According to Oscar Wilde, before Dickens there were no fogs, and before Turner no sunsets. Wilde is merely exaggerating a truth, practising the art of aphorism, drawing our attention to this precept: we need art so that we can see what we are seeing. On his way to the Hebrides, Dr Johnson pulled down the blind on what a future generation of writers would take for their subject-matter - wild, 'romantic' nature. Johnson, had he lived, would not have seen the point of Wordsworth's 'single sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music of that old stone wall'. But if art enables and liberates its audience, it can also disable and enslave the subsequent generation of writers. In To Jerusalem and Back, Saul Bellow notes that 'in every generation we recognise a leader race of masterminds whose ideas ("class-struggle", "Oedipus complex", "identity crisis") come down over us like butterfly nets.' This insight applies to artists as well as thinkers.

LRB 12 November 1987 | PDF Download