Something I’ve come across in real life, but far more in (English) literature from the early-through-mid 1900s, is a weird idolatry of art. In real life this tends to be an excuse by young women to tolerate things they shouldn’t tolerate from good looking men they’re attracted to. In literature, though, there is generally far less of an obvious explanation for it.

Chesterton talked about the phenomenon as “art for art’s sake” and the thing always strikes me as having one of the great hallmarks of desperation: a mighty struggle to pretend that a thing is what one wants it to be.

I think I would do well, at this point, to give an example of what I mean. A good one that comes to mind is in Dorothy L. Sayers’ masterpiece, Gaudy Night.

“You see how easy it is, when you stick to the rules,” said Wimsey. “Miss Vane feels no compunction. She wipes me out with a firm hand, rather than damage my reputation. But the question isn’t always so simple. How about the artist of genius who has to choose between letting his family starve and painting pot-boilers to keep them?”

“He has no business to have a wife and family,” said Miss Hillyard.

“Poor devil! Then he has the further interesting choice between repressions and immorality. Mrs. Goodwin, I gather, would object to the repressions and some people might object to the immorality.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Miss Pyke. “You have hypothesized a wife and family. Well—he could stop painting. That, if he really is a genius, would be a loss to the world. But he mustn’t paint bad pictures—that would be really immoral.”

“Why?” asked Miss Edwards. “What do a few bad pictures matter, more or less?”

“Of course they matter,” said Miss Shaw. She knew a good deal about painting. “A bad picture by a good painter is a betrayal of truth—his own truth.”

Now that I’ve typed it out it’s not quite what I had in mind. You can see it, perhaps more clearly, in The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man With No Face. I can’t give details without spoiling the story (it’s a short story), but murder is committed because of an obsession with art and offense taken at the quality of the art not being recognized.

You also see this kind of thing, though not shared by the rest of the cast, in the character of Henrietta Savernake in The Hollow. She is disconnected from the rest of humanity because she is so intensely an artist, and art is more important than life. She went around in a daze trying to find the perfect model for a statue she was sculpting, then destroyed it because she realized she had, in some indefinable way, included the spite of the model (who blathered on self-importantly while modeling) into the face which otherwise had exactly what she wanted. But she wasn’t just discontent with it, she woke up from sleeping with this terrible revelation and had to run and destroy the sculpture immediately while she still had the power to do it and wasn’t too attached to it. You can also see this in how she couldn’t mourn the victim, she could only make a sculpture to express her grief.

You can see a similar thing, though in negative, in the discussion of Ann Dormer’s paintings in the Lord Peter story The Unpleasantness At the Bellona Club. Ann Dorland’s paintings were judged terrible. Not merely incompetent, but outright bad. It has something of the flavor of the ancient Greek horror at hubris.

I’ve seen many similar things which, unfortunately, are not coming to mind; hopefully you have too and know to what I am referring.

The phenomenon of artist-as-creative-god seems to be a phenomenon of, primarily, the first half of the nineteen hundreds. As far as I can tell it did predate the first world war, though it does not seem to have outlasted the second.

I can’t help but wonder if this is related to what G.K. Chesterton said (in Orthodoxy) about the will-worshipers:

At the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination. A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches. Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world. They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism. But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature. The main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they are makers. They say that choice is itself the divine thing. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men’s acts are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness. He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will. He does not say, “Jam will make me happy,” but “I want jam.” And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm. Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited about it that he is obliged to write prose. He publishes a short play with several long prefaces. This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are prefaces: Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry. But that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men. Even Mr. H.G.Wells has half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, “I FEEL this curve is right,” or “that line SHALL go thus.” They are all excited; and well they may be. For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they can break out of the doomed fortress of  rationalism. They think they can escape.

The Modern world, which was very much confronting the problems of Modern Philosophy in the late 1800s, faces the problem of the radical skepticism which defined Modern Philosophy. It is in the prison of doubt and has trouble bringing itself to that faith required even for simple things like getting up in the morning. (If anyone doubts this, one merely needs to look at the rate of prescriptions for antidepressants.) It strikes me that there might be a relation, here. That is, the worship of art was, perhaps, a moderately disguised worship of will in an attempt to evade the mental paralysis of Modern Philosophy. It was not sensible because it was driven by desperation.

I don’t know if this is the explanation, but it does explain the phenomenon.