Confessions of Aleister Crowley

363 and the fatigue and the exposure, though he stuck to it with the utmost gameness. He had the passive patient courage of the Jew in its fullest development. However, there was no need for any further display of this virtue, and I put him to bed and told him to stay there and repair his ravaged intestines on delicate food until they were strong enough to support him through the next ordeal. As for myself, I was as fit as I had ever been in my life, and appreciating the extreme barbarism of the wilderness was the best possible preparation for swinging over to the other extreme and feeding my soul on the refinements of art. As a critic of art I have curious qualifications. My early life left me ignorant of the existence of anything of the sort beyond Landseer's "Dignity and Impudence". I suppose I ought to have deduced the existence of art from this alone had I been an ideal logician. Such horrors imply their opposites. However, even in my emancipation I never discovered art as I did literature. It never occurred to me that there might be a plastic language as well as a spoken and written one. I had no conception that ideas could be conveyed through this medium. To me, as to the multitude, art meant nothing more than literature. The first picture that awakened me was Manet's wonder "Olympe", enthusiastically demonstrated by Gerald Kelly to be the greatest picture ever painted. I could see nothing but bad drawing and bad taste; and yet something told me that I was making a mistake. When I reached Rodin shortly afterwards I understood him at once, because the sculpture and architecture of the East had prepared me. I knew that they were the expression of certain religious enthusiasms, and it was easy for me to make the connection and say, "Rodin's sculpture gives the impression of elemental energy." Yet this was subconscious. In my poems I have treated Rodin from a purely literary standpoint. As time passed my interest in the arts increased. I was still careful to avoid contemporary literature lest it should influence my thought or style. But I saw no harm in making friends with painters and learning to see the world through their eyes. Having already seen it through my own in the course of my wanderings, I was the better able to observe clearly and judge impartially. Perhaps this circumstance itself had biased me. It is at least the case that I have no use for artists who have lost touch with tradition and see nature secondhand. I think I have kept my head pretty square on my shoulders in the turmoil of the recent revolutions. I find myself able to distinguish between {585} the artist whose eccentricities and heresies interpret his individual peculiarities and the self- advertising quack who tries to be original by outdoing the most outrageous heresiarch of the moment. In the galleries of the Prado there is no occasion to trouble about such matters. The place fills one with uttermost peace; one goes there to worship Velasquez and Goya, not to argue. Perhaps I was still to ingenuous to appreciate Goya to the full. On the other hand, there may be something in my impression that he is badly represented at Madrid. Much of his work struck me as the mechanical masterpieces of the clever court painter. Possibly, moreover, there was no room for him in my spirit, seduced, as it was, by the vivid variety of Velasquez. "Las Meninas" is worshipped in a room consecrated solely to itself, and I spent more of my mornings in that room and let it soak in. I decided then, and might concur still had I not learnt the absurdity of trying to ascribe an order to things which are each unique and absolute, that "Las Meninas" is the greatest picture in the world. It certainly taught me to know the one thing that I care to learn about painting: that the subject of a picture is merely an excuse for arranging forms and colours in such a way as to express the inmost self of the artist. I had made several experiments with hashish since my return from China, always with excessive precaution. Some of these had been somewhat unexpectedly successful. I found that my habit of analysing and controlling my mind enabled me to turn the effect of the drug to the best account. Instead of getting intoxicated, I became quite abnormally able to push introspection to the limit. The result of these experiments had been slowly sorted out and interpreted in the course of months. I found a striking analogy between this toxic excitement and the more legitimate methods