Views
It being perfectly obvious that nobody now adopts such a denomination, it must nevertheless be recognised that this word has seen a development to the same degree and in the same way as artist and poet. ("That man is an Artist," or again "I respect Poets," and above all, "the delightful rigour Aesthetes bring to their intentions...") In the last analysis, words have every right to overturn things and to inspire disgust: after fifteen years you find a dead woman's slipper in the back of a cupboard; you take it to the dustbin.There is a cynical pleasure in thinking about words which drag something of us along with them into the dustbin.
On the other hand, the automatic protest against a debased mental form is itself already pretty well threadbare. The wretch who asserts that art no longer functions, because, that way, one distances oneself from the "dangers of action," has already made a declaration which really must be considered like the dead woman's slipper. In fact, though it may be a fairly disgusting spectacle, the ageing process is the same for a cliché as for a system of carburization. Everything that, in the category of the emotions, responds to an admissible need is fated to suffer an improvement which, on the other hand, one is obliged to regard with the same uneasy (or cynical) curiosity as some sort or other of Chinese torture.