A Preface to Morals > Chapter VI. Lost Provinces > Art (d) The Artist as Prophet
Whether the necessity of creating his own tradition is a good or a bad thing for the artist, there can be no doubt that it is a novel thing and a burdensome one. Artists have responded to it by proclaiming one of two theories: they have said that the artist, being a genius, was a prophet; when they did not say that, they said that religion, morality, and philosophy were irrelevant, and that art should be practiced for art's sake. Both theories are obviously attempts to find some personal substitute for those traditions upon which artists in all other ages have been dependent.
The theory of the artist as prophet has this serious defect: there is practically no evidence to support it. Why should there be? What connection is there between the capacity to make beautiful objects and the capacity to discover truth? Surely experience shows that it is something of a marvel when a great artist appears who, like Leonardo or Goethe, is also an original and important thinker. Indeed, it is reasonable to ask whether the analysis and abstraction which thinking involves are not radically different psychological processes from the painter's passionate appreciation of the appearance of things. Certainly to think as physicists think is to strip objects of all their secondary characters, not alone of their emotional significance, but of their color, their texture, their fragrance, and even of their superficial forms. The world as we know it through our senses has completely disappeared before the physicist begins to think about it. And in its place there is a collection of concepts which have no pictorial value whatsoever. These concepts are by definition incapable of being visualized, and when as a concession to human weakness, his own or his pupil's, the scientist constructs a mechanical model to illustrate an idea, this model is at best a crude analogy, and in no real sense the portrait of that idea.
Thus when Shelley made Earth say:
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens.
he borrowed an image from astronomy. But this image, which is, I think, superb poetry, radically alters the original scientific idea, for it introduces into a realm of purely physical relations the notion of a gigantic spectator with a vastly magnified human eye. There are, no doubt, many other concepts in science which, if poets knew more science, would lend themselves to translation into equally noble images. But these images would not state the scientific truth.
The current belief that artists are prophets is an inheritance from the time when science had no critical method of its own, and poets, being reflective persons, had at least as good a chance as anyone else of stumbling upon truths which were subsequently verified. It is due in some measure also to the human tendency to remember the happy guesses of poets and to forget their unhappy ones, a tendency which has gone far to sustain the reputations of fortune-tellers, oracles, and stockbrokers. But above all, the reputation of the artist as one who must have wisdom is sustained by a rather genial fallacy: he finds expression for the feelings of the spectator, and the spectator rather quickly assumes that the artist has found an explanation for the world.
Yet unless I am greatly mistaken the modern painter has ceased not only to depict any theory of destiny but has ceased to express any important human mood in the presence of destiny. One goes to a museum and comes out feeling that one has beheld an odd assortment of nude bodies, copper kettles, oranges, tomatoes, and zinnias, babies, street corners, apple trees, bathing beaches, bankers, and fashionable ladies. I do not say that this person or that may not find a picture immensely significant to him. But the general impression for anyone, I think, is of a chaos of anecdotes, perceptions, fantasies, and little commentaries, which may be all very well in their way, but are not sustaining and could readily be dispensed with.
The conclusive answer to the romantic theory of the artist as prophet is a visit to a collection of modern paintings.