Tonight I must be in an antic mood, for I intend to talk about Art.
This is, of course, absurd. I am a middlebrow, generally unknown fantasy writer. Google my latest novel (The Baldur Game, in case you forgot, which is not unlikely) you’ll find that the only person talking about the book online is me. I have zero standing to make pronouncements about Art.
But I’ve had a couple thoughts. I’ll maunder on about the first one tonight. The next one will be provided the next time I find myself with a night without a book to review.
One truth that grows increasingly unavoidable as one grows old (though I think I’ve never repressed it much myself) is that we are going to die. The sands of time are sinking, the sun is setting in the west. Choose your metaphor.
I’m inclined to think of it as like floating down a river. You can’t slow your velocity and you can’t go ashore and rest – you are forever being carried by the current.
The river has pleasant stretches and unpleasant stretches. Some stretches are horrible. Some are delightful.
But good or bad, they speed past. The bad ones come to an end, but so do the good ones.
And sometimes you see one so wonderful, so sublime that you want to preserve it. You want to share it. You feel that the world will be better – it will be an act of love for humanity – if you can just preserve that moment for others to enjoy as well.
That’s what art is. An effort to preserve – to freeze – one of those fleeting moments and make it available to others.
Art, therefore, is an attempt at stopping time.
Or it was, until the Postmoderns decided that Art should be an exercise in self-expression, the less interesting the self, the better.
There is a lot of Inklings (among other) interest, here, in “Art, therefore, is an attempt at stopping time” – especially where Tolkien is concerned, but also, for example, Williams’s first ‘Masque’ springs to mind – and, again, the sense I have of Goethe’s Faust (which I’ve never yet read all of, even in translation…).
But for the moment, I want to take your reference to The Baldur Game (which I hope – and expect – people are enjoying, even if not being reported as talking about, online!) to go off on a tangent, and ask if you know Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake (1866)? I’ve finally gotten around to starting to read it, and find it interesting to compare (and contrast) with the Erling saga – not least in its ideas about kingship and contrasting, freer ways of (self-)government!
Someone referred me to the Kingsley book a while back and I tried reading it. I really tried, but I found it awful. No sense of the period (he thought, as I recall, that 11th Century Englishmen jousted like knights). I couldn’t finish it.
Thanks! He does seem (for one example that struck me) to be putting 12th-century things – such as ‘courts of love’ (if indeed they existed, though their existence seems to have been assumed in the 19th c.) – into his depiction of the 11th c. Whether this is likely to be ignorance, or some kind of deliberate play with anachronism – like T.H. White’s in The Sword in the Stone, though less extreme (and less systematic?) – or a combination of both, I don’t know. (I have not tried to look into the Hereward sources, and so cannot say if there may already be anachronistic things in the Gesta Herewardi or the Estoire des Engleis, which he then takes over.) I think it’s fun that he keeps referring the reader to Snorri Sturluson for further details of one thing and another (but I haven’t followed up any of these, yet – nor read much of Snorri, beyond Jean Young’s Prose Edda translation).