“The most effectual men have always been those whose notions were diametrically opposed to those of their time,” she said carefully.
“I don’t think that is so; except in so far as all effectual men are always the enemies of every time. With that fundamental divergence, they give a weight of impartiality to the supreme thesis and need of their age. Any opinion of their fellows that they adopt they support with the uncanny authority of a plea from a hostile camp. All activity on the part of a good mind has the stimulus of a paradox. To produce is the sacrifice of genius.”
They seemed to have an exotic grace to him as they promenaded their sinuous healthy intellects in this eighteenth-century landscape. There was no other pair of people who could talk like that on those terraces. They were both of them barbarians, head and shoulders taller than the polished stock around. And they were highly strung and graceful. They were out of place.
“Your philosophy reminds me of Jean-Jacques,” she said.
“Does it? How do you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Well, your hostility to a tidy rabble, and preference for a rough and uncultivated bed to build on brings to mind ‘wild nature’ and the doctrine of the natural man. You want a human landscape similar to Jean-Jacques’ rocks and water falls.”
“I see what you mean. But I also notice that the temper of my theories is the exact opposite of Jean-Jacques’.—He raved over and poetized his wild nature and naturalness generally and put it forward as an ideal. My point of view is that it is a question of expediency only. I do not for a moment sentimentalize crudeness. I maintain that that crude and unformed bed, or backing, is absolutely essential to maximum fineness; just as crudity in an individual’s composition is necessary for him to be able to create. There is no more absolute value in stupidity and formlessness than there is in dung. But they are just as necessary. The conditions of creation and of life disgust me. The birth of a work of art is as dirty as that of a baby. But I consider that my most irremediable follies have come from fastidiousness; not the other thing. If you are going to work or perform, you must make up your mind to have dirty hands most part of the time. Similarly, you must praise chaos and filth. It is put there for you. Incense is, I believe, camels’ dung. When you praise, you do so with dung. When you see men fighting, robbing each other, behaving meanly or breaking out into violent vulgarities, you must conventionally clap your hands. If you have not the stomach to do that, you cannot be a creative artist. If people stopped behaving in that way, you could not be a creative artist.”
“So you would discourage virtue, self-sacrifice, and graceful behaviour?”
“No, praise them very much. Also praise deceit, lechery, and panic. Whatever a man does, praise him. In that way you will be acting as the artist does; If you are not an artist, you will not act in that way. An artist should be as impartial as God.”
“Is God impartial?”