Through many ages, mankind has been striving to register the image on the retina as it is: no more glyphs and hieroglyphs. We’ll have the real objective reality.
And we have succeeded. As soon as we succeed, the Kodak is invented, to prove our success. Could lies come out of a black box, into which nothing but light had entered? Impossible! It takes life to tell a lie.
Colour also, which primitive man cannot really see, is now seen by us, and fitted to the spectrum.
Eureka! We have seen it, with our own eyes.
When we see a red cow, we see a red cow. We are quite sure of it, because the unimpeachable Kodak sees exactly the same.
But supposing we had all of us been born blind, and had to get our image of a red cow by touching her, and smelling her, hearing her moo, and “feeling” her? Whatever should we think of her? Whatever sort of image should we have of her, in our dark minds? Something very different, surely!
As vision developed towards the Kodak, man’s idea of himself developed towards the snapshot. Primitive man simply didn’t know what he was: he was always half in the dark. But we have learned to see, and each of us has a complete Kodak idea of himself.
You take a snap of your sweetheart, in the field among the buttercups, smiling tenderly at the red cow with a calf, and dauntlessly offering a cabbage-leaf.
Awfully nice, and absolutely “real.” There is your sweetheart, complete in herself, enjoying a sort of absolute objective reality: complete, perfect, all her surroundings contributing to her, incontestable. She is really a “picture.”
This is the habit we have formed: of visualizing everything. Each man to himself is a picture. That is, he is a complete little objective reality, complete in himself, existing by himself, absolutely, in the middle of the picture. All the rest is just setting, background. To every man, to every woman, the universe is just a setting to the absolute little picture of himself, herself.
This has been the development of the conscious ego in man, through several thousand years: since Greece first broke the spell of “darkness.” Man has learnt to see himself. So now, he is what he sees. He makes himself in his own image.
Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learnt to see straight. They fumbled in the dark, and didn’t quite know where they were, or what they were. Like men in a dark room, they only felt their own existence surging in the darkness of other creatures.
We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness. We see as the All-Seeing Eye sees, with the universal vision. And we are what is seen: each man to himself an identity, an isolated absolute, corresponding with a universe of isolated absolutes. A picture! A Kodak snap, in a universal film of snaps.
We have achieved universal vision. Even god could not see differently from what we see: only more extensively, like a telescope, or more intensively, like a microscope. But the same vision. A vision of images which are real, and each one limited to itself.
We behave as if we had got to the bottom of the sack, and seen the Platonic Idea with our own eyes, in all its photographically developed perfection, lying in the bottom of the sack of the universe. Our own ego!
The identifying of ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me.
As soon as we are supremely satisfied about it, somebody starts to upset us. Comes Cezanne with his pitcher and his apples, which not only are not life-like, but are a living lie. The Kodak will prove it.
The Kodak will take all sorts of snaps, misty, atmospheric, sun- dazed, dancing — all quite different. Yet the image is the image. There is only more or less sun, more or less vapour, more or less light and shade.
The All-Seeing Eye sees with every degree of intensity and in every possible kind of mood: Giotto, Titian, El Greco, Turner, all so different, yet all the true image in the All-Seeing Eye.
This Cezanne still-life, however, is contrary to the All-Seeing Eye. Apples, to the eye of God, could not look like that, nor could a tablecloth, nor could a pitcher. So, it is wrong.
Because man, since he grew out of a personal God, has taken over to himself all the attributes of the Personal Godhead. It is the all- seeing human eye which is now the Eternal Eye.
And if apples don’t look like that, in any light or circumstance, or under any mood, then they shouldn’t be painted like that.
Oh, la-la-la! The apples are just like that, to me! cries Cezanne. They are like that, no matter what they look like.
Apples are always apples! says Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
Sometimes they’re a sin, sometimes they’re a knock on the head, sometimes they’re a bellyache, sometimes they’re part of a pie, sometimes they’re sauce for the goose.
And you can’t see a bellyache, neither can you see a sin, neither can you see a knock on the head. So paint the apple in these aspects, and you get — probably, or approximately — a Cezanne still- life.
What an apple looks like to an urchin, to a thrush, to a browsing cow, to Sir Isaac Newton, to a caterpillar, to a hornet, to a mackerel who finds one bobbing on the sea, I leave you to conjecture. But the All-Seeing must have mackerel’s eyes, as well as man’s.
And this is the immorality in Cezanne: he begins to see more than the All-Seeing Eye of humanity can possibly see, Kodak-wise. If you can see in the apple a bellyache and a knock on the head, and paint these in the image, among the prettiness, then it is the death of the Kodak and the movies, and must be immoral.
It’s all very well talking about decoration and illustration, significant form, or tactile values, or plastique, or movement, or space- composition, or colour-mass relations, afterwards. You might as well force your guest to eat the menu card, at the end of the dinner.
What art has got to do, and will go on doing, is to reveal things in their different relationships. That is to say, you’ve got to see in the apple the bellyache, Sir Isaac’s knock on the cranium, the vast, moist wall through which the insect bores to lay her eggs in the middle, and the untasted, unknown quality which Eve saw hanging on a tree. Add to this the glaucous glimpse that the mackerel gets as he comes to the surface, and Fantin-Latour’s apples are no more to you than enamelled rissoles.
The true artist doesn’t substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively immoral.
The universe is like Father Ocean, a stream of all things slowly moving. We move, and the rock of ages moves. And since we move and move for ever, in no discernible direction, there is no centre to the movement, to us. To us, the centre shifts at every moment. Even the pole-star ceases to sit on the pole. Allons! there is no road before us
I
There is nothing to do but to maintain a true relationship to the things we move with and amongst and against. The apple, like the moon, has still an unseen side. The movement of Ocean will turn it round to us, or us to it.
There is nothing man can do but maintain himself in true relationship to his contiguous universe. An ancient Rameses can sit in stone absolute, absolved from visual contact, deep in the silent ocean of sensual contact. Michelangelo’s Adam can open his eyes for the first time, and see the old man in the skies, objectively. Turner can tumble into the open mouth of the objective universe of light, till we see nothing but his disappearing heels. As the stream carries him, each in his own relatedness, each one differently, so a man must go through life.
Each thing, living or unliving, streams in its own odd, intertwining flux, and nothing, not even man nor the God of man, nor anything that man has thought or felt or known, is fixed or abiding. All moves. And nothing is true, or good, or right, except in its own living relatedness to its own circumambient universe; to the things that are in the stream with it.
Design, in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t
invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
Egypt had a wonderful relation to a vast living universe, only dimly visual in its reality. The dim eye-vision and the powerful blood-feeling of the Negro African, even today, gives us strange images, which our eyes can hardly see, but which we know are surpassing. The big silent statue of Rameses is like a drop of water, hanging through the centuries in dark suspense, and never static. The African fetish-statues have no movement, visually represented. Yet one little motionless wooden figure stirs more than all the Parthenon frieze. It sits in the place where no Kodak can snap it.
As for us, we have our Kodak-vision, all in bits that group or jig. Like the movies, that jerk but never move. An endless shifting and rattling together of isolated images, “snaps,” miles of them, all of them jigging, but each one utterly incapable of movement or change, in itself. A kaleidoscope of inert images, mechanically shaken.
And this is our vaunted “consciousness,” made up, really, of inert visual images and little else: like the cinematograph.
Let Cezanne’s apples go rolling off the table for ever. They live by their own laws, in their own ambiente, and not by the laws of the Kodak — or of man. They are casually related to man. But to those apples, man is by no means the absolute.
A new relationship between ourselves and the universe means a new morality. Taste the unsteady apples of Cezanne, and the nailed- down apples of Fantin-Latour are apples of Sodom. If the status quo were paradise, it would indeed be a sin to taste the new apples; but since the status quo is much more prison than paradise, we can go ahead.
MORALITY AND THE NOVEL
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment. As mankind is always struggling in the toils of old relationships, art is always ahead of the “times,” which themselves are always far in the rear of the living moment.
When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.
The vision on the canvas is a third thing, utterly intangible and inexplicable, the offspring of the sunflower itself and van Gogh himself. The vision on the canvas is for -ver incommensurable with the canvas, or the paint, or van Gogh as a human organism, or the sunflower as a botanical organism. You cannot weigh nor measure nor even describe the vision on the canvas. It exists, to tell the truth, only in the much-debated fourth dimension. In dimensional space it has no existence.
It is a revelation of the perfected relation, at a certain moment, between a man and a sunflower. It is neither man-in-the-mirror nor flower-in-the-mirror, neither is it above or below or across anything. It is in between everything, in the fourth dimension.
And this perfected relation between man and his circumambient universe is life itself, for mankind. It has the fourth-dimensional quality of eternity and perfection. Yet it is momentaneous.
Man and the sunflower both pass away from the moment, in the process of forming a new relationship. The relation between all things changes from day to day, in a subtle stealth of change. Hence art, which reveals or attains to another perfect relationship, will be for ever new.
At the same time, that which exists in the non-dimensional space of pure relationship is deathless, lifeless, and eternal. That is, it gives us the feeling of being beyond life or death. We say an Assyrian lion or an Egyptian hawk’s head “lives.” What we really mean is that it is beyond life, and therefore beyond death. It gives us that feeling. And there is something inside us which must also be beyond life and beyond death, since that “feeling” which we get from an Assyrian lion or an Egyptian hawk’s head is so infinitely precious to us. As the evening star, that spark of pure relation between night and day, has been precious to man since time began.
If we think about it, we find that our life consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This is how I “save my soul” by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and other people, me and a nation, me and a race of men, me and the animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon: an infinity of pure relations, big and little, like the stars of the sky: that makes our eternity, for each one of us, me and the timber I am sawing, the lines of force I follow; me and the dough I knead for bread, me and the very motion with which I write, me and the bit of gold I have got. This, if we knew it, is our life and our eternity: the subtle, perfected relation between me and my whole circumambient universe.
And morality is that delicate, for ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe, which precedes and accompanies a true relatedness.
Now here we see the beauty and the great value of the novel. Philosophy, religion, science, they are all of them busy nailing things down, to get a stable equilibrium. Religion, with its nailed- down One God, who says Thou shalt, Thou shan’t, and hammers home every time; philosophy, with its fixed ideas; science with its “laws”: they, all of them, all the time, want to nail us on to some tree or other.
But the novel, no. The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
The modern novel tends to become more and more immoral, as the novelist tends to press his thumb heavier and heavier in the pan: either on the side of love, pure love: or on the side of licentious “freedom.”
The novel is not, as a rule, immoral because the novelist has any dominant idea, or purpose. The immorality lies in the novelist’s helpless, unconscious predilection. Love is a great emotion. But if you set out to write a novel, and you yourself are in the throes of the great predilection for love, love as the supreme, the only emotion worth living for, then you will write an immoral novel.
Because no emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for. All emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship between a human being and the other human being or creature or thing he becomes purely related to. All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, un- established balance between two people who amount to anything. If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship, a pure relatedness, the only thing that matters: and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction.
Life is so made that opposites sway about a trembling centre of balance. The sins of the fathers are visited on the children. If the fathers drag down the balance on the side of love, peace, and production, then in the third or fourth generation the balance will swing back violently to hate, rage, and destruction. We must balance as we go.
And of all the art forms, the novel most of all demands the trembling and oscillating of the balance. The “sweet” novel is more falsified, and therefore more immoral, than the blood-and-thunder novel.
The same with the smart and smudgily cynical novel, which says it doesn’t matter what you do, because one thing is as good as another, anyhow, and prostitution is just as much “life” as anything else.
This misses the point entirely. A thing isn’t life just because somebody does it. This the artist ought to know perfectly well. The ordinary bank clerk buy
ing himself a new straw hat isn’t “life” at all: it is just existence, quite all right, like everyday dinners: but not “life.”
By life, we mean something that gleams, that has the fourth- dimensional quality. If the bank clerk feels really piquant about his hat, if he establishes a lively relation with it, and goes out of the shop with the new straw on his head, a changed man, be-aureoled, then that is life.
The same with the prostitute. If a man establishes a living relation to her, if only for one moment, then it is life. But if it doesn’t: if it is just money and function, then it is not life, but sordidness, and a betrayal of living.
If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships may consist in. If the novelist honours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.
But there are so many relationships which are not real. When the man in Crime and Punishment murders the old woman for sixpence, although it is actual enough, it is never quite real. The balance between the murderer and the old woman is gone entirely; it is only a mess. It is actuality, but it is not “life,” in the living sense.
The popular novel, on the other hand, dishes up a rechauffe of old relationships: If Winter Comes. And old relationships dished up are likewise immoral. Even a magnificent painter like Raphael does nothing more than dress up in gorgeous new dresses relationships which have already been experienced. And this gives a gluttonous kind of pleasure to the mass: a voluptuousness, a wallowing. For centuries, men say of their voluptuously ideal woman: “She is a Raphael Madonna.” And women are only just learning to take it as an insult.
A new relation, a new relatedness hurts somewhat in the attaining; and will always hurt. So life will always hurt. Because real voluptuousness lies in re-acting old relationships, and at the best, getting an alcoholic sort of pleasure out of it, slightly depraving.
Each time we strive to a new relation, with anyone or anything, it is bound to hurt somewhat. Because it means the struggle with and the displacing of old connexions, and this is never pleasant. And moreover, between living things at least, an adjustment means also a fight, for each party, inevitably, must “seek its own” in the other, and be denied When, in the two parties, each of them seeks his own, her own, absolutely, then it is a fight to the death. And this is true of the thing called “passion.” On the other hand, when, of the two parties, one yields utterly to the other, this is called sacrifice, and it also means death. So the Constant Nymph died of her eighteen months of constancy.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1040