“That,” I said, “is what I have come here this afternoon to learn.”
He emitted a snort of disgust. “But we must do something.” And for the first time one of the four flappers spoke: “We’ve got,” she said, “to justify our existence.”
That is rather what we were in 1919: a number of persons walking about with a pocket full of stones, wondering which window to smash. In the end we found the stones weighed rather heavily and hurt our thighs and spoilt our clothes, and we dropped them on the pavement. It is easy enough to evolve plans of international brotherhood when the Government feeds and boards and clothes you and gives you some twenty-five pounds pocket-money a month. It is less easy when you have to earn your own living. Questions of international policy seemed less important when the morning post brought a yellow form with scarlet letters across the top: “Third and final application.” During the war our liabilities had been those of many million others. In 1919 we entered the glass case of our private lives. We reassumed the habit of our own troubles and our own problems; we became again what Gilbert Frankau describes as the “possessive and predatory male.”
X
BUT I doubt even if there had been some employment for it, whether that particular enthusiasm would have survived very long the return to peace conditions. We were only sympathetic to the Communists because their views on the war tallied with our own. We should have soon realised how wide is the divergence between their interests and ours. For Communism is, or so it would seem to me, a sort of insurance policy taken out by the routine worker against the creative worker. The routine worker, the man who knocks nails into the soles of boots, who adds up columns of figures in a ledger, who pushes a trolley up a slope, who does tolerably well a thing that some fifty thousand other people could do equally well if they so chose, is protecting himself against the ingenuity that contrives a machine that will take the place of twenty such as he. He plays for safety. He enters a business as office boy; licks the backs of stamps; he passes into the counting-house and sits on a high stool. He makes no blots in his ledgers, and puts the right invoices in the right envelopes. He is allotted a room to himself and becomes a junior manager. At the age of forty-five he is drawing a salary of £450 a year. At the age of sixty-six he is given a pension in return for faithful service. He knows his limitations. He accepts and fulfils orders. Of himself he produces nothing. He knows that anyone else could do his job as well as he can. He retains his position through industry and punctuality. He appeals to the humanity of his directors. He hopes in time to fill, in his firm, much the same position as a butler in a baronial establishment. He has weathered many storms. He has become an institution. But because he knows his limitations he is frightened, frightened of the ravages of creative business, the amalgamations of one firm with another firm, the hard, purposeful nature of young blood, of the introduction of new ideas. He knows that, after a certain age, he has no value in the open market. And so he would limit the scope of private enterprise. He would prevent big men from launching schemes whose failure will involve thousands in disaster. The State must supervise and guarantee big business. It must control the avenues of precarious livelihood. It is not envy of the rich that drives the routine worker to Communism. As long as he is paid an adequate and steady wage he does not mind what money his employer makes or loses. But he knows as long as there is big business, as long as tigers hunt and are hunted in the high jungle of finance, so long will markets rise and fall, and so long will there be slumps and crashes and a cutting of staffs and wages; so long will the law of demand and supply be operative. Communism is the armour of the feeble against the adventurous; of safety against daring.
And the artist, more perhaps than anyone, is the soldier of fortune.
He has no armour but his talents and his confidence. He makes his own terms with life. He stands in the open market. And he will stand there whatever party may be in power, whatever changes may alter the surface and the circumstance of life. He belongs to that community which was designated once “as rogues and vagabonds.” He is of the bastardy of Feste and Touchstone.
We are entertainers: we who paint pictures, or tell stories, or enact history. And, if we amuse you, you pay us well; and if we fail, you seek elsewhere diversion. Six hundred years ago minstrels and strolling players came by night to the great banqueting hall, and before the leaping fire told their stories and played their play and sang their song. And, if they gave pleasure, there was good food and wine and a roof above them and gold in their purses for the morrow’s journey. And if they failed to please there were blows and curses and a night of rain. To-day a novel is printed upon paper, bound in cloth, and scattered over three continents. There are double-column advertisements in the Sunday papers; there are paragraphs and reviews and luncheon parties. There are agents and royalties and contracts. The writing of a story is a trade that provides many thousands of people with employment. But it is only the surface of life that alters, the principle is the same. A man is telling a story: men and women respond to its humour, or its pathos, or its beauty. They pay richly for their entertainment. But the moment that the story-teller ceases to amuse he is deserted. There are some writers who are pleased to think of themselves as prophets and reformers, who object to the social stigma of their profession. But because they are merchants of hard words they are entertainers none the less. People like to be abused now and then. It is agreeable to sit after a good dinner before a leaping fire, with a decanter of whisky at one’s elbow, and read of the approaching overthrow of Israel. The sense of danger titivates the jaded palate. People do not wish always to be wrapped in cotton wool; they like to be frightened, to be “Grand Guignoled” now and then. To be told that their sins are of such blackness gives them a pleasing sense of their own importance. It is a sensation worth the buying.
It would be hardly, I think, too fanciful to draw a parallel between the artist and the courtesan. The real courtesan, I mean; not the poor drabs who trudge by night down Shaftesbury Avenue. One thinks of “Skittles” driving down Hyde Park in the sixties, to hold a levee by the Achilles statue; “Skittles” who broke hearts and homes and fortunes; Skittles who outlived her friends, her beauty, and her generation to die three years ago unremembered. There is more than a slight resemblance between the life of such a one and of the artist. Like her, he has no social status; like her, he is bought and used and flung away. He pleases as she pleases, for a while, through freshness and vitality and novelty; and those that have had their entertainment, feel no after sense of obligation. As long as he so pleases he is granted a wide licence to flout the conventions with which society has thought it wise to protect itself. Society knows that he is not of her, and she can afford to wait. Everything is forgiven to an “artistic temperament” as long as that temperament is the property of a skilful entertainer. The artist can make what hash he likes of his private life. He can refuse to be accepted without his mistress: and, on the whole, the public prefers its entertainer not to be domesticated like itself. A popular novelist, who had contributed a serial to a Sunday newspaper, was asked to provide the editor with a photograph. He sent a pleasant snap of himself, in his garden, with his wife and children. The snap was returned. “Our readers,” the editor said, “would prefer not to think of you as a married man.”
Much the same licence is accorded to the courtesan, as long as she is beautiful. She can, if she chooses, be rude to men who ask her for a dance. She can make fun of them in public. She rampages through life in the pride of her youth; she can pick and choose. Her charm and her beauty are her capital. She makes a bargain with the world of routine and wealth, the world that sells cotton and builds empires, the industrious, unflagging world that asks in its spare time to be amused. To such a one the world says: “Here are two pictures. Make your choice. You may stay all your life a suburban girl. You will go to subscription dances and get kissed furtively in the passage by smarmy, over-dressed young men, who will boast to their companions of your surrender. One of them you will select to take you to a cinema, and, as a payment, you will allow him to hold your hand. And to one of these young men you will eventually become engaged. You may be very much in love with him, or you may be seeking an escape from the uncongenial surroundings of your home. But in either case the result at the end of three years’ time will be the same. The blue bird will have flown away. You will be a mother and a housewife. You will have settled down to the humdrum of suburban matrimony. Your husband will no longer be satisfied with your company in the evening. He will bring in with him those tedious friends of his who were once your dance partners, those tedious friends grown smarmier and softer with the years. And you will sit sewing in a corner while they discuss the political situation and the latest murder case. There will be not a great deal of money. You will be clothed, not dressed. Your prettiness will soon pass, because you will be unable to give it the right setting of georgette and crêpe-de-chine. And you will gaze enviously at the gay windows of Oxford Circus. Before you are thirty, before one of your hairs is grey, your personal life will be at an end. And you will never have lived. You will be safe, that is all. There will be food to eat, a fire to sit before, a roof above you when you have come to the weakening hours of age.