CHAPTER XI

LITERATURE AND FREEDOM—­ART FOR ART’S SAKE

I

Art for art’s sake has come to have a meaning which must be challenged, but yet it can be used in a sense that is both high and sacred.  If a gifted writer take literature as a great vocation and determine to use his talents faithfully and well, without reference to fee or reward; if prosperity cannot seduce him to the misuse of his genius, then we give him our high praise.  Let it still not be forgotten that the labourer is worthy of his hire.  But if the hire is not forthcoming, and he knowing it, yet says in his heart, “The work must still be done”; and if he does it loyally and bravely, despite the present coldness of the world, doing the good work for the love of the work and all beautiful things; and if with this meaning he take “art for art’s sake” as his battle-cry, then we repeat it is used in a sense both high and sacred.

II

But there are artists abroad whose chief glory seems to be to deny that they have convictions—­that is, convictions about the passionate things of life that rouse and move their generation.  Now that they should not be special pleaders is an obvious duty, but unless they have a passionate feeling for the vital things that move men, heart and soul, they cannot interpret the heart and soul of passionate men, and their work must be for ever cold.  When literature is not passionate it does not touch the spirit to lift and spread its wings and soar to finer air.  That is the great want about all the clever books now being turned out—­they often give us excitement; they never give us ecstasy.  Then there is an obvious feeling of something lacking which men try to make up with art; and they produce work faultless in form and fastidious in phrase, but still it lacks the touch of fire that would lift it from common things to greatness.

III

If we are to apply art to great work we must distinguish art from artifice.  We find the two well contrasted in Synge’s “Riders to the Sea” and his “Playboy.”  The first was written straight from the heart.  We feel Synge must have followed those people carrying the dead body, and touched to the quick by the caoine, passed the touch on to us, for in the lyric swell of the close we get the true emotion.  Here alone is he in the line of greatness.  This gripped his heart and he wrote out of himself.  But in the other work of his it was otherwise.  He has put his method on record:  he listened through a chink in the floor, and wrote around other people.  It is characteristic of the art of our time.  Let it be called art if the critics will, but it is not life.

IV