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Each of the arts
has its saints and ascetics, practitioners so totally dedicated
to their craft that they seem to have little time for anything
else-or even interest, for that matter. There are ignoble
instances of this, of course, and only an enthusiast would
maintain that excellence in art trumps and negates all moral
fault. And only a prig would hold that, since human perfection
cannot be identified with excellence in art, then art is only
a trivial pursuit, best eschewed altogether.
When Paul compared
athletes and Christians, he spoke of perishable and imperishable
crowns, but perishable crowns can be the means of attaining
the imperishable. Isn't it silly to think that anyone could
live without engaging in some if not all of the ordinary,
mundane activities? We have here no lasting city, but it is
here that we earn our passport to the next.
In a recent and
fascinating biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Scott Donaldson
makes a convincing case that Robinson was not only a wonderful
poet but also a good man. Such judgments are rare in literary
biography. A new life of Robert Louis Stevenson - Myself
and the Other Fellow - gives a more clouded expression
of this matter. Both writers did little else than write and
the few other things they engaged in were ordered to their
art. Their common aim was fame and glory.
There is a type
of fame such artists would disdain. Being on the lips of many
who had not read them, their names bruited about, notoriety,
considered 'very important persons' - this was not their goal.
Rather they wanted readers who would see that they had made
something good, achieved in an excellent way the goal of their
art. Such acknowledgment is related to their achievement,
as fame in the first sense is not. Horace wanted a monument
'more enduring than bronze'; that is, to exist for future
readers who would appreciate the intricate artistry of the
odes.
The poet retains
his kinship with the philosopher; in a secularized culture
he is still allowed to ask out loud what it all means. The
answers are often gnomic and oblique. Stevenson shucked
off the Calvinism of his youth and considered himself an atheist,
but this seems a pose; Robinson, on the other hand, though
no church goer, throughout his long career pondered the transcendent
point of ordinary human lives. He wrote largely of life's
losers, as if the question was inescapable there. No easy
answers, of course: the poet deals with wonder but does not
assuage it. Is our culture such that it is the role of the
poet to provide, however enigmatically, nostalgia for what
has been lost? Attaining the perishable crown is perhaps the
surest way of sensing its inadequacy.
Ralph McInerny |
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