There are dozens
and scores of men who can write stuff which has all the mannerisms and
external characteristics of high-class stuff, but which is not high-class.
Extinct exotic periodicals, such as the _Yellow Book_, the _Savoy_, the
_Dial_, the _Anglo-Saxon_, and such publications as the _Neolith_, richly
prove this. What was and is the matter with all of them is literary
priggishness, and dullness. One used to read them more often as a duty
than as a pleasure.
* * * * *
A great danger is the inevitable tendency to disdain the public and to
appeal only to artists. Artists, like washerwomen, cannot live on one
another. Moreover, nobody has any right to disdain the public. You will
find that, as a general rule, the greatest artists have managed to get and
to keep on good terms with the public. If an artist is clever enough--if
he is not narrow, insolent, and unbalanced--he will usually contrive while
pleasing himself to please the public, or _a_ public. It is his business
to do so. If he does not do so he proves himself incompetent. He is merely
mumbling to himself. Just as the finite connotes the infinite, so an
artist connotes a public. The artist who says he doesn't care a fig for
the public is a liar.
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