THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE
Little by little we now begin to note the outlines of Ogi’s art code.
Two negative propositions we may consider as clear: Ogi does not paint
the thing as it really is; and he does not paint the thing as he sees
it. The former he could not do, for he does not know what the thing
really is; and the second he would consider bad manners, bad morals and
bad taste. Ogi paints the thing as he thinks it ought to be; or, more
commonly, he paints the thing as he thinks other people ought to think
it to be.
And now comes the question: Why, having chosen his subject, does Ogi
idealize it according to one idea, and not according to another? Are
such decisions matters of accident or whim? Assuredly not; for human
psychology has its laws, which we can learn to understand. We ask: What
are the laws of Ogi, his hand and his eye and his brain? What forces
determine that he shall present his “reality” in this way and not in
that?
The first thing to say is: Don’t ask Ogi about it, for he cannot tell
you. Ogi is not at all what he thinks he is, and does not produce his
works of art from the motives he publishes to the world. We shall find
that the fellow has been almost too shrewd--he has contrived a set of
pretenses so clever that he has fooled, not merely his public, but
himself. He who would produce a great work of art, said Milton, must
first make a work of art of his own life. Ogi has taken this maxim
literally, and got out a fancy line of trade-lies.
It is perfectly plain that the artist is a social product, a member of a
tribe and swayed by tribal impulses. But you find him denying this with
passion, and picturing himself as a solitary soul dwelling in an ivory
tower, galloping through the sky on a winged horse, visited and directed
by heaven-sent messengers, and wooed by mysterious lovely ladies called
Muses. At the same time, however, he wants at least one lady love who is
real; and this lady love does not often share his interest in the
imaginary lady loves. On the contrary, she is accustomed to point out
the brutal fact that Ogi wants three good chunks of aurochs meat every
twenty-four hours; also, the lady herself wants a little meat--and more
important yet, she wants it served according to the best tribal
conventions, those to which she was accustomed before she ran away and
married an artist. The tribal law decrees that the glass on her table
must be cut by hand, even though it is cut crooked; the linen on her
table must be embroidered by hand, because, if it is done wholesale, by
machinery, it is not “art.”
Theoretically, it is possible for an artist to produce his art-works for
the approval of the imaginary Muses; but as a matter of fact you find
that the most solitary old Ogi has somebody, a faithful friend, or an
old housekeeper, or even a child, whose approval he craves. Even an
artist on a desert island will be thinking that some day a ship will
land there; while young and rebellious artists produce for a dream
public in the future. I myself did all my early work from that motive;
and in Voltaire I came upon what seemed to me the cruelest sentence ever
penned: “Letters to posterity seldom reach their destination!”
Ogi must have an audience. So, in his selecting, his idealizing, and his
other varieties of feigning, he has always before him the problem: Will
this please my public? And to what extent? And for how long? There is no
birth control movement in Ogi’s brain; vast numbers of dream children
are born there, and he must select a few of them to be nourished and
raised up to reality, while he sentences the others to be starved and
buried.
Having become a professional, living by his work, Ogi is under the
necessity of finding an audience that will feed him. And remember, it is
not merely the three chunks of aurochs meat per day, and three more for
Mrs. Ogi; it is the means of serving Mrs. Ogi’s meat in the fashion her
social position requires. Surely I do not have to prove the proposition
that Ogi cannot produce beautiful and inspiring works of art while Mrs.
Ogi is raising ructions in the cave!
So comes the great struggle in the artist’s soul, a struggle which has
gone on for three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three generations,
and may continue for as many more. Among the children of Ogi’s brain are
some he dearly loves, but who will not “sell.” There are others whom he
despises, but whom he knows the public will acclaim and pay for. “Which
shall it be?”
The answers have been as various as the souls of artists. We shall see
how through the ages there have been hero artists and martyr artists,
men who have produced what they believed to be the best, in the face of
obloquy, ridicule, starvation, even the dungeon and the stake. But,
manifestly, these conditions are not the most favorable for the birth of
masterpieces. To develop an art technique requires decades of practice
and study. To feel other persons’ emotions intensely and reproduce them
according to some coherent plan; to devise new forms, and arrange
millions of musical notes or words or molecules of paint in a complex
design--all this requires intense and persistent concentration. Men
cannot do such work without leisure; neither can they do it while they
are despising themselves for doing it. So we may set down the following
as one of the fundamental art laws:
_The bulk of the successful artists of any time are men in harmony with
the spirit of that time, and identified with the powers prevailing._