failed harvest

…the conquest of the public imagination by the arts, by “art as a way of life,” has reinforced the natural resistance of the mind to ordinary logic, order, and precision, without replacing these with any strong dose of artistic logic, order, and precision. The arts have simply given universal warrant to the offbeat, the intelligible, the defiant without purpose. The schools have soaked up this heady brew. Anything new, obscure, implausible, self-willed is worth trying out, is an educational experiment. Soon, the pupil comes to think that anything unformed, obscure, slovenly he may do is validated by art’s contempt for tradition, correctness, and sense.

[…]

Nothing is right by virtue of its origins, but only by virtue of its results. A stifling tradition is bad and a “great” tradition is good. Innovation that brings improvement is what we all desire; innovation that impoverishes the mind and the chances of life is damnable.

[…]

But nowadays we despise the very word cultivation. I admit that unweeded soil grows wondrous things, which nobody can predict. And these things have an abundance. But it would be a rash man who would call it a harvest.

—Jacques Barzun, “The Centrality of Reading,” The Written Word (Newbury House Publishers, 1971)

imagination and madness

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy