The Artist (Galsworthy)

by John Galsworthy

 

The Artist

By JOHN GALSWORTHY

Illustrated by by Guy Pene Du Bois

THE inner workings of the artist's mind, especially the artist of the new schools, is a puzzle to the layman. This sketch of Mr. Galsworthy's is as accurate a chart as we have ever seen published

HE had long known, of course, that to say the word "bourgeois" with contempt was a little bit old-fashioned, and he did his utmost not to; yet was there a still small voice within him that would whisper: "Those people—I want to and I do treat them as my equals. I have even gone so far of late years as to dress like them, to play their games, to eat regularly, to drink little, to love decorously, with many other bourgeois virtues, but in spite of all I remain where I was, an inhabitant of another—" and just as he thought the whispering voice was going to die away, it would add hurriedly, "and a better world."

It worried him; and he would diligently examine the premises of that small secret conclusion, hoping to find a flaw in the justness of his conviction that he was superior. But he never did; and for a long time he could not discover why.

Their conduct often struck him as almost superfluously good. They were brave; much braver than he was conscious of being; clean-thinking, oh, far more clean-thinking than a man like himself, necessarily given to visions of all kinds; they were straightforward, almost ridiculously so, as it seemed to one who saw the inside-out of everything almost before he saw the outside-in; they were simple, as touchingly simple as little children, to whom Scriptures and Post-Impressionism had combined to award the crown of wisdom; they were kind and self-denying in a way that often made him feel quite desperately his own selfishness—and yet, they were inferior. It was simply maddening that he could never rid himself of that impression.

It was one November afternoon, while talking with another artist, that the simple reason struck him with extraordinary force and clarity: He could make them, and they could not make him!

It was clearly this which caused him to feel so much like God when they were about. Glad enough, as any man might be, of that discovery, it did not set his mind at rest. He felt that he ought rather to be humbled than elated. And he went to work at once to be so, saying to himself: "I am just, perhaps, a little nearer to the Creative Purpose than the rest of the world—a mere accident, nothing to be proud of; I can't help it, nothing to make a fuss about, though people will!" For it did seem to him sometimes that the whole world was in conspiracy to make him feel superior—as if there were any need! He would have felt much more comfortable if that world had despised him, as it used to in the old days, for then the fire of his conviction could with so much better grace have flared to heaven; there would have been something fine about a superiority leading its own forlorn hope; but this trailing behind the drums and trumpets of a Press and Public so easily taken in, he felt to be both flat and a little degrading. True, he had his moments, as when his eyes would light on sentences like this (penned generally by clergymen): "All this talk of Art is idle; what really matters is Morals." Then indeed his spirit would flame, and after gazing at "is Morals" with flashing eye and curling lip, and wondering whether it ought to have been "are Morals," he would say to whomsoever might happen to be there: "These bourgeois! What do they know? What can they see?" and without waiting for an answer, would reply: "Nothing! Nothing. Less than nothing!" and mean it. It was at moments such as these that he realized how he not only despised but almost hated those dense and cocky Philistines who could not see his obvious superiority. He felt that he did not lightly call them by such names, because they really were dense and cocky, and no more able to see things from his point of view than they were to jump over the moon. These fellows could see nothing except from their own confounded viewpoint! They were so stodgy, too; and he gravely distrusted anything static. Flux, flux, and once more flux! He knew by intuition that an artist alone had the capacity for concreting the titles of life in forms that were not deleterious to anybody. For rules and canons he recognized the necessity with his head (including his tongue), but never with his heart; except of course the rules and canons of Art. He worshipped these; and when anybody like Tolstoi came along and said: "Blow Art!" or words to that effect, he hummed like bees caught on a gust of wind. What did it matter whether you had anything to express, so long as you expressed it? That only was "pure æsthetics," as he often said.

TO place before the Public eye something so exquisitely purged of thick and muddy actuality that it might be us perfectly without direct appeal today as it would be two thousand years hence, this was an ambition to which in truth he nearly always attained; this only was Great Art. He would assert with his last breath—which was rather short, for he suffered from indigestion—that one must never concrete anything in terms of ordinary nature. No! one must devise pictures of life that would be equally unfamiliar to men in A.D. 2520, as they had been in A.D. 1920; and when an inconsiderate person drew his attention to the fact that to the spectator in 2520 the most naturalistic pictures of the life of 1920 would seem quite convincingly fantastic, so that there was no need for him to go out of his way to devise fantasy—he would stare. For he was emphatically not one of those, who did not care a button what the form was, so long as the spirit of the artist shone clear and potent through the pictures he drew. No, no; he either demanded the poetical, the thing that got off the ground, with the wind in its hair (and he himself would make the wind, rather perfumed); or—if not the poetical—something observed with extreme fidelity and without the smallest touch of that true danger to Art, the temperamental point of view. "No!" he would say, "It*s our business to put it down just as it is, to see it, not to feel it. In feeling damnation lies." And nothing gave him greater uneasiness than to find the emotions of anger, scorn, love, reverence, or pity surging within him as he worked, for he knew that they would, if he did not at once master them, spoil a certain splendid vacuity that he demanded of all Art. In painting, Rafael, Tintoretto, and Holbein pleased him greatly; in fiction, Salammbô was his model, for, as he very justly said, you could supply to it what soul you liked—there being no inconvenient soul already in possession.

AS can be well imagined, his conviction of being, in a small way, God, permeated an outlook that was passionless and impartial to a degree—except perhaps toward the bourgeoisie, with their tiring morals, and peculiar habits. If he had a weakness, it was his paramount desire to suppress in himself any symptoms of temperament, except just that temperament of having no temperament, which seemed to him the only one permissible to an artist, who, as he said, was nothing if not simply a recorder, or a weaver of beautiful lines in the air.

Record and design, statement and decoration—these, in combination, constituted creation! It was to him a certain source of pleasure that he had discovered this. He was, of course, as all artists should be, avid of sensations, but perfectly careful not to feel them—that Is, beyond, as it were, a physical point, so that he might be able to record them, or use them for his weaving in a purely æsthetic manner. The moment they impinged on his spirit and reason, and sent the blood to his head, he reined in, and began tracing lines in the air, a practice that never failed him.

It was his deliberate opinion that a work of art quite as great as the "Bacchus and Ariadne" could be made out of a kettle singing on a hob. You had merely to record it with beautiful lines and color; and what—in parenthesis—could lend itself more readily to beautiful treatment of lines woven in the air than steam rising from a spout? It was a subject, too, which in its very essence almost precluded temperamental treatment, so that this abiding temptation was removed from the creator. It could be transferred to canvas with a sort of immortal blandness—black, singing, beautiful. All that cant, such as: "The greater the artist's spirit, the greater the subject he will treat, and the greater achievement attain, technique living equal," was to him beneath contempt. The spirit did not matter because one must not intrude it, and since one must not intrude it, the more unpretentious the subject, the less temptation one had to diverge from impersonality, that first principle of Art. Oranges on a dish was probably the finest subject one could meet with; unless one chanced to dislike oranges. As for what people called "criticism of life," he maintained that such was only permissible when the criticism was so sunk into the very fibre of a work as to be imperceptible to the most searching eye. When this was achieved he thought it extremely valuable. Anything else was simply the work of the moralist, of the man who took sides and used his powers of expression to embody a temperamental and therefore an obviously one-sided view of his subject; and, however high those powers of expression might be, he could not admit that this was in any sense real art. He could never forgive Leonardo da Vinci, because, he said, "the fellow was always trying to put the scientific side of himself into his confounded paintings, and not just content to render faithfully in terms of decoration"; nor could he ever condone Euripides for letting his philosophy tincture his plays. And, if it were advanced that the former was the greatest painter and the latter the greatest dramatist the world had ever seen, he would say: "That may be, but they weren't artists, of course."

He was fond of the words "of course"; they gave the impression that he could not be startled, as was right and proper for a man occupying his post, a little nearer to the Creative Purpose than those others. As mark of that position, he always permitted himself just one eccentricity, changing it every year, his mind being subtle—not like those of certain politicians or millionaires, content to wear orchids or drive zebras all their lives. Anon it would be a little pointed beard and no hair to speak of; next year, no beard, and wings; the year after, a pair of pince-nez with alabaster rims, very cunning; once more anon, a little pointed beard. In these ways he singled himself out just enough, no more; for he was no poseur, believing in his own place in the scheme of things too deeply.

His views on matters of the day varied, of course, with the views of those he talked to, since it was his privilege always to see either the other side or something so much more subtle on the same side as made that side the other.

But all topical thought and emotion was be side the point for one who lived in his work; who lived to receive impressions and render them again so faithfully that you could not tell he had ever received them. His was—as he sometimes felt—a rare and precious personality.