of ecclesiastical art, painting came into its own as an end in
itself, apart from any place that it might have in the scheme of
the community’s affairs. The symptom of this change is the rise of
landscape painting: in the search for pure esthetic experience the
painter began to look for themes which were divorced from any human
interest but that of pure contemplation. During the last century
this split between painting as a form of social art and painting as a
means of achieving contemplative ecstasy has become deeper: even those
academic painters who followed the methods of the older artists no
longer have the same field to work in, whilst the revolutionist--the
impressionists of one period, the cubists of another, and the
post-impressionists or expressionists of a third--are forced by the
general irrelevance of art in Coketown to produce work which only the
more or less initiate will appreciate.
Now, I would not for worlds underrate the gains which have been
achieved by the divorce of art from the whole life of the community.
In their isolation from the social group that produced them the modern
artists have been able to pursue their solitary way to limits which
the common man is probably incapable of reaching: they have widened
the field of esthetic delight and have introduced new values into the
world of painting, values which will remain even though the disease
which created them disappears, just as one can salvage a pearl from an
oyster whose sickness is healed. The view from the mountain top is none
the worse because many people are afflicted with dizziness and nausea
before they have reached the summit; and, like the pursuit of truth,
the pursuit of esthetic values is a good in itself apart from any
values which may be realized in the community. On these terms, Cézanne
and Van Gogh and Ryder, to mention a few of the dead, will hold their
own, and keep the boundaries of art from ever shrinking again, I trust,
to its academic limits.
Nevertheless, the effects of focussing on the picturesque can no more
be overlooked in art than the dangers of specialization in science. It
is almost a banality to point out how, historically, as the picturesque
developed in art, beauty has tended to disappear from life. Whilst
the cultivated few have become gloriously alive to more exquisite
sensations than their ancestors had probably ever experienced, the
“mutilated many” have been forced to live in great cities and in abject
country towns of a blackness and ugliness such as the world, if we are
to judge by the records that exist, has never seen before. In other
words, we have become more sensitive to experiences--to the contents of
our inner worlds--only to become more callous to things, to the brash
surfaces of the world without. In our preoccupation with the inner
worlds we have to a large extent lost our hold upon beauty, which,
in the limiting sense in which the word is used here, is the quality
by which anything, from a torso to a building, shows its adaptation
to an end and its sensitiveness to esthetic values--values which are
abstracted and intensified in the pure picturesque--that are involved
in such an adaptation. In this sense, the beautiful, as Emerson said,
rests on the foundations of the necessary: it is the outward token of
an inward grace; its appearance is the manifestation of a humanized
life; and its existence and development constitute, in fact, a sort of
index to a community’s vitality.
The divorce of the artist from the community, and the turning away of
his energies from beauty, in which the picturesque might be fulfilled,
to the picturesque itself, separate from any practical needs, has
scarcely been compensated by the advances that have been made in the
separate world of art. The result has been that work which should
have been done by artists of great capacity has been done by people of
minor or degraded ability. Anonymous jerrybuilders have erected the
greater number of our houses, absurd engineers have laid out our towns
with no thought for anything but sewers and paving contracts; rapacious
and illiterate men who have achieved success in business discourse to
the multitude on what constitutes the good life--and so on. There is
really no end to the number of things which we do badly in the modern
community, for want of the artist to do them at all.
This generalization applies to the whole range of the arts. The
greater part of the creative dreaming and planning which constitutes
literature and art has had very little bearing upon the community in
which we live, and has done little to equip us with patterns, with
images and ideals, by means of which we might react creatively upon
our environment. Yet it should be obvious that if the inspiration for
the good life is to come from anywhere, it must come from no other
people than the great artists. An intense social life, as Gabriel
Tarde pointed out in his fine utopian fantasy, Underground Man, has
“for its indispensable condition the esthetic life and the universal
propagation of the religion of truth and beauty.” The common man, when
he is in love, has a little glimpse of the way in which the drudgery
of the daily world may be transmuted through emotional stimulus; it
is the business of the artist to make the transmutation permanent,
for the only difference between the artist and the common man is that
the artist is, so to say, in love all the while. It is out of the
vivid patterns of the artist’s ecstasy that he draws men together and
gives them the vision to shape their lives and the destiny of their
community anew.
8
No matter how the modern artist may use or fritter away his abilities,
it is plain that he has an enormous reservoir of power at his disposal.
What, for instance, has made America so wholly devoted to the conquest
of material things? Why are we so given over to collecting those vast
miscellanies of goods which are temptingly displayed in the advertising
sections of our illustrated weeklies and monthly magazines? The
necessity for ameliorating the hard, crude life of the pioneer has
indeed been an important influence; but the traditions of this life
in turn produced all the minor “artists” or “artlings” who write and
draw for the popular papers, who create the plots of plays and motion
picture scenarios; and since most of these poor wretches have never
been educated in the humanist sense to any degree--since they know no
other environment than New York or Los Angeles or Gopher Prairie, since
they are acquainted with the achievements of no other age than their
own, they have devoted themselves wholeheartedly to idealizing a great
many of the things that are crude or ugly or stupid in their beloved
community. So the idola of business have been perpetuated by “artlings”
who themselves know only the standards of the business man.
Because of the limited horizons of the American artist, therefore, the
rising generation aspires after the things that Messrs. Jack London,
Rupert Hughes, Scott Fitzgerald, and heaven knows who else have
thought good and fine; the younger generation talks like the heroes
and heroines of a melodrama by Mr. Samuel Shipman, when they do not
attain the higher level of comic cuts; the younger generation thrills
to the type of beauty which Mr. Penryhn Stanlaws sets before its gaze.
The notion that the common man despises art is absurd. The common man
worships art and lives by it; and when good art is not available he
takes the second best or the tenth best or the hundredth best. The
success of Mr. Eugene O’Neil, one of the few playwrights of any girth
who has contributed to the American stage, proves that the only way
that people can be kept away from good art is by not providing it. The
younger generation might just as well have had its idea-patterns shaped
by Sophocles, Praxiteles, and Plato, if our genuine artists were not so
aloof to their responsibilities, and if they were intellectually mature
enough to accept the full burden of their vocation. It is a sign of a
terrific neurosis--and no mark at all of esthetic aptitude--that our
genuine art is so completely disoriented and so thoroughly out of touch
with the community. We must turn to a man of such uneven parts as Mr.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay before we have anything like a recognition of
the classic rôle of the artist.
Art for the artist’s sake is largely a symptom of that neurotic
individualism which drives the artist out of a public world which
baffles him into a private world where he may reign in solitude as
an unruly demiurge. Art for the public’s sake, on the other hand,
substitutes the vices of the extrovert for the vices of the introvert.
When I say that art must have some vital contact with the community I
do not mean, let me emphasize, that the artist must cater to public
whim or demand. Art in its social setting is neither a personal
cathartic for the artist, nor a salve to quiet the itching vanity of
the community: it is essentially a means by which people who have had
a strange diversity of experiences have their activities emotionally
canalized into patterns and molds which they are able to share pretty
completely with each other. Pure art is inevitably propaganda. I mean
by this that it is meant to be propagated, and that in so far as it
fails to impregnate the community in which it exists with its ideas
and images, in so far as the community is not changed for better or
worse by its existence, its claims are spurious. Propagandist art, on
the other hand, is inevitably impure since instead of bringing people
together on a common emotional plane, as men, it tends to accentuate
their differences, and to void emotions which are proper to art into a
realm where the emotions of the missionary’s tent or the soapboxer’s
platform hold exclusive sway. It is just because the “artist” in
America has been impure in motive--a propagandist for Pollyanna in
the face of Euripides, a propagandist for “just folks” in the face of
Swift, a propagandist for niceness in the face of Rabelais--that he has
failed miserably as an artist, and has left our communities to stew so
completely in their own savorless juice.
9
For examples of what the artist might be, and what his proper relation
to the community might be when he was mature enough to recognize it
and discipline himself to it, let us look at Mr. William Butler Yeats
or A. E. There are doubtless a good many other examples that might be
offered in Europe; but these are particularly good; for the reason that
with A. E. one can see in his The National Being how the conceptions
of art enter into the tissues of all his plans for renovating life in
the Irish Countryside. In the work of these artists and their fellows
we have a clue to one of the most promising attempts to establish a
concrete eutopia which shall rise out of the real facts of the everyday
environment and, at the same time, turn upon them and mold them
creatively a little nearer the heart’s desire.
In the account of Four Years which Mr. Yeats published in The
Dial he explains his attitude towards the literature and social
life of Ireland; and I recommend that account to all the forlorn
revolutionaries and reformers who wonder why the dry bones of their
doctrines remain dry bones, instead of knitting themselves together and
becoming alive. This passage in particular, defines the relation of the
artist both to the tradition of his art and to the community in which
he must find a root:
“The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven, asserted
that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his own
day, and this with the Fairy Queen and the Lyrical Ballads and Blake’s
early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in book and gallery,
those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded upon that work of the
ancient kingdom already further in time from Later Egypt than Later
Egypt is from us.” He dismisses this claim with the just assertion
that the artist is free to choose any style that suits his mood and
subject; for in the world of art time and space are irrelevant; and
he goes on to say, “We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the
uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those
stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering, for the
work’s sake, what I have called ‘the applied arts of literature,’ the
association of literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and
at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation
that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day laborer, would accept a
common design. Perhaps even these images, once created and associated
with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some
powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trample
the rice-fields of Japan.”
By citing Mr. Yeats’ conceptions I do not mean to limit the artist
to a single function--that of patterning the good life. It is quite
plain that pure esthetic experience is a good in itself; and when the
artist has rendered this experience in a picture, a poem, a novel, a
philosophy, he has performed a unique and indispensable piece of work.
Could italics keep this passage from being ignored I should employ them.
What I have called the picturesque is in reality just as
self-sustaining and delightful as the radiant good health which Sir
Thomas More rated so highly in his Utopia. If the community went to
the dogs, it would still be exuberantly self-sustaining, whilst anyone
had the time or the capacity to enjoy it. What I protest against is
the way in which the field of the genuine artist, during these last
three hundred years, has been whittled away, so that it has become
more and more a mark of the artist to concern himself solely with
the narrow province of pure esthetic experience, and to protest his
complete aloofness from anything that lies outside this realm. Such an
attitude would have struck Euripides or Milton or Goethe or Wagner as
undignified and stupid, I am sure, because art is as large as life, and
it does not gain in vigor or intensity by reducing its scope to that of
the puppet stage. The point is that there is an artistic function to be
performed in the community, for the community, as well as in the world
of art, for those who are lifted up to art.
“Nations, races, and individual men,” as Mr. Yeats says again, “are
unified by an image, or a bundle of related images, symbolical and
provocative of the state of mind that is of all states of mind not
impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation because
only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair
rouses the will to full intensity.”
Whether these images shall be provided by patrioteers, hack editors,
politicians, advertising men and commercialized “artists” or whether
they shall be created by genuine playwrights and poets and philosophers
is an important question. The function of creating these images is an
artistic one, and the artist who evades his responsibility is making
life for himself and his kind more difficult, since in the long run
a community whose sacred literature is written by Colonel Diver and
Scadder and Jefferson Brick--the great heroes of Civilization as the
star of empire westward makes its way--will make even the most solitary
cultivation of the arts a thorny and difficult task.
In the good life, the purely esthetic element has a prominent place;
but unless the artist is capable of moving men to the good life, the
esthetic element is bound to be driven farther and farther away from
the common realities, until the world of the artist will scarcely be
distinguishable from the phantasia of dementia præcox. Already, the
symptoms of this corrosive futility have appeared in literature and
painting in Western Europe and America; and such light as comes forth
from this art is but the phosphorescence of decay. If the arts are not
to disintegrate utterly, must they not focus more and more upon eutopia?
10
It comes to this then: our plans for a new social order have been as
dull as mud because, in the first place, they have been abstract and
cockney, and have not taken into account the immense diversity and
complexity of man’s environment; and in the second place, they have not
created any vivid patterns that would move men to great things. They
have not been “informed by science and ennobled by the arts.”
Through the paralysis of the arts and sciences our contemporary
programs for revolution and reform have done very little to lift our
heads over the disorderly and bedraggled environments in which we
conduct our daily business. This failure to create a common pattern
for the good life in each region has made such excellent efforts as
the garden city movement seem weak and ineffectual when we place them
alongside the towns that mediæval civilization, which had such a common
pattern, created. Without the common background of eutopian idola,
all our efforts at rehabilitation--the new architecture, the garden
city movement, the electrification of industry, the organization of
great industrial guilds such as the Building Trades have achieved in
England and the garment workers seem on the point of effecting in
America--without these common idola, I say, all our practical efforts
are spotty and inconsecutive and incomplete. It was not, let us
remember, by any legislative device that the cities of the industrial
age were monotonously patterned in the image of Coketown. It was rather
because everyone within these horrid centers accepted the same values
and pursued the same ends--as they were projected by economists like
Ricardo, industrialists like Stephenson, and lyric poets like Samuel
Smiles--that the plans of the jerrybuilder and the engineer expressed
to perfection the brutality and social disharmony of the community.
The same process that gave us Coketown can, when our world of ideas is
transformed, give us something better than Coketown.
The chief use of the classic utopias that we have surveyed is to
suggest that the same methods which are used by the utopian thinkers
to project an ideal community on paper may be employed, in a practical
way, to develop a better community on earth. The weakness of the
utopian thinkers consisted in the assumption that the dreams and
projects of any single man might be realized in society at large.
From the bitter frustration of Fourier, Cabet, Hertzka, and even John
Ruskin those who are in search of the beloved community may well take
a warning. Where the critics of the utopian method were, I believe,
wrong was in holding that the business of projecting prouder worlds was
a futile and footling pastime. These anti-utopian critics overlooked
the fact that one of the main factors that condition any future are
the attitudes and beliefs which people have in relation to that
future--that, as Mr. John Dewey would say, in any judgment of practise
one’s belief in a hypothesis is one of the things that affect its
realization.
When we have projected the pattern of an ideal community and tend
to warp our conduct in conformity with that pattern, we overcome
the momentum of actual institutions. In feeling free to project new
patterns, in holding that human beings can will a change in their
institutions and habits of life, the utopians were, I believe, on solid
ground; and the utopian philosophies were a great improvement over the
more nebulous religious and ethical systems of the past in that they
saw the necessity for giving their ideals form and life. In fact, it
has been in the pictures of ideal commonwealths such as Plato’s that
the “ideal” and the “actual” have met.
It is true that the pure utopians have overlooked the fact that every
institution has a momentum of its own: its speed may be quickened or
reduced, it may be switched on another track, as the Roman Church
during the Reformation was switched from the main line of civilization
to a subsidiary route; and at times, in the catastrophe of war or
revolution, an institution may jump the track altogether and be
wrecked. The critical problem for the eutopian, the problem of the
transition from one set of institutions to another, from one way of
life to another, was overlooked. Plato’s Republic, for example, was
a fairly attractive place; but one wonders in what Greek city in the
Fourth Century B.C. the transition could have taken place. A transition
implies not merely a goal but a starting point: if we are to move the
world, as Archimedes threatened to with his lever, we must have some
ground to stand on. It is only by paying attention to the limitations
of each region, and by allowing for the driving force of history, that
we can make the earth come to terms with man’s idola. This is perhaps
the most difficult lesson that the eutopian must learn.
11
What, then, is the first step out of the present disorder? The first
step, it seems to me, is to ignore all the fake utopias and social
myths that have proved either so sterile or so disastrous during the
last few centuries. There is perhaps no logical reason why the myth of
the national state should not be preserved; but it is a myth which has
done very little, on the whole, to promote the good life, and has on
the contrary done a great deal to make the good life impossible; and to
continue to cling to it in the face of perpetual wars, pestilences, and
spiritual devastations is the sort of fanaticism which will probably
seem as blind and cruel to future generations as persecutions for
Christian heresy do to the present one. On the same grounds, there are
a number of other social myths, like the proletarian myth, which run
so badly against the grain of reality that they cannot be preserved
without ignoring a great many values which are essential to a humane
existence; and on pragmatic grounds it would be fine and beneficial to
drop them quickly into limbo. There is no reason to think that there
will be a quick conversion from these myths: the holocaust of war has
only intensified the myth of the National State; and our experience
with religious myths suggests on the contrary that the forms at any
rate will be preserved long after the last shred of reality has
disappeared. But the sooner those who are capable of intellectual
criticism abandon these particular myths, the sooner will these idola
fall into the state which has been happily described as “innocuous
desuetude.”
If our knowledge of human behavior counts for anything, however, we
cannot put aside old myths without creating new ones. The eighteenth
century agnostics very wisely realized that if they wished to maintain
the values which had been created by Deism, they could not abandon God
without inventing him all over again. In turning away from obsolete and
disastrous social myths I do not suggest that we give up the habit of
making myths; for that habit, for good or bad, seems to be ingrained
in the human psyche. The nearest we can get to rationality is not to
efface our myths but to attempt to infuse them with right reason, and
to alter them or exchange them for other myths when they appear to work
badly.
Here is where we reap the full benefit of the great utopian tradition.
In turning away from the social myths that hamper us, we do not jump
blindly into a blankness: we rather ally ourselves with a different
order of social myth which has always been vivified and enriched by the
arts and sciences.