“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.