It is discouraging and humiliating to think (and therefore we think it
very seldom) that nowadays we artists, painters of portraits and
landscapes, builders and decorators of houses, pianists, singers,
fiddlers, and, quite as really though less obviously, writers, are all
of us indirectly helping to keep up the greed which makes the
privileged and possessing classes cling to their monopolies and
accumulate their possessions. Bitter to realise that, disinterested as
we must mostly be (for good artistic work means talent, talent
preference, and preference disinterestedness), we are, as Ruskin has
already told us, but the parasites of parasites.
For of the pleasure-giving things we make, what portion really gives
any pleasure, or comes within reach of giving pleasure, to those whose
hands _as a whole class_ (as distinguished from the brain of an
occasional individual of the other class) produce the wealth we all of
us have to live, or try to live, upon? Of course there is the seeming
consolation that, like the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs, the Watteaus
and the Fragonards of the past, the Millais and the Sargents (charming
sitters, or the reverse, and all), and the Monets and Brabazons, will
sooner or later become what we call public property in public
galleries. But, meanwhile, the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs and
Watteaus and Fragonards themselves, though the legal property of
everybody, are really reserved for those same classes who own their
modern equivalents, simply because those alone have the leisure and
culture necessary to enjoy them. The case is not really different for
the one or two seemingly more independent and noble artistic
individualities, the great decorators like Watts or Besnard; their own
work, like their own conscience, is indeed the purer and stronger for
their intention of painting not for smoking-rooms and private
collections, but for places where all men can see and understand; but
then all men cannot see--they are busy or too tired--and they cannot
understand, because the language of art has become foreign to them.
The same applies to composers and to writers: music and books are
cheap enough, but the familiarity with musical forms and literary
styles, without which music and books are mere noise and waste-paper,
is practically unattainable to the classes who till the ground,
extract its stone and minerals, and make, with their hands, every
material thing (save works of art) that we possess.
Indeed, one additional reason why, ever since the eighteenth century,
art has been set up as the opposite of useful work, and explained as a
form of play (though its technical difficulties grew more exorbitant
and exhausting year by year) is probably that, in our modern
civilisations, art has been obviously produced for the benefit of the
classes who virtually do not work, and by artists born or bred to
belong to those idle classes themselves. For it is a fact that, as the
artist nowadays finds his public only among the comparatively idle
(or, at all events, those whose activity distributes wealth in their
own favour rather than creates it), so also he requires to be, more
and more, in sympathy with their mode of living and thinking: the
friend, the client, most often the son, of what we call (with terrible
unperceived irony in the words) _leisured_ folk. As to the folk who
have no leisure (and therefore, according to our modern æsthetics, no
_art_ because no _play_) they can receive from us privileged persons
(when privilege happens to be worth its keep) no benefits save very
practical ones. The only kind of work founded on "leisure"--which does
in our day not merely increase the advantages of already well-off
persons, but actually filter down to help the unleisured producers of
our wealth--is not the work of the artist, but of the doctor, the
nurse, the inventor, the man of science; who knows? Perhaps almost of
the philosopher, the historian, the sociologist: the clearer away of
convenient error, the unmaker and remaker of consciences.
As I began by saying, it is not very comfortable, nowadays, to be an
artist, and yet possess a mind and heart. And two of the greatest
artists of our times, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have done their utmost to
make it more uncomfortable still. So that it is natural for our
artists to decide that art exists only for art's own sake, since it
cannot nowadays be said to exist for the sake of anything else. And as
to us, privileged persons, with leisure and culture fitting us for
artistic enjoyment, it is even more natural to consider art as a kind
of play: play in which we get refreshed after somebody else's work.