Albert Edelfelt, A Girl Knitting Socks 1896

FROM The Dispossessed Majority by Wilmot Robertson (Howard Allen Enterprises, 1996):

Liberal dogma to the contrary, such popular goals as universal literacy are not necessarily conducive to great literature. The England of Shakespeare, apart from having a much smaller population, had a much higher illiteracy rate than present-day Britain.  Nor does universal suffrage seem to raise the quality of artistic output. When Bach was Konzertmeister in Weimar and composing a new cantata every month, no one could vote. Some 220 years later in the Weimar Republic, there were tens of millions of voters, but no Bachs.

Great drama, which usually incorporates great poetry, is the rarest form of great art. Art critics and historians have been at some loss to explain why great plays have appeared so infrequently in history and then only in clusters — fifth-century (B.C.) Athens, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, seventeenth-century Spain and France. The answer may be that conditions for great drama are only ripe when artist and audience are in biological as well as linguistic rapport. Such rapport, unfortunately, is bound to be short-lived because the era of great drama is usually accompanied by large-scale economic and material advances which tend to soften national character, sharpen class divisions and attract extraneous racial and cultural elements from abroad. To the great playwright a heterogeneous or divided audience is no audience at all.

Not only high art but all art seems to stagnate in an environment of brawling minorities, diverse religions, clashing traditions, and contrasting habits. This is probably why, in spite of their vast wealth and power, such world cities as Alexandria and Antioch in ancient times and New York City and Rio de Janeiro in modern times have produced nothing that can compare to the art of municipalities a fraction of their size. The artist needs an audience which understands him — an audience of his own people. The artist needs an audience to write up to, paint up to, and compose up to — an aristocracy of his own people. These seem to be the true sine qua nons of great art. Whenever they are absent great art is absent.

How else can the timeless art of the “benighted” Middle Ages and the already dated art of the “advanced” twentieth century be explained? Why is it that all the cultural resources of a dernier cri superpower like the United Stales cannot produce one single musical work that can compare with a minor composition of Mozart? Why is it that perhaps the greatest contribution to twentieth-century English literature has been made not by the English, Americans, Australians, or Canadians, but by the Irish — the most nationalistic, most tribal, most religious and most racially minded of all present-day English-speaking people. Modern England may have had its D.H. Lawrence and the United States its Faulkner, but only Ireland in this century has assembled such a formidable literary array as Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Paul Vincent Carroll, Joyce Carey, and James Stephens. If, as current opinion holds, liberal democracy, internationalism, and cultural pluralism enrich the soil of art, then these Irish artists bloomed in a very unlikely garden.

The historical sequence of human communities seems to be race-building, nation-building, art-building, and empire-building. As the country moves closer to imperialism, the people move farther apart. The binding forces of the state are weakened by war, civil strife, and entropy, as the cultural shell is penetrated by outsiders. The aristocracy withdraws into an isolated decadence, its place taken by a plutocracy. Members of the once dominant population group mix with the newcomers and in order to compete are forced to adopt many of their habits. Art becomes multiracial, multinational, multidirectional, and multifarious.

Much of Western art, particularly in the United States, is now in such a stage of dissolution. The surrealist painters, atonal jazz musicologists, prosaic poets, emetic novelists, crypto-pornographers, and revanchist pamphleteers say they are searching for new forms because the old forms are exhausted. Actually they are exhuming the most ancient forms of all — simple geometric shapes, color blobs, drum beats, genitalia, four-letter words, and four-word sentences. The old forms are not exhausted. The minority artist simply has no feeling for them, for they are not his forms. Since style is not a commodity that can he bought or invented, the avant-garde, having no style of its own, can only retreat to a styleless primitivism.

(pp. 243-245)

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