Is it possible to create an artistic masterpiece whose content is morally and politically loathsome? If so, what should we make of such art? I can think of one clear example: Birth of a Nation, the silent film directed in 1915 by D. W. Griffith. About its repellent message there can be no doubt. The story of two families, one in the North and one in the South, during and after the American Civil War, it is pure propaganda for the Ku Klux Klan. Based on two novels by Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots, Griffith’s epic movie paints an idealized picture of the antebellum South, where slaves lived in happy harmony with their white masters. This paradise of racial hierarchy is brutally disturbed by northern liberals, who not only win the Civil War but also give blacks the right to vote, thereby upsetting the “natural order.” Given their freedom, the blacks in Griffith’s movie start behaving like sex-crazed, power-hungry savages. White women are no longer safe. Chaos reigns. And only the heroic march of the white-robed KKK saves the virtue of white womanhood and the honor of white men. Many of the blacks are played by white actors, mugging and leering grotesquely in blackface. The most villainous character in the film is a venal mulatto politician who does the most unpardonable thing of all — he gets a law passed allowing mixed-race marriages. The horror of this is dramatized in the most notorious scene in the movie. A freedman named Gus is in love with a white girl named Flora. He follows her into the woods, declaring that he wants to marry her. Flora runs away from him, terrified. He follows her, shouting that he means her no harm. Standing on a cliff, Flora says she will jump if he comes any closer. He makes a move, perhaps to stop her. She jumps. He is duly caught by a posse of hooded Klansmen and lynched. It is a horrifying scene. Yet it also shows Griffith’s mastery of his art, for it is beautifully staged in a demonstration of cinematic realism that would change the medium forever. It is not just the innovative camera work, the clever use of music, and the dramatic cutting that lifts this scene and others from the level of squalid propaganda. There is real pathos in the characters. Griffith was too good an artist not to allow some ambivalence to seep into his film, despite his racist beliefs. The scene of Gus’ pursuit of Flora suggests more than the terror of rape. Gus strikes one less as a threatening figure than a pathetic one, who tries to express his love for a woman who can only see him as a wild beast. The intertitle says that it is better for Flora to die than to lose her honor. Griffith and much of his white audience might have agreed, but what he has shown is more complicated. It is hard to think of other masterpieces that are as repellent as Birth of a Nation. One might consider Jud Süß, the antisemitic propaganda movie made in Germany in 1940 by Veit Harlan — but Harlan, though perfectly competent, didn’t come close to the genius of Griffith. The film has its moments, but it is far from being an artistic masterwork. Consider also another example of a great artist with terrible ideas from the same period. Louis-Ferdinand Céline was indisputably an antisemite and a Nazi sympathizer. His pamphlets, such as Trifles for a Massacre in 1937, show him at his hateful worst in this respect. A typical passage: When I was on the docks in London, I saw plenty of them, the Yids. These weren’t Hymie jewelers, these were vicious lowlifes, they ate rats together. Or this: The Kikes that rule the Universe, they understand them, those secrets of public opinion. Hidden in the corners, they have all of the wires in their hands. Propaganda, gold, advertising, radio, press, the cinema. From Hollywood the Jewess, to Moscow the Yid. When Gallimard decided to republish some of his most odious texts in 2017, there was so much protest that the plan had to be suspended. But Céline’s best-known literary work, Journey to the End of the Night, from 1932, though filled with bile and pessimism about mankind, cannot be classified as extremist propaganda. That was not the purpose of his novel. There is great art in the book, which reflects the dark vision of human existence that Céline shared with other veterans of World War I, such as Ernst Jünger or Curzio Malaparte. Oscar Wilde said, as an aesthete would, that there is only good art and bad art — morality and the artist’s motives are completely beside the point. But it cannot be that simple. Aesthetics has a moral component. Art does not have to be uplifting or exemplary. But it is difficult to imagine great art that does not in some way express a sense that life is worth living. By implication — and I recognize the paradox — this suggests that some things might be worth dying for, too. But a simple death wish, for oneself or for others, is a poor basis for good art. We know that we can appreciate works of art even if we profoundly disagree with the beliefs or ideologies that they are meant to convey. An atheist can still be moved by a painting depicting the martyrdom of Christian saints. One mark of artistic quality is a degree of complexity. A good work of art (such as the suicide scene in Birth of a Nation) can be read in different ways. A Madonna and Child by Raphael was clearly meant as an expression of religious piety, but a secular person might read the image as a beautiful depiction of maternal love. This is even true of religious art, whether it is Christian, or Buddhist, or whatnot, that threatens hellish torments for sinners or unbelievers. We can
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