John Collings Squire

“ It merely serves to show how impossible it is to eradicate men's higher impulses, and the feeling for Art goes with the rest, lake away long hours, take away slums—take away, in fact, everything we've got, and put its exact opposite in its place, and amongst the things which will come again to the surface of the people's soul will be the old, irrepressible yearning after Art. ”

“ The shortest way in which to combat these assaults would be to say right away to Capitalism: "Pluck the beam out of your own eye before thou pluckest out the mote which is in thy brother's—or, rather, thy son's." If the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of these several conditions is the test of a system's attitude towards Art, Capitalism stands trebly condemned out of its own mouth ”

“ It may be an open question as to whether an artist should be absolutely free from any employment except his art. But at all events he never has been under Capitalism. If one excepts the painters—and most of those have had a very bad time in early life, while some have died in extreme poverty—one finds that the greater number of geniuses, English and foreign, have been forced not only to work for a living, but to do uncongenial and painful work for a living. ”

“ When all men are economically free, or even partially so, culture is bound to be far more general than it ever can be in a population mainly composed of wage-slaves or chattel-slaves; and when culture is general, genius will never be neglected.
We come to Capitalism. Instead of looking back, we will look around. Once more we will see how Art fares in these two great respects: How far is the general artistic instinct of the people given free play, and how far is the individual genius encouraged to exercise his powers to the fullest? ”

“ But, indeed, one cannot draw the line between the man who removes ugliness of any description and the man who is consciously serving Art. If we feed a hungry child, we arc in a certain sense helping the cause of Art. If we pull down a filthy cottage and erect something habitable in its place, we are doing so no less. The ancient identities between Beauty and Good, and between Ugliness and Evil are as true now as ever they were. ”

“ The two great requisites for the free development of the artistic instinct—a not too-crushing burden of mechanical labour, and a fair amount of leisure time—were absent as far as the mass of the people were concerned. Art was the concern of the few, and the few were agreed that this was as it should be. Culture, as in our own day, was deliberate, and not spontaneous; and the Romans, like ourselves, laid far too much stress upon the particular in a man's art and too little on the general. With them, as with us, the vast majority of the population was cheated out of its rightful inheritance. ”

“ And as, for the community at large, it seems as clear as daylight to me that better material conditions and a freer life will bring out again all those instincts which in many men are suppressed under Capitalism. Art will give pleasure to work and beauty to the world. And beauty breeds like every other living thing—except the upper classes. The more beautiful the world becomes, the more men's efforts will be centred on making it beautiful. On what lines these efforts will run it were a little rash to attempt to forecast. Men will attempt to abolish ugliness wherever possible ”

“ Under a competitive commercial system, where cheapness is the Holy Grail, almost every single thing you can think of is bound to be a triumph of ugliness. For the beautifying of work means the expenditure of a certain amount of the workman's time, and if one firm tried this the others would undersell it with cheaper though uglier articles; and, with things as they are, few men can afford to reject the cheaper in favour of the dearer if they both equally well serve the primary material purpose for which they have been made. ”

“ One cannot think of a single great writer whose first work has been received with anything but coldness or abuse from the critics. Time has justified them all. The few have over and over again shown themselves utterly without judgment, but as these works have gradually filtered through to the people they have been acclaimed as masterpieces. ”

“ It is certain, at all events, that Art, as the flower of life, will always be the companion and helpmate of humanity, and must always reflect the character of its own genesis and environment, and be both the imperishable record and true monument of the race and the social state which gave it birth. ”

“ Capitalism has never allowed the artist to live for his art—at least not until he has become almost too old to enjoy his leisure. The only way by which the gifted writer or painter has been able to secure case and independence in early life has been by prostituting his gifts to the caprice of his masters. ”

“ It may truly be said that it takes a lifetime to produce beautiful work in Art, yet, after all, an artist is, primarily, a man or a woman, and not a specialised function. The more understanding, the more sympathy an artist has in life and labour, surely the better for his art, and a general training as a useful citizen should at least precede specialisation in any branch of Art. ”

“ If we consider, however, how largely the question of Art enters into human life—into, indeed, it might almost be said, every sphere of human activity, in some form or another, since there is no labour which does not recognise the exercise of some kind of mental or manual skill, or both—we may reasonably come to regard Art, in its social bearing, and connected, as it is, with the crafts of common life, as a necessity. ”

“ I have no doubt that if, at the present time, a man similarly gifted should arise to sing the wrongs of the income-tax payer he could feather his nest well in a few weeks.
It is a commonplace that the true test of Art is the test of time. ”

“ In Egypt, in Mexico, in Assyria, in Babylonia, and in the East there has always been a helpless proletariat ground down by a master-class, and the artistic instincts of the majority have been stunted in infancy and stifled in later life. But there has been one period where these instincts have had, to a great extent, free play; and that period was the Middle Age in Western Europe. The reign of omnipotent capital had not yet come, and the worker was, within limits, his own master. ”

“ Genius takes some little time to be appreciated, and then a whole people is always a safer judge than an individual who is asked to give an immediate opinion. But, frankly, is there any reason why you should thus keep the artists as a breed apart, a sort of Levites? A poet eats, sleeps, and drinks, and (if he is a sensible man) plays billiards. There seems to me to be no valid reason why he should not spend three or four hours a day in some socially necessary labour, mental or physical—always giving him a choice of occupation, of course. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the artists, when Art was in its infancy, took their part in the ordinary work as well as doing their own, we may take it that in a Socialistic State the artists could do a few hours ordinary labour a day, and neither they nor their Art, nor their neighbours would be any the worse for it. In fact, a little thought about the origin of Art will make one realise that all this cantish outcry about "Will Socialism starve the artist?" ”

“ With the enormously-increased leisure which would be at the command of any community under Socialism, when labour would be directed not for the increase of profits for the benefit of individual owners, but organised for the service and to supply the wants of the whole people, and supposing that a certain amount of ordinary useful work or service to be required of all able-bodied citizens, each would still have a large margin of spare time which might be spent in the pursuit of Art by any who developed talent and taste in that direction. ”

“ But how does Capitalism treat those rare ones who are born with exceptional gifts? How far is genius allowed to travel untrammelled along its own peculiar lines. And this, perhaps, is the crux of the whole matter, for it is in connection with the fate of the individual artist that the hottest attacks from this quarter are made.
Our opponents lay down three dicta: That the artist must be free from the burden of extraneous work, and that he would not be so under Socialism; that he must be given the necessary means to live a decent life, and that he would not get them under Socialism ”

“ That is what is happening when we see talented painters wasting their time in painting vast portraits of rich nonentities or their wives for the Academy show. Your magnate hears that X.Y.Z. is a good painter, but he would see him a long way further before he would commission him to paint anything but a portrait of himself. Ostentation and taste can never exist side by side.
As the painter can make money by flattering the Capitalist's vanity through reflecting his ugly features, so the literary man can make money by reflecting his ugly thought—political or otherwise. ”

“ The matter which we are about to consider is not one about which I feel myself peculiarly competent to speak, but it is at least one which many people regard as of very great, if not of supreme importance, and one to which comparatively little really careful attention has been paid either by the opponents of Socialism or by its advocates. It is true that many upholders of the present capitalistic system talk in a vague sort of way about Socialism being destructive of Art, without ever making any attempt to support the statement by serious argument. ”

“ While men of repute become overburdened with work, and have a practical monopoly in certain directions, the struggle for recognition among the young and unknown grows even more severe; and. while success can command large fees at one end of the scale, there is a disproportionate drop at the other end, and unrecognised talent often'has to do uncongenial work, or work unworthy of its best powers, in order to live. Yet the profits of the most, successful artist are as nothing compared to those of the successful dealer in Art. ”

“ When, too, the energies of humanity are concentrated upon perfecting the conditions of human life itself, and on increasing its pleasurable resources, and cultivating the aesthetic faculties, it is quite possible that the community might be prepared to make even considerable sacrifices for the sake of the beauty and joy in works of Art—as indeed they have always done. ”

“ Nevertheless it is a great pity, that some qualified person does not devote himself to a full inquiry into the relations between the prosperity of Art and the economic structure of society; as the publication of such an inquiry might be the means of bringing into our movement many men and women who, through an apathy towards what they regard as a purely bread-and-butter issue, have hitherto remained outside. ”

“ One cause of this has been the increased specialisation in the production of works of Art, by which most men can find no good medium for the expression of the yearnings that are within them; and another cause is the fact that the majority of our unfortunate fellows find that it takes them all their time to earn enough hard cash to keep body and soul together, and cannot afford to waste a minute in what has come to be regarded (falsely, I think) as a mere luxury and not a necessity of life. ”

“ Thus much for the Middle Ages and the artistic instincts of the people generally; it remains to be added that the more gifted individuals, the geniuses, were better looked after than ever before or since. There was a certain tradition of art patronage amongst the nobles; but an enormous amount of it was done by the monasteries and the various corporations of the towns, pious and otherwise. Wherever you had any noticeable number of men gathered together, they welcomed and gladly employed any man who showed signs of genius. ”

“ In order that the free citizen might devote himself to general culture, seven of his fellowmen were turned into "dumb drudges." The same thing was to be seen in Rome—unlimited leisure at the top of the social scale, unlimited toil and hardship at the bottom, whether the labourer was slave or nominally free man. ”

“ Thus it is that the Middle Ages were the only times in which there has been a great Popular Art. Popular literary work did not keep pace with popular handicraft. But that was not because the masses of the people had not the requisite faculties, but because the tools were not to hand. ”

“ I think that one may safely say that no artist of any repute has ever given it as his opinion that Socialism would be bad for Art. The only people who attack Socialism on artistic grounds are the very people who are least in sympathy with Art. One cannot put the position better than in the words of Emile Vandervelde, the Belgian Socialist leader. "We have seen," he says in his book on Collectivism, "the most idle and inert of the capitalist classes reproach Socialism with weakening individual initiative ”

“ Art then springs from man's primal instincts. Moreover, these instincts are present in every individual to a greater or lesser extent of development. Our capitalistic system has tended to give people the impression that the instinct for Art is present in the few, and totally absent in the many. ”

“ Our error at present is not in forcing artists to take up other work in order to earn their living, but in giving them so much of this other work, or such distasteful work, that their energies are sapped and their thought deadened. ”