ART. T RA 0 I T ION. AND T RUT H
19
all intense experience and keen perception are banished from it, then
of course the artist is cut off from it. But one can surely question the
preconceptions in which men hide from the risks of powerful exper–
ience. Nietzsche and Rilke did not exalt prettification above sordid
reality; they rejected bloodless stereotypes for a vision of magnificent
terror.
Consider such diverse painters as Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van
Gogh. Rembrandt did not shut his eyes to reality to escape into a
realm of agreeable fancy: he saw the aged, the beggars, and the out–
casts of society as they had not been seen before. He penetrated all
kinds
of traditional prejudices to see the beauty of reality. Well might
a contemporary have objected, as Heller does to Rilke and Nietzsche:
"We can no longer be sure that we love the lovable and abhor the
detestable." Precisely this revaluation is a measure of Rembrandt's
greatness.
A critic brought up on the values of Raphael, Giorgione, or even
Titian, might have voiced Heller's protest when confronted with
Rubens' nudes. But Rubens did not escape from reality into art: he
saw beauty where previous painters had failed to see it; he was in
Nietzsche's sense a Dionysian artist. And so of course was Van Gogh.
His world may be a realm of madness; his flowers, cypresses, and
starry skies do not look like snapshots. But he did not fly into fancy;
he did not retreat from a tragic world to find refuge among comfor–
table creatures of the mind. Rather he seems to be saying: even in
madness there is beauty, even in fever and torment there is glory,
even in despair there is power.
In the end all three criticisms of Nietzsche and Rilke come down
to this: they were different from St. Thomas; they did not praise
what St. Thomas praised or believe what he believed; and their con–
ception of reality was not his. The norm of course need not be St.
Thomas, though it often is he even when he is not named; the norm
could be merely the anonymous "one"-what Heidegger calls
Das
Man.
What matters is that the critic thinks he knows what is praise–
worthy and what is real, instead of considering the possibility that
men like Nietzsche and Rilke, Plato and Shakespeare, Rembrandt and
Rubens can teach us something about these matters by changing our
perception.
