Art and æsthetic experience in the social order. The creative activity which is, to a peculiar extent, the artist's, is sought and practiced to some degree by all men. Genius is rare, but talent of a minor sort is frequent. In the playing of a musical instrument, in the practice of a handicraft, in the cultivation of a garden, ordinary men in modern society find an outlet for invention, craftsmanship, and imagination. To give this joy of creation, in smaller or larger measure, to all men is to promote social happiness. In the discussion of instinct it was pointed out that men come nearest to attaining happiness when they are doing what is their bent by original nature, when they are acting out of sheer love of the activity rather than from compulsion. And since all men possess, although in moderate degree, the creative impulse, to give this impulse a chance is a distinct social good.
The employment of the creative imagination demands both leisure and training. Leisure is needed because, in the routine activities of industry, men's actions are determined not by their imagination, but by the immediacies of practical demands. There may be, as Helen Marot suggests, a possibility of a wide utilization of the creative impulse in industry. But a large part of industrial life must of necessity remain routine. In consequence, during their leisure hours alone, can men find free scope for some form of æsthetic interest and activity. The second requisite is training. Even the poor player of an instrument can derive some pleasure from his performance. And, under the accidents of economic and social circumstance, many a flower may really be born to blush unseen through the fact that its talents receive no opportunity. The occasional "discovery" by a wealthy man of a genius in the slums, indicates how a more liberal and general provision of training in the arts might redound to the general good. And a more widespread endowment of training in the fine arts, if it did not produce many geniuses, might at least produce a number of competent painters and musicians, who, in the practice of their skill, during their leisure, would derive considerable and altogether wholesome pleasure.
While high æsthetic capacity may be lacking in most people, æsthetic appreciation is widely diffused, and the education of taste and the growth in appreciation of the arts have been marked. The museums of art in our large cities report a constantly increasing attendance, both of visitors to the galleries and attendants at lectures. And the crowds which regularly attend musical programs of a sustainedly high character in many cities, winter and summer, are evidence of how widespread and eager is appreciation of the fine arts. In the Scandinavian countries and in Germany one of the most remarkable social phenomena has been the growth of a widely supported people's theater movement, in which there has been consistent support of the highest type of operas and plays.
Art as an industry. The fact that objects of art are themselves immediate satisfactions and supply human wants, makes their provision for large numbers an important social enterprise. Certain forms of art, therefore, become highly industrialized. The provision of the objects of art becomes a profitable business, as it is also made possible only by a large economic outlay. Tolstoy in his What is Art? brings out strikingly the economic basis of artistic enterprises in contemporary society:
For the support of art in Russia [1898], the government grants millions of roubles in subsidies to academies, conservatories, and theatres. In France, twenty million francs are assigned for art, and similar grants are made in Germany and England.
In every large town enormous buildings are erected for museums, academies, conservatories, dramatic schools, and for performances and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workmen—carpenters, masons, painters, joiners, paperhangers, tailors, hairdressers, jewelers, molders, type-setters—spend their whole lives in hard labor to satisfy the demands of art, so that hardly any other department of human activity, except the military, consumes so much energy as this.
Not only is enormous labor spent on this activity, but in it, as in war, the very lives of men are sacrificed. Hundreds of thousands of people devote their lives from childhood to learning to twirl their legs rapidly (dancers), or to touch notes and strings very rapidly (musicians) or to turn every phrase inside out and find a rhyme for every word.[1]
[Footnote 1: Tolstoy: What is Art? pp. 1-2 (written in 1898).]
Tolstoy's point in thus emphasizing the immense energies devoted to artistic enterprises is to lead us to consider what is the end of all this labor. He points out scathingly the ugliness, frivolity, and crudity of much that passes for drama in the theater, for music in the concert hall, and for literature between covers. He pleads for a simple art that shall express with sincerity the genuine emotions of the great mass of men.
Whatever be our estimate of Tolstoy's sweeping condemnation of so much of what has come to be regarded as classic beauty, the point he makes about the commercialization of art is incontrovertible. If art is an industry, the good is determined, as it were, by popular vote. The many must be pleased rather than the discriminating. While, as has been noted, æsthetic appreciation is fairly general, appreciation of the subtler forms of art requires training. The glaring, the conspicuous, the broad effect, is more likely to win rapid popular approval than the subtle, the quiet, and the fragile. That taste is readily educable is true. But when immediate profits are the end, one cannot pause to educate the public. And publishing and the theater are two conspicuous instances of the conflicts that not infrequently arise between standards of economic return and standards of æsthetic merit. Even where there is no deliberate selection of the worse rather than the better, commercial standards operate to put the novel in art at a discount. As already pointed out, we tend to appreciate forms and ideas to which we are accustomed. In consequence, where commercial demands make immediate widespread appreciation necessary, the untried, the odd, the radical innovation in music, literature, or drama, is a questionable venture. There are notable instances of works which, though eventually recognized as great, had to go begging at first for a publisher or a producer. This was the case with some of Meredith's earlier novels; later Meredith, as a publisher's reader, turned down some of Shaw. The same inhospitality met some of the plays of Ibsen and some of the symphonies of Tschaikowsky.