What, after all, is the essence of the artistic life, the artist's
ideal? I think the reason why it is so often misconceived and
misunderstood is because of the fact that it is a narrow path and is
followed whole-heartedly by few. Moreover, in England at the present
time, when we are all so tolerant and imagine ourselves to be permeated
by intelligent sympathy with ideas, there seem to me to be hardly any
people who comprehend this point of view at all. There is a good deal
of interest in England in moral ideals, though even much of that is of
a Puritan and commercial type. The God that we ignorantly worship is
Success, and our interest in moral ideas is mainly confined to our
interest in what is successful. We are not in love with beautiful,
impracticable visions at all; we measure a man's moral intensity by the
extent to which he makes people respectable and prosperous. We believe
in an educator when he makes his boys do their work and play their
games; in a priest, when he makes people join clubs, find regular
employment, give up alcohol. We believe in a statesman when he makes a
nation wealthy and contented. We have no intellectual ideals, no ideals
of beauty. Our idea of poetry is that people should fall in love, and
our idea of art is the depicting of rather obvious allegories. These
things are good in their way, but they are very elementary. Our men of
intellect become scientific researchers, historians, erudite persons.
How few living writers there are who unite intellect with emotion! The
truth is that we do not believe in emotion; we think it a thing to play
with, a thing to grow out of, not a thing to live by. If a person
discourses or writes of his feelings we think him a sentimentalist, and
have an uneasy suspicion that he is violating the canons of good taste.
The result is that we are a sensible, a good-humoured, and a vulgar
nation. When we are dealing with art, we have no respect for any but
successful artists. If the practice of art results in fame and money,
we praise the artist in a patronising way; when the artist prophesies,
we think him slightly absurd until he commands a hearing, and then we
worship him, because his prophecies have a wide circulation. If the
artist is unsuccessful, we consider him a mere dilettante. Then, too,
art suffers grievously from having been annexed by moralists, who talk
about art as the handmaid of religion, and praise the artist if he
provides incentives for conduct of a commercial type. It would be
better for art if it were frankly snubbed rather than thus unctuously
encouraged. We look upon it all as a matter of influence, for the one
thing that we desire is to be felt, to affect other people, to inspire
action. The one thing that we cannot tolerate is that a man should
despise and withdraw from the busy conventional world. If he ends by
impressing the world we admire him, and people his solitude with ugly
motives. The fact is that there was never a more unpromising soil for
artists than this commonplace, active, strenuous century in which we
live. The temptations we put in the artist's way are terribly strong;
when we have done our work, we like to be amused by books and plays and
pictures, and we are ready to pay high prices to the people who can
give our heavy souls small sensations of joy and terror and sorrow. And
wealth is a fierce temptation to the artist, because it gives him
liberty, freedom of motion, comfort, things of beauty and
consideration. The result is that too many of the artists who appear
among us fall victims to the temptations of the world, and become a
kind of superior parasite and prostitute, believing in their dignity
because they are not openly humiliated.
But the true artist, like the true priest, cares only for the beautiful
quality of the thought that he pursues. The true priest is the man who
loves virtue, disinterestedness, truth, and purity with a kind of
passion, and only desires to feed the same love in faithful hearts. He
seeks the Kingdom of God first; and if the good things of the world are
strewn, as they are apt to be strewn, in the path of the virtuous
person, he is never for a moment seduced into believing that they are
the object of his search. His desire is that souls should glow and
thrill with high, sacred, and tender emotions, which are their own
surpassing reward.
So, too, the artist is concerned solely with the beautiful
thing--whether it is the beauty of the eager relationships of men and
women, or the ever-changing exquisite forms and colours of nature, or
the effect of all these things upon the desirous soul of man. And it is
here that his danger lies, that he may grow to be preoccupied with the
changing and blended texture of his own soul, into which flow so many
sweet influences and gracious visions--if, like the Lady of Shalott,
he grows to think of the live things that move on the river-side only
as objects that may minister to the richness of the web that he weaves.
He must keep his eye intent upon the power, whatever it may be, that is
behind all these gracious manifestations; they must all be symbols to
him of some unrevealed mystery, or he will grow to love the gem for its
colour, the flower for its form, the cloud for its whiteness or
empurpled gloom, the far-off hill for its azure tints, and so forget to
discern the spirit that thus gleams and flashes from its shrouding
vapours.
And then, too, in art as in love, the artist must lose himself that he
may find himself. If he considers all things in relation to his own
sensitive and perceptive temperament, he will become immured in a
chilly egotism, a narrow selfishness, from which he will not dare to
emerge. He must fling himself whole-heartedly into a passionate worship
of what is beautiful, not desiring it only that it may thrill and
satisfy him, but longing to draw near to its innermost essence. The
artist may know, indeed, that he is following the wrong path when he
loves the artistic presentation of a thing better than the thing
presented, when he is moved more by a single picture of a perfect scene
than by the ten thousand lovely things which he may see in a single
country walk. He must, indeed, select emotions and beautiful objects by
their quality; he must compare and distinguish; but if he once believes
that his concern is with representation rather than with life, he goes
downward. He must not be concerned for a single instant with the
thought, "How will this that I perceive affect others as I represent
it?" but he must rather be so amazed and carried out of himself by the
beauty of what he sees, that the representing of it is only a necessary
consequence of the vision; as a child may tell an adventure
breathlessly and intently to its mother or its nurse, absorbed in the
recollection.
And thus the true artist will not weigh and ponder the most effective
medium for his expression; the thought must be so overpowering that the
choice of a medium will be a matter of pure instinct. The most, indeed,
of what he feels and perceives he will recognise to be frankly
untranslatable in speech or pigment or musical notes, too high, too
sacred, too sublime. His work will be no more selfish than the work of
the pilot or the general is selfish. The responsibility, the crisis,
the claim of the moment, will outweigh and obliterate all personal, all
fruitless considerations. He must have no thought of success; if it
comes, he may rejoice that he has been a faithful interpreter, and has
shared his joy with others; if it does not come, his joy is not
lessened.
Then, too, in ordering his life, he must be humble, sincere, and
simple. He must keep his eye and his mind open to all generous
admirations. He must let no lust or appetite, no ambition of pride,
cloud his vision. He must take delight in the work of other artists,
and strive to see the beautiful and perfect rather than the false and
feeble. He must rejoice if he can see his own dream more seriously and
sweetly depicted than he can himself depict it, for he must care for
nothing but the triumph of beauty over ugliness, of light over
darkness. And thus the true artist may be most easily told by his
lavish appreciation of the work of other artists, rather than by his
censure and disapproval.
And, again, he must be able to take delight in the smallest and
humblest beauties of life. He must not need to travel far and wide in
the search for what is romantic, but he must find it lying richly all
about him in the simplest scene. He must not crave for excitement or
startling events or triumphs or compliments; he must not desire to know
or to be known by famous persons, because his joys must all flow from a
purer and clearer fountain-head. He must find no day nor hour dreary,
and his only fatigue must be the wholesome fatigue that follows on
patient labour, not the jaded fatigue of the strained imagination.
Age, and even infirmity, does not dull the zest of such a nature; it
merely substitutes a range of gentler and more tranquil emotions for
the heroic and passionate enthusiasms of youth; for the true artist
knows that the emotion of which he is in search is something far higher
and purer and more vivid than his fiercest imaginations--and yet it has
the calm of strength and the dignity of worth; the vehement impulses of
youth "do it wrong, being so majestical." And he draws nearer to it when
animal heat and the turbulence of youthful spirit has burnt clearer and
hotter, throwing off its smoke and lively flame for a keener and purer
glow.
And above all things, the artist must most beware of the complacency,
the sense of victory, the belief that he has attained, has plumbed the
depth, seen into the heart of the mystery. Rather as life draws on he
must feel, in awe and hope, that it is infinitely mightier and greater
than he thought in the days of potent impulse. His whole soul must be
full of a sacred fear as he draws closer to the gate, the opening of
which may give him a nearer glimpse of the secret. The humble sense of
failure will be a bright and noble thought, because it will show him
how much the mystery transcends the most daring hope and dream.