VIII
No matter how the modern artist may use or fritter away his abilities, it is plain that he has an enormous reservoir of power at his disposal. What, for instance, has made America so wholly devoted to the conquest of material things? Why are we so given over to collecting those vast miscellanies of goods which are temptingly displayed in the advertising sections of our illustrated weeklies and monthly magazines? The necessity for ameliorating the hard, crude life of the pioneer has indeed been an important influence; but the traditions of this life in turn produced all the minor “artists” or “artlings” who write and draw for the popular papers, who create the plots of plays and motion picture scenarios; and since most of these poor wretches have never been educated in the humanist sense to any degree—since they know no other environment than New York or Los Angeles or Gopher Prairie, since they are acquainted with the achievements of no other age than their own, they have devoted themselves wholeheartedly to idealizing a great many of the things that are crude or ugly or stupid in their beloved community. So the idola of business have been perpetuated by “artlings” who themselves know only the standards of the business man.
Because of the limited horizons of the American artist, therefore, the rising generation aspires after the things that Messrs. Jack London, Rupert Hughes, Robert Chambers, and heaven knows who else have thought good and fine; the younger generation talks like the heroes and heroines of a melodrama by Mr. Samuel Shipman, when they do not attain the higher level of comic cuts; the younger generation thrills to the type of beauty which Mr. Penryhn Stanlaws sets before its gaze. The notion that the common man despises art is absurd. The common man worships art and lives by it; and when good art is not available he takes the second best or the tenth best or the hundredth best. The success of Mr. Eugene O’Neill, perhaps the one playwright of any girth who has contributed to the American stage, proves that the only way that people can be kept away from good art is by not providing it. The younger generation might just as well have had its idea-patterns shaped by Sophocles, Praxiteles, and Plato, if our genuine artists were not so aloof to their responsibilities, and if they were intellectually mature enough to accept the full burden of their vocation. It is a sign of a terrific neurosis—and no mark at all of esthetic aptitude—that our genuine art is so completely disoriented and so thoroughly out of touch with the community. We must turn to a man of such uneven parts as Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay before we have anything like a recognition of the classic role of the artist.
Art for the artist’s sake is largely a symptom of that neurotic individualism which drives the artist out of a public world which baffles him into a private world where he may reign in solitude as an unruly demiurge. Art for the public’s sake, on the other hand, substitutes the vices of the extrovert for the vices of the introvert. When I say that art must have some vital contact with the community I do not mean, let me emphasize, that the artist must cater to public whim or demand. Art in its social setting is neither a personal cathartic for the artist, nor a salve to quiet the itching vanity of the community: it is essentially a means by which people who have had a strange diversity of experiences have their activities emotionally canalized into patterns and molds which they are able to share pretty completely with each other. Pure art is inevitably propaganda. I mean by this that it is meant to be propagated, and that in so far as it fails to impregnate the community in which it exists with its ideas and images, in so far as the community is not changed for better or worse by its existence, its claims are spurious. Propagandist art, on the other hand, is inevitably impure since instead of bringing people together on a common emotional plane, as men, it tends to accentuate their differences, and to void emotions which are proper to art into a realm where the emotions of the missionary’s tent or the soap-boxer’s platform hold exclusive sway. It is just because the “artist” in America has been impure in motive—a propagandist for Pollyanna in the face of Euripides, a propagandist for “just folks” in the face of Swift, a propagandist for niceness in the face of Rabelais—that he has failed miserably as an artist, and has left our communities to stew so completely in their own savorless juice.
IX
For examples of what the artist might be, and what his proper relation to the community might be when he was mature enough to recognize it and discipline himself to it, let us look at Mr. William Butler Yeats or Æ. There are doubtless a good many other examples that might be offered in Europe; but
