RODUCTION

TO

ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS

Perhaps the most important part of Criticism is the fact that it
presents to the creator a problem which is never solved. Criticism is
to him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will not
succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was a
certain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or an
irrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not.
For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions so
intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple to category
Life itself.

The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as he rejects the
simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early
age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race.
This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the
vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some
particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at
least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects to
avoid by whatever makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be
fit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce life
each day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always a
willing virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus only may he
retain and record that pure surprise whose earliest voicing is the
first cry of the infant.

The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward Life should be his way
toward Criticism also. He should hold it as part of his Adventure. He
should understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, stupid
and cruel, the ponderable weight of Life itself, reacting upon his
search for a fresh conquest over it. Though it persist unchanged in
its role of purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Public, he
should know it for himself a blessed dispensation.

With his maturity, the creator's work goes out into the world. And in
this act, he puts the world away. For the artist's work defines: and
definition means apartness: and the average man is undefined in the
social body. Here is a danger for the artist within the very essence
of his artistic virtue. During the years of his apprenticeship, he has
struggled to create for himself an essential world out of experience.
Now he begins to succeed: and he lives too fully in his own selection:
he lives too simply in the effects of his effort. The gross and
fumbling