Read-Aloud Plays Part 30

Of course. No man lives forever. n.o.body that was ever born was useful enough to live forever. The bigger a man is the longer his influence is creative, in art and everything else, but the time always comes when his value is spent. When the world needs a new influence.

SILVIA

It's really wonderful, Mr. Wentworth, how knowing the truth about art shows one the truth about other things. When I remember what I used to believe!

MR. WENTWORTH

But see here, young man, you wouldn't do away with the _Louvre_, would you? Why, what would happen if these ideas were carried out....

JOE

No, I wouldn't do away with it. Why should I? If to burn it down would wake people up to _life_, I'd do it in a minute. But it wouldn't. They would only sanctify the superst.i.tion and make it immortal. No, leave the Louvre as it is. It's really quite useful.

MR. WENTWORTH

But good gracious! _Useful?_

JOE

Yes. Like history. To do away with the Louvre would be to destroy a part of history. There's no good doing that. We need history--it cranks up life--but we've got to recognize that after all it is only history, not life itself--not art.

MR. WENTWORTH

But what _is_ art, if the Louvre _isn't_?

SILVIA

Don't you see, Mr. Wentworth? If you could only get for a moment into the stream of experience where Joe and the others brought me! A picture is art as long as it's alive--as long as it can give back the fresh, first-hand impulses that were put into it. After that--when life has flowed on and set up new impulses requiring a different expression--then a picture drops back upon a lower level. What Joe calls _history_.

JOE

Like everything else.

MR. WENTWORTH

But you put art on the same plane as invention. An improved motor car sc.r.a.ps the old model. But you can't _improve_ art!

JOE

No, certainly not. We don't try to. We just do our best. We _recover_ art.

MR. WENTWORTH

_Recover_ it?

SILVIA

Yes--discover it all over again. It gets lost, lost in hard and fast rules or sentimentality, then a genius comes along and digs down to the buried city--creation. Art isn't like invention. It's more like religion.

MR. WENTWORTH

There you are!

JOE

There we are! Isn't there a struggle going on all the time to free religion, the _spirit_ of religion, from hard and fast rules and from false emotions? It's exactly the same thing.

MR. WENTWORTH

Ah, but rules are necessary to maintain order. That's what I insist about art. We _must_ have rules!

SILVIA

I know exactly what you mean, Mr. Wentworth. You mean that if fanatics tore down all the churches on the street corners, and there weren't any more Sunday morning sermons, everybody would run wild. But there again it's the same thing as with art: the man who has the spirit of the thing in him feels that the spirit itself is a far better control than heaps of stones and sermons. It's all a matter of _living_. Imagine asking one of the Apostles which church he went to!

MR. WENTWORTH

Wait! We are getting art mixed up with too much else. Didn't you say, Mr.

Carson, that pictures died when they no longer gave out impulses of beauty?

JOE

Yes.

MR. WENTWORTH

Well! I admit there are dead pictures, too many of them, but they are the canva.s.ses that were still-born. The masterpieces in the Louvre _still_ give out impulses--beautiful impulses--to many of us, thank heaven!

SILVIA

But that's just it! The impulses you mean aren't those of art at all.

They--

JOE

Those pictures don't give out impulses to the _artist_. The impulses they do give out are only the emotions that satisfy the student who has learned some rules and then sees the rules worked out. The artist produced the rules as a side issue, but you are trying to make the rules produce the artist. That's the difficulty when people as a whole lose the creative sense. They are satisfied with things at second-hand. Second-hand expressions of life, and second-hand philosophies to justify the expressions. It's a kind of conspiracy in which everybody works against everybody else. Only the few real artists in any generation break through it into the light.

SILVIA

The light of the sun!

MR. WENTWORTH

I fear we are hopelessly at odds in this question. Well, as the Romans said, there's no disputing about tastes. Every one to his own taste.

JOE

No!