The Conservation of Genius

A Proposal to Declare the Artist Independent, for the Furthering of Art

WALLACE IRWIN

IN a recent paper I spoke, perhaps with too little light and too little learning, of the artist's age-long enslavement to a patronage system; and although I speak now with greater optimism, there is still no doubt in my mind that the genius, if he would keep body and soul together, must either possess a personal income or sing for his supper, as countless others have done and are doing. If he is to become "independent"—using the word as it is employed in the financial district—the singer must stick to popular songs; and even these are occasionally great, in spite of their base intent.

The world at large is still Jacobean enough to resent money-making in an author. To the popular mind the writer is something of a sluggard, staying home to open his mail, half of which contains advances from silly women, the other half advances from sillier publishers. The ideal author, according to the popular version, should be a disembodied spirit—and who ever heard of a ghost entering the First National Bank to certify a large check? Never before in the history of mankind has the scribbler been paid so far beyond his value; and the less Ids value the greater his pay. Such at least is the verdict of those who care just enough about authorship to condemn it.

Well, poverty and authorship have, from days of old, become handily Interchangeable terms. As the post-bellum Southerner referred to damyankee in one word and the tourist haunted European refers to richamerican in otic word so has it been the custom to stamp the writer with the composite label Strugglingauthor. Even as the trout, rising to the fisherman's fly, is supposed to struggle and agonize and make game for the sportsman, so should the author struggle and agonize for the benefit of an observant world. Otherwise he is a poor fish indeed, a coarse, fat carp, mouthing sluggishlv in his muddy pond. The world will always resent prosperity in an author. To see a struggling author emerge from obscurity to own his own home, his own car, even possibly his own box at the opera, gives the onlooker a shock just as it would be to see Joan of Arc in Russian sables, flirting down Fifth Avenue.

BUT since the writer must always have his patron, in some form, I wonder if the magazine, the movie, the newspaper syndicate are less desirable than those that have possessed his soul in the past. Yesterday it was commonly said that the popular magazines were ruining the literary gifts of young Americans. Today we are reading books by writers who got their training in the popular magazines— Sinclair Lewis, Edna Fcrber, Joseph Hergcsheimer, Zona Gale, Willa Cathcr. You may like all or none of them but you must acknowledge their vitality in American literature.

Another significant thing about these writers. Raised under the most tyrannical of all patronage systems—the patronage of public opinion— they have managed to defy the boss and emerge triumphant. Who would have thought that Main Street, with its impertinent refusal to flatter and idealize the average citizen, would have appealed to anything larger than the little group oi serious thinkers? Demos, the tyrant, sought in vain to trample Lewis underfoot. The crowd cursed him and cursing flocked to the bookstores to buy his heretical book and find out what it was all about. By dint ol unpopularity Lewis became the most popular novelist in the United States. Our public, admiring success above all other things, saw in Lewis a conqueror who had entered the citadel by an unexpected gate.

And again it fills us with much optimism when we compare the quality of today's popular novels with that of yesterday's. The novels of 1898 or 1905, which were sold wherever gum is chewed, no longer interest the great mass of our readers. We have lost interest in the type of ten-penny knighthood which flowered in Indiana and shouted defiance with an accent suspiciously resembling that of the Buckeye State. True, we have nothing to replace Henry James; but I am speaking more particularly of popular fiction. True again we have lost the great wide river that was Mark Twain. And the valuable New England school departed with the early century.

BUT with the new renaissance come hopcful signs, signs that art itself is becoming popular. I'lie literary mind is quickening, turning from glittering bombast and half digested historical romance and is contemplating the life that lies around us. Demos is offended at this turn of events; he winces at times and curses under his breath and turns to the Sunday supplements; his pen driving slaves have rebelled. They arc openly preferring William Dean Howells to General Lew Wallace. They are turning from the bombastic theatre of synthetic mediaeval ism to the quiet, if sometimes unmoral, domestic novel. No wonder Demos swears. He likes pretty pictures, and they won't give them to him. In spite of that, many of these truth-telling books seem to succeed. Who are buying them? Indeed, it looks as though a rather fierce minority of the reading public had joined the insurrcctos.

Liberty, equality, fraternity, these three, a divine trinity! We look upon this triple godhead with ecstatic emotion, forgetting for a time that they are the most perishable of human ideals. Chains are falling on every hand. File young intellectuals are going mad with freedom. Free verse has run so far amuck that it has ceased to be verse. The liberators of prose have destroyed subject and predicate, thrown English into a fourth dimension where nouns and verbs are interchangeable, adjectives are created out of odd scraps. We read of a heroine's marching hair, her lisping eyes. She handbags down the street. Her thoughts arclike something thrown up by a subterranean explosion. Like this: Scrawned violets. Mere husks of flavor. Beans again. Oh God. Human hearts. Full lipped hearts clocking out their passion. Venus. Aphrodite can't last in a cafeteria. Shucks. Let's dance ....

Freedom such as this, of course, is not much to be feared because it is suicidal, obviously self-destroying. Such emancipated genius reminds us of the African who, released from slavery, goes to New York and kills himself sniffing cocaine. So fares the youthful Spartacus spurning the shackles of publisher and producer, vet giving himself over body and soul to the narcotic word habit. His works come to us occasionally from the psychopathic ward, but they cannot endure for long because the public is not, to any large extent, psychopathic.

ALL of which brings us to the point, I hope I have not dulled by over grinding. Here is again a question ot artistic patronage, or to use a politer word, a conservation ot the arts. Patronage by popular magazines, books, movies is but a butter-fingered way of nurturing any aesthetic genius. By such a system only bigness can endure, the frailer flowers mu t perish. Or to use an apter simile, the great, slow-growing powers must be blasted in the seed. Today a Keats would not die in his earlv twenties; he might live to a fat old age, but he would grow into something else than Keats. This should not be, for in a spiritual sense the opening primrose has the value of the moon.

In America today there are many men of talents too unusual to be recognized by our stirring Lord Demos. One of them, probably our most promising composer, gives ho best working hours to the business house that pays his expenses. Another, a novelist of international reputation, still attempts to exist on his pitiful royalties. Unusual and non-lucrative artistic gifts should be subsidized in America as they are being subsidized in Europe. In Congress they speak at length on the subject of our national resources; forests shall not be abused lest the streams go dry and the plains wither with drouth.

BUT what of conserving our national genius? Has it ever come before Congress? It has not. It would be laughed out of Washington or taken into a committee room and quietly strangled. In an economy administration it is a poor time, perhaps, to devise ways and means of spending more money. But for the price of a battleship much could be done toward funding "that one talent which is death to hide," toward sustaining such of our great men as cannot today hope for material rewards, vet whose work, il even modestly supported, will eventually glorify our civilization.

In this plan, of course, there is danger too. It is easy to imagine a Committee on Deserving Genius meeting in the Senate Office Building to discuss candidates. The Senior Senator, wise and persuasive, has in mind a lad named Euripides Smith, boy singer of Keokuk. Smith, the critics say, belongs to the sub-moron or cretin school, but his father isrunning for Governor on the Republican ticket and controls enough votes to unhorse a senator in twenty days. What would you, then? Much is said, pro and con. And finally it is arranged, as such things are, that Smith shall be pensioned provided the Senator from Wisconsin's choice, Alberta Wilburton Sweet, author of Sweetheart Throbs, shall be also admitted into the charmed circle of government pensioners.

(Continued on page 100)

(Continued from page 57)

Eminent philosophers to the contrary, there are those as I have hinted to whom the world owes a living. Not to the weakly experimental, the unproved, the ineffective. Not to the gifted men and women who, by the very nature of their gifts, have brought themselves substantial incomes. But to the neglected few who, by their power to make pictures in the mind, make songs in the heart, make beauty everywhere—in short, to make everything but money—deserve tlie right to live. Their reward should not be in the nature of a dole; it should be a palm of exalted honor.

Apropos of this, I once mentioned my ill-formed plan to a friend who is a cynic and a journalist. "Why," I asked, "do we wait until they've starved to death, then put them in the Hall of Fame?"

"Well," he replied, "When you're in the Hall of Fame your living expenses amount to practically nothing."

This seemed unsatisfactory, so I insisted, "Anyhow it will be a hundred years before Congress endows genius."

"That's only fair," he decided. "It has been a lot over a hundred years since a genius has endowed Congress."