CHAPTER III

ART AND PERSONALITY

We have promised to prove our thesis psychologically, by watching the art process at work, and historically, by studying the art works of the ages. We begin with the former task.

Let us investigate the art process in its elemental forms, as we have seen them in the story of Ogi. Art begins as the effort of man to represent reality; first, for the purpose of bringing it back to his own mind, and second, for the purpose of making it apprehensible to others. Just as Ogi would seek for ways to keep the meat of the aurochs for as long as possible so that he might eat it, so he would keep the memory of the aurochs so that he might contemplate it. And just as he would share the meat of the aurochs in a feast with his fellows, and derive honor and advantage therefrom, so he would use a picture of the aurochs, or a story of the hunt, or a song about it, or a dance reproducing it.

Thus we note two motives, the second of them predominantly social. It is this impulse to communicate ideas and emotions to others, that becomes the dominant motive in art, and is the determining factor in the greatness of art. We share Ogi's memory of the hunt, his thrills of fear, his furious struggle, his triumph over a chunk of brutal and non-rational force. Try it on your own little Ogis, and you will find they never tire of hearing about the aurochs hunt; and here is the essential point-while hearing, they are living in the minds of others, they are becoming social beings. So through the ages the race has developed its great civilizing force, the sympathetic imagination, which has brought the tribes together into nations, and ultimately may bring the nations into the human race.

The pleasures which we derive from a picture or representation of reality are many and complicated. There is, first of all, the pleasure of recognition. In its cruder form it is like guessing a puzzle; in more mature reproductions we have the pleasure of following the details. "That is old Smith," we say "even to the wart on his nose!" We say: "You can see the shine of the fish's scales, you can wipe the fuzz off the peach, you can bury

your hands in the birds' feathers!" But is that all there is to art? Manifestly not, for if it were, the sons and grandsons of Ogi would have been put out of business by the photographic camera. You can take a microscope to the product of a camera, and discover endless more details a bigger magic than any son or grandson of Ogi has achieved.

But even supposing that a micro-photograph were the highest art, still you could not get away from the influence of personality. There would always remain the problem: Upon what shall the camera-lens be focussed?

The first artist I met in my life was a painter, the late J. G. Brown. He used to paint pictures of newsboys and country urchins, and the quaint-looking old fellows who loaf in cross-roads stores. As a boy I watched him at work, and roamed about the country with him when he selected his subjects. At this distance I remember only two things about him, his benevolent gray beard, and the intense repugnance he expressed when I pointed out an old war veteran who had lost an arm. Deformity and mutilation-oh, horrible! Never could an artist tolerate such a subject as that!

But growing older, I observed that some of the world's greatest artists had made a habit of painting mutilations and deformities. I saw "Old Masters" portraying crucifixions and martyrdoms; I saw the nightmares of Doré, and the war paintings of Verestchagin. So I understand the difference between a man who wishes to probe the deeps of the human spirit, and one who wishes merely to be popular with children and childish-minded adults. The late J. G. Brown was a "realist," according to the popular use of the term; that is, having selected a subject, he painted him exactly as he was; but by deliberately excluding from his artistic vision everything suggesting pain and failure, he left you as the sum total of his work an utterly false and sentimental view of life.

Most artists go even further in imposing their personality upon their work. Having selected a subject, they do not reproduce it exactly, but modify it, emphasizing this trait or that. This process is known as "idealizing." The word is generally understood to mean making the thing more pretty, more to the beholder's taste; but this is a misuse of the word. To idealize a subject means to

modify it according to an idea, to make it expressive of that idea, whether pleasing or otherwise. Henry James tells a story about a portrait painter, who takes as his subject a prominent man; divining the fundamental cheapness and falsity of the man's character, he paints a portrait which brings out these qualities, and so for the first time reveals the man to the world, and causes the man's wife to leave him. That is one kind of "idealizing"; but manifestly the portrait painter who practiced that method would have a hard time to find sitters.

What generally happens in such cases we saw when Ogi was invited to portray the Witch Doctor and the Old Man of his tribe. The last great hero of the Hohenzollerns, who paid for those white marble monsters at which I tittered in the Sieges Allée, is cursed with a withered left arm, a cause of agonies of humiliation to his strutting soul. In his photographs you will see him carefully posed, so that his left arm is partly turned away. But how about the countless paintings he had made of himself? Do you imagine that the painter ever failed to supply a sound and sturdy left arm? In the same way, in the pictorial labors of all the Ogis of Egypt, you will find the ruler always represented as of abnormal stature. Manifestly, in a settled empire the ruler will be of smaller stature than his fighting men, because he will be coddled in childhood; but the smaller he becomes in reality, the more rigid the art convention that he is big.

It was for offenses such as this that Plato drove the artists out of his Republic. They were liars and pretenders, the whole tribe, and destroyed men's respect for truth. But as a matter of fact, this kind of idealizing of rulers and fighting men may be entirely sincere. The artist is more sensitive than his fellowmen-that is what makes him an artist; he shrinks from pain and violence, and feels a real awe for authority. He thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in making him bigger in body, the artist is acting as a seer and philosopher, bringing out an inner truth. Such is the clue to the greater part of our present-day art standards; snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition, also bragging and strutting and beating of tom-toms. Every little tea-party poet and semi-invalid cherishes a strong and cruel dream-Nietzsche with his Blond Beast, and Carlyle

with his Hero-worship, and Henley with his Song of the Sword, and Kipling with his God of our Fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line.

CHAPTER IV

THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE

Little by little we now begin to note the outlines of Ogi's art code. Two negative propositions we may consider as clear: Ogi does not paint the thing as it really is; and he does not paint the thing as he sees it. The former he could not do, for he does not know what the thing really is; and the second he would consider bad manners, bad morals and bad taste. Ogi paints the thing as he thinks it ought to be; or, more commonly, he paints the thing as he thinks other people ought to think it to be.

And now comes the question: Why, having chosen his subject, does Ogi idealize it according to one idea, and not

Raccording to another? Are such decisions matters of acci

dent or whim? Assuredly not; for human psychology has its laws, which we can learn to understand. We ask:. What are the laws of Ogi, his hand and his eye and his brain? What forces determine that he shall present his "reality" in this way and not in that?

The first thing to say is: Don't ask Ogi about it, for he cannot tell you. Ogi is not at all what he thinks he is, and does not produce his works of art from the motives he publishes to the world. We shall find that the fellow has been almost too shrewd-he has contrived a set of pretenses so clever that he has fooled, not merely his public, but himself. He who would produce a great work of art, said Milton, must first make a work of art of his own life. Ogi has taken this maxim literally, and got out a fancy line of trade-lies.

It is perfectly plain that the artist is a social product, a member of a tribe and swayed by tribal impulses. But you find him denying this with passion, and picturing himself as a solitary soul dwelling in an ivory tower, galloping through the sky on a winged horse, visited and directed by heaven-sent messengers, and wooed by mysterious lovely ladies called Muses. At the same time, however, he wants at least one lady love who is real; and this lady

love does not often share his interest in the imaginary lady loves. On the contrary, she is accustomed to point out the brutal fact that Ogi wants three good chunks of aurochs meat every twenty-four hours; also, the lady herself wants a little meat-and more important yet, she wants it served according to the best tribal conventions, those to which she was accustomed before she ran away and married an artist. The tribal law decrees that the glass on her table must be cut by hand, even though it is cut crooked; the linen on her table must be embroidered by hand, because, if it is done wholesale, by machinery, it is not "art."

Theoretically, it is possible for an artist to produce his art-works for the approval of the imaginary Muses; but as a matter of fact you find that the most solitary old Ogi has somebody, a faithful friend, or an old housekeeper, or even a child, whose approval he craves. Even an artist on a desert island will be thinking that some day a ship will land there; while young and rebellious artists produce for a dream public in the future. I myself did all my early work from that motive; and in Voltaire I came upon what seemed to me the cruelest sentence ever penned: "Letters to posterity seldom reach their destination !"

Ogi must have an audience. So, in his selecting, his idealizing, and his other varieties of feigning, he has always before him the problem: Will this please my public? And to what extent? And for how long? There is no birth control movement in Ogi's brain; vast numbers of dream children are born there, and he must select a few of them to be nourished and raised up to reality, while he sentences the others to be starved and buried.

Having become a professional, living by his work, Qgi is under the necessity of finding an audience that will feed him. And remember, it is not merely the three chunks of aurochs meat per day, and three more for Mrs. Ogi; it is the means of serving Mrs. Ogi's meat in the fashion her social position requires. Surely I do not have to prove the proposition that Ògi cannot produce beautiful and inspiring works of art while Mrs. Ogi is raising ructions in the cave!

So comes the great struggle in the artist's soul, a struggle which has gone on for three thousand, three