Page:John Collings Squire - Socialism and Art (1907).pdf/9

 work was about as good as it could be. But the point is: Why did he do it; and what did he get for it?

Mr. Kipling, in a poem called, I think, "The Story of Ung," has pictured a palaeolithic artist getting maintained by his tribe merely for scratching heads on bones. Now one rather imagines that this notion of a savage making Art his only means of subsistence is historically untrue. One conceives rather that in primitive communities the men who do the tattooing and the painting, do also their share of the hunting and the fishing. It is difficult to believe that a primitive tribe would maintain an artist simply quâ artist. But whether this is so or not—and I am no palæologist—does not matter two straws. If these early men maintained the artists altogether, one may be safe in saying that a civilised communistic society would scarcely do less. If, on the other hand, the artists, when Art was in its infancy, took their part in the ordinary work as well as doing their own, we may take it that in a Socialistic State the artists could do a few hours ordinary labour a day, and neither they nor their Art, nor their neighbours would be any the worse for it. In fact, a little thought about the origin of Art will make one realise that all this cantish outcry about "Will Socialism starve the artist?" is nothing but a most preposterous red herring. For under moderately free and natural conditions men make poems, pictures, and the rest, because it is their nature so to do; and the chiefest part of their reward is bound to be the pleasure (akin to religious ecstasy) which they feel in the act of producing and in the contemplation of the finished product.

Art then springs from man's primal instincts. Moreover, these instincts are present in every individual to a greater or lesser extent of development. Our capitalistic system has tended to give people the impression that the instinct for Art is present in the few, and totally absent in the many. One cause of this has been the increased specialisation in the production of works of Art, by which most men can find no good medium for the expression of the yearnings that are within them; and another cause is the fact that the majority of our unfortunate fellows find that it takes them all their time to earn enough hard cash to keep body and soul together, and cannot afford to waste a minute in what has come to be regarded (falsely, I think) as a mere luxury and not a necessity of life.

But every human being has in him the longing to to imitate (for they come to the same thing); although