The Artistry of Art
When we speak of an artist we do not think of a day-laborer. Somehow there is a connotation of long fingers and delicate features, an implication as of flowers, a suggestion of the super-fine. About him as a halo is the word beauty.
Whatever materials he lays hold of, he plucks out of it beauty: out of the dung-hill the flower, out of the chill moon passion, out of the night light, out of the noon-tide shade. If he is found lying in the gutter, as Oscar Wilde has remarked, he will at least be looking at the stars.
The artist is primarily a temperament. He is a point of view. Life may be a dome of many-colored glass, and the white radiance of eternity thrown through it to our minds in varying colors, but the artist sees them all, and so sees white, or sees none of them and sees black. He looks at life comprehensively, and seeks a unity. Where another is content with detail, the artist demands structure. The general are genial enough to take life as it comes, and are not concerned that it is chaos. The artist either goes forth to meet life, or evades it utterly in both cases for the purpose of making it cosmos. While others are content with a moderate dividend of experience, the artist must have all of experience, or none of it. He must be either a Pan or a Narcissus, a universalist, or an egoist.
The Philistine world talk of artists as something not undesirable certainly as past events, but undesired as present calamities. There is in the air a sense of anxiety concerning them. They make the complacent so uncomfortable. So has the world damned them as unique, apart from the majority, being fearful of their destiny, and has evolved, because of this fear, the false dogma of spontaneous creation in art. A Dante is born the author of the Divine Comedy; a Shelley rises a child from the womb the inevitable father of the Prometheus and the Cenci; a George Meredith is given a somewhat humbler birth in a fashionable tailor’s shop the fated creator of the “Egoist” and Modern Love.
At any play, novel or poem in which destiny played such an omnipotent part the world would turn up its nose, and say: “Absurd! That’s not real, that’s not life.” But in the case of the world’s artists it pleases the general to say: “Well, well, life is stranger than fiction, is it not?”
A modern philosopher has written, and it seems to me most wisely, “Our temperaments are in some sort our destinies”. Now let me admit thus far the world’s conclusion. The true artist is born like the rest of us with a certain temperament, which is in some sort his destiny. But it is at this point we must leave the world. For if it were only this birthright that was required, certainly there would be in this present day a plethora of geniuses.
The artist is primarily a temperament, but secondarily he is an artist. The importance I attach to this secondary cause of creative ability is the importance of the unknown, or at best the unrecognized. For it is in the world’s tradition to ignore this fact. Only the geniuses themselves have spoken for the artistry of art.
Let us consider this paradox for a moment. The world’s idea of an artist as born the child of destiny, conceived in the womb of Fate, fore-doomed a priori; and the world’s idea of all other men as free, at least in part, to form and fashion their own daily lives.
When we speak of an artist we do not think of a day-laborer, nor of labor. We are amused at Whistler’s famous repartee to Ruskin’s lawyer when he asked him how he dared charge so much for an hour’s work, and Whistler replied, “Not for an hour’s work, but for the knowledge of a lifetime,” but as a jury we are not convinced by it. And yet in following the development of certain great poets I am more and more capable of imagining what I know to be true, that, granted the temperament, genius is made by intense industry; and that it is labor which causes the difference between the great man and the unhappy dilettante.