Art
The Beaver and the Silk-worm
ONCE upon a time there was a silk-worm who lived on a mulberry tree by a river, and in the river there lived a beaver, for this was in a country where the climate suited all sorts of animals. And the silk-worm laboured all day, and from its belly spun a cocoon of the finest threads, of incomparable delicacy and of exquisite softness, and as it spun it rejoiced and said : " The fruit of my belly is beautiful, and -from it -I have built a house more lovely than the houses of all the other animals." But the beaver scam- pered about and collected wood, big bits, of .wood and little bits of wood, and mud and leaves, and from them with infinite patience and ingenuity it built its house to withstand the attacks of wind and water. And the silk-worm looked down and said : " HoW coarse is the work of this dirty beaver - And when all was ready, the silk-worm retired into its cocoon, and the beaver took . up its residence in its mud flat. And in due course all the other animals came to pay their respects. They greeted the beaver and congratulated him on hisi splendid house. And they said : " This is very remarkable.' We have all seen branches and twigs and mud before, but we never thought them worth noticing. And we should never have dreamt that out of commonplace materials you could make such a strong and river-worthy house. What a genius you must be " And then they sniffed at the silk-worm, who by this time was fast asleep in his silken cocoon, and they said : " What is this curious object, and who lives here ? " The beaver answered : " The silk-worm made that. He spun it out of his belly." And the beasts said : " How disgusting .! But anyhow that is his affair and has nothing to do with us." And they went away.
Now you may say that the beasts were precipitate in their judgement and die-hard in their principles, and that they merely condemned the silk-worm's creation because it was unlike what they were accustomed to. But there I think you would be unfair; because when silk-worms spin things wholly from their belly or, to come down to more relevant matters, when men create things entirely from the insides of their minds, they must be prepared for others to say : "This may be all very fine, but it has nothing to do with us," or, at best, to regard their productions as an agreeable kind of escape from the more important world of reality.
I would therefore put the moral of my silly story in this form : All great art is made out of materials found in the outer world, and is directly connected with material reality. There are, of course, many kinds of silk-worm arts, of arts of escape, to which we are all devoted. The most obvious example is the fairy-story, or, more particularly, the kind of fantastic story produced nowadays by Lord Dunsany and illustrated by Sime. As cocoons these could hardly be snore lovely, and yet no one will, I think, maintain that Lord Dunsany and Sime are artists of the order of Balzac and Courbet, to put it no higher. And one reason, I believe, why they cannot be artists of the first importance is their complete independence of material reality.
But many painters of a wholly different type have con- demned themselves to the second class by their refusal to take material reality as the foundation for their work. In recent years the extreme school of artists,' best represented by Gleizes, failed because it attempted to create completely -abstract patterns free froni any taint of imitation. At the present moment the Surrealists seem to be failing for the same sort of reason: They use material objects in their paintingi only as a means of expressing the fantasies with which their minds are -obsessed, as a means of freeing themselves frOm the repressions and complexes which disturb their peace of mind. Their productions, therefore, as is admitted even by their supporters, belong really to psycho-sexual exposition, not to art. Of all Surrealists this applieS most strongly to Salvador Dali, whose works are now on view at the Zwemmer Gallery. Not only are his paintings the expressions of his sexual disturbances, but these disturbances are recorded Merely in diagrammatic form, plotted according to personal co-ordinates. The idiom is so personal, that even those to whom the matter is sympathetic will find satisfaction hard to obtain.
Ass.rnorry BLUNT.
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