THE ARTIST AND THE
PUBLIC
I
I can divide all the imaginative writers I have ever met into two
classes--those who admitted and sometimes proclaimed loudly that they
desired popularity; and those who expressed a noble scorn or a gentle
contempt for popularity. The latter, however, always failed to conceal
their envy of popular authors, and this envy was a phenomenon whose
truculent bitterness could not be surpassed even in political or
religious life. And indeed, since (as I have held in a previous chapter)
the object of the artist is to share his emotions with others, it would
be strange if the normal artist spurned popularity in order to keep his
emotions as much as possible to himself. An enormous amount of dishonest
nonsense has been and will be written by uncreative critics, of course
in the higher interests of creative authors, about popularity and the
proper attitude of the artist thereto. But possibly the attitude of a
first-class artist himself may prove a more valuable guide.
The _Letters of George Meredith_ (of which the first volume is a
magnificent unfolding of the character of a great man) are full of
references to popularity, references overt and covert. Meredith could
never--and quite naturally--get away from the idea of popularity. He was
a student of the English public, and could occasionally be unjust to it.
Writing to M. André Raffalovich (who had sent him a letter of
appreciation) in November, 1881, he said: "I venture to judge by your
name that you are at most but half English. I can consequently believe
in the feeling you express for the work of an unpopular writer.
Otherwise one would incline to be sceptical, for the English are given
to practical jokes, and to stir up the vanity of authors who are
supposed to languish in the shade amuses them." A remark curiously
unfair to the small, faithful band of admirers which Meredith then had.
The whole letter, while warmly and touchingly grateful, is gloomy.
Further on in it he says: "Good work has a fair chance to be recognised
in the end, and if not, what does it matter?" But there is constant
proof that it did matter very much. In a letter to William Hardman,
written when he was well and hopeful, he says: "Never mind: if we do but
get the public ear, oh, my dear old boy!" To Captain Maxse, in reference
to a vast sum of £8,000 paid by the _Cornhill_ people to George Eliot
(for an unreadable novel), he exclaims: "Bon Dieu! Will aught like this
ever happen to me?"
And to his son he was very explicit about the extent to which
unpopularity "mattered": "As I am unpopular I am ill-paid, and therefore
bound to work double tides, hardly ever able to lay down the pen. This
affects my weakened stomach, and so the round of the vicious circle is
looped." (Vol. I., p. 322.) And in another letter to Arthur Meredith
about the same time he sums up his career thus: "As for me, I have
failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." (Vol. I., p.
318.) This letter is dated June 23rd, 1881. Meredith was then
fifty-three years of age. He had written _Modern Love_, _The Shaving of
Shagpat_, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, _Rhoda Fleming_, _The Egoist_
and other masterpieces. He knew that he had done his best and that his
best was very fine. It would be difficult to credit that he did not
privately deem himself one of the masters of English literature and
destined to what we call immortality. He had the enthusiastic
appreciation of some of the finest minds of the epoch. And yet, "As for
me, I have failed, and I find little to make the end undesirable." But
he had not failed in his industry, nor in the quality of his work, nor
in achieving self-respect and the respect of his friends. He had failed
only in one thing--immediate popularity.
II
Assuming then that an author is justified in desiring immediate
popularity, instead of being content with poverty and the unheard
plaudits of posterity, another point presents itself. Ought he to limit
himself to a mere desire for popularity, or ought he actually to do
something, or to refrain from doing something, to the special end of
obtaining popularity? Ought he to say: "I shall write exactly what and
how I like, without any regard for the public; I shall consider nothing
but my own individuality and powers; I shall be guided solely by my own
personal conception of what the public ought to like"? Or ought he to
say: "Let me examine this public, and let me see whether some compromise
between us is not possible"?
Certain authors are never under the necessity of facing the
alternative. Occasionally, by chance, a genius may be so fortunately
constituted and so brilliantly endowed that he captures the public at
once, prestige being established, and the question of compromise never
arises. But this is exceedingly rare. On the other hand, many mediocre
authors, exercising the most complete sincerity, find ample appreciation
in the vast mediocrity of the public, and are never troubled by any
problem worse than the vagaries of their fountain-pens. Such authors
enjoy in plenty the gewgaw known as happiness. Of nearly all really
original artists, however, it may be said that they are at loggerheads
with the public--as an almost inevitable consequence of their
originality; and for them the problem of compromise or no-compromise
acutely exists.
George Meredith was such an artist. George Meredith before anything else
was a poet. He would have been a better poet than a novelist, and I
believe that he thought so. The public did not care for his poetry. If
he had belonged to the no-compromise school, whose adherents usually
have the effrontery to claim him, he would have said: "I shall keep on
writing poetry, even if I have to become a stockbroker in order to do
it." But when he was only thirty-three--a boy, as authors go--he had
already tired of no-compromise. He wrote to Augustus Jessopp: "It may be
that in a year or two I shall find time for a full sustained Song....
The worst is that having taken to prose delineations of character and
life, one's affections are divided.... And in truth, being a servant of
the public, _I must wait till my master commands before I take seriously
to singing_." (Vol. I., p. 45.) Here is as good an example as one is
likely to find of a first-class artist openly admitting the futility of
writing what will not be immediately read, when he can write something
else, less to his taste, that will be read. The same sentiment has
actuated an immense number of first-class creative artists, including
Shakspere, who would have been a rare client for a literary agent.... So
much for refraining from doing the precise sort of work one would prefer
to do because it is not appreciated by the public.
There remains the doing of a sort of work against the grain because the
public appreciates it--otherwise the pot-boiler. In 1861 Meredith wrote
to Mrs Ross: "I am engaged in extra potboiling work which enables me to
do this," i.e., to write an occasional long poem. (Vol. I., p. 52.) Oh,
base compromise! Seventeen years later he wrote to R.L. Stevenson: "Of
potboilers let none speak. Jove hangs them upon necks that could soar
above his heights but for the accursed weight." (Vol. I., p. 291.) It
may be said that Meredith was forced to write potboilers. He was no more
forced to write potboilers than any other author. Sooner than wallow in
that shame, he might have earned money in more difficult ways. Or he
might have indulged in that starvation so heartily prescribed for
authors by a plutocratic noble who occasionally deigns to employ the
English tongue in prose. Meredith subdued his muse, and Meredith wrote
potboilers, because he was a first-class artist and a man of profound
common sense. Being extremely creative, he had to arrive somehow, and he
remembered that the earth is the earth, and the world the world, and men
men, and he arrived as best he could. The great majority of his peers
have acted similarly.
The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on
his own terms, and on none but his own terms, is either a god or a
conceited and impractical fool. And he is somewhat more likely to be the
latter than the former. He wants too much. There are two sides to every
bargain, including the artistic. The most fertile and the most powerful
artists are the readiest to recognise this, because their sense of
proportion, which is the sense of order, is well developed. The lack of
the sense of proportion is the mark of the _petit maître_. The sagacious
artist, while respecting himself, will respect the idiosyncrasies of his
public. To do both simultaneously is quite possible. In particular, the
sagacious artist will respect basic national prejudices. For example, no
first-class English novelist or dramatist would dream of allowing to his
pen the freedom in treating sexual phenomena which Continental writers
enjoy as a matter of course. The British public is admittedly wrong on
this important point--hypocritical, illogical and absurd. But what would
you? You cannot defy it; you literally cannot. If you tried, you would
not even get as far as print, to say nothing of library counters. You
can only get round it by ingenuity and guile. You can only go a very
little further than is quite safe. You can only do one man's modest
share in the education of the public.
In Valery Larbaud's latest novel, _A.O. Barnabooth,_ occurs a phrase of
deep wisdom about women: "_La femme est une grande realite, comme la
guerre_." It might be applied to the public. The public is a great
actuality, like war. If you are a creative and creating artist, you
cannot ignore it, though it can ignore you. There it is! You can do
something with it, but not much. And what you do not do with it, it must
do with you, if there is to be the contact which is essential to the
artistic function. This contact may be closened and completed by the
artist's cleverness--the mere cleverness of adaptability which most
first-class artists have exhibited. You can wear the fashions of the
day. You can tickle the ingenuous beast's ear in order to distract his
attention while you stab him in the chest. You can cajole money out of
him by one kind of work in order to gain leisure in which to force him
to accept later on something that he would prefer to refuse. You can use
a thousand devices on the excellent simpleton.... And in the process you
may degrade yourself to a mere popularity-hunter! Of course you may; as
you may become a drunkard through drinking a glass of beer. Only, if you
have anything to say worth saying, you usually don't succumb to this
danger. If you have anything to say worth saying, you usually manage
somehow to get it said, and read. The artist of genuine vocation is apt
to be a wily person. He knows how to sacrifice inessentials so that he
may retain essentials. And he can mysteriously put himself even into a
potboiler. _Clarissa Harlowe_, which influenced fiction throughout
Europe, was the direct result of potboiling. If the artist has not the
wit and the strength of mind to keep his own soul amid the collisions of
life, he is the inferior of a plain, honest merchant in stamina, and
ought to retire to the upper branches of the Civil Service.
III
When the author has finished the composition of a work, when he has put
into the trappings of the time as much of his eternal self as they will
safely hold, having regard to the best welfare of his creative career as
a whole, when, in short, he has done all that he can to ensure the
fullest public appreciation of the essential in him--there still remains
to be accomplished something which is not unimportant in the entire
affair of obtaining contact with the public. He has to see that the work
is placed before the public as advantageously as possible. In other
words, he has to dispose of the work as advantageously as possible. In
other words, when he lays down the pen he ought to become a merchant,
for the mere reason that he has an article to sell, and the more
skilfully he sells it the better will be the result, not only for the
public appreciation of his message, but for himself as a private
individual and as an artist with further activities in front of him.
Now this absolutely logical attitude of a merchant towards one's
finished work infuriates the dilettanti of the literary world, to whom
the very word "royalties" is anathema. They apparently would prefer to
treat literature as they imagine Byron treated it, although as a fact no
poet in a short life ever contrived to make as many pounds sterling out
of verse as Byron made. Or perhaps they would like to return to the
golden days when the author had to be "patronised" in order to exist; or
even to the mid-nineteenth century, when practically all authors save
the most successful--and not a few of the successful also--failed to
obtain the fair reward of their work. The dilettanti's snobbishness and
sentimentality prevent them from admitting that, in a democratic age,
when an author is genuinely appreciated, either he makes money or he is
the foolish victim of a scoundrel. They are fond of saying that
agreements and royalties have nothing to do with literature. But
agreements and royalties have a very great deal to do with literature.
Full contact between artist and public depends largely upon publisher or
manager being compelled to be efficient and just. And upon the
publisher's or manager's efficiency and justice depend also the dignity,
the leisure, the easy flow of coin, the freedom, and the pride which are
helpful to the full fruition of any artist. No artist was ever assisted
in his career by the yoke, by servitude, by enforced monotony, by
overwork, by economic inferiority. See Meredith's correspondence
everywhere.
Nor can there be any satisfaction in doing badly that which might be
done well. If an artist writes a fine poem, shows it to his dearest
friend, and burns it--I can respect him. But if an artist writes a fine
poem, and then by sloppiness and snobbishness allows it to be
inefficiently published, and fails to secure his own interests in the
transaction, on the plea that he is an artist and not a merchant, then I
refuse to respect him. A man cannot fulfil, and has no right to fulfil,
one function only in this complex world. Some, indeed many, of the
greatest creative artists have managed to be very good merchants also,
and have not been ashamed of the double _rôle_. To read the
correspondence and memoirs of certain supreme artists one might be
excused for thinking, indeed, that they were more interested in the
_rôle_ of merchant than in the other _rôle_; and yet their work in no
wise suffered. In the distribution of energy between the two _rôles_
common sense is naturally needed. But the artist who has enough common
sense--or, otherwise expressed, enough sense of reality--not to disdain
the _rôle_ of merchant will probably have enough not to exaggerate it.
He may be reassured on one point--namely, that success in the _rôle_ of
merchant will never impair any self-satisfaction he may feel in the
_rôle_ of artist. The late discovery of a large public in America
delighted Meredith and had a tonic effect on his whole system. It is
often hinted, even if it is not often said, that great popularity ought
to disturb the conscience of the artist. I do not believe it. If the
conscience of the artist is not disturbed during the actual work itself,
no subsequent phenomenon will or should disturb it. Once the artist is
convinced of his artistic honesty, no public can be too large for his
peace of mind. On the other hand, failure in the _rôle_ of merchant will
emphatically impair his self-satisfaction in the _rôle_ of artist and
his courage in the further pursuance of that _rôle_.
But many artists have admittedly no aptitude for merchantry. Not only is
their sense of the bindingness of a bargain imperfect, but they are apt
in business to behave in a puerile manner, to close an arrangement out
of mere impatience, to be grossly undiplomatic, to be victimised by
their vanity, to believe what they ought not to believe, to discredit
what is patently true, to worry over negligible trifles, and generally
to make a clumsy mess of their affairs. An artist may say: "I cannot
work unless I have a free mind, and I cannot have a free mind if I am to
be bothered all the time by details of business."
Apart from the fact that no artist who pretends also to be a man can in
this world hope for a free mind, and that if he seeks it by neglecting
his debtors he will be deprived of it by his creditors--apart from that,
the artist's demand for a free mind is reasonable. Moreover, it is
always a distressing sight to see a man trying to do what nature has not
fitted him to do, and so doing it ill. Such artists, however--and they
form possibly the majority--can always employ an expert to do their
business for them, to cope on their behalf with the necessary middleman.
Not that I deem the publisher or the theatrical manager to be by nature
less upright than any other class of merchant. But the publisher and the
theatrical manager have been subjected for centuries to a special and
grave temptation. The ordinary merchant deals with other merchants--his
equals in business skill. The publisher and the theatrical manager deal
with what amounts to a race of children, of whom even arch-angels could
not refrain from taking advantage.
When the democratisation of literature seriously set in, it inevitably
grew plain that the publisher and the theatrical manager had very
humanly been giving way to the temptation with which heaven in her
infinite wisdom had pleased to afflict them,--and the Society of Authors
came into being. A natural consequence of the general awakening was the
self-invention of the literary agent. The Society of Authors, against
immense obstacles, has performed wonders in the economic education of
the creative artist, and therefore in the improvement of letters. The
literary agent, against obstacles still more immense, has carried out
the details of the revolution. The outcry--partly sentimental, partly
snobbish, but mainly interested--was at first tremendous against these
meddlers who would destroy the charming personal relations that used to
exist between, for example, the author and the publisher. (The less said
about those charming personal relations the better. Documents exist.)
But the main battle is now over, and everyone concerned is beautifully
aware who holds the field. Though much remains to be done, much has been
done; and today the creative artist who, conscious of inability to
transact his own affairs efficiently, does not obtain efficient advice
and help therein, stands in his own light both as an artist and as a
man, and is a reactionary force. He owes the practice of elementary
common sense to himself, to his work, and to his profession at large.
IV
The same dilettante spirit which refuses to see the connection between
art and money has also a tendency to repudiate the world of men at
large, as being unfit for the habitation of artists. This is a still
more serious error of attitude--especially in a storyteller. No artist
is likely to be entirely admirable who is not a man before he is an
artist. The notion that art is first and the rest of the universe
nowhere is bound to lead to preciosity and futility in art. The artist
who is too sensitive for contacts with the non-artistic world is thereby
too sensitive for his vocation, and fit only to fall into gentle
ecstasies over the work of artists less sensitive than himself.
The classic modern example of the tragedy of the artist who repudiates
the world is Flaubert. At an early age Flaubert convinced himself that
he had no use for the world of men. He demanded to be left in solitude
and tranquillity. The morbid streak in his constitution grew rapidly
under the fostering influences of peace and tranquillity. He was
brilliantly peculiar as a schoolboy. As an old man of twenty-two,
mourning over the vanished brio of youth, he carried morbidity to
perfection. Only when he was travelling (as, for example, in Egypt) do
his letters lose for a time their distemper. His love-letters are often
ignobly inept, and nearly always spoilt by the crass provincialism of
the refined and cultivated hermit. His mistress was a woman difficult to
handle and indeed a Tartar in egotism, but as the recipient of
Flaubert's love-letters she must win universal sympathy.
Full of a grievance against the whole modern planet, Flaubert turned
passionately to ancient times (in which he would have been equally
unhappy had he lived in them), and hoped to resurrect beauty when he
had failed to see it round about him. Whether or not he did resurrect
beauty is a point which the present age is now deciding. His fictions of
modern life undoubtedly suffer from his detestation of the material; but
considering his manner of existence it is marvellous that he should have
been able to accomplish any of them, except _Un Coeur Simple_. The final
one, _Bouvard et Pécuchet_, shows the lack of the sense of reality which
must be the inevitable sequel of divorce from mankind. It is realism
without conviction. No such characters as Bouvard and Pecuchet could
ever have existed outside Flaubert's brain, and the reader's resultant
impression is that the author has ruined a central idea which was well
suited for a grand larkish extravaganza in the hands of a French Swift.
But the spectacle of Flaubert writing in _mots justes_ a grand larkish
extravaganza cannot be conjured up by fancy.
There are many sub-Flauberts rife in London. They are usually more
critical than creative, but their influence upon creators, and
especially the younger creators, is not negligible. Their aim in
preciosity would seem to be to keep themselves unspotted from the world.
They are for ever being surprised and hurt by the crudity and coarseness
of human nature, and for ever bracing themselves to be not as others
are. They would have incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just
discipline for them would be that they should be cross-examined by the
great bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced accordingly.
The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is to be found to-day even
in relatively robust minds. I was recently at a provincial cinema, and
witnessed on the screen with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama
entitled "Gold is not All." My friend, who combines the callings of
engineer and general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said: "You
know, this kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow. Had he
lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a cinema audience to
show him what the general level of human nature really is? Nobody has
any right to be ashamed of human nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother?
Is one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolution? Human nature _is_.
And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, absorbs that
supreme fact into his brain, the better for his work.
There is a numerous band of persons in London--and the novelist and
dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their circle--who spend so
much time and emotion in practising the rites of the religion of art
that they become incapable of real existence. Each is a Stylites on a
pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John,
Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards,
Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and
their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but
they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They
never approach normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it.
They class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard of
Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the eternal
enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must open a newspaper
to look at the advertisements and announcements relating to the arts.
The occasional frequenting of this circle may not be disadvantageous to
the creative artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its
disease by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake! No
phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours, is meet for
the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man, as to whom the
artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever constitute the
main part of the material in which he works.
Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the antidote to the
circle of dilettantism is the circle of social reform. It is not. I
referred in the first chapter to the prevalent illusion that the
republic has just now arrived at a crisis, and that if something is not
immediately done disaster will soon be upon us. This is the illusion to
which the circle of social reforms is naturally prone, and it is an
illusion against which the common sense of the creative artist must
mightily protest. The world is, without doubt, a very bad world; but it
is also a very good world. The function of the artist is certainly
concerned more with what is than with what ought to be. When all
necessary reform has been accomplished our perfected planet will be
stone-cold. Until then the artist's affair is to keep his balance amid
warring points of view, and in the main to record and enjoy what is....
But is not the Minimum Wage Bill urgent? But when the minimum wage is as
trite as the jury-system, the urgency of reform will still be tempting
the artist too far out of his true path. And the artist who yields is
lost.