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Kenneth Clark the Artist Grows Kenneth Clark The artist grows old Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 “What is it to grow old?” asked Mat- Festers the dull remembrance of a thew Arnold, and gave a depressing an- change, swer: But no emotion–none! . ’Tis not to have our life Arnold was about forty when he wrote Mellowed and softened as with sunset- these melancholy lines, and his experi- glow ence of old age was presumably drawn . ’Tis not to see the world from his father’s friends or his fellow As from a height, with rapt prophetic civil servants. He wrote in a reaction eyes, against the conventional picture of a And heart profoundly stirred. golden old age which had been current . It is to spend long days in antiquity from Sophocles to Cicero’s And not once feel that we were ever de Senectute. Everyone remembers Ceph- young; alus, Plato’s dear old man at the begin- . Deep in our hidden heart ning of the Republic: ‘Old age has a great sense of peace and freedom. When the passions have lost their hold, you have Kenneth Clark, a Foreign Honorary Member of escaped, as Sophocles says, not only the American Academy from 1964 until his death from one mad master, but from many!’ in 1983, was a preeminent art historian of his Arnold was justi½ed in refuting this clas- generation. He was a director of the National sical myth of a golden sunset. But all the Gallery, a Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Slade same, his diagnosis is not entirely cor- Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, and the author rect. ‘No emotion–none!’ On the con- of many books, including “Leonardo da Vinci” trary, elderly people feel emotion, and (1939), “Landscape Painting” (1950), “The tend to weep more than young ones. But Nude” (1956), and “Civilization” (1969), a best- bbc is it the kind of emotion that can be ex- selling companion to his renowned television pressed in memorable words? A few series of the same name. “The artist grows old” minutes’ reflection shows that it is not. was originally delivered in 1970, when Clark was The number of poets who have written Sir Robert Rede’s Lecturer at Cambridge Univer- memorable verse over the age of seven- sity. ty is very small indeed, and to write tol- © 1972 by Cambridge University Press. Re- erably over the age of sixty-½ve is excep- printed with the permission of Cambridge tional. This decline in the poetic faculty University Press. in old age must be distinguished from Dædalus Winter 2006 77 Kenneth the loss of inspiration that may afflict a some unforeseeable Open Sesame, can Clark poet at any age. But the two are obvious- bring them out of bondage. In 1835 on aging ly connected. However desirable it may Wordsworth heard of the death of James be, in the conduct of life, to be free from Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. He went in- passion, the mad masters have been re- to the next room. He thought of Chatter- sponsible for at least three-quarters of ton, that marvellous boy; he thought of the great poetry in the world. And old his lost friends; and in less than an hour age, although it does not put an end to he returned with an extempore effusion: our emotions, dulls the intensity of all Nor has the rolling year twice measured our responses. The romantic poets rec- From sign to sign its stedfast course, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ognised that this was the cause of declin- Since every mortal power of Coleridge ing inspiration; and, as we know from Had frozen at its marvellous source. Coleridge, it could happen quite early. The rapt one, of the Godlike forehead, He was only thirty-two when he wrote The heaven eyed creature sleeps in earth. that long and moving letter in verse to And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Sarah Hutchinson from which he later Has vanished from his lonely hearth. extracted his ‘Ode to Dejection’: A parallel instance can be quoted from I see them all, so excellently fair, Tennyson; he had long been deprived I see, not feel, how beautiful they are. of poetic inspiration, and had just ½n- And he went on to de½ne more precisely ished writing ‘Romney’s Remorse’, the feeling that he had lost: which even the most fervent Tenny- sonians do not defend, when, crossing Joy is the strong voice, joy the luminous to the Isle of Wight in October 1889, cloud. he was struck by an exceptionally high We in ourselves rejoice. tide, which seemed for some reason to This is a much more accurate descrip- symbolise his recent recovery from a tion of the loss that befalls us in old age serious illness. Open Sesame. When he than Arnold’s ‘no emotion–none!’ El- returned to Faringford he went straight derly people do not, and perhaps should to his room and in twenty minutes not, rejoice in themselves. Coleridge emerged with a poem: read this letter to the Wordsworths on But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 21 April 1802. At that time William had Too full for sound and foam, not lost the faculty of joy: in fact he When that which drew from out the was at work on the ‘Immortality’ ode. boundless deep He was so shocked by Coleridge’s pes- Turns again home. simism that he added one (or perhaps two) stanzas to the ‘Ode’ in order to re- He knew what had happened, and fute it. Alas, a few years later he suffered knew that it wouldn’t happen again. the same fate. He continued to write po- He gave instructions that ‘Crossing the etry; he wrote on high themes, with con- Bar’ should always be placed last in any scientious skill. ‘But emotion–none!’ collection of his works. Of course, the As most of you will know, there was an trouble about these flashes from the exception, and I will quote it to prove, depths of an elderly poet’s buried life is if proof were needed, that our feelings that they cannot be sustained. To do so do not die, but are buried so deeply in requires the kind of concentration that our memories that only some shock, is a physical attribute. ‘I can no longer 78 Dædalus Winter 2006 expect to be revisited by the continu- on a vigorous use of memory, with its The artist ous excitement under which I wrote my resulting confluence of ideas, is usually grows old other book’, said A. E. Housman in his in decline. The most ironic instance is preface to Last Poems, ‘nor indeed could that of Bernard Shaw, who believed that I well sustain it if it came.’ man would become wise if he could live If, for obvious reasons, elderly writers to be over 100 and to prove it wrote a dif- cannot sing with the same fervour as fuse and unreadable play that lacks all young ones, are there not other branches the intellectual vigour of his maturity. of literature in which they can excel? Such are the facts that must be faced One poet, who himself wrote movingly if we are to consider the old age of writ- in old age, tried to put a case for his fel- ers and artists. But they do not by any Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 low ancients: means exhaust the subject. I believe that old, even very old, artists, have added And yet, though ours be failing frames, something of immense value to the sum Gentlemen, of human experience. There is undoubt- So were some others’ history names edly what I may call, translating from the Who trod their track light-limbed and fast German, an old-age style, a special char- As these youth, and not alien acter common to nearly all their work; From enterprise, to their long last, and during the rest of the lecture I shall Gentlemen. try to discover what it is. For some reason which is rather hard Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, to analyse, painters and sculptors do Gentlemen, not suffer from the same loss of creative Pythagoras, Thucydides, power that afflicts writers. Indeed the Herodotus and Homer–yea, very greatest artists–Michelangelo, Clement, Augustin, Origen, Titian, Rembrandt, Donatello, Turner Burnt brightlier towards their setting day, and Cézanne–seem to us to have pro- Gentlemen. duced their most impressive work in It is a valiant effort, but I do not ½nd the last ten or ½fteen years of fairly long Hardy’s roll-call wholly convincing. lives. I say seem to us because this was Sophocles is the classic instance, and not formerly the accepted opinion. In we must allow it. But we have no means the nineteenth century Turner’s later of knowing whether the late works of paintings were considered the work of Homer and Pythagoras were superior a madman, and Rembrandt’s Conspiracy to their early ones. I am ashamed to say of Claudius Civilis was called a grotesque that I have not compared the late and masquerade. The lack of polish in Tit- early works of Clement and Origen; but ian’s later canvases was excused on the I have compared St Augustine’s Confes- grounds that the painter was over nine- sions with the City of God, and have no ty, and John Addington Symonds said hesitation in saying that the Confessions, of Michelangelo’s Capella Paolina, ‘the written twenty years earlier, is the more frigidity of old age had fallen on his brightly burning of the two.
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