“We approach with bated breath these austere and sacred--”
Stop, I say!
“Austere and sacred regions--”
Usher, will you please throw this fellow out! He is not the man we were
listening to this morning--he is a rank impostor, who has disguised
himself as an artist in order to befuddle our deliberations with
mystagogical cant. If you will pull off that false beard, I think
you will find that he is a well-known Chautauqua lecturer.... Aha, I
thought so!--Shame on you! And now get out of here as quickly as you
can!--Ah, there comes the real Artist--late, as usual. What have you to
say for yourself?
“I’m sorry--I got to thinking of something else, and nearly forgot to
come back here. Which brings me at once to the heart of what I want to
say. Artists, as I have said, are children--and, children that they
are, they forget the errands upon which the world sends them. They
forget, because these errands are not part of their own life. You
reproach us with being careless and irresponsible--but if you will
study the child at play or the artist at work, you will discover that
he is not careless or irresponsible in regard to his own concerns. But
this deep divorce between the concerns of the artist and the child and
the concerns of the world is the tragic problem for which we now seek a
solution. The world has been unable to solve it. It has only made the
breach deeper.
“For the world does not know that its work can be play, that adult life
can be a game like the games of children, only with more desperate
and magnificent issues. It does not reflect that we gather sticks in
the wood with infinite happy patience and labour to build our bonfires
because those bonfires are our own dream creatively realized; and it
cannot think of any better way to get us to bring in the wood for the
kitchen stove than to say, ‘Johnny, I’ve told you three times to bring
in that wood, and if you can’t mind I’ll have your father interview you
in the woodshed.’ In brief, it presents our participation in adult life
as meaningless toil performed at the bidding of another under coercion.
And the whole of adult life gradually takes on this same aspect. We are
to do the bidding of another in office or factory because otherwise we
will starve.
“So the child-artist unwillingly becomes a slave. But there are some
children who rebel against slavery. They prefer to keep their dreams.
They are regarded with disapproval and anxiety by their families, who
tell them that they must grow up. But they do not want to grow up into
slavery. They want to remain free. They want to make their dreams come
true.
“‘But who will pay for your dreams?’ the world asks. And it is not
pleasant to face the possibility of starving to death. And so they
comfort themselves with the illusion of fame and wealth. Sometimes
their families are cajoled into investing in this rather doubtful
speculative enterprise, and the child-artist becomes an artist-child,
supported through life by his parents, and playing busily at his art.
Sometimes the speculation turns out well financially, the illusion of
success becomes a reality; but this, however gratifying to the artist
as a justification of his career, is not his own reason for being an
artist. The ‘successful’ artist has a childlike pleasure in the awe
of really grown-up people at the material proofs of his importance;
and if he has given hostages to fortune, if he must support a family
of his own, he may ploddingly reproduce the happy accidents of his
creative effort which gained him these rewards; but he feels that in so
doing he has ceased to be a free man and become a slave--and all too
often, as we know from the shocked comment of the world, he renounces
these rewards, becomes a child at play again, and lets his wife and
children get along as best they may. He yearns, perhaps, for fame--as
a sort of public consent to his going on being a child. But whether he
starves in the garret or bows from his limousine to admiring crowds,
what he really wants of the world is just permission to play. He is not
interested in the affairs of the world.
“There are exceptions, of course. There are poets and musicians
and painters who take an interest in the destinies of mankind; but
this is regarded by their fellow-artists as a kind of heresy or
disloyalty--much as school children (or college boys) regard the
behaviour of one who really takes his school work seriously. The public
also is accustomed to regard the artist as a child; they laugh at his
‘ideas’ about practical affairs--though often enough they adopt his
ideas in dead earnest later. Shelley, for instance, proposed to conduct
campaigns of education by dropping leaflets from balloons. ‘A quaint
idea, characteristic of his visionary and impractical mind,’ said his
biographers; and then, having laughed at the idea, the world in its
Great War proceeds to adopt that idea and carry it out on a tremendous
scale....
“When the child refuses to be a slave, he is thenceforth excluded by
common consent from the affairs of the grown-up world. And as the
breach widens between the artist and the world, as the world becomes
more and more committed to slavery, the artist is more consciously and
wilfully a child. He is forbidden by the growing public opinion of his
group to write or sing about human destinies. ‘The artist must not be
a propagandist,’ it is declared indignantly. And finally it comes to
such a pass that it is not artistic good-form for the artist to tell
stories which the public can understand--the painter is prohibited from
making images which the common man is able to recognize--the musician
scorns to compose tunes which anybody could dance to or whistle! And
all this is simply the child’s defiance to the world--his games are
his own, and the grown-ups can keep their hands off! If adult life is
slavery (which it is), he will be damned before he will have anything
to do with it.
“And he is damned--damned to a childishness which contains only the
stubborn wilfulness of the child’s playing, but has forgotten its
motive. That motive is different from his. He has changed from the
child who played at being a man, to a man who plays at being a child.
The child’s dreams were large, and his are small. The child took
all life for his province--was by turns a warrior, a blacksmith,
a circus-rider, a husband, a store-keeper, a fireman, a savage,
an undertaker. The child-artist wanted to play at everything. The
artist-child has renounced these magnificent ambitions. The world may
conscript him to fight in its wars, but he refuses to bother his head
as to what they are about; if he finds that he has to walk up-town
because there is a street-car strike, he is mildly annoyed, but (I am
describing an extreme but not infrequent type) he declines to interest
himself in the labour movement; he escapes from the responsibilities
of a serious love-affair on the ground that ‘an artist should never
marry’; he pays his grocery bills, or leaves them unpaid, but the
co-operative movement bores him; and so on! He is content to live in
that little corner of life in which he can play undisturbed by worldly
interests. This type, I have said, is not infrequent; its perfect
exemplars, the artists who were so completely children that they did
not even know of the existence of the outside world, are revered as
the saints of art, and often as its martyrs, which in truth they were;
and they are admired by thousands of young artists who only aspire to
such perfection, while shamefacedly admitting that they themselves are
tainted with ordinary human interests.
“This is what the world has done to us; it has made us choose between
being children in a tiny sphere all our lives, or going into the larger
world of reality as slaves. And I think we have made the right choice.
For we have kept alive in our childish folly the flame of a sacred
revolt against slavery. We have succeeded in making the world envious
of our freedom. We have shown it the only way to be happy.
“But the artist cannot get along without the world. His art springs
from the commonest impulses of the human race, and those impulses are
utilitarian at root; the savage who scratched the aurochs on the wall
of his cave was hungry for meat and desirous of luck in the hunting
tomorrow; the primitive Greeks who danced their seasonal dances from
which sprang the glory of dramatic art, wanted the crops to grow;
and that which we call great art everywhere is great only because
it springs from a communal hunger and fulfils a communal wish. When
art becomes divorced from the aspirations of the common man, all its
technical perfection will not keep it alive; it revolts against its own
technical perfection, and goes off into quaint and austere quests for
new truths upon which to nourish itself; and only when it discovers the
common man and fulfils his unfulfilled desires, does it flourish again.
Art must concern itself with the world, or perish.
“Nor can the world get along without the artist. Slavery cannot keep
it going--it needs the free impulses of the creative spirit. It needs
the artist, not as a being to scorn and worship by turns, but as the
worker-director of its activities. It needs the artist as blacksmith,
husband, and store-keeper--as teacher, priest, and statesman. Only so
can it endure and fulfil its destinies.
“But if the artist is to be all these things, if he is to enter into
the activities of the real world instead of running away from them,
he must grow up. And that is the task of education: to make a man
of him without killing the artist. We must begin, then, before the
artist in him is killed; we must begin with the child. So far as I
can see, the school as it exists at present is utterly and hopelessly
inadequate to the task. It requires a special mechanism, which happily
exists in the outside world, and need only be incorporated into the
educational system, in order to provide a medium of transition between
the dream-creations of childhood and the realistic creativity of adult
life. This mechanism is the Theatre.”