Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/686



IEN à signaler. How could there be with October temperatures aping those of July and nothing to remind improvident artists as yet that there are such things as dealers, galleries, critics, and livings-to-make. By and bye the chilly winds from the north will empty Provincetown, Ogunquit, Woodstock, and possibly even New Hope, and those cigales, the artists, will blandish the contents of their portfolios before the eyes of those fourmis, the art dealers, and the drama of the winter will begin. The art dealers might improve upon the advice of the fourmi of the fable by pointing out that if art students will congregate in summer in such places as Provincetown they might just as well danser in Provincetown. Artists swarm 1n other countries than this, as observers in Paris and Munich have testified, but surely nowhere is there such a passion for thinking in kind as here; and to no other one habit may we so surely attribute our paucity of results. We hear a lot about a democratic art and the tendencies of the age, of the infallibility of the common people whose idols, such as Charlie Chaplin and Babe Ruth, afterward become the idols of the supposedly astute—and there is much that is significant in this kind of talk, for to the tyrannical common people accrue more and more of the money and power, and hence patronage, of the world. It is the shavings of eighths of cents or less from these very ordinary people that produces our Rockefellers and Fords, and if money be the sole test of an aristocracy we are not very far off from the moment, if not actually arrived at it, when our Sunday supplement artists who are exceedingly well paid shall become our élite. So profound a student as Mr Van Vechten is already seriously advising his clientele to "collect" Sunday supplements, holding that a "complete set," an hundred years hence, will be priceless!

But however that may be, it seems altogether likely that the problem of the individual artist has not greatly changed and that he who is and will be best fitted to utter the word en-masse is he who gets far enough away from the mass to gain a perspective of it. In other words an artist may indulge to any degree he wishes in any kind of mob except the artistic mob. Walt Whitman, who first