Only in an age like our own could this ridiculous travesty of an artist pass for an artist. It is only in our age that his neurotic touchiness could possibly be mistaken for strength and vigour; and yet there are hundreds of his kind among the painters and sculptors of the day.
Many a student's call to Art, at present, is merely a reminder, on the part of Nature, that he should cultivate restraint and forbearance, and should go in for commerce; for there is a whole universe between such a man and the artist of value. Not that sensitiveness is absent in the real artist; but it is of a kind which has strength to wait, to reflect, to weigh, and, if necessary, to refrain from action altogether.
"Slow is the experience of all deep wells," says Zarathustra. "Long must they wait ere they know what hath sunk into their depths."[9]
But the people I have just described have only a skin, and any itch upon it they call Art.
No lasting good, no permanent value can come of these irascible people who will be avenged on all that they call beauty, "right away"; who will, so to speak, "pay beauty out," and who cannot contain themselves in its presence. They can but help to swell the ranks of the incompetent, and even if they are successful, as they sometimes are nowadays, all they do is to wreck the sacred calling in which they are but pathological usurpers.
Now, in turning to the more general causes, we find that in accounting for the prevailing anarchy in Europe and in countries like Europe, and particularly in England and in countries like England, Nietzsche pointed to the whole heritage of traditional thought which prevailed and still does prevail in the civilized parts of the Western world, and declared that it was in our most fundamental beliefs, in our most unquestioned dogmas, and in our most vaunted birthrights that this anarchy takes its source.
If Art had lost its prestige in our midst, and even its justification; and if individualism, incompetence, eccentricity, mediocrity and doubt were rife, we must seek the causes of all this neither in Diderot's somewhat disappointing essay on painting, nor in the slur that Rousseau had once cast upon the culture of man, nor in John Stuart Mill's arguments in favour of individualism, nor yet in Spencer's declaration that "the activities we call play are united with the æsthetic activities by the trait that neither subserves in any direct way the processes conducive to life."[10]
All these things are merely symptomatic. Diderot, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Spencer were only symptoms of still deeper influences which have been at work for centuries, and those influences are to be sought in the most vital values upon which our civilization is based.
[4] G. E., p. 145.