From A Child
of the Century
By Ben Hecht
In my
youth the word art had a meaning it has completely lost. I shall try to give its 1910-1925 definition.
If you
did not believe in God, in the importance of marriage, in the United States
Government, in the sanity of politicians, in the necessity of education or in
the wisdom of your elders, you automatically believed in art. You did not automatically plunge into the
worlds of painting, music and literature.
You plunged out of worlds, out
of family worlds, business worlds, greed and ambition worlds. You did not necessarily stay out of them
forever. It might happen that you got
married, grew a paunch, bought an automobile and, what with one pressure and
another, forgot all about art and drifted back into cozier bourgeois orbits
with no damage done other than a memory of foolishness outgrown.
But as
long as you “believed in art” you remained orphaned from the smothering arms of
society. You shaved only when you wanted
to and you felt a contempt in your head like a third glass of wine for all that
was popular and successful. Mediocrity
might wear a crown and rule all the rest of the world, but at your side it was
a beggar. You were divorced not only
from the crowd, but from all its gods.
And you selected gods to worship as lonely and disinherited as yourself.
And this
befell because the wish to bloom as an individual is all that art was. It was a rare wish and came to few. The numerous professions claimed their
millions; art touched only its hundreds.
The
mystery of its touch belonged to biology as much as to aesthetics. It was usually not a consciousness of latent
talent nor an ambition to shine in the world that summoned youth to the
arts. Talent and ambition, as often as
not, came after the call. They were part
of the equipment of the professional.
Nor was
it even any particular yearning for beauty that stirred the young soul of the
proclaimed artist. That, too, came later
– if at all.
The
mystery was chiefly this – that there was seemingly a tiny proportion of the
human family born without greed, who entered life without fear of tomorrow,
without an urge to lose themselves safely in the known and practical worlds of
their elders.
These
were, in the past, automatically the artists.
