[From the last issue (pp. 361–2) of Horizon (Dec.,
1949)—the magazine whose tone Waugh brutally characterised as “R.A.F. Pansy”.]
This study in misunderstood genius leads us easily on to
Bacon’s horror-fretted canvases and to Dallapiccola’s Songs for Prisoners, to
the criticism made of him “a few, a very few musicians, have an intense
awareness, heightened by their intellect, of the tragedy within our time—of the
religious struggle which is carried on to the last drop of blood-between the
spiritual ideal of liberty and the tyrranous brutality of matter and its
inexorable determinism.”
One can perceive the inner trend of the Forties as
maintaining this desperate struggle of the modem movement, between man,
betrayed by science, bereft of religion, deserted by the pleasant imaginings of
humanism against the blind fate of which he is now so expertly conscious that
if we were to close this last Comment with the suggestion that every one who
now is reading it may in ten years’ time, or even five, look back to this
moment as the happiest in their lives, there would be few who would gainsay us.
“Nothing dreadful is ever done with, no bad thing gets any better; you can’t be
too serious.” This is the message of the Forties from which, alas, there seems
no escape, for it is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an
artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of
his despair.
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