invention and the higher activities. It happens whenever the medium is
regarded merely as material to be manipulated, when the artist thinks
that he can learn to fly by mastering some other artist's machine, when
his art is to him a matter of invention gradually perfected and
necessarily progressing through the advance of knowledge and skill. One
often finds this false analogy in books about the history of the arts,
especially of painting and music. It is assumed, for instance, that
Italian painting progressed mechanically from Giotto to Titian, that
Titian had a greater power of expression than Giotto because he had
command of a number of inventions in anatomy and perspective and the
like that were unknown to Giotto. So we have histories of the
development of the symphony, in which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven are
treated as if they were mechanical inventors each profiting by the
discoveries of his predecessors. Beethoven was the greatest of the three
because he had the luck to be born last, and Beethoven's earliest
symphonies are necessarily better than Mozart's latest because they were
composed later. But in such histories there always comes a point at
which artists cease to profit by the inventions of their predecessors.
After Michelangelo, perhaps after Beethoven, is the decadence. Then
suddenly there is talk of inspiration, or the lack of it. Mere
imitators appear, and the historian who reviles them does not see that
they have only practised, and refuted, his theory of art. They also have
had the luck to be born later; but it has been bad luck, not good, for
them, because to them their art has been all a matter of mechanical
invention, of professionalism.
The worst of it is that the greatest artists are apt themselves to fall
in love with their own inventions, not to see that they are mechanical
inventions because they themselves have discovered them. Michelangelo in
his "Last Judgment" is very professional; Titian was professional
through all his middle age; Tintoret was professional whenever he was
bored with his work, which happened often; Shakespeare, whenever he was
lazy, which was not seldom. Beethoven, we now begin to see, could be
very earnestly professional; and as for Milton--consider this end of the
last speech of Manoah, in _Samson Agonistes_, where we expect a simple
cadence:--
The virgins also shall on feastful days
Visit his tomb with flowers, only bewailing
His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice,
From whence captivity and loss of eyes
Milton was tempted into the jargon of these last two lines, which are
like a bad translation of a Greek play, by professionalism. He was
trying to make his poetry as much unlike ordinary speech as he could; he
was for the moment a slave to a tradition, and none the less a slave
because it was the tradition of his own past.
Professionalism is a device for making expression easy; and it is one
used by the greatest artists sometimes because their business is to be
always expressing themselves, and even they have not always something to
express. But expression is so difficult, even for those who have
something to express, that they must be always practising it if they are
ever to succeed in it. Wordsworth, for instance, was a professed enemy
of professionalism in poetry; yet he, too, was for ever writing verses.
It was a hobby with him as well as an art; and his professionalism was
merely less accomplished than that of Milton or Spenser:--
Fair Ellen Irwin, when she sate
Upon the Braes of Kirtle,
Was lovely as a Grecian maid
Adorned with wreaths of myrtle.
Why adorned with wreaths of myrtle? Wordsworth himself tells us. His
subject had already been treated in Scotch poems "in simple ballad
strain," so, he says, "at the outset I threw out a classical image to
prepare the reader for the style in which I meant to treat the story,
and so to preclude all comparison." No one, whose object was just to
tell the story, would compare Ellen with a Grecian maid and her wreaths
of myrtle; but Wordsworth must do so to show us how he means to tell it,
and, as he forgets to mention, so that he may rhyme with Kirtle. That is
all professionalism, all a device for making expression easy, practised
by a great poet because at the moment he had nothing to express. But art
is always difficult and cannot be made easy by this means. We need not
take a malicious pleasure in such lapses of the great poet; but it is
well to know when Homer nods, even though he uses all his craft to
pretend that he is wide awake. Criticism may have a negative as well as
a positive value. It may set us on our guard against professionalism
even in the greatest artists, and most of all in them. For it is they
who begin professionalism and, with the mere momentum of their vitality,
make it attractive. Because they are great men and really accomplished,
they can say nothing with a grand air; and these grand nothings of
theirs allure us just because they are nothings and make no demands
upon our intelligence. That is art indeed, we cry: and we intoxicate
ourselves with it because it is merely art. "The quality of mercy is not
strained" is far more popular than Lear's speech, "No, no, no! Come,
let's away to prison," because it is professional rhetoric; it is what
Shakespeare could write at any moment, whereas the speech of Lear is
what Lear said at one particular moment. The contrast between the two is
the contrast well put in the epigram about Barry and Garrick in their
renderings of King Lear:--
A king, aye, every inch a king, such Barry doth appear.
But Garrick's quite another thing; he's every inch King Lear.
We admire the great artist when he is every inch a king more than when
he has lost his kingship in his passion.
He no doubt knows the difference well enough. But he wishes to do
everything well, he has a natural human delight in his own
accomplishment; and a job to finish. Shakespeare, Michelangelo,
Beethoven were not slaves to their own professionalism; no doubt they
could laugh at it themselves. But there is always a danger that we shall
be enslaved by it; and it is the business of criticism to free us from
that slavery, to make us aware of this last infirmity of great artists.
We are on our guard easily enough against a professionalism that is out
of fashion. The Wagnerian of a generation ago could sneer at the
professionalism of Mozart; but the professionalism of Wagner seemed to
him to be inspiration made constant and certain by a new musical
invention. We know now only too well, from Wagner's imitators, that he
did not invent a new method of tapping inspiration; we ought to know
that no one can do that. The more complete the method the more tiresome
it becomes, even as practised by the inventor.
Decadence in art is always caused by professionalism, which makes the
technique of art too difficult, and so destroys the artist's energy and
joy in his practice of it. Teachers of the arts are always inclined to
insist on their difficulty and to set hard tasks to their pupils for the
sake of their hardness; and often the pupil stays too long learning
until he thinks that anything which is difficult to do must therefore be
worth doing. This notion also overawes the general public so that they
value what looks to them difficult; but in art that which seems
difficult to us fails with us, we are aware of the difficulty, not of
the art. The greater the work of art the easier it seems to us. We feel
that we could have done it ourselves if only we had had the luck to hit
upon that way of doing it; indeed, where our æsthetic experience of it
is complete, we feel as if we were doing it ourselves; our minds jump
with the artist's mind; we are for the moment the artist himself in his
very act of creation. But we are always apt to undervalue this true and
complete æsthetic experience, because it seems so easy and simple, and
we mistake for it a painful sense of the artist's skill, of his
professional accomplishment. So we demand of artists, that they shall
impress us with their accomplishment; we have not had our money's worth
unless we feel that we could not possibly do ourselves what they have
done. No doubt, when the _Songs of Innocence_ were first published,
anyone who did happen to read them thought them doggerel. Blake in a
moment had freed himself from all the professionalism of the followers
of Pope, and even now they make poetry seem an easy art to us, until we
try to write songs of innocence ourselves:--
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away,
Till the morning appears in the skies."
We call it artless, with still a hint of depreciation in the word, or at
least of wonder that we should be so moved by such simple means. It is a
kind of cottage-poetry, and has that beauty which in a cottage moves us
more than all the art of palaces. But we never learn the lesson of that
beauty because it seems to us so easily won; and so our arts are always
threatened by the decadence of professionalism. But poetry in England
has been a living art so long because it has had the power of freeing
itself from professionalism and choosing the better path with Mary and
with Ruth. The value of the Romantic movement lay, not in its escape to
the wonders of the past, but in its escape from professionalism and all
its self-imposed and easy difficulties. For it is much easier to write
professional verses in any style than to write songs of innocence; and
that is why professionalism in all the arts tempts all kinds of artists.
Anyone can achieve it who has the mind. It is a substitute for
expression, as mere duty is a substitute for virtue. But, as a
forbidding sense of duty makes virtue itself seem unattractive, so
professionalism destroys men's natural delight in the arts. Like the
artist himself, his public becomes anxious, perverse, exacting; afraid
lest it shall admire the wrong thing, because it has lost the immediate
sense of the right thing. Just as it expects art to be difficult, so it
expects its own pleasure in art to be difficult; and thus we have
attained to our present notion about art which is like the Puritan
notion about virtue, that it is what no human being could possibly enjoy
by nature. And if we do enjoy it, "like a meadow gale in spring," it
cannot be good art.
But in painting as in poetry, all the new movements of value are escapes
from professionalism; and they begin by shocking the public because they
seem to make the art too easy. Dickens was horrified by an early work of
Millais; Ruskin was enraged by a nocturne of Whistler. He said it was
cockney impudence because it lacked the professionalism he expected.
Artists and critics alike are always binding burdens on the arts; and
they are always angry with the artist who cuts the burden off his back.
They think he is merely shirking difficulties. But the difficulty of
expression is so much greater than the self-imposed difficulties of
mere professionalism that any man who is afraid of difficulties will try
to be a professional rather than an artist.
In art there is always humility, in professionalism pride. And it is
this pride that makes art more ugly and tiresome than any other work of
man. Nothing is stranger in human nature than the tyranny of boredom it
will endure in the pursuit of art; and the more bored men are, the more
they are convinced of artistic salvation. Our museums are cumbered with
monstrous monuments of past professionalism; our bookshelves groan with
them. Always we are trying to like things because they seem to us very
well done; never do we dare to say to ourselves: It may be well done,
but it were better if it were not done at all; and the artist is still
to us a dog walking on his hind legs, a performer whose merit lies in
the unnatural difficulty of his performance.
Waste or Creation?
The William Morris Celebration was not so irrelevant to these times as
it may seem. Morris was always foretelling a catastrophe to our society,
and it has come. That commercial system of ours, which seems to so many
part of the order of Nature, was to him as evil and unnatural as
slavery. His quarrel with it was not political, but human; it was the
quarrel not of the oppressed, for he was not the man to be oppressed in
any society, but of the workman. He was sure that a society which
encouraged bad work and discouraged good must in some way or other come
to a bad end; and he would have seen in this war the end that he
predicted. Whatever its result, there must be a change in the order of
our society, whether it sinks through incessant wars, national and
commercial, into barbarism or is shocked into an effort to attain to
civilization. There were particular sayings of Morris's to which no one
at the time paid much heed. They seemed mere grumblings against what
must be. He was, for instance, always crying out against our waste of
labour. If only all men did work that was worth doing--
Think what a change that would make in the world! I tell you I
feel dazed at the thought of the immensity of the work which is
undergone for the making of useless things. It would be an
instructive day's work, for any one of us who is strong enough,
to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London
on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop
windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life
of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious
or unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the
lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them; and to many
people, even of those who buy them, they are obvious
encumbrances to real work, thought, and pleasure.
At the time most people said that this waste of labour was all a matter
of demand and supply, and thought no more about it; some said that it
was good for trade. Very few saw, with Morris, that demand for such
things is something willed and something that ought not to be willed.
But then it was generally believed that we could afford this waste of
labour; and so it went on until, after a year or two of war, we found
that we could not afford it. Then even the most ignorant and thoughtless
learned, from facts, not from books, certain lessons of political
economy. They learned that, in war-time at least, a nation that wastes
its labour will be overcome by one that does not. At once the common
will was set against the waste of labour; and, what would have seemed
strangest of all forty years ago, the Government, with the consent of
the people, set to work to stop the waste of labour, and did to a great
extent succeed in stopping it. When people thought in terms of
munitions, instead of in terms of general well-being, they saw that the
waste of labour must be, and could be, stopped. They talked no longer
about the laws of supply and demand, but about munitions. Those who had
made trash must be set to make munitions, or to fight, or in some way to
second the Army. Those who still were ready to waste labour on trash for
themselves were no longer obeying the laws of supply and demand; they
were diverting labour from its proper task; they were unpatriotic, they
were helping the Germans. Money, in fact, had no longer the right to an
absolute command over labour. A man, before he spent a sovereign, must
ask himself whether he was spending it for the good of the nation; and
if he did not ask himself that, the Government would ask it for him.
So much the war taught us, for purposes of war. But Morris many years
ago tried to teach it for purposes of peace. When he wrote those words
which we have quoted, he was not talking politics but ordinary common
sense. He was not even talking art, but rather economics; and he was
talking it not to any vague abstraction called the community, but to
each individual human being. At that time every one thought of economics
as something which concerned society or the universe. It was, so to
speak, a natural science; it observed phenomena as if they were in the
heavens; and stated laws about them, laws not human but natural. Perhaps
it was the greatest achievement of Morris in the way of thought that he
saw economics, even more clearly than Ruskin, as a matter not of natural
laws, but of conscience and duty. He did not talk about economics at
all, but about the waste of labour, just as we talk about it now. The
only difference is that he saw it to be one of the chief causes of
poverty in time of peace, whereas we see it as a hindrance to victory in
time of war. We have, for war purposes, acquired the conscience that he
wished us to acquire for all purposes. The question is whether we shall
keep it in peace.
Upon that depends the question how soon we shall recover from the war.
For there is no doubt that we shall not be able to afford our former
waste of labour; and, if we persist in it, we shall be bankrupt as a
society. It may be said that we shall not have the money, the power, to
waste labour. But we shall certainly have some superfluous energy, more
and more, it is to be hoped, as time goes on; and our future recovery
will depend upon the use we make of this superfluous energy. We can
waste it, as we wasted it before the war; or we can keep the conscience
we have acquired in war and ask ourselves in peace, with every penny we
spend, whether we are wasting labour. It is true that what may be waste
to one will not be waste to another; but in that matter every one must
obey his own conscience. The important thing is that every one should
have a conscience and obey it. There will be plenty of people to tell us
that no one can define waste of labour. No one can define sin; but each
man has his own conscience on that point and lives well or ill as he
obeys it or disobeys it. Besides, there are many things, all the trash
that Morris speaks about in the shop windows, that every one knows to be
waste. We need not trouble ourselves about the fact that art will seem
waste to the philistine and not to the artist. We must allow for
differences on that point as on most others. Some things that might
have been waste to Samuel Smiles would have been to Morris a symptom of
well-being. But he knew, and often said, that we cannot have the beauty
which was to him a symptom of well-being unless we end the waste of
labour on trash. Of luxury he said:--
By those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for
art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each
day's hard practice of the difficult art of living. But I say,
art cannot live beside it nor self-respect in any class of
life. Effeminacy and brutality are its companions on the right
hand and the left.
There is, we have all discovered now, only a certain amount of labour in
the country, in the world. Even the most ignorant are aware at last that
money does not create labour but only commands it, and may command it to
do what will or will not benefit us all. We were, for the purposes of
the war, much more of a fellowship than we had ever been before. We
acknowledged a duty to each other, the duty of commanding labour to the
common good. We asked with every sovereign we spent whether it would
help or hinder us in the war. Morris would have us ask also whether it
will help or hinder us in the advance towards a general happiness.
And he put a further question, which in time of war unfortunately we
could not put, a question not only about the work but about the workman.
Are we, with our money, forcing him to work that is for him worth doing;
are we, to use an old phrase, considering the good of his soul? Morris
insisted on our duty to the workman more even than on our duty to
society. He saw that where great masses of men do work that they know to
be futile there must be a low standard of work and incessant discontent.
The workman may not even know the cause of his discontent. He may think
he is angry with the rich because they are rich; but the real source of
his anger is the work that they set him to do with their riches. And no
class war, no redistribution of wealth, will end that discontent if the
same waste of labour continues. Double the wages of every workman in the
country, and if he spends the increase on trash no one will be any
better off in mind or body. There will still be poverty and still
discontent, with the work if not with the wages.
The problem for us, for every modern society now, is not so much to
redistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but to
use our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste it
piecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We have
to solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is not
to lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us a
great opportunity. It has opened our eyes, if only we do not shut them
again. It has taught every one in the country the most important of all
lessons in political economy which the books often seem to conceal. And,
better still, it has taught us that in economics we can exercise our own
wills, that they concern each individual man and woman as much as
morals; that they are morals, and not abstract mathematics; that we have
the same duty towards the country, towards mankind, that we have to our
own families. The proverb, Waste not, want not, does not apply merely to
each private income. We have accounts to settle not only with our
bankers, but with the community. It will thrive or not according as we
are thrifty or thriftless; and our thrift depends upon how we spend our
income, not merely on how much we spend of it. For all that part of it
which we do not spend on necessaries is the superfluous energy of
mankind, and we determine how it shall be exercised; each individual
determines that, not an abstraction called society.
One may present the thrift of labour as a matter of duty to society.
But Morris saw that it was more than that; and he lit it with the
sunlight of the warmer virtues. It is not merely society that we have to
consider, or the direction of its superfluous energy. It is also the
happiness, the life, of actual men and women. We shall not cease to
waste work until we think always of the worker behind it, until we see
that it is our duty, if with our money we have command over him, to set
him to work worth doing. Capital now is to most of those who own it a
means of earning interest. We should think of it as creative, as the
power which may make the wilderness blossom like the rose and change the
slum into a home for men and women; and, better still, as the power that
may train and set men to do work that will satisfy their souls, so that
they shall work for the work's sake and not only for the wages. Until
capital becomes so creative in the hands of those who own it there will
always be a struggle for the possession of it; and to those who do
possess it it will bring merely superfluities and not happiness. If it
becomes creative, no one will mind much who possesses it. The class war
will be ended by a league of classes, their aim not merely peace, but
those things which make men resolve not to spoil peace with war.
We shall be told that this is a dream, as we are always told that the
ending of war is a dream. "So long as human nature is what it is there
will always be war." Those who talk thus think of human nature as
something not ourselves making for unrighteousness. It is not their own
nature. They know that they themselves do not wish for war; but, looking
at mankind in the mass and leaving themselves out of that mass, they see
it governed by some force that is not really human nature, but merely
nature "red in tooth and claw," a process become a malignant goddess,
who forces mankind to act contrary to their own desires, contrary even
to their own interests. She has taken the place for us of the old
original sin; and the belief in her is far more primitive than the
belief in original sin. She is in fact but a modern name for all the
malignant idols that savages have worshipped with sacrifices of blood
and tears that they did not wish to make. It is strange that, priding
ourselves as we do on our modern scepticism which has taught us to
disbelieve in the miracle of the Gadarene swine, we yet have not dared
to affirm the plain fact that this nature, this human nature, does not
exist. There is no force, no process, whether within us or outside us,
that compels us to act contrary to our desires and our interests. There
is nothing but fear; and fear can be conquered, as by individuals, so by
the collective will of man. It is fear that produces war, the fear that
other men are not like ourselves, that they are hostile animals governed
utterly by the instinct of self-preservation.