Upon their experience is founded that legend of the
unpopularity of all great artists which has grown to astonishing
proportions. Accepting this legend, and believing that all great artists
are misunderstood, the artist has come to cherish a scorn of the public
for which he works and to pretend a greater scorn than he feels. He
cannot believe himself great _unless_ he is misunderstood, and he hugs
his unpopularity to himself as a sign of genius and arrives at that
sublime affectation which answers praise of his work with an exclamation
of dismay: "Is it as bad as that?" He invents new excesses and
eccentricities to insure misunderstanding, and proclaims the doctrine
that, as anything great must be incomprehensible, so anything
incomprehensible must be great. And the public has taken him, at least
partly, at his word. He may or may not be great, but he is certainly
incomprehensible and probably a little mad. Until he succeeds the public
looks upon the artist as a more or less harmless lunatic. When he
succeeds it is willing to exalt him into a kind of god and to worship
his eccentricities as a part of his divinity. So we arrive at a belief
in the insanity of genius. What would Raphael have thought of such a
notion, or that consummate man of the world, Titian? What would the
serene and mighty Veronese have thought of it, or the cool, clear-seeing
Velazquez? How his Excellency the Ambassador of his Most Catholic
Majesty, glorious Peter Paul Rubens, would have laughed!
It is this lack of sympathy and understanding between the artist and his
public--this fatal isolation of the artist--that is the cause of nearly
all the shortcomings of modern art; of the weakness of what is known as
official or academic art no less than of the extravagance of the art of
opposition.
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