And that is the way they act. Sometimes I see peo-pul in this kind of picture: a cosmic squirming mass of black caterpillars moving first one way and then the other, slowly and vaguely, not like measuring worms who cover the ground or like ants who have their definite business, but heavily, blindly, in the stunned manner peculiar to caterpillar organisms. They peer and poke and nod and ponder and creep and crawl and scramble and grow dizzy and turn around and around, wondering whether they shall go on the way they started or go back the way they came or refuse to go at all. Once in a hundred years one of the caterpillars breaks his skin and flies away—a butterfly through the unfriendly air. Then the black mass writhes in protest and arranges that the next butterfly shall have his wings well clipped. I know my metaphor is not scientifically intact, but what does it matter? It satisfies my impulse—which is simply to call names. So I might as well say “People are caterpillars” and be done with it.
I have a painter artist friend who says that to talk about the artist in life is simply to repeat one of those silly phrases that mean nothing. But it means entirely too much, I think—which is the reason there are so many of the species in evidence: about two in a million perhaps—and I know that is far too optimistic. That would mean some four or five thousand people in the living world who have nothing in common with caterpillars. The count is too high!
For really there are no artists among us. Living picturesquely, artistically, has nothing to do with being an artist in life; and even living with the poise that marks a good piece of art hasn’t necessarily anything to do with it. If you ask me to choose a type of the real artist in life I shall say Nietzsche rather than Goethe. For the artist in life has inevitably to do with prophecy rather than with holding up the mirror; and that means chiefly—to have strength!
Now where are the strong people? Of course “strength” is an indefinite term. Sometimes it seems a matter of dominating the superfluous; sometimes it seems the power “to meet fate with an equal gaze”; and sometimes the resource or the daring to push one’s fate to a farther goal. But these are beginnings! If you pick up what is known as your soul from a wreckage and make it march on you think you are very strong. If you manage to make it march with pride and joy you think you are a Superman. But this is easily within the effort of Everyman. I am talking of artists now and of the radiant possibility that such beings may develop in this uninspired land; and, in these terms, to be strong is to help create the farther goal!
It’s disgusting to realize that the people we know are not this sort. Take any twenty of your friends and classify them briefly as types. Perhaps there are five who have “personality”: but one of them has no energy, one no will, one no brains, one no imagination, and the other no “spirit;” there are five who have “intellect”: one of them has no “character,” one no strength, one can’t see or hear or feel, one sees so inclusively that he has no goal, and one sees so “straight” that he misses the road on both sides; there are five who have a capacity for art: one is lazy, one is ignorant, one is afraid, one is vain, one has a lie in him; and there are five who have a capacity for living: one can’t think, one can’t work, one can’t persevere, one can’t stand alone, one wastes his gift on others and never realizes himself. You can work out such combinations ad infinitum and you can excuse them to the same distance by calling it all a matter of having the defects of your qualities. Why not call it a matter of having the complacency of your defects?
If you’ve not got imagination you can’t help it; if you’ve not got strength you can get it. It won’t make you an artist but it will make it impossible for you to be confused with the caterpillars. If you’ve got a vision—an Idea—and can find the strength to fly toward it you’ll be an artist in life. This is not to confuse the artist with the prophet. You can’t very well do that because the terms are so interdependent. There has never been an artist without the prophet in him, and there has never been a prophet who was not an artist. It’s a different thing if you’re talking about priests or about inferior artists. And then of course you have to remember that there are no such things as inferior artists. Priest and demagogue are the names for those who fail as prophets or as artists.
And what is the use of such a harangue? There is very little use. People won’t be artists. Peo-pul don’t change. But the individual changes, and that is the hope. Individuals are persons who can stand alone. There ought to be Individuals coming out of a generation brought up on Nietzsche. Such an upbringing has taught us at least two things: first that he who goes forward goes alone, and second that it is weakness rather than nobility to succumb to the caterpillars. Yes, and something else: that it is from superabundance rather than from hunger that creation comes. We start out fortified with all this. We don’t need to wrestle with our gods every time the old laws threaten to submerge us; our universe doesn’t totter when the caterpillars groan that we will be lonely if we go alone or hurt if we are misunderstood or tragic if we don’t compromise. We don’t mind these things.
It really all comes to one end: Life for Art’s sake. We believe in that because it is the only way to get more Life—a finer quality, a higher vibration. This bigger concept doesn’t mean merely more Beauty. It means more Intensity. In short, it means the New Hellenism. And that is a step beyond the old Greek ideal of proportion and moderation. It pushes forward to the superabundance that dares abandonment.
Art and nothing else! Art is the great means of making life possible, the great seducer to life, the great stimulus of life.—Nietzsche.