XVI. The Child as Artist

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 beauty?

The Questioner. Well—er—I suppose now that we have got this far into the subject, we might as well get to the end of it. Go on!

The Artist. What I am about to tell you is the only really important thing about art. Unfortunately, the facts at issue have never been studied by first-class scientific minds, and so they lack a proper terminology to make them clear. In default of such a scientific terminology, we are forced to use the word “rhythm” in the special sense in which artists understand it. You speak of the movements of a dance as being rhythmic. The artist understands the word to refer to the relation of these movements to each other and above all to the emotion which they express. And to him the whole world is a dance, full of rhythmic gestures. The gesture of standing still,[Pg 108] or of being asleep, is also rhythmic; the body is itself a gesture—he will speak of the rhythm of the line of a lifted arm or a bent knee. Trees that lift their branches to the sky, and rocks that sleep on the ground have their rhythms—every tree and every rock its own special rhythm. The rhythm of a pine tree is different from that of a palm—the rhythm of granitic rocks different from that of limestone. So far the matter is simple enough. But the relations of these rhythms to each other are also rhythmic. These relations are in fact so manifold that they constitute a chaos. But in this chaos each person feels a different rhythm; and, according as he has the power, transmits his sense of it to us through a rhythmic treatment of his medium. In the presence of his work, we feel what he has felt about the world; but we feel something more than that—we feel also the rhythm of the struggle in the artist between his impulse to command and his impulse to obey. Our own impulses of vanity and of reverence go out to welcome his power and his faithfulness. And just as there are gay rhythms and sad rhythms in the gesture of movement, so there are magnificent rhythms and trivial rhythms in the gesture of a soul facing the chaos of the world. What has he found worth while to play[Pg 109] with, and how has he played with it? What kind of creator is he? Ability to feel and express significant rhythm—that is nine-tenths of art.

The Questioner. But my dear fellow, how are we to teach all this to children?

The Artist. Very simply: by giving them a knife and a piece of wood.

The Questioner. Well, really!

The Artist. And crayons and clay and singing-games and so forth.—But perhaps you prefer to show them pictures of alleged masterpieces, and tell them, “This is great art!” They will believe you, of course; and they will hate great art ever afterwards—just as they hate great poetry, and for the same excellent reason: because, presented to them in that way, it is nothing but a damned nuisance. Yet the child who enjoys hearing and telling a story has in him the capacity to appreciate and perhaps to create the greatest of stories; and the child who enjoys whittling a block of wood has in him the capacity to appreciate and perhaps to create the greatest art!

The Questioner. Then you do not think children can be taught to appreciate art by looking at photographic reproductions of it?

The Artist. I would hardly expect a Fiji Islander to become an appreciator of civilized[Pg 110] music by letting him look at my phonograph records. The dingy-brownish photograph of a gloriously colored painting has even less educational value—for it lies about the original. Do you know that there are thousands and thousands of American school children who think that the great masterpieces of the world’s painting are the color of axle-grease? They are never told that their own free efforts with colored crayons are more like Botticelli in every sense than any photograph could possibly be; but it is true.

The Questioner. But don’t you want them to respect Botticelli?

The Artist. No. I want them to look at Botticelli’s pictures as they look at those of another child—free to criticize, free to dislike, free to scorn. For only when you are free to despise, are you free to admire. After all, who was Botticelli? Another child. Perhaps they may prefer Goya—

The Questioner. Or the Sunday comic supplement!

The Artist. A healthy taste. And if they know what drawing is, though having used a pencil themselves, they will prefer the better comic pictures to the worse, and be ready to appreciate Goya and Daumier—who were the[Pg 111] super-Sunday-supplement comic artists of their day.

The Questioner. Left to themselves they may come to like Goya, as you say; but will they ever come to appreciate such a masterpiece as Leonardo’s Last Supper without some more formal teaching?

The Artist. Do you call it “teaching” to talk solemnly to children in language they cannot understand? If they are making pictures themselves, and being assisted in their enthusiastic experiments by a real artist instead of a teacher, they will naturally wonder why their friend should have the photograph of the Last Supper in the portfolio from which he is always taking out some picture in order to illustrate his answers to their questions. And having wondered, they will ask why, and their friend will tell them; and perhaps they will get some of their friends enthusiasm, and perhaps not. But they will know that the real human being who is like themselves does like that picture.

The Questioner. But it makes no difference whether they like it or not?

The Artist. You can’t compel them to like it, can you? You can only compel them to pretend that they do.

[Pg 112]The Questioner. Can’t you teach them what is called “good taste”?

The Artist. Only too easily. And their “good taste” will lead them infallibly to prefer the imitations of what they have been taught to praise, and quite as infallibly to reject the great new art of their generation. They will think some new Whistler a pot of paint flung in the public’s face, and the next Cezanne a dauber.

The Questioner. Then you don’t approve of good taste!

The Artist. Every artist despises it, and the people who have it. We know quite well that the people who pretend to like Titian and Turner, because they have been carefully taught that it is the thing to do, would have turned up their noses at Titian and Turner in their own day—because they were not on the list of dead artists whom it was the fashion to call great; they know moreover that these same people of good taste are generally incapable of distinguishing between a beautiful and an ugly wall-paper, between a beautiful and an ugly plate, or even between a beautiful and an ugly necktie! Outside the bounds of their memorized list, they have no taste whatever.

[Pg 113]The Questioner. Cannot good taste be taught so as to include the whole of life?

The Artist. It would take too much time. And thank God for that! For good taste is simply a polite pretense by which we cover up our lack of that real sense of beauty which comes only from intimate acquaintance with creative processes. The most cultivated people in the world cannot produce beauty by merely having notions about it. But the most uncultivated people in the world cannot help producing beauty if only they have time to dream as they work—if only they have freedom to let their work become something besides utilitarian.

The Questioner. You think, then, that education should not concern itself with good taste, but rather with creative effort?

The Artist. Exactly.

The Questioner. You say that children are artists already?

The Artist. And that artists are children.

The Questioner. Then the task of education in respect to them would seem to be easy!

The Artist. No—on the contrary, infinitely hard!

The Questioner. What do you mean?

[Pg 114]The Artist. I have said that children are artists and that artists are children. The task of education is to help them to grow up.

The Questioner. New difficulties!

The Artist. And tremendous ones! But if I am to discuss them, you must keep still for a while and let me talk in my own fashion.

—Very well, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we adjourn for lunch, and when we reassemble here give the Artist the platform for half an hour? What is the sentiment of the meeting? The Ayes have it.