Essays in Idleness

Ars est celare artem, as they say, or at least some of them say, though I am told with a straight face that it was just Ovid in the Ars Amatoria, or the Metamorphoses, Book X. Or Quintilian, when I looked it up in Mencken. I had thought it was Horace, in the Ars Poetica. But I cannot find it there, and now I think perhaps the source is quaint and mediaeval. Except, that this principle goes back beyond the Greeks, and is implicit throughout Herodotus, “the father of journalism.” It is not the “highest” art, as the rhetorician, Quintilian, suggests, but it is an art that lies behind art, that will help us explain why art cannot be replaced by mere accuracy, or by piling on “data,” as we do today. Rather than master the technique of an art, we create a machine to spit things out, and replace it with a machine that spits them out faster. But spitting is not art.

Journalism, or the more intelligent, later draughts of history, only become comprehensible when we leave things out. But knowing what is trivial, and should be removed from the account, and what is not, requires more than habitual suppression. It requires a profound opposition to what is boring. That is why virtually all journalism is boring. It simply spits out sex and violence like a machine. Moreover, there is an order in which one tells the story, or even a joke; if you don’t have it right you will spoil everything that would have been interesting, or at least, funny. The true artist must learn to shut up when he has nothing to say. He must be artful even in his silence.

That is why God gave His people the faculty of discernment, although they seldom cultivate it. One makes sense of things, or must stumble about senselessly, like a liberal or a leftist. They do not understand candour can be understood only by the candid.

For true candour requires art, not artlessness.