IN this matter, most decidedly, we need expert advice. Let us start with Beauty. The one who best understands Beauty is undoubtedly the Artist. Let us call in the Artist.... Will you question him, or shall I? You prefer to do it yourself, I see. Very well, then—but please try to get to the point as soon as possible!

The Questioner. What we want to know is this: is it possible to teach the child to become an artist?

The Artist. He is an artist already.

The Questioner. What do you mean!

The Artist. Just what I say. The child is an artist; and the artist is always a child. The greatest periods of art have always been those in which artists had the direct, na?ve, unspoiled vision of the child. The aim of our best artists today is to recover that vision. They are trying to see the world as children see it, and to record their vision of it as a child would do. Have you[Pg 101] ever looked at children’s drawings—not the sort of things they are taught to do by mistaken and mischievous adults, but the pictures that are the natural expressions of their creative impulses? And haven’t you observed that modern paintings are coming to be more and more like such pictures?

The Questioner. Well—er, yes, I had noticed something of the kind! But is that sort of thing necessarily art? I mean—well, I don’t want to attempt to argue with you on a subject in which you are an expert, but—

The Artist. Oh, that’s all right! The modern artist is ready to discuss art with anybody—the more ignorant of the subject, the better! You see, we want art to cease to be the possession of a caste—we want it to belong to everybody. As a member of the human race, your opinions are important to us.

The Questioner. That is very kind of you. I fear it is rather in the nature of a digression, but, since I may ask without fear of seeming presumptuous,—are those horrid misshapen green nudes of Matisse, and those cubical blocks of paint by I-forget-his-name, and all that sort of thing—are they your notion of what art should be?

The Artist. Mine? Oh, not at all! They[Pg 102] are merely two out of a thousand contemporary attempts to recover the na?ve childlike vision of which I spoke. If you will compare them with a child’s drawing, or with a picture by a Navajo Indian, or with the sketch of an aurochs traced on the wall of his cave by one of our remote ancestors, you will note an essential difference. Those artists were not trying to be na?ve and childlike; they were na?ve and childlike. The chief merit of our modern efforts, in my personal opinion, is in their quality as a challenge to traditional and mistaken notions of what art should be—an advertisement, startling enough, and sometimes maliciously startling, of the artist’s belief that he has the right to be first of all an artist.

The Questioner. Now we are coming to the point. What is an artist?

The Artist. I told you, a child. And by that, I mean one who plays with his materials—not one who performs a set and perhaps useful task with them. A creator—

The Questioner. But a creator of what? Not of Beauty, by any chance?

The Artist. Incidentally of Beauty.

The Questioner. There we seem to disagree. If those horrid pictures—

[Pg 103]The Artist. Suppose you tell me what Beauty is.

The Questioner. It seems to me quite simple. Beauty is—well—a thing is either beautiful, or it isn’t. And—

The Artist. Just so; the only trouble is that so few of us are able to agree whether it is or isn’t. You yourself have doubtless changed your opinions about what is beautiful many times in the course of your career as an art-lover; and the time may come when you will cherish some horrid nude of Matisse’s as your dearest possession. Let us admit, like the wise old poet, that Beauty is not a thing which can be argued about. It can only be produced.

The Questioner. But if we don’t know what Beauty is, how can we produce it?

The Artist. I have already told you—as the incidental result of creative effort.

The Questioner. Effort to create what?

The Artist. Oh, anything.

The Questioner. Are you joking?

The Artist. I never was more serious in my life. And I should really inform you that I am merely repeating the familiar commonplaces of modern esthetics. Beauty is the incidental result of the effort to create a house, a sword,—

[Pg 104]The Questioner. Or a shoe?

The Artist. Yes. I have some peasant shoes from Russia which are very beautiful. You can see shoes which are works of art in any good museum.

The Questioner. But hardly in any boot-shop window!

The Artist. Those shoes were not created—they were done as a set task. They were not made by peasants or craftsmen for pleasure—they were made by wage-slaves who did them only because they must. Do not for a moment imagine that it is the difference in materials or shape that matters—it is the difference in the spirit with which they are made. I have seen modern shoes which are works of art—because they were made by a bootmaker who is an artist and does what pleases himself.

The Questioner. Do they please anybody else?

The Artist. Eh?

The Questioner. Would you be seen wearing them?

The Artist. Would I be seen drinking my coffee from a cup that had been turned on a wheel by a man who loved the feel of the clay under his fingers and who knew just the right[Pg 105] touch to give the brim? Was Richard Coeur du Lion’s sword less a sword because it had been made by an artist who dreamed over the steel instead of by a tired man in a hurry? I cannot afford to wear shoes made by my bootmaker-artist friend—but I wish I could, for they fit!

The Questioner. Will you give me his address?—I beg your pardon—Please go on.

The Artist. I was about to say, you wrong the artist if you think that he is not interested in utility. It is only because utility has become bound up with slavery that artists and people with artistic impulses revolt against it and in defiance produce utterly and fantastically useless things. This will be so, as long as being useful means being a slave. But art is not an end in itself; it had its origin, and will find its destiny, in the production of useful things. For example—

The Questioner. Yes, do let us get down to the concrete!

The Artist. Suppose you are out walking in a hilly country, and decide to whittle yourself a stick. Your wish is to make something useful. But you can’t help making it more than useful. You can’t help it, because, if you are not in a hurry, and nobody else is bossing the job, you find other impulses besides the utilitarian one coming[Pg 106] in to elaborate your task. Shall I name those impulses?

The Questioner. If you will.

The Artist. I am not a psychologist, but I would call them the impulse to command and the impulse to obey.

The Questioner. To command and obey what?

The Artist. Your material, whatever it is—paint and canvas, words, sounds, clay, marble, iron. In this case, the stick of wood.

The Questioner. I’m afraid I do not quite—

The Artist. The impulse to command comes first—the impulse to just show that stick who is master! the desire to impose your imperial will upon it. I suppose you might call it Vanity. And that impulse alone would result in your making something fantastic and grotesque or strikingly absurd—and yet beautiful in its way. But it is met and checked by the other impulse—the impulse to obey. No man that ever whittled wood but has felt that impulse. He feels that he must not do simply what he wants to do, but also what the wood wants done to it. The real artist does not care to treat marble as if it were soft, nor paint and canvas as though they were three-dimensional.[Pg 107] He could if he wanted to—but he respects his medium. There is an instinctive pleasure in letting it have its way. I suppose you might call it Reverence. And this Vanity and this Reverence, the desire to command and the desire to obey, when they are set free in the dream and effort of creation, produce something which is more than useful. That something more is what we call Beauty.—Do you care to have me go further into the mechanics of beaut............