The Artistic Sensibility Confronts Poverty

Looking into the matter of why artists so readily incline to the glorification of the established and powerful one has an obvious answer in the fact of the allotment of opportunities and rewards by which artists must work and live by self-serving and vainglorious elites--these paying the piper and so also the ones calling the tune. However, looking a little more deeply at the matter they see that while the realities of power in society encourage this few artists really "sell out" in delivering what the powerful want, instead serving their masters willingly. One argument has it that this is because the propaganda on the side of the status quo is at all times so great, and the artist, because of their "artistic sensitivity," particularly susceptible to it, with the result that they are easily propagandized, with this turning them into natural propagandizers themselves--the more in as they are even more than most affected by luxury and esteem and its graces, and repulsed by the opposite. Indeed, E.M. Forster's remark in Howard's End that "the very poor . . . are unthinkable," and indeed "to be approached by the statistician or the poet" seems telling of the mentality. After all, to consider the "very poor" lengthily and deeply, acquiring the mastery of the minutiae of their misery such as a realist novelist would require in order to make a genuine success of their work, seemed to Forster more than a person possessed of an artistic sensibility could bear--and perhaps many another, the statistician protected by dealing impersonally in vast numbers, the poet by their offering only a brief verse on the basis of a brief exposure rather than writing any epic poems of life in the slums, and of course, the same going for the "middle class or higher" readership to which Forster addressed his remarks.

Of course, many artists have looked, and looked hard, at the life of the very poor a Forster considers unthinkable--a Charles Dickens, an Emile Zola, a Stephen Crane, an Upton Sinclair, to name but a very few, and created extraordinary work thereby. However, it says something of the artistic outlook and its limitations, as reflected in Forster, that such are so few--and that in line with the prejudices of those who would rather not have anyone write of poverty and its realities at all, they join in the sneering dismissal of those writers who did what they could not and did not as not really artists at all.