Potatoes in a Cellar

R. G.

I am not here to harry institutions, to prod up mummies swathed in red tape and embalmed in routine and respectability, nor am I here to bury the unburied dead.

People say, “Why do you jump on the Art Institute for becoming a trade school? It is only following the tendencies of the times. Art is like everything else.” There you have it!—the whole trouble. There is no consciousness of art, no consciousness that art is beyond all these things—that it is as the sun to the earth, and if it were to fail us we should grow like potatoes in a deep cellar.

It is only when art students say, “This is not what we sought. Where shall we go, what shall we love, what do, to find what we sought?” that the Art Institute is brought into it, and then only to serve as an example of the lack of art consciousness everywhere, and to emphasize the fact that the artist has no place in this land of wasteful virtues.

An artist almost disgraces the family into which he is born, he is pitied a little by outsiders, he is left alone. At last, when he can stand it no longer, he breaks the parent heart, and goes out full of high hope to find his own kind and to keep his own faith. After a short time he finds the art school very much like a factory; he learns to do his piece, when he had thought to create a new beauty, and he finds, too, that he is still an outcast for his beliefs and desires.

More than ninety-nine percent of the students who study art never qualify as artists. We are all born into the world creators. In the interval some wander into by-paths, play nicely upon the piano or violin, do art, or write poetry. Maiden aunts and fond grandmas proclaim them geniuses, all the time praying that they do not become artists. When love comes, they leave the by-paths to fall into lock step on the old worn way.

It is not what is accomplished on these journeys along the outposts of art, but it is the experience that counts. If they have met there one or two who stirred their senses with the impression of bearing a “fragile and mighty thing,” who could rise above the earth and shout in a flamelight of joy, or fall upon the earth and moan with the dark trouble of Things; if they have caught from these a quickened sense of Life, and learned a broader observation and consciousness of beauty; even though they cannot create as the artist creates—still from this experience they should feel the power to create a new life for those whom they in their turn may meet. If they would so much as teach the children, not the old formidable “Fear God and keep his commandments,” but rather

we should grow a race with a deep desire for the “free, unsullied things which never fail and never can decay.”

The Artist knows as surely as though he walked with God upon those six days of creation that this He made and nothing more—but here He made all. Other men fill in the gap between what they are and what they feel they could be, what they long for and cannot find, what they attain and aspire to, with Religion. Then, walled in with the belief of finding completion in a future life, they live on unconscious of the passionate splendor and ecstasy of this life. The artist, realizing that here we must live our life and our immortality, cries out to men to know all, to feel all, to be all here, and he strives with his whole soul, gives up his life to show men what he has seen. But the turning of great wheels, the blasts of furnaces, and the straining of millions of human beings that a few may be comfortable, drown his voice. And because he does not take part in this great struggle for physical contentment, does not live the cramped, dwarfed life of society, there is no place for him in modern life. Even though the wisest seem deceived, still the artist must believe that a consciousness of Art will come, and that even the most stupid will sometime know that he must have Art before bread.

I know—for I have experienced it and perhaps experienced little else!—that art is of more value than truth.—Nietzsche.