ABSTRACT
Now so far as the painter, poet, or musician works as pure artist, exercising freely his creative faculty, his economic ‘costs’ consist merely of his ‘keep’, the material and intellectual consumption necessary to support him and to feed his art. The net human costs of the creative work are nil. For though all creative work may involve some pains of travail, those pains are more than compensated by the joy that a child is born. Even if we distinguish the creative conception from the process of artistic execution, which may involve much laborious effort not interesting or desirable in itself, we must’ still remember that these labours are sustained and endowed with pleasurable significance as means to a clearly desired end, so that the whole activity becomes in a real sense a labour of love. In other words, the human costs are outweighed by the human utility even in the processes of production, so that the pure practice of art is a net increase of life. The artist, who, following freely his own creative bent, produces pictures, plays or novels which bring him in great gains, is thus in the position of being paid handsomely for work which is in itself a pleasure to perform and which he would do just as well if he were only paid his human ‘keep’. The wasteful social economy of the ordinary process of remunerating successful artists needs no discussion. For the true art faculty resembles those processes by which Nature works in the organic world for the increase of commodities whose comparative scarcity secures for them a market value. A poet who ‘does but sing because he must’, and yet is paid heavily for doing so, is evidently getting the best of both worlds. Our present point, however, is that the ‘economic cost’ which his publisher incurs in royalties upon the sales of his poem is attended by no net ‘human cost’ at all, but by a positive fund of ‘human utility’. And this holds of all truly creative work: the performance involves an increase of life, not that loss which is the essence of all human cost.
