attitude of superiority. He has absolutely no right to claim exemptions or privileges except in his capacity as a human being. The artist employs his form as the voice of a great multitude. It is only through the vicarious activity of creation that the great multitude ever finds a voice. Every creative activity speaks on behalf of utterly voiceless victims of society and circumstance, of everyone, finally, since man is always at some time the victim of his environment: and since they have undergone the supreme indignity, on behalf of the dead. The artist in barbarian society is the only true representative of the people.

That is what I mean by saying that the essence of romanticism is the acceptance of a sense of tragedy. All creative work speaks on behalf of somebody who would otherwise be voiceless, even the decoration of the potter who protests against the monotony of his work. I am always conscious of these submerged voices, as much in the tentative and nervous forms of early expression — savage and childhood production, bad derivative art produced, under civilised conditions, by people striving to express themselves — as in the technically professional work of the great ages of painting. No creative activity is free from the sense of protest. It is the sole way open to man of protesting against his destiny.

In the actual circumstances of contemporary writing, the standing aside must take different forms, though if it involves bitterness, hatred, a sense of moral and aesthetic superiority, or any form of ivory-towerism, it defeats itself. On the one hand, one can and must stand aside, though one can at the same time admire the scale and tragic quality of an event, or the courage which has gone to make an achievement. Anyone who is not deeply moved by events is probably not capable of creation. There is not the smallest reason why a poet should not write odes to the Russian Revolution or the Dneiper Dam if these subjects move him, and represent the message which, on behalf of some of the submerged voices, he is attempting to interpret, any more than there is a reason why he should not hate a tyrant or drive a concrete-mixer. But the poetry is subsequent to the fact that whoever writes it has already stood far enough away from his subject to be able to see it in reasonable and historical proportion. It is the right to do this, even in a community whose ideals inspire sympathy, that is utterly fundamental to good writing, and it is precisely this right which contemporary society is unanimous in denying. When it comes to the interpretation of the war, both publics and their leaders realise, consciously or unconsciously, that there is no more serious threat to the will to continue fighting than the existence of a body of objective art. It requires to be explained away, blackguarded into silence, conscripted, or ignored, according to the methods in vogue in the society concerned. But it continues to exist. The right to stand aside is contested everywhere. Leaders who have acclaimed the work of a particular artist because he denounced their opponents are exasperated to find that the denunciatory criticism extends to themselves.

And on the other hand there is the essential prerequisite on which all romantic theory is founded — the community of the artist with his fellow men: in other words, his humanity. He must cater for the need to stand aside by regarding all movements and societies neutrally, not in that he refuses to judge them at all, but that he judges them on the same basis. He cannot afford to have in his bag divers weights — that is one of the traits of civic lunacy. The artist's isolation and humanity are no different from the isolation and humanity of other responsible people — isolation from barbarism, solidarity with other human beings. It is a tribute to English letters that in a period of almost unparalleled national insanity should have produced Trevelyan's Social History. This is the history of the relationships and the experience from which there is no standing aside, the story of humanity in its incessant war with society. If artist is to take the side of man, he is fulfilling both his duties of isolation and humanity.

I disagree with the idea that the artist is primarily the interpreter of the symptoms and processes of economic change — to follow Caudwell's conception is to limit the number of levels on which art could or should exist. The unit with which the artist is concerned is first of all the human being.