In the account of Four Years which Mr. Yeats published in The Dial he explains his attitude towards the literature and social life of Ireland; and I recommend that account to all the forlorn revolutionaries and reformers who wonder why the dry bones of their doctrines remain dry bones, instead of knitting themselves together and becoming alive. This passage in particular, defines the relation of the artist both to the tradition of his art and to the community in which he must find a root:
“The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven, asserted that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his own day, and this with The Fairy Queen and the Lyrical Ballads and Blake’s early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in book and gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded upon that work of the ancient kingdom already further in time from Later Egypt than Later Egypt is from us.” He dismisses this claim with the just assertion that the artist is free to choose any style that suits his mood and subject; for in the world of art time and space are irrelevant; and he goes on to say, “We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering, for the work’s sake, what I have called ‘the applied arts of literature,’ the association of literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day laborer, would accept a common design. Perhaps even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trample the rice-fields of Japan.”
By citing Mr. Yeats’ conceptions I do not mean to limit the artist to a single function—that of patterning the good life. It is quite plain that pure esthetic experience is a good in itself; and when the artist has rendered this experience in a picture, a poem, a novel, a philosophy, he has performed a unique and indispensable piece of work. Could italics keep this passage from being ignored I should employ them.
What I have called the picturesque is in reality just as self-sustaining and delightful as the radiant good health which Sir Thomas More rated so highly in his Utopia. If the community went to the dogs, it would still be exuberantly self-sustaining, whilst anyone had the time or the capacity to enjoy it. What I protest against is the way in which the field of the genuine artist, during these last three hundred years, has been whittled away, so that it has become more and more a mark of the artist to concern himself solely with the narrow province of pure esthetic experience, and to protest his complete aloofness from anything that lies outside this realm. Such an attitude would have struck Euripides or Milton or Goethe or Wagner as undignified and stupid, I am sure, because art is as large as life, and it does not gain in vigor or intensity by reducing its scope to that of the puppet stage. The point is that there is an artistic function to be performed in the community, for the community, as well as in the world of art, for those who are lifted up to art.
“Nations, races, and individual men,” as Mr. Yeats says again, “are unified by an image, or a bundle of related images, symbolical and provocative of the state of mind that is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity.”
Whether these images shall be provided by patrioteers, hack editors, politicians, advertising men and commercialized “artists” or whether they shall be created by genuine playwrights and poets and philosophers is an important question. The function of creating these images is an artistic one, and the artist who evades his responsibility is making life for himself and his kind more difficult, since in the long run a community whose sacred literature is written by Colonel Diver and Scadder and Jefferson Brick—the great heroes of Civilization as the star of empire westward makes its way—will make even the most solitary cultivation of the arts a thorny and difficult task.
In the good life, the purely esthetic element has a prominent place; but unless the artist is capable of moving men to the good life, the esthetic element is bound to be driven farther and farther away from the common realities, until the world of the artist will scarcely be distinguishable from the fantasia of dementia praecox. Already, the symptoms of this corrosive futility have appeared in literature and painting in Western Europe and America; and such light as comes forth from this art is but the phosphorescence of decay. If the arts are not to disintegrate utterly, must they not focus more and more upon eutopia?
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It comes to this then: our plans for a new social order have been as dull as mud because, in the first place, they have been abstract and cockney, and have not taken into account the immense diversity and complexity
