The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

What, after all, is the essence of the artistic life, the artist's ideal? I think the reason why it is so often misconceived and misunderstood is because of the fact that it is a narrow path and is followed whole-heartedly by few. Moreover, in England at the present time, when we are all so tolerant and imagine ourselves to be permeated by intelligent sympathy with ideas, there seem to me to be hardly any people who comprehend this point of view at all. There is a good deal of interest in England in moral ideals, though even much of that is of a Puritan and commercial type. The God that we ignorantly worship is Success, and our interest in moral ideas is mainly confined to our interest in what is successful. We are not in love with beautiful, impracticable visions at all; we measure a man's moral intensity by the extent to which he makes people respectable and prosperous.

We believe in an educator when he makes his boys do their work and play their games; in a priest, when he makes people join clubs, find regular employment, give up alcohol. We believe in a statesman when he makes a nation wealthy and contented. We have no intellectual ideals, no ideals of beauty. Our idea of poetry is that people should fall in love, and our idea of art is the depicting of rather obvious allegories. These things are good in their way, but they are very elementary. Our men of intellect become scientific researchers, historians, erudite persons. How few living writers there are who unite intellect with emotion! The truth is that we do not believe in emotion; we think it a thing to play with, a thing to grow out of, not a thing to live by. If a person discourses or writes of his feelings we think him a sentimentalist, and have an uneasy suspicion that he is violating the canons of good taste.