Villagers
Although the serious affairs of life are met as conscientiously by the man or woman who has the real spirit of the Village, nevertheless each of them assuredly shows less of that sordidness and mad desire for money so prevalent throughout the land....
The real villager's life is better balanced. He produces written words of value, or material objects that offer utility and delight. He sings his songs. He has a good time.—From the Ink Pot (a Greenwich Village paper).
quoted the above to a practical friend and he countered by quoting Dickens' delightful fraud, "Harold Skimpole":
"This is where the bird lives and sings! They pluck his feathers now and then, and clip his wings, but he sings, he sings!... Not an ambitious note, but still he sings!"
And my friend proceeded heartlessly: "'Skimpole' would have made a perfect Villager!"
It is hard to answer cold prose when your arguments are those of warm poetry. Not that prose has power to conquer poetry, but that the languages are so hopelessly dissimilar. They need an interpreter and the post is not a sinecure.
I want to try to throw a few dim sidelights on these Villagers whom I love and whom I know to be as alien to the average metropolitan consciousness and perception as though they were aboriginal representatives of interior and unexplored China. They are perhaps chiefly strange because of their ridiculous and lovely simplicity.
The artistic instinct, or impulse, is not particularly rare. Many persons have a real love for beautiful things, even a real aptitude for designing or reproducing them. The creative instinct is something vastly different. Creative artists,—great painters or sculptors, great illustrators, and wizards in pencil and pen and charcoal effects,—must be both born and made; and there are, the gods know, few enough of them, all told! Until comparatively recent times, everyone gifted with the blessing of an artistic sense turned it into a curse by trying to paint, draw or model, while the world yawned, laughed, turned away in disgust; and the real artists flung up their hands to heaven and cried: "What next?"