be an
artist? So culture attacks and sometimes ruins him. If he survives,
culture has to adopt him. He becomes part of the tradition, a standard,
a stick with which to beat the next original genius who dares to shove
an unsponsored nose above water.

In the nineteenth century cultured people were amazed to find that such
cads as Keats and Burns were also great poets. They had to be accepted,
and their caddishness had to be explained away. The shocking
intemperance of Burns was deplored in a paragraph, and passed over--as
though Burns were not as essentially a drunkard as a poet! The
vulgarity of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne did not escape the nice
censure of Matthew Arnold who could not be expected to see that a man
incapable of writing such letters would not have written "The Eve of St.
Agnes." In our day culture having failed to suppress Mr. Augustus John
welcomes him with undiscriminating enthusiasm some ten years behind the
times. Here and there, a man of power may force the door, but culture
never loves originality until it has lost the appearance of originality.
The original genius is ill to live with until he is dead. Culture will
not live with him; it takes as lover the artificer of the _faux-bon_. It
adores the man who is clever enough to imitate, not any particular work
of art, but art itself. It adores the man who gives in an unexpected way
just what it has been taught to expect. It wants, not art, but something
so much like art that it can feel the sort of emotions it would be nice
to feel for art. To be frank, cultivated people are no fonder of art
than the Philistines; but they like to get thrills, and they like to see
old faces under new bonnets. They admire Mr. Lavery's seductive
banalities and the literary and erudite novelettes of M. Rostand. They
go silly over Reinhardt and Bakst. These confectioners seem to give the
distinction of art to the natural thoughts and feelings of cultivated
people. Culture is far more dangerous than Philistinism because it is
more intelligent and more pliant. It has a specious air of being on the
side of the artist. It has the charm of its acquired taste, and it can
corrupt because it can speak with an authority unknown in Philistia.
Because it pretends to care about art, artists are not indifferent to
its judgments. Culture imposes on people who would snap their fingers at
vulgarity. With culture itself, even in the low sense in which I have
been using the word, we ne