Part 6

“I’m sorry--I got to thinking of something else, and nearly forgot to come back here. Which brings me at once to the heart of what I want to say. Artists, as I have said, are children--and, children that they are, they forget the errands upon which the world sends them. They forget, because these errands are not part of their own life. You reproach us with being careless and irresponsible--but if you will study the child at play or the artist at work, you will discover that he is not careless or irresponsible in regard to his own concerns. But this deep divorce between the concerns of the artist and the child and the concerns of the world is the tragic problem for which we now seek a solution. The world has been unable to solve it. It has only made the breach deeper.

“For the world does not know that its work can be play, that adult life can be a game like the games of children, only with more desperate and magnificent issues. It does not reflect that we gather sticks in the wood with infinite happy patience and labour to build our bonfires because those bonfires are our own dream creatively realized; and it cannot think of any better way to get us to bring in the wood for the kitchen stove than to say, ‘Johnny, I’ve told you three times to bring in that wood, and if you can’t mind I’ll have your father interview you in the woodshed.’ In brief, it presents our participation in adult life as meaningless toil performed at the bidding of another under coercion. And the whole of adult life gradually takes on this same aspect. We are to do the bidding of another in office or factory because otherwise we will starve.

“So the child-artist unwillingly becomes a slave. But there are some children who rebel against slavery. They prefer to keep their dreams. They are regarded with disapproval and anxiety by their families, who tell them that they must grow up. But they do not want to grow up into slavery. They want to remain free. They want to make their dreams come true.

“‘But who will pay for your dreams?’ the world asks. And it is not pleasant to face the possibility of starving to death. And so they comfort themselves with the illusion of fame and wealth. Sometimes their families are cajoled into investing in this rather doubtful speculative enterprise, and the child-artist becomes an artist-child, supported through life by his parents, and playing busily at his art. Sometimes the speculation turns out well financially, the illusion of success becomes a reality; but this, however gratifying to the artist as a justification of his career, is not his own reason for being an artist. The ‘successful’ artist has a childlike pleasure in the awe of really grown-up people at the material proofs of his importance; and if he has given hostages to fortune, if he must support a family of his own, he may ploddingly reproduce the happy accidents of his creative effort which gained him these rewards; but he feels that in so doing he has ceased to be a free man and become a slave--and all too often, as we know from the shocked comment of the world, he renounces these rewards, becomes a child at play again, and lets his wife and children get along as best they may. He yearns, perhaps, for fame--as a sort of public consent to his going on being a child. But whether he starves in the garret or bows from his limousine to admiring crowds, what he really wants of the world is just permission to play. He is not interested in the affairs of the world.

“There are exceptions, of course. There are poets and musicians and painters who take an interest in the destinies of mankind; but this is regarded by their fellow-artists as a kind of heresy or disloyalty--much as school children (or college boys) regard the behaviour of one who really takes his school work seriously. The public also is accustomed to regard the artist as a child; they laugh at his ‘ideas’ about practical affairs--though often enough they adopt his ideas in dead earnest later. Shelley, for instance, proposed to conduct campaigns of education by dropping leaflets from balloons. ‘A quaint idea, characteristic of his visionary and impractical mind,’ said his biographers; and then, having laughed at the idea, the world in its Great War proceeds to adopt that idea and carry it out on a tremendous scale....

“When the child refuses to be a slave, he is thenceforth excluded by common consent from the affairs of the grown-up world. And as the breach widens between the artist and the world, as the world becomes more and more committed to slavery, the artist is more consciously and wilfully a child. He is forbidden by the growing public opinion of his group to write or sing about human destinies. ‘The artist must not be a propagandist,’ it is declared indignantly. And finally it comes to such a pass that it is not artistic good-form for the artist to tell stories which the public can understand--the painter is prohibited from making images which the common man is able to recognize--the musician scorns to compose tunes which anybody could dance to or whistle! And all this is simply the child’s defiance to the world--his games are his own, and the grown-ups can keep their hands off! If adult life is slavery (which it is), he will be damned before he will have anything to do with it.

“And he is damned--damned to a childishness which contains only the stubborn wilfulness of the child’s playing, but has forgotten its motive. That motive is different from his. He has changed from the child who played at being a man, to a man who plays at being a child. The child’s dreams were large, and his are small. The child took all life for his province--was by turns a warrior, a blacksmith, a circus-rider, a husband, a store-keeper, a fireman, a savage, an undertaker. The child-artist wanted to play at everything. The artist-child has renounced these magnificent ambitions. The world may conscript him to fight in its wars, but he refuses to bother his head as to what they are about; if he finds that he has to walk up-town because there is a street-car strike, he is mildly annoyed, but (I am describing an extreme but not infrequent type) he declines to interest himself in the labour movement; he escapes from the responsibilities of a serious love-affair on the ground that ‘an artist should never marry’; he pays his grocery bills, or leaves them unpaid, but the co-operative movement bores him; and so on! He is content to live in that little corner of life in which he can play undisturbed by worldly interests. This type, I have said, is not infrequent; its perfect exemplars, the artists who were so completely children that they did not even know of the existence of the outside world, are revered as the saints of art, and often as its martyrs, which in truth they were; and they are admired by thousands of young artists who only aspire to such perfection, while shamefacedly admitting that they themselves are tainted with ordinary human interests.

“This is what the world has done to us; it has made us choose between being children in a tiny sphere all our lives, or going into the larger world of reality as slaves. And I think we have made the right choice. For we have kept alive in our childish folly the flame of a sacred revolt against slavery. We have succeeded in making the world envious of our freedom. We have shown it the only way to be happy.

“But the artist cannot get along without the world. His art springs from the commonest impulses of the human race, and those impulses are utilitarian at root; the savage who scratched the aurochs on the wall of his cave was hungry for meat and desirous of luck in the hunting tomorrow; the primitive Greeks who danced their seasonal dances from which sprang the glory of dramatic art, wanted the crops to grow; and that which we call great art everywhere is great only because it springs from a communal hunger and fulfils a communal wish. When art becomes divorced from the aspirations of the common man, all its technical perfection will not keep it alive; it revolts against its own technical perfection, and goes off into quaint and austere quests for new truths upon which to nourish itself; and only when it discovers the common man and fulfils his unfulfilled desires, does it flourish again. Art must concern itself with the world, or perish.

“Nor can the world get along without the artist. Slavery cannot keep it going--it needs the free impulses of the creative spirit. It needs the artist, not as a being to scorn and worship by turns, but as the worker-director of its activities. It needs the artist as blacksmith, husband, and store-keeper--as teacher, priest, and statesman. Only so can it endure and fulfil its destinies.

“But if the artist is to be all these things, if he is to enter into the activities of the real world instead of running away from them, he must grow up. And that is the task of education: to make a man of him without killing the artist. We must begin, then, before the artist in him is killed; we must begin with the child. So far as I can see, the school as it exists at present is utterly and hopelessly inadequate to the task. It requires a special mechanism, which happily exists in the outside world, and need only be incorporated into the educational system, in order to provide a medium of transition between the dream-creations of childhood and the realistic creativity of adult life. This mechanism is the Theatre.”

XVIII. The Drama of Education

“But why--in the name of all that is beautiful!--_why_ the Theatre?”

Ah! Who uttered that agonized cry of protest?

He comes forward.

“It was I who spoke. Do not, I beg of you, as you love Beauty, have any truck with the Theatre. Leave it alone--avoid it--flee it as you would the pestilence! I know what I am talking about!”

And who, pray, are you?

“I am an Actor!”

Well, well!--this is rather curious.

“Not at all! Who should know better than the Actor the dreadful truth about the Theatre--that it is the home of a base triviality, the citadel of insincerity, the last refuge of everything that is banal in thought and action!”

Really, the Theatre seems to have no friends nowadays except the professors who teach play-writing in the colleges! But I think we should hear what our friend the Artist has to say in its defence.

THE ARTIST. “There is nothing wrong with the Theatre except what is wrong with the whole of modern life. Our newspapers are base and trivial, our politics are insincere, and the products of our slave-system of production have a banality which Broadway could scarcely surpass. In all these fields of effort, as in the Theatre, the creative spirit has surrendered to the slave-system. But in the Theatre, and in no place else in the world, we find the modes of child-life, of primitive creative activity, surviving intact into adult life. What is costume but the ‘dressing-up’ of childhood, the program with its cast of characters but a way of saying ‘Let’s pretend!’--what, in short, is the Playhouse but a house of Play? It is all there--the singing and dancing, the make-believe, the whole paraphernalia of child creativity: it is true that the game is played by children who are not free to create their own dreams, who must play always at some one else’s bidding, half children and half slaves! But--and this is its importance to us--the Theatre is the place where the interests of the child meet and merge into those of the adult. It is the natural transition between dreams and realities. And it is thereby the bridge across the gulf that separates art from the world.

“Let me explain. When I use the phrase ‘The Theatre,’ I am not thinking of the dramatic arts in any restricted and special sense. For the Theatre, as the original source of all the arts, the spring from which half a hundred streams have poured, into the separate arts of music, dancing, singing, poetry, pageantry, and what not--the Theatre in its historic aspect as the spirit of communal festivity--is significant to us not as the vehicle of a so-called dramatic art, separate and distinct from the arts which go to make it up, but rather as the institution which preserves the memory of the common origin of all these arts and which still has the power to unite them in the service of a common purpose. In the Theatre, as in the child’s playing, they are not things alien from each other and isolate from life, but parts of each other and of a greater thing--the expressing of a common emotion.

“So when I speak of making the Theatre a part of the educational system in the interest of art and artists, I mean to suggest a union of all the arts in the expression of communal purposes and emotions through a psychological device of which the Theatre, even in its contemporary form, stands as a ready-to-hand example.

“I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Theatre for continuing to exist, in however trivial or base a form. Suppose it had perished for ever from the earth! Who would be so daring a theorist as to conceive the project of bringing together the story-teller, the poet, the musician, the singer, the dancer, the pantomimist, the painter, in the co-operative enterprise of creating ‘one common wave of thought and joy lifting mankind again’? Who, if such a thing were proposed, would have any idea what was being talked about? As it is, however, I can point to any musical comedy on Broadway and say, ‘What I mean is something like that, only quite different!’

“Different, because the communal emotions which these artists would have joined themselves together to express would hardly be, if they were left free to decide the question themselves, the mere emotions of mob-anxiety, mob-lasciviousness and mob-humour which are the three motifs of commercial drama. No, you have to pay people to get them to take part in that dull and tawdry game! When they do things to suit themselves, as they sometimes adventurously do even now, it is something that it is more fun to play at. As free men and women they cannot help being artists, they must needs choose that their play shall be a ‘work of art whose rhythms fulfil some deep wish of the human soul.--’”

“Just a moment! Some one, I think, wants to ask a question.--Louder, please!”

“I said--this is all very well as a plea for a Free Theatre, but what has it to do with Education?”

THE ARTIST. “Evidently I have not made myself clear. The problem of Education with respect to Art is to keep alive the child’s creative impulses, and use them in the real world of adult life. We don’t want to kill the artist in him; nor do we want to keep him a child all his life in some tiny corner of the world, apart from its serious activities. We don’t want the slave who has forgotten how to play, nor the dreamer who is afraid of realities. We want an education which will merge the child’s play into the man’s life, the artist’s dreams into the citizen’s labours. The Theatre--”

“Excuse me, but what I can’t see is how a Children’s Theatre is going to do all that! Even if you put a theatre in every school-building--”

THE ARTIST. “You quite mistake my meaning. I would rather confiscate the theatres and put a school into each of them; and so, for that matter, would I do with the factories! But, unfortunately, I am not Minister of Public Education. In default of that, what I propose is small enough--but it is not so small as you suppose when you think that I want to set children to rehearsing plays and making scenery for a school play. I propose rather that the spirit of the Theatre--the spirit of creative play--should enter into every branch of the school work, until the school itself becomes a Theatre--a gorgeous, joyous, dramatic festival of learning-to-live.

“Think how real History would become if it were dramatized by the children themselves! I do not mean its merely picturesque moments, but its real meanings, acted out--the whole drama of human progress--a group of cave-men talking of the days before men knew how to make fire--Chaldean traders, Babylonian princes, Egyptian slaves, each with his story to tell--Greek citizens discussing politics just before the election--a wounded London artisan hiding from the King’s soldiers in a garret, and telling his shelterer the true story of Wat Tyler’s rebellion--a French peasant just before the Revolution, and his son who has been reading a strange book by that man Rousseau in which it is declared that there is no such thing as the Divine Right of Kings....

“Mathematics as an organized creative effort centering around real planning and building and measuring and calculating....

“Geography--a magnificent voyaging in play all round the world and in reality all round the town and surrounding countryside.... A scientific investigation of the natural resources of the community, its manufactures, exports and imports, discussed round bonfires in the woods by the committee at the end of a long day’s tramp, and the final drawing up of their report, to be illustrated on the screen by photographs taken by themselves.... The adventure of map-making....

“(You get the idea, don’t you? You see _why_ it is more real than ordinary education--_because_ it is all play!)

“And all these delightful games brought together in grand pageants--instead of examinations!--every half year....

“That is what I mean.

“Making whatever teaching of art there may be, part and parcel with these activities--and using the school-theatre, if one exists, _not_ to produce Sheridan’s ‘Rivals’ in, but as a convenience to the presentation of the drama of their own education; but in any case making all their world a stage, not forgetting that first and best stage of all, God’s green outdoors!

“No, I say, I do not want to put a theatre into every school--I want every school to be a Theatre in which a Guild of Young Artists will learn to do the work of the world without ceasing to be free and happy.

“I hope I have succeeded in making myself clear?”

XIX. The Drama of Life

As to his immediate proposals, I think the Artist has made himself quite clear. But he opened up an interesting vista of possibilities when he spoke of being Minister of Public Education. He said he couldn’t do certain things because he wasn’t Minister of Public Education. What we would like very much to know is what he would do if he were!--Do you mind telling us?

THE ARTIST. “In the first place I would set fire to--But you are sure I am not taking up your time unduly?”

No, no! Go on!

THE ARTIST. “I would set fire to the coat-tails of all the present boards of education who are now running our educational system in complete indifference to the interests of the child. I would institute democratic control: turn the school system over to the National Guild of Young Artists. My career as an educational autocrat would necessarily stop right there, so far as the internal revolutionizing of education is concerned--for what I have been telling you is simply what I think the children themselves would do with the schools if they were allowed to run them.

“But Education, as I understand it, does not stop short with the school--it extends throughout all life. It is what I would call the civilizing process. And there is much to be done to many departments of life before they can become part of a real civilizing process. I will describe only one, but not the least fundamental of these changes--the democratizing of the Theatre. Or rather, as I should say, turning it into a school.

“A school of what? you will ask. A school of life, of aspiration, of progress, of civilization. It can be all these things if it becomes the People’s Theatre. Therefore, as Minister of Public Education, I propose to confiscate the Theatres and turn them over to the People.

“But again, when I speak of ‘The Theatre,’ I do not mean merely the buildings in which plays are given. I mean all those arts which are part of communal creativity. I propose to unite them all in communal festivals of human progress. I do not propose that we shall begin by holding classes in the Hippodrome--though that will come. I propose to begin with solemn and magnificent national holiday pageants similar to those which were so frequently and gorgeously celebrated during the days of the great French Revolution--”

At this moment a policeman approaches the stage.

“I wish to warn the speaker that everything he says is being taken down in shorthand by one of our men, and if he wants to finish his speech the less he says about Revolution the better. That’s all.”

THE ARTIST. “Thank you! I should have said, during the days of a certain great political and social upheaval which laid the foundations of modern life in general, and of our gallant ally, the French Republic, in particular. The historic festivals of which I speak were in charge of the great artists and composers of the nation, and their art and music were used to express the common emotion and purpose of the People. So it will be with ours. Our artists will unite to express the new ideals of mankind, and together with each other and with the People, will lay the foundations of a new and democratic art.

“It is here that the theatres, which will already be in charge of the guilds of artists, will come into play. For the new art must have a solid basis in popular emotions such as only the theatre can give. They will therefore present plays which criticize the old slave-system, satirize its manners, its traditional heroes, its ideals; plays which invest with tragic dignity the age-long struggle of the People against oppressive institutions and customs; plays which creatively foreshadow a new popular culture and morality; and plays which celebrate the final victory of the People in their revolutionary strug--”

Another policeman:

“Are ye making an address on education, or trying to incite to riot? L’ave that word Revolution alone.--This is the second time we’re warning ye.”

THE ARTIST. “I’m sorry. I had hoped to show the influence of the national aspirations of a great Celtic people upon their artistic life, and the final flowering of their dreams in a certain political and social upheaval--”

THE POLICEMAN. “Oh, ye mean the Irish Revolution? That’s different! Ye’re all right. Go on!”

THE ARTIST. “My time, however, is short. I shall leave to your imagination the means to be used in furthering these aims by the democratization of technical artistic culture. I shall speak only of its spiritual aspects. The Theatre, as I have said, will take the lead in preparing for the new day by presenting plays which will teach the People courage and confidence in their destiny, teach them to scorn the ideals of the traditional past, deepen their sense of community with the People in all lands in their world-wide struggle for freedom, and make them face the future with a clear and unshakable resolution, an indomitable will to victory.

“If I had time, I should like to tell you how this educational program is already being carried out, in spite of the greatest difficulties, by a certain Slavic nation--”

Another interruption!--by a red-faced, dictatorial, imperatorial personage who has been sitting there all this time, swelling with rage and awaiting his opportunity. He speaks:

“Officer! I am a member of the Board of Education, and I demand that you arrest that man as a Bolshevik agitator!”

(Tumultuous scenes.)

XX. Curiosity

Let us, my friends, pass over this unfortunate incident, and get on to the next thing as quickly as possible. The next thing on our program is Truth. The one who best understands Truth is undoubtedly the Philosopher.--Here he is, and we shall commence without delay. Will some one volunteer to conduct the examination? Thank you, madam. Go right ahead.

THE LADY. We wish to ask you a few questions.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Certainly, madam. What about?

THE LADY. About Truth.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Dear, dear!

THE LADY. Whom are you addressing?