| 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.