But it is not all, because—and here I strike
my breast proudly—because of us artists.
Not only can we write on Shakespeare’s tomb,
“He wrote Hamlet” or “He was
not for an age, but for all time,” but we can
write on a contemporary baker’s tomb, “He
provided bread for the man who wrote Hamlet,”
and on a contemporary butcher’s tomb, “He
was not only for himself, but for Shakespeare.”
We perceive, in fact, that the only matter upon which
any worker, other than the artist, can congratulate
himself, whether he be manual-worker, brain-worker,
surgeon, judge, or politician, is that he is helping
to make the world tolerable for the artist. It
is only the artist who will leave anything behind
him. He is the fighting-man, the man who counts;
the others are merely the Army Service Corps of civilization.
A world without its artists, a world of bees, would
be as futile and as meaningless a thing as an army
composed entirely of the A.S.C.
Possibly you put in a plea here for the explorer and
the scientist. The explorer perhaps may stand
alone. His discovery of a peak in Darien is something
in itself, quite apart from the happy possibility
that Keats may be tempted to bring it into a sonnet.
Yes, if a Beef-Essence-Merchant has only provided
sustenance for an Explorer he has not lived in vain,
however much the poets and the painters recoil from
his wares. But of the scientist I am less certain.
I fancy that his invention of the telephone (for instance)
can only be counted to his credit because it has brought
the author into closer touch with his publisher.
So we artists (yes, and explorers) may be of good
faith. They may try to pretend, these others,
in their little times of stress, that we are nothing—decorative,
inessential; that it is they who make the world go
round. This will not upset us. We could not
live without them; true. But (a much more bitter
thought) they would have no reason for living at all,
were it not for us.
A London Garden
I have always wanted a garden of my own. Other
people’s gardens are all very well, but the
visitor never sees them at their best. He comes
down in June, perhaps, and says something polite about
the roses. “You ought to have seen them
last year,” says his host disparagingly, and
the visitor represses with difficulty the retort, “You
ought to have asked me down to see them last year.”
Or, perhaps, he comes down in August, and lingers
for a moment beneath the fig-tree. “Poor
show of figs,” says the host, “I don’t
know what’s happened to them. Now we had
a record crop of raspberries. Never seen them
so plentiful before.” And the visitor has
to console himself with the thought of the raspberries
which he has never seen, and will probably miss again
next year. It is not very comforting.
Give me, therefore, a garden of my own. Let me
grow my own flowers, and watch over them from seedhood
to senility. Then shall I miss nothing of their
glory, and when visitors come I can impress them with
my stories of the wonderful show of groundsel which
we had last year.
