Домашнее чтение An artistic person and his place in the world.
S. Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence was published in 1919 and was a great success. This popularity is due to the fact that the novel ruthlessly scourges the vices and prejudices of respectable British society.
Е ne thread running through Maugham's work is the notion that life is a theatre in which people play various roles. And humanity plays in this theatre of great comedy. The entire society that surrounds Charles Strickland, the protagonist of The Moon and Sixpence, is involved in this comedy in a very active way. Charles Strickland is, up to a certain point, subject to the conventions of secular society. He is seventeen years in the role of caring father and decent spouse. Strickland is dull, withdrawn, uninterested in others. His life is monotonous and flows between the stock exchange, where Charles works as a broker, and home. But in the soul of the hero grows craving for art, for painting. This craving, weak at first, gradually develops into a passion impossible to cope with. Strickland has discovered something that has overturned his consciousness, freed him from human notions, prejudices and ideas. All moral constraints suddenly lost their power over him. Everything he had once treasured became an empty convention. Strickland was now convinced that the material had no power over the spiritual. And as the moon cannot be removed from the sky, the artist cannot be subjected to the laws of society.
But there is no artist like an artist. And a mediocre but successful mediocrity like Dirk Strove, who draws vulgar pictures for the pleasures of the crowd, is one thing; it is quite another to be obsessed with Charles Strickland, who is not interested in the opinion of others. He cares little for the fate of the pictures he has painted. Strickland is not interested in the finished picture; he cares less about the result than in the creative process itself. The narrator, who is also engaged in creative work, is of the same opinion. In his view, the writer should seek satisfaction only in the work itself, remaining indifferent to praise and blasphemy, to success and failure.
The creative force that had accumulated over the years was gnawing at Charles Strickland, and he longed to be free of it. He did not listen to arguments or respond to tricky questions. He doesn't care at all whether he has talent or not, whether his paintings are a success or not.
While the characters are similar, the narrator differs from Strickland in his attitude to the fate of his work and his attitude to society. He admits that he could not produce work in an uninhabited society, knowing that his work would not be read by anyone. Strickland is indifferent to this. Charles is totally indifferent to success, to fame, to wealth, to all the achievements of civilisation. Strickland's only dream is to be on an island, away from civilization, and there, in the midst of primitive nature, to fully realize his creative powers.
Strickland hates the flesh and its needs, which detach the mind from the spiritual and ground his thought. He lives by automatically satisfying the body's needs for sleep and food. Strickland does not notice what he wears, what he sleeps on, what he sits on, what he eats.
The narrator constantly focuses his attention on the irrational, unearthly nature of Strickland's creative passion, which borders on divine insight. This is what makes Strickland different from other artists: he creates not for people, but to satisfy his instinct for beauty. That's why he is neither understood nor recognised, which is why his paintings are not successful. True beauty is a phenomenon of an unearthly order, into which a true creator has managed to penetrate with his creative eye. True beauty lives independently of the opinion and recognition of others. This is how Dirk Stroeve, a bad artist, but a fine connoisseur of art, puts it.
Dirk is almost the only person who immediately saw Strickland as a genius. The narrator also believed in the talent of Charles - as evidenced by his repeated desire to buy paintings by Strickland. He is horrified by some of Charles's actions, tries to make himself hate him, but gives up each time, subdued by his wit, and continues to maintain a relationship with him. The narrator, like a true writer, does not condemn Strickland, but studies him as a rare specimen, trying to get to the bottom of the nature of his actions, which from the point of view of conventional wisdom, are monstrous.
Maugham's character is alien not only to society, but also to the geography itself. He is not satisfied with life in England, but he finds no solace in Paris either. Strickland is drawn elsewhere, to places far from civilisation. He feels that this is where his real home is. He has lived there in a past incarnation, and his mind holds vague reverberations of that life. This unconscious feeling of a lost homeland is similar to the feeling of an unattainable ideal which Strickland tries to embody in his art. It's as if he's set himself the task of finding the primary basis of the world, of "reconciling the moon and the penny".
According to Maugham, the world of the artist includes such components: The evolution of the artist's outlook, his soul, his artistic images; The otherness of the artist; The alternation of periods of calm with turbulent periods; The struggle of genius and the human essence; The non-existent, unearthly, high purpose of the artist; Art for itself; The achrony of the artist's world; The encroachment on the eternal.
The narrator, after seeing Strickland's paintings, said that the artist seeks to express what cannot be expressed by means of painting. It is as if he is trying to re-create the world out of chaos, but the setting of Paris, businesslike, noisy, steeped in vice, is not suitable for this. And Strickland aspires to the south, to a green island in the middle of the ocean. His entire previous life is a journey to that island, and all of his previous work is a sketch for the main picture he painted on the walls of a Tahitian hut.