If we are to come into our inheritance as an artistic people, let us
hear less of Art with a big A. Let us turn from the oracle of the
Personally Conducted and make bonfires of our Baedeckers.
The “Old Masters” were plain men, for the most part, with the virtues
and vices of their time, and would kill a man or paint a Madonna with
equal skill and enthusiasm. Art was to them only one form of a manifold
activity, not a problem to be solved nor a fetish to be worshipped.
Cellini made salt cellars and bragged about them long before he cast
his Perseus. Michaelangelo painted the Sistine ceiling because the
Pope commanded him, and not because he was divinely inspired to do it.
Raphael and Rubens ran picture factories which turned out paintings
of a certain brand, like so many barrels of flour. Shakespeare patched
together threadbare scenes and situations for special occasions, as
managers now prepare a Christmas pantomime; and Balzac wrote the
“Comedie Humaine” to pay his debts.
Literature is not a thing of limited editions, nor painting of spring
exhibitions. While you are seeking the coming novelist between rich
covers he may be doing a daily “story” for some sensational morning
paper; and the new Raphael you think of as hid away in some sequestered
north-lit studio may be designing labels for boxes in a lithograph
factory.
Respect, therefore, the poster, though it _is_ obtrusive, and despise
not the Japanese print, though it be cheap. Admit that there is more
merit in the pen and ink picture of which are printed a million copies,
than in the etching on your library walls, of which there are only ten.
Believe that the baths and aqueducts of Rome, however marvellous, are
puerile as feats of engineering compared with a city floated on Lake
Michigan mud; and learn that while you drowse over your “standard
authors” of today the work of him who will be the standard author of
tomorrow may be appearing in these despised pages.