The Searing of the Heart and the Cruel Irony of the Artist's Path Through Life

It seems to me safe to say that many artists become artists because they are more sensitive than others, and what another century would have called "sensibility" and "fine feeling" mean so much to them--and pursuing a career as an artist seems to them a way to save that from what they fear will be the deadening of their sensibility by the kind of workaday existence those not born rich typically endure, with its drudgery and innumerable meanness. Living from their art, living well from their art, thus seem a salvation from something unbearable. Alas, the artist rarely finds the alternative for which they hope in that artistic career, the more in as so few ever really do get to live well from their art, while even of those who do find their way to that all but the most fortunate are apt to find, as Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions, that by the time they attain success their "heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," their faculty for that sensibility and that fine feeling by which they set store seared and calloused with it--and many apt to be reduced to pessimism and even nihilism. Indeed, the common fate is probably to find their heart "seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," without ever attaining success.

It is hard to see how it could be otherwise in a society where art is nothing but something from which business can make money, and the price of trying to be one of the few who can live this way is far, far higher than the propagandists of "aspiration" allow--the more is as so many pay the price, with nothing but what they lost to show for it.