Page:John Collings Squire - Socialism and Art (1907).pdf/8

 may consider (wrongly or rightly) indispensable to the proper development of Art, and, without further ado, blankly deny that these conditions could possibly exist in a Socialist State." It is interesting, too, to observe whence these objections come. One would imagine that if they had anything in them, the artists, as being the people most concerned, would cry them aloud on the housetops. But this is not the case. Of the great artists and literary men now living or recently dead, a large number have come out as avowed Socialists, and the rest have been apparently indifferent to the whole thing. I think that one may safely say that no artist of any repute has ever given it as his opinion that Socialism would be bad for Art. The only people who attack Socialism on artistic grounds are the very people who are least in sympathy with Art. One cannot put the position better than in the words of Emile Vandervelde, the Belgian Socialist leader. "We have seen," he says in his book on Collectivism, "the most idle and inert of the capitalist classes reproach Socialism with weakening individual initiative; we have seen the most tyrannical of the employers oppose it in the name of human liberty; it is therefore quite in keeping that in their turn the most tasteless and unappreciative of the bourgeois should undertake the defence of Art against the 'ignorant masses' and the 'modern barbarians.'"

Now, what do these people say? Roughly, it is this: "In your Socialistic society all work will be regulated by the State; and (putting aside the fact that manual labourers always dislike to see other people apparently doing nothing) we fail to see how you are going to regulate intellectual work or how you are going to reward it." "Do you intend," cries an indignant French publicist, "to give artists an eight hours day; to command Victor Hugo to begin having his poetic inspiration at seven o'clock, and to switch it off at nine?"

We do not! But before we proceed to make a more elaborate answer to these questions it might be useful to see what have been the conditions of the patronage of Art in former times and in our own day.

Let us go back a few years; say, to the Stone Age. From the remotest prehistoric times the creative instinct has come to the surface in man. Our cave-dwelling ancestor used to pick up a large bone after he had finished his lunch, and scratch upon it with a flint two lines to represent a horse. No doubt, like the Deity, on the seventh day, he fondly flattered himself that his