Flowers of Evil

The problem with this is that, while there is, of course, a subjective element to all judgment, to view it as only subjective is as absurd as it is hypocritical. If all judgments were merely subjective, all ideas and actions, all products of human creation, would be equally valuable or invaluable, as the case may be. There would be no difference between an installation of human feces and the Eiffel Tower. But of course, there is a difference, and we make such distinctions all the time with the understanding that the difference is not one of mere preference but located in the thing itself.

In this excellent collection of essays, Anthony Daniels argues that the belief that judgment is relative in a mushy, egalitarian way has not made judgment obsolete but has impoverished it. The result is that people are just as opinionated today as they’ve always been, but with less reason and eloquence. In reality, judgment is comparative, Daniels notes, citing Samuel Johnson; and it is in the exercise of nuanced distinctions that our judgment becomes better, which until recently was considered one of the touchstones of civilized life. There is plenty of both reason and eloquence here, as well as a fair amount of humor. The essays, which have been selected from Daniels’s New Criterion columns, focus on literature but also deal with art and a handful of miscellaneous topics—from gooseberries to Vladimir Lenin in Zurich.

Some critics work in paragraphs. Daniels’s specialty is the mot juste. Virginia Woolf, he writes in an essay on her rather unprogressive treatment of her household servants, “was that peculiarly emblematic type of our age, a person of advanced views and reactionary feeling.” Kahlil Gibran, he writes, “mastered the difficult art of writing entirely in clichés without saying much that is true.” On Gibran’s semi-erotic sketches: “If ever there were an exhibition of his drawings, it might with justice be titled Nudity for Prudes.” The popularity of Harold Pinter’s plays can be attributed to the fact that they happened to be “in tune with the nascent intellectual fashion for believing that the unpolished and the brutal were somehow more real and authentic than the refined and civilized.” In an essay on literary prizes, he writes that because of our childish “fascination with, and trust in, lists . . . the repeated award of literary prizes to the wrong authors for the wrong books never seems to destroy their prestige.”

His judgments aren’t all negative. He praises the playwright Terence Rattigan’s “subtle [exploration] of human dilemmas and of the tragically destructive power of passion.” R. S. Thomas’s “rage,” he writes, was “the source of, or at least essential to, his poetic greatness.”

In a long essay on George Orwell, Daniels splits the difference. On the one hand, he praises Orwell’s honesty, humility, and bravery. (“Insofar,” Daniels adds, “as it is possible for an intellectual in a liberal democracy to be brave.”) On the other, he revisits Orwell’s “vicious” Homage to Catalonia (1938), in which Orwell praises the destruction of churches (lamenting that the Communists didn’t also raze Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia) and rationalizes the forced enlistment of children as “the easiest way of providing for them.” Orwell claimed in 1946, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” Poppycock.

“Either he forgot what he had written” in Homage to Catalonia, Daniels concludes, or “didn’t understand its implications.”

An Englishman who practiced medicine until 2005, Daniels often brings science and psychology into conversation with philosophy and literature. In “Mr. Hyde and the Epidemiology of Evil,” Daniels makes note of the use of the Jekyll and Hyde metaphor by some of his patients to shirk any personal responsibility for their evil actions. Their point, Daniels writes, in claiming that they are “a Jekyll and Hyde,” is that they are essentially good people (Jekyll) but due to outside forces, over which they have no control, they sometimes do bad things (Hyde). Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella suggests no such view of evil. In fact, it presents the opposite view: Evil is intrinsic in Jekyll and, by extension, in all of us.

“The chemicals do not create the evil,” Daniels writes, “they release it from the chains in which virtue has hitherto imprisoned it. Jekyll is a very fortunate man. . . . But once he gives in to the attractions of evil, he decisively changes the balance between good and evil within him.” The moral of the novel is that “Character is habit . . . if you practice evil, you become evil.”

One of the most intriguing pieces is a comparison of the work of the 17th-century still-life painter El Labrador (Juan Fernández) with that of contemporary hyperrealists. Despite the obvious technical skill of both Fernández and the hyperrealists, there’s a difference: “The realism of the former is contemplative and elevating while that of the latter is brash, jarring, superficial.” The hyperrealists offer no critique of the “garish” objects often depicted in their work. They live, Daniels writes, “in a world of perpetual bright light and primary colors, without subtlety or nuance or restraint”:

While the relationship between an artist and his audience is complex, Daniels is right that the art of our age is often little more than a game of one-upmanship, one in which museum curators and art critics happily participate since it also happens to be a rather rich one.

Witty without superficiality, wise without stuffiness, Good and Evil in the Garden of Art is a reminder that intelligent and entertaining criticism is still alive and well today, if rarer than in the past, and mostly ignored by so-called cultural elites. So be it. One day, the truth will out.

Micah Mattix is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University.