Lapsed Bohemians

"You know how they wrote in that century... People with no soul."
- The Island of the Day Before, last lines

A soul is always needed in artist in the things he does. A good one, let us assume by taking at once the aesthetic doctrine of Tolstoy. If an artist does not feel for his own art, how then may he expect others to feel for his? Go on and dispute that first statement, if you feel like it. If you do, you're not the first, and a richly populated canon has sprung from the denial from that first statement. In Tolstoy's opinion its roots dug as far into the past as the Renaissance, but in any case the Anti-art tradition , as aforementioned, is its most outward manifestation.

The bohemianism of the post-Renaissance era of Europe, then, may not be so removed from the modern art which so often despises it. The last lines which summed up Roberto della Griva's account of his shipwreck was an uncomfortable ending to the book, but it mirrors a state of mind which existed then as well as now. It strikes at the root of the pretentiousness of art and artists.

The callwords of poetry, of contemplation, romance and othersuch, being worthy each on their own, are needless repeated and advertised. This so happens when the incentive that these qualities bring are attractive. It pays for an artist to heighten his profile through such an image; an artist is always seen a head taller than the rest in terms of abilities of cognition. And of course, a knack in language and in expression, spoken or written, benign or expletive, is an indespensable element in courtship of any form.

Was it the case in the European upper-classes? I may venture a guess so and be more than a little convinced myself. Roberto, a Piedmontese aristocrat, certainly had a propensity to set his eyes on more than one woman (lot like me, really). He also wrote love letters, which were dictated to him by Saint-Savin; this other guy had in his hands a winning formula for the love letter. His revelry in metaphysics with Father Caspar, and then himself, was in retrospect a little sycophantic in addition to the general interesting. Finally, his delirious dreams with Ferrante were a kitschy tales of good fighting evil: with a damsel in distress thrown in, even.

Why, a soul capable of such imagination, contemplation, desire, be deemed nought? But, we see through Saint-Savin's insight, you can pretend a soul if you don't have one, just repeat after me.

And, I imagine, somewhere into the twentieth century, they got tired of the pretense and flaunted soullessness (as ageless a disease as leprosy) as a novelty, a revolution, converging with the rest of the fashionable ideas to form the never-ending political hubbub of now.

Hence I conclude: That soullessness as a state of being has been preserved in art as a revered tradition, survived even (and especially) by the anti-art tradition that the Cabaret Voltaire artists claim to be trailblazers for; that richness and beauty of origins the most bereft of soul can be taken into an artistic canon. And art should not be so mystified such that even we, the artists ourselves, find it dodgy to relate to our brainchildren. This is art we are talking about after all, not theology.