No More Learning

The
popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It
is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is
too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style,
psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned
are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most
uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such
requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament,
would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the
amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his
individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender
everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are
a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true,
but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the
two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may
be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this
kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one
comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular
control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any
attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to
the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large
measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike
novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of
Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects
his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right
in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a
disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For
what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny
of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
In Art,
the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not
because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never
taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar
them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely,
according to one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a
great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and
Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the
Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter,
so that I need not dwell upon the point.

But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public
really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they
saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama;
and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of
the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a
country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the
classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the
free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer
why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not
paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of
them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh
mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it
appears they get so angry and bewildered, that they always use two
stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What
they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is
grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a
beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly
immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing
that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter
to subject-matter.