The conception of art as of something outside, and almost opposed to,
practical life, and the tendency to explain its gratuitous existence
by a special "play instinct" more gratuitous itself, are due in great
measure to our wrong way of thinking and feeling upon no less a matter
than human activity as such. The old-fashioned psychology which,
ignoring instinct and impulse, explained all action as the result of
a kind of calculation of future pleasure and pain, has accustomed us
to account for all fruitful human activity, whatever we call _work_,
by a wish for some benefit or fear of some disadvantage. And, on the
other hand, the economic systems of our time (or, at all events, the
systematic exposition of our economic arrangements) have furthermore
accustomed us to think of everything like _work_ as done under
compulsion, fear of worse, or a kind of bribery. It is really taken as
a postulate, and almost as an axiom, that no one would make or do
anything useful save under the goad of want; of want not in the sense
of _wanting to do or make that thing_, but of _wanting to have or be
able to do something else_. Hence everything which is manifestly done
from no such motive, but from an inner impulse towards the doing,
comes to be thought of as opposed to _work_, and to be designated as
_play_. Now art is very obviously carried on for its own sake:
experience, even of our mercantile age, teaches that if a man does not
paint a picture or compose a symphony from an inner necessity as
disinterested as that which makes another man look at the picture or
listen to the symphony, no amount of self-interest, of disadvantages
and advantages, will enable him to do either otherwise than badly.
Hence, as I said, we are made to think of art as _play_, or a kind of
play.
But play itself, being unaccountable on the basis of external
advantage and disadvantage, being, from the false economic point of
view, unproductive, that is to say, pure waste, has in its turn to be
accounted for by the supposition of surplus energy occasionally
requiring to be let off to no purpose, or merely to prevent the
machine from bursting. This opposition of work and play is founded in
our experience of a social state which is still at sixes and sevens;
of a civilisation so imperfectly developed and organised that the
majority does nothing save under compulsion, and the minority does
nothing to any purpose; and where that little boy's Scylla and
Charybdis _all work_ and _all play_ is effectually realised in a
nightmare too terrible and too foolish, above all too wakingly true,
to be looked at in the face without flinching. One wonders,
incidentally, how any creature perpetually working from the reasons
given by economists, that is to say, working against the grain, from
no spontaneous wish or pleasure, can possibly store up, in such
exhausting effort, a surplus of energy requiring to be let off! And
one wonders, on the other hand, how any really good work of any kind,
work not merely kept by dire competitive necessity up to a standard,
but able to afford any standard to keep up to, can well be produced
save by the letting off of surplus energy; that is to say, how good
work can ever be done otherwise than by impulses and instincts acting
spontaneously, in fact as play. The reality seems to be that,
imperfect as is our poor life, present and past, we are maligning it;
founding our theories, for simplicity's sake and to excuse our lack of
hope and striving, upon its very worst samples. Wasteful as is the
mal-distribution of human activities (mal-distribution worse than that
of land or capital!), cruel as is the consequent pressure of want,
there yet remains at the bottom of an immense amount of work an inner
push different from that outer constraint, an inner need as fruitful
as the outer one is wasteful: there remains the satisfaction in work,
the wish to work. However outer necessity, "competition," "minimum of
cost," "iron law of wages," call it what you choose, direct and
misdirect, through need of bread or greed of luxury, the application
of human activity, that activity has to be there, and with it its own
alleviation and reward: pleasure in work. All decent human work
partakes (let us thank the great reasonablenesses of real things!) of
the quality of play: if it did not it would be bad or ever on the
verge of badness; and if ever human activity attains to fullest
fruitfulness, it will be (every experience of our own best work shows
it) when the distinction of _work_ and of _play_ will cease to have a
meaning, play remaining only as the preparatory work of the child, as
the strength-repairing, balance-adjusting work of the adult.
And meanwhile, through all the centuries of centuries, art, which is
the type and sample of all higher, better modes of life, art has given
us in itself the concrete sample, the unmistakable type of that
needful reconciliation of work and play; and has shown us that there
is, or should be, no difference between them. For art has made the
things which are useful, and done the things which are needed, in
those shapes and ways of beauty which have no aim but our
satisfaction.