Shamefaced Art

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

"GREAT art demands passionate appreciation." It would be interesting to take a consensus of American opinion upon that pronouncement. Many smiles could be counted, much ironic comment heard, but we fear that unqualified acquiescence would be confined entirely to the folk commonly supposed to inhabit batik-hung studios in Greenwich Village. And yet the dictum is mere truth.

Say it in French, "Great art demands passionate appreciation." It would not sound half so silly. But of course. Great art is a passion of the spirit.

Here in the United States we pride ourselves upon being a rugged people, and we are upon business bent. We are doers, not dreamers: building blast furnaces and factories, growing and reaping vast acreages of wheat, indulging in engineering feats, volubly advertising all products under the sun, at-tending conventions, amassing money, enthralled by country houses, motor cars, and golf links. Each to his job, we say—but art is not a job; art is a luxury. Pleasant if you can afford it. Yes. But it is not real work.

The cultivated foreigner, however, looks curiously upon our activities and ingenuities coupled with our casual neglect of a native art. In our department stores, for instance, he notes the superabundance of our books, their attractive jackets, the hard-hitting "appeal" of their advertisements. But literature? Here and there, perhaps, buried in the welter somewhere, lying rather out of it, lost in the spreading shadow of best sellers. "Do you judge all books, then, by the number of copies they sell-every author by the amount of his royalties?" To the foreigner it would seem so.

The general public in America does so judge. Of what import that a man should write a book if it is not what the majority of the people want to read? The greatest authors have always appealed to the most people. Other books fail by comparison. Such is the verdict. To everything, even to books, we apply a standard of Usefulness which we interpret most singularly. As for your "Great art demands passionate appreciation," that is merely a whine from the little fellows who have not "succeeded." Trust healthy American judgment to pick the right books, the big books, the books that count.

But unfortunately, rugged though he may appear, a true artist is compact of sensibility and subtlety. He is not to be measured with a yardstick, appraised in a generalization formulated by the average intelligence. He can be truly approached only by minds at least desirous of the qualities his own evinces. His work is also the product of an intellectual passion, inevitable in creation, not written for this "purpose" or that. Only where it meets an answering passion of the mind is its full meaning delivered. This older nations understand. We, not yet.

We are too much afraid of seeming any-thing but red-blooded, rough, rugged, hale, hearty, healthy. Subtlety is insidious, sensibility we confuse with weakness, art with "artyness." We take refuge from what we do not understand in our chief pride, our National Sense of Humor. Strange how much escapes it !

So beside the business man and the professional man the artist goes shamefaced.

He adopts perforce their heartiness, their healthiness, their rough, rugged, hale redbloodedness—at least superficially. He endeavors to make his writing into as much of a business as possible. He hopes to appear "practical." He fears to be accused of temperament. Or he simply does nothing of the sort, rebels entirely, and, in the eyes of the general public, enters the national sideshow of freaks.

A truly preposterous situation, for it is as if the social body practiced a deliberate stultification of its own keenest sense organs. The intelligence of the true artist is the nerve centre of his age. Through him alone do we truly see, feel, and come to understand our time.

It is no plea for special dispensation to point out that such widespread indifference and misjudgment stunt the growth to mental maturity of any nation. When the artist is regarded as a true worker and not a drone in our society, when the many strive at least to meet him on his own ground instead of always insisting that he must meet them on theirs, then only will the great energy that is in the brawn and sinew of our social body have a fit brain and spirit to guide it.