A great danger is the inevitable tendency to disdain the public and to appeal only to artists.  Artists, like washerwomen, cannot live on one another.  Moreover, nobody has any right to disdain the public.  You will find that, as a general rule, the greatest artists have managed to get and to keep on good terms with the public.  If an artist is clever enough—­if he is not narrow, insolent, and unbalanced—­he will usually contrive while pleasing himself to please the public, or a public.  It is his business to do so.  If he does not do so he proves himself incompetent.  He is merely mumbling to himself.  Just as the finite connotes the infinite, so an artist connotes a public.  The artist who says he doesn’t care a fig for the public is a liar.  He may have many admirable virtues, but he is a liar.  The tragedy of all the smaller literary periodicals in France is that the breach between them and the public is complete.  They are unhealthy, because they have not sufficient force to keep themselves alive, and they make no effort to acquire that force.  They scorn that force.  They are kept alive by private subsidies.  A paper cannot be established in a fortnight, but no artistic paper which has no reasonable prospect of paying its way ought to continue to exist; for it demonstrates nothing but an obstinacy which is ridiculous.  The first business of the editor of an artistic periodical is to interest the public in questions of art.  He cannot possibly convince them till he has interested them up to the point of regularly listening to him.  Enthusiastic artists are apt to forget this.  It is no use being brilliant and conscientious on a tub at a street corner unless you can attract some kind of a crowd.  The public has just got to be considered.  You may say that it is not easy to make any public listen to the truth about anything.  Well, of course, it isn’t.  But it can be done by tact, and tact, and tact.

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I do not think that there is a remunerative public in England for any really literary paper which entirely bars politics and morals.  England is not an artistic country, in the sense that Latin countries are artistic, and no end can be served by pretending that it is.  Its serious interests are political and moral.  Personally, I fail to see how politics and morals can be separated from art.  I should be very sorry to separate my art from my politics.  And I am convinced that the conductors of the new organ will perceive later, if not sooner, that political and moral altercations must not be kept out of their columns.  At any rate they will have to be propagandist, pugilistic, and even bloodthirsty.  They will have to formulate a creed, and to try to ram it down people’s throats.  To print merely so many square feet of the best obtainable imaginative stuff, and to let the stuff speak for itself, will assuredly not suffice in this excellent country.

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