Part 13

Or rather, and here is the special irony of the situation, his alternative is not a literal physical hunger, but that subtler hunger that follows the denial of the imperious instinct to create beauty; he has not to starve his body of bread, but his soul of music. For while society withholds with one hand, so to speak, any payment for the best work he can do, because it is too good, because it requires too long to be understood, it freely offers him with the other a bare livelihood, if not more, for work of secondary value--teaching, performance, exposition, anything but creation. It constantly pulls, pushes, cajoles, persuades, coaxes, browbeats him from the superior to the inferior activity. It so fills his days with the one that even if at long intervals an opportunity for the other presents itself he has hardly the spirit to seize it. It deadens him with detail, drugs him with drudgery, cages him until he forgets how to sing. Where, as in America, there exists a very "high standard of living," as it is quaintly called, meaning that many and costly material wants have to be met before spiritual needs can be considered, the labor imposed by such a struggle may be overwhelming. And it is superimposed, we must remember, on the other labor, the creative one, described above. The same nerves, body, and brain, in the same twenty-four hours each day, must sustain the two labors, one to earn a livelihood, the other to make use of it. No wonder few can endure it; no wonder most give it up in despair or dull indifference, and content themselves with the livelihood without taking the trouble to live.

Not only, moreover, are the broad facts of economics, under a capitalistic-industrial system, thus flatly inimical to creative work, but in a plutocratic civilization like ours the more subtle forces of public opinion are perhaps even more fatal to it, because more pervasive and intangible. In Europe the impecunious artist is accepted with tolerance, even with a touch of respect, and suffered to live undisturbed in his Bohemia and to pursue his dreams. To us, who still as a people recognize no measure of achievement but income, and who accept without a murmur the domination of mass-convention in most matters of opinion, he is something worse than an interesting eccentric or even a harmless crank; he is something of a sybarite and a skulker; he is one who "doesn't play the game." Therefore he need look to us for understanding or sympathy no more than for more material rewards. If he wishes to be approved of, let him do something useful--that is, something that pays.

When we realize the penalties that are thus piled upon the head of the artist whose only offense is that he wishes to give something to society of which it does not yet recognize the value, our wonder that there is so little American composition of the first quality changes to surprise that there is any. We begin to suspect--as Ruskin did at forty, and devoted the rest of his life to demonstrating the truth of his suspicion--that the decadence of art we witness all around us is only a symptom of a deeper disease, and that, as William Morris expressed it, "Slavery lies between us and art."[68] Capitalistic industrialism, as Matthew Arnold saw, "materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class"; and under such conditions vital art can have no secure or assured life. It may well be, therefore, that art can only in the long run be saved, like society itself, by the fairer, freer, humaner system that socialism promises. It cannot but thrill all true lovers of art to find its claims, with those of a liberalized society, being championed to-day, no longer merely by individual thinkers like Ruskin and Morris, but by great representative bodies like the British Labor Party. "Society, like the individual," says a draft report of this party[69] "does not live by bread alone--does not exist only for perpetual wealth production. The Labour Party will insist on greatly increased public provision being made for scientific investigation and original research, in every branch of knowledge, not to say also for the promotion of music, literature, and fine art, which have been under capitalism so greatly neglected, and upon which, so the Labour Party holds, any real development of civilization fundamentally depends."

Finally, however, inspiring as are the hopes these words suggest, the American composer need not await their realization before putting forth those individual efforts without the aid of which, after all, they can never attain it. Music, like society, has reached its present state only through the struggles, against immense odds, of its martyrs and its heroes: not only of Bach, of Mozart, of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, of Brahms, but of countless others who have wrought and suffered in obscurity and with a consecration of their more limited powers to the great cause of beauty. And if American life lays almost crushing burdens on artistic initiative, there is also in the best American tradition a courage, an independence, a certain nonchalant and plucky self-reliance that ought to carry an artist far on the solitary path he has to travel. It ought to keep him from turning back, though it could not guard him against wandering and getting lost. All that can help him there is clearsightedness, a realistic and unsentimental view of the society in which he lives and the terms on which he lives in it. He must discharge the work he does for a livelihood as conscientiously as he can, but meanwhile not forget to live also. He must not make the tragic mistake, the unpardonable sin of the artist, described by Thoreau: "To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known only to ourselves, far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of our freedom to make that known." He must cut down his material requirements to the minimum and honor his own poverty. He must learn to find his satisfaction in the work itself, and not expect recognition, which is bound to be late (even later in America than elsewhere), and likely to be mistaken. Above all, he must not pity himself or grow embittered, for in the possession of a lifelong enthusiasm, an ideal that he can always work towards and will never reach, he has the best gift that life has to offer.

FOOTNOTES:

[59] The New Republic, October 16, 1915.

[60] "Two Views of Ragtime." The Seven Arts, July, 1917.

[61] The time is really 4-8, though marked 2-4.

[62] The Times, London, February 8, 1913, quoted in Boston Symphony Orchestra Program Books, vol. 32, p. 1186.

[63] See, for instance, Mr. Carl van Vechten's "Interpreters and Interpretations."

[64] Quoted by Mr. Charles L. Buchanan in an admirably sane article on "Rag Time and American Music" in The Opera Magazine, February, 1916.

[65] For example:

"They got a fiddler there That always slickens his hair, An' folks he sure do pull some bow," from "The Memphis Blues," in which Mr. H. K. Moderwell assures us we shall find "characteristic verse of a high order."

[66] The Nation, May 30, 1867.

[67] "The Great Society," by Graham Wallas.

[68] Quoted in "The Socialist Movement," by J. Ramsay MacDonald, p. 86.

[69] The Labor Party's Draft Report on Reconstruction: "The Aims of Labour," by Arthur Henderson, Appendix, page 106.

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.

The spellings for the names Scriabine and Strawinsky have been retained as they appeared in the original book.

End of Project Gutenberg's Contemporary Composers, by Daniel Gregory Mason