A man was taken the other day to a soiree of artists and serious thinkers. He had never been to such a gathering before, and he was totally ignorant of the rules. Fool that he was, he thought it expected of him to show that he too liked art, and it pleased him to think he had been to a recent exhibition. He plunged in and began to describe a picture. It was of a high cliff running down to the sea, and on the little strip of beach lay the body of a young girl. The sun was rising in the background. Those who heard him were horrified, and the friend who had introduced him perspired visibly. 'She had such a wonderful expression on her face---you must have noticed it?’ he concluded. 'Never looked at it .... I'm not interested in brewery advertisements,’ replied one of the party, and left the man feeling as guilty as if he had murdered his aunt.
But he was a dauntless person, and after much careful lecturing from his friend he began to attain artistic respectability. He has worked out a rule of conduct for himself. If the picture looks interesting, he hurries past knowing that it contains a story or a moral, and such things are no longer for him. Among the subjects he has learned to avoid are pretty girls, dancers, Eve and Venus, affectionate dogs, moonlight on snow, mermaids, and motherly old women by the fireside. He has learned to pause in front of torsos, fragments of arms, and sketches consisting of not more than a dozen lines. He has been seen to stand immovable for ten minutes before the portrait of an apple, to imitate the curve of the shadow with a tense motion of his thumb, and walk away scowling at the wretchedness of the lighting arrangements. His conversational apparatus has grown prodigiously. By taking a beam or two from Bergson, a wheel from Freud, some gearing from William James and the discards of alchemists, Hegelians and mental healers, he has provided himself with a vehicle of explanation. This enables him to avoid the vulgar habit of liking too many things, and he rarely makes a break at a soiree. The high quality of his artistic insight is established by the fact, that he is able to grow eloquent over a spot in the upper left hand corner of the most obscure picture in the gallery, while he treats the rest of the exhibition for the low-lived, ill-bred thing it is.
It is not the business of outsiders to criticize him. For he and his circle of artist friends are a close community, and only those who can speak their language are admitted. Philistines say it isn't a language at all, but merely an elaborate and noisy form of the inarticulate. It has even been said that there are circles within the circles using deeper and deeper symbols of the incommunicable, and that in the last analysis the best work done by men in this group is incomprehensible to the men themselves. There is a rumor that one of them remarked: 'When I have evolved artistically, I shall like that painting of mine--some day it will reveal infinity to me. I shall grow to be worthy of it.’
In the meantime the less gifted people have meted out a curious fate to him and his kind. They know nothing of the infinities revealed; after two or three efforts to understand his manifestoes they betray no particular desire to know. But often enough they like the patterns, and are busily engaged in using them for sofa cushions, neckties, wall paper, and ladies evening dresses. At any hour of the day or night it is now possible to see men and women dressed in the scattered remnants of a mysterious metaphysics. Musical comedy costumes are deeply affected by them, magazine covers flaunt them, advertising is full of them, they are to be seen on candy-boxes and doilies and whimsical shoes.
Nor are the outsiders ungrateful. They are much obliged for the improvement in neckties, believing that if it requires a mystery and a cult and a jumble of philosophy to produce it, the price is not too high. But there is a persistent question in their minds which they hardly dare to utter aloud. Standing in front of one of the new products, they have tried their level best to purge themselves through pity and fear, or find a hint of open country beyond. But almost in vain. 'Is this all?’ they ask, for they had been led to believe that art was something more than the decoration of life. 'These things,’ they say, 'are often good carpets and good trimmings, but men pray on a rug, not to it, we have been given better clothes, but we are naked.’
According to this theory of the outsiders, art is made to increase life, by which they mean that it cuts paths for the impulses which are not consumed in ordinary living. It enables men to be heroes and lovers and prophets and villains in a world where there are no practical costs, a world which is literally immortal because death and defeat are vicarious. In that realm they can spend the evening in Purgatory or know the Liebestod before bedtime, abduct Helen and play ball with Nausicaa, do a thousand things they were made to do, and still remain law-abiding citizens. They can compress time and space, and obliterate distance, be omnipotent and free and gorgeously sad. They can live a thousand lives, lift the roofs off houses, open sealed caskets, and see the other side of the moon. Individual man is limited by circumstances, squeezed outrageously in the world of custom, law, responsibility, thwarted by weakness and poverty and the shortness of time. But his soul is profuse, errant, and multiple, not to be contained or employed in a career. It is made of contradictions, some of which must go under in the pressure of events. It cannot satisfy itself in the restricted area of permissible emotions. It longs for things that would kill it, and is ever-lastingly adjusted to compromise and prudence.
This overflow is the itching plague of mankind, haunting it with crimes and heroisms that it is unable to achieve, the corridor of its mind a ghost-walk of lives that it might have lived. Miser and murderer and libertine, grandee and lover and hero tumble after each other in this pageant of lost causes forever conspiring against the peace of that exterior which men show to the world. Art is the liberator of these submerged selves because it enables them to walk in daylight, to be incarnated and to find expression, without wrecking the continuity of organized life.
But art cannot do its work if it remains incommunicable. Man cannot live vicarious lives in a medium in which he does not understand. Above all, he cannot find utterance in decoration or 'externality’ alone. That is why he will not accept the heresy which tells him that the subject of art does not matter, that the picture of a daffodil is as significant as the picture of a soul. He believes persistently that design and pattern are not the end of art, that the artist must respond to those moral conflicts which constitute the living theme of great works. He need not quarrel with those who are unable to be more than craftsmen engaged in making the costumes, utensils and furniture of life. His quarrel is with their pretension that they have usurped the avenues of human expression.
In some such way as that the outsider might reply to those who claim to speak for modern art. In the effort to establish his argument he could do more than point to those creations which have meant most to the inner life of mankind, or ask the obvious question whether there is no qualitative difference between a Greek tragedy and a Greek vase. He would be inclined to turn on the illuminati and ask them whether they have found what they need, and whether in the test of experience they have attained answers to craving and struggle, either rest or new life when they wanted it most? And whether there is not already a creeping disillusionment with trifles and abstractions and incidentals heaped up to leave them unfulfilled? And whether the immense pretentiousness and trumpetings of the millennium and the scrapheap of explanations and titanism are not the signs of men whistling to keep up their courage, shouting to conceal their doubts?
The layman may even hint at a possible explanation. The avoidance of significant themes, the emphasis on treatment and decoration are perhaps due to the fact that we are living now in a society of a scale never known before, in an environment enlarged and complicated beyond anything mankind has ever experienced. We have not learned to adjust human passion to this new situation, to value human motive in the terrifying intricacy of modern life. Moral science, as Socrates understood it, is in perplexity and confusion, and if ever any order is attained it will be by long study and invention. Only then might the material of human conflict be sufficiently understood to furnish art with its greater themes. For painters, poets, novelists are happiest when they live in a moral tradition. The lack of it today has robbed them of themes on which to work.
So they have turned away from the theme and concentrated on the externals of their craft, on technique, or form, or pattern, or color, or on the less important objects of the natural world. Having turned away, they try to justify their result by endless theorizing aimed to show that what they are getting is all that an artist should seek. They despise the theme because today the theme is infinitely difficult to grasp. They have transformed an evasion, a necessary and perhaps an inevitable evasion, into a virtue. They are trying to make their central failure a criterion of success
