The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

Some residuum of such malice and cruelty there must be, even in the supremest work of art, else the eternal contradictions upon which life depends would be destroyed. But the emotion of love, in such works, will always be found to have its fingers, as it were, firmly upon the throat of its antagonist, so that the resultant rhythm shall be felt to be the ultimate rhythm of life itself, wherein the eternal struggle of love with malice issues in the relative overcoming of the latter by the former.

It would be invidious perhaps to name, in this place, any particular works of art in which the predominant element is malice rather than love. But such works of art exist in considerable number, and the lacerated and distorted beauty of them remains as a perpetual witness to what they have missed. In speaking of these inferior works of art the aesthetic psychologist must be on his guard against the confusion of such moods as the creative instinct of destruction or the creative instinct of simple sensuality with the inert malice we are considering.

The instinct of destruction is essentially connected with the instinct of creation and indeed must be regarded as an indirect expression of that instinct; for, as one can clearly understand, almost every creative undertaking implies some kind of destructive or at least some kind of suppressive or renunciant act which renders such an undertaking possible.

In the same way it is not difficult to see that the simple impulse of natural sensuality, or direct animal lust, is profoundly connected with the creative instinct, and is indeed the expression of the creative instinct on the plane of purely material energy. But it must be understood, however, that neither the will to destruction nor the will to sensuality are by any means always as innocent as the forms of them I have indicated above.

It often happens indeed that this destructive instinct is profoundly penetrated by malice and derives the thrill of its activity from malice; and this may easily be observed in certain famous but not supreme works of art. It must also be understood that the impulse to sensuality or lust is not always the direct simple animal instinct to which I have referred. What has come to be called "Sadism" is an instance of this aberration of an innocent impulse.

The instinct of "sadism," or the deriving of voluptuous pleasure from sensual cruelty, has its origin in the legitimate association of the impulse to destroy with the impulse to create, as these things are inseparably linked together in the normal "possession" of a woman by a man. In such "possession" the active masculine principle has to exercise a certain minimum of destruction with a view to a certain maximum of creation; and the normal resistance of the female is the mental corollary of this.

The normal resistance of the artist's medium to the activity of his energy is a sort of aesthetic parallel to this situation; and it is easy to see how, in the creation of a work of art, this aesthetic overcoming of resistance may get itself mentally associated with the parallel sensation experienced on the sensual plane. The point we have to make is this: that while in normal cases the impulse to sensuality is perfectly direct, innocent, animal, and earth-born; in other cases it becomes vitiated by the presence in it of a larger amount of destructive energy than can be accounted for by the original necessity.

Thus in a great many quite famous works of art there will be found an element of sadism. But it will always remain that in the supreme works of art this sadistic element has been overcome and transformed by the pressure upon it of the emotion of love. There exists, however, other instances, when the work of art in question is obviously inferior, in which we are confronted by something much more evil than the mere presence of the sadistic impulse. What I refer to is a very subtle and complicated mood wherein the simple sadistic impulse to derive sensual pleasure from the contemplation of cruelty has been seized upon and taken possession of by the emotion of malice.

The complicated mood resulting from this association of sadistic cruelty with inert malice is perhaps the most powerful engine of evil that exists in the world; although a pure unmitigated condition of unsensualized, unimpassioned, motiveless malice is, in its inmost self, more essentially and profoundly evil. For while the energy of sadism renders the actual destructive power of malice much more formidable, we must remember that what really constitutes the essence of evil is never the energy of destruction but always the malicious inertness of resistance to creation. We have thus arrived at some measure of insight as to the nature of art and we find that whatever else it may be it must be penetrated through and through by the overcoming of malice by love. It must, in other words, have the actual outflowing of the soul as the instrument of its expression and as the psycho-material medium with which it inscribes its vision upon the objective mystery that confronts it.

We have at least arrived at this point in our search for a definite criterion: that when in any work of art a vein of excessive cruelty or, worse still, a vein of sneering and vindictive malice, dominates the emotional atmosphere, such a work of art, however admirable it may be in other respects, falls below the level of the most excellent. The relation between the idea of beauty as expressed by the aesthetic sense and those other ideas, namely of truth and goodness, which complete the circle of human vision, is a relation which may be suggested thus.