There is a numerous band of persons in London--and the novelist and
dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their circle--who spend so
much time and emotion in practising the rites of the religion of art
that they become incapable of real existence. Each is a Stylites on a
pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John,
Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards,
Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and
their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but
they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They
never approach normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it.
They class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard of
Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the eternal
enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must open a newspaper
to look at the advertisements and announcements relating to the arts.
The occasional frequenting of this circle may not be disadvantageous to
the creative artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its
disease by constant steady plunges into the cold sea of the general
national life. Let him mingle with the public, for God's sake! No
phenomenon on this wretched planet, which after all is ours, is meet for
the artist's shrinking scorn. And the average man, as to whom the
artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever constitute the
main part of the material in which he works.