Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 34-35))

A PAGE FROM SHAW*

AND I do not think any person who is in touch with the artistic profes-
sions will deny that they are recruited largely by persons who become
^ actors, or painters, or journalists and authors because they are
incapable of steady work and regular habits, or that the attraction which the
patrons of the stage, music, and literature find in their favorite arts has often
little or nothing to do with the need which nerves great artists to the heavy
travail of creation. The claim of art to our respect must stand or fall with the
validity of its pretension to cultivate and refine our senses and faculties until
seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting become highly conscious and
critical acts with us, protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise, discordant
speech, frowzy clothing and re-breathed air, and taking keen interest and pleas-
ure in beauty, in music, and in nature, besides making us insist, as necessary
for comfort and decency, on clean, wholesome, handsome fabrics to wear,
and utensils of fine material and elegant workmanship to handle. Further,
art should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy,
greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, precision of action, and
considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and
intellectual superficiality or vulgarity. The worthy artist or craftsman is he
who serves the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures,
musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and fine
implements, poems, fictions, essays, and dramas which call the heightened
senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity. The great artist is
he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher
beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds, after a brief
struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the
heritage of the race. This is why we value art; this is why we feel that the
iconoclast and the Philistine are attacking something made holier, by solid
usefulness, than their own theories and purity and practicality; this is why
art has won the privileges of religion; so that London shopkeepers who would
fiercely resent a compulsory church rate, who do not know “Yankee Doodle”
from Luther’s hymn, and who are more interested in photographs of the
latest celebrities than in the Velasquez portraits in the National Gallery,
tamely allow the London County Council to spend their money on bands, or
municipal art inspectors, and on plaster casts from the antique.

*From “The Sanity of Art,” by G. Bernard Shaw.