conscientious, he has all the highest qualities of the ideal
brick-maker. He produces the best bricks, and you can generally depend
upon him to turn out both honest and workmanlike articles. But he is not
an architect. For the architectonic faculty in its highest developments
you must come to England. And he is not a teacher or expounder. For the
expository faculty in its purest form, the faculty that enables men to
flash forth clearly and distinctly before the eyes of others the facts
and principles they know and perceive themselves, you must go to France.
Oh, dear, yes; we may well be proud of England. Remember, I have already
disclaimed more than once in these papers the vulgar error of
patriotism. But freedom from that narrow vice does not imply inability
to recognise the good qualities of one's own race as well as the bad
ones. And the Englishman, left to himself and his own native methods,
used to cut a very respectable figure indeed in the domain of science.
No other nation has produced a Newton or a Darwin. The Englishman's way
was to get up an interest in a subject first; and then, working back
from the part of it that specially appealed to his own tastes, to make
himself master of the entire field of inquiry. This natural and
thoroughly individualistic English method enabled him to arrive at new
results in a way impossible to the pedantically educated German--nay,
even to the lucidly and systematically educated Frenchman. It was the
plan to develop "mere amateurs," I admit; but it was also the plan to
develop discoverers and revolutionisers of science. For the man most
likely to advance knowledge is not the man who knows in an encyclopædic
rote-work fashion the whole circle of the sciences, but the man who
takes a fresh interest for its own sake in some particular branch of
inquiry.
Darwin was a "mere amateur." He worked at things for the love of them.
So were Murchison, Lyell, Benjamin Franklin, Herschel. So were or are
Bates, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace. "Mere amateurs!" every
man of them.
In an evil hour, however, our pastors and masters in conclave assembled
said to one another, "Come now, let us Teutonise English scientific
education." And straightway they Teutonised it. And there began to arise
in England a new brood of patent machine-made scientists--excellent men
in their way, authorities on the Arachnida, knowing all about everything
that could be taught in the schools, but lacking somehow the supreme
grace of the old English originality. They are first-rate specialists, I
allow; and I don't deny that a civilised country has all need of
specialists. Nay, I even admit that the day of the specialist has only
just begun. He will yet go far; he will impose himself and his yoke upon
us. But don't let us therefore make the grand mistake of concluding that
our fine old English birthright in science--the birthright that gave us
our Newtons, our Cavendishes, our Darwins, our Lyells--was all folly and
error. Don't let us spoil ourselves in order to become mere second-hand
Germans. Let us recognise the fact that each nation has a work of its
own to do in the world; and that as star from star, so one nation
differeth from another in glory. Let each of us thank the goodness and
the grace that on his birth have smiled, that he was born of English
breed, and not a German child.
"Don't you think," a military gentleman once said to me, "the Germans
are wonderful organisers?" "No," I answered, "I don't; but I think
they're excellent drill-sergeants."
There are people who drop German authorities upon you as if a Teutonic
name were guarantee enough for anything. They say, "Hausberger asserts,"
or "According to Schimmelpenninck." This is pure fetichism. Believe me,
your man of science isn't necessarily any the better because he comes to
you with the label, "Made in Germany." The German instinct is the
instinct of Frederick William of Prussia--the instinct of drilling. Very
thorough and efficient men in their way it turns out; men versed in all
the lore of their chosen subject. If they are also men of transcendent
ability (as often happens), they can give us a comprehensive view of
their own chosen field such as few Englishmen (except Sir Archibald
Geikie, and he's a Scot) can equal. If I wanted to select a learned man
for a special Government post--British Museum, and so forth--I dare say
I should often be compelled to admit, as Government often admits, that
the best man then and there obtainable is the German. But if I wanted to
train Herbert Spencers and Faradays, I would certainly _not_ send them
to Bonn or to Berlin. John Stuart Mill was an English Scotchman,
educated and stuffed by his able father on the German system; and how
much of spontaneity, of vividness, of _verve_, we all of us feel John
Stuart Mill lost by it! One often wonders to what great, to what still
greater, things that lofty brain might not have attained, if only James
Mill would have given it a chance to develop itself naturally!
Our English gift is originality. Our English keynote is individuality.
Let us cling to those precious heirlooms of our Celtic ancestry, and
refuse to be Teutonised. Let us discard the lessons of the Potsdam
grenadiers. Let us write on the pediment of our educational temple, "No
German need apply." Let us disclaim that silly phrase "A mere amateur."
Let us return to the simple faith in direct observation that made
English science supreme in Europe.
And may the Lord gi'e us Britons a guid conceit o' oorsel's!
XII.
_A SQUALID VILLAGE._
Strange that the wealthiest class in the wealthiest country in the world
should so long have been content to inhabit a squalid village!
I'm not going to compare London, as Englishmen often do, with Paris or
Vienna. I won't do two great towns that gross injustice. And, indeed,
comparison here is quite out of the question. You don't compare Oxford
with Little Peddlington, or Edinburgh with Thrums, and then ask which is
the handsomest. Things must be alike in kind before you can begin to
compare them. And London and Paris are not alike in kind. One is a city,
and a noble city; the other is a village, and a squalid village.
No; I will not even take a humbler standard of comparison, and look at
London side by side with Brussels, Antwerp, Munich, Turin. Each of those
is a city, and a fine city in its way; but each of them is small. Still,
even by their side, London is again but a squalid village. I insist upon
that point, because, misled by their ancient familiarity with London,
most Englishmen have had their senses and understandings so blunted on
this issue, that they really don't know what is meant by a town, or a
fine town, when they see one. And don't suppose it's because London is
in Britain and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks:
for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow and
Newcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling,
invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, from
anti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford,
Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all fine
streets that would attract attention even in France or Germany. But the
Strand, Piccadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street--good Lord, deliver us!
One more _caveat_ as to my meaning. When I cite among real towns
Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich, I am not thinking of the treasures of art
those beautiful places contain; that is another and altogether higher
question. Towns supreme in this respect often lag far behind others of
less importance--lag behind in those external features and that general
architectural effectiveness which rightly entitle us to say in a broad
sense, "This is a fine city." Florence, for example, contains more
treasures of art in a small space than any other town of Europe; yet
Florence, though undoubtedly a town, and even a fine town, is not to be
compared in this respect, I do not say with Venice or Brussels, but even
with Munich or Milan. On the other hand, London contains far more
treasures of art in its way than Boston, Massachusetts; but Boston is a
handsome, well-built, regular town, while London--well, I will spare you
the further repetition of the trite truism that London is a squalid
village. In one word, the point I am seeking to bring out here is that a
town, as a town, is handsome or otherwise, not in virtue of the works of
art or antiquity it contains, but in virtue of its ground-plan, its
architecture, its external and visible decorations and places--the
Louvre, the Boulevards, the Champs Elysées, the Place de l'Opéra.
Now London has no ground-plan. It has no street architecture. It has no
decorations, though it has many uglifications. It is frankly and simply
and ostentatiously hideous. And being wholly wanting in a system of any
sort--in organic parts, in idea, in views, in vistas--it is only a
village, and a painfully uninteresting one.
Most Englishmen see London before they see any other great town. They
become so familiarised with it that their sense of comparison is dulled
and blunted. I had the good fortune to have seen many other great towns
before I ever saw London: and I shall never forget my first sense of
surprise at its unmitigated ugliness.
Get on top of an omnibus--I don't say in Paris, from the Palais Royal to
the Arc de Triomphe, but in Brussels, from the Gare du Nord to the
Palais de Justice--and what do you see? From end to end one unbroken
succession of noble and open prospects. I'm not thinking now of the
Grande Place in the old town, with its magnificent collection of
mediæval buildings; the Great Fire effectively deprived us of our one
sole chance of such an element of beauty in modern London. I confine
myself on purpose to the parts of Brussels which are purely recent, and
might have been imitated at a distance in London, if there had been any
public spirit or any public body in England to imitate them. (But
unhappily there was neither.) Recall to mind as you read the strikingly
handsome street view that greets you as you emerge from the Northern
Station down the great central Boulevards to the Gare du Midi--all built
within our own memory. Then think of the prospects that gradually unfold
themselves as you rise on the hill; the fine vista north towards Sainte
Marie de Schaarbeck; the beautiful Rue Royale, bounded by that charming
Parc; the unequalled stretch of the Rue de la Régence, starting from the
Place Royale with Godfrey of Bouillon, and ending with the imposing mass
of the Palais de Justice. It is to me a matter for mingled surprise and
humiliation that so many Englishmen can look year after year at that
glorious street--perhaps the finest in the world--and yet never think to
themselves, "Mightn't we faintly imitate some small part of this in our
wealthy, ugly, uncompromising London?"
I always say to Americans who come to Europe: "When you go to England,
don't see our towns, but see our country. Our country is something
unequalled in the world: while our towns!--well, anyway, keep away from
London!"
With the solitary and not very brilliant exception of the Embankment,
there isn't a street in London where one could take a stranger to admire
the architecture. Compare that record with the new Boulevards in
Antwerp, where almost every house is worth serious study: or with the
Ring at Cologne (to keep close home all the time), where one can see
whole rows of German Renaissance houses of extraordinary interest. What
street in London can be mentioned in this respect side by side with
Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street in Boston; with Euclid Avenue in
Cleveland, Ohio; with the upper end of Fifth Avenue, New York; nay, even
with the new Via Roma at Genoa? Why is it that we English can't get on
the King's Road at Brighton anything faintly approaching that splendid
sea front on the Digue at Ostend, or those coquettish white villas that
line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice? The blight of London seems to
lie over all Southern England.
Paris looks like the capital of a world-wide empire. London, looks like
a shapeless neglected suburb, allowed to grow up by accident anyhow. And
that's just the plain truth of it. 'Tis a fortuitous concourse of
hap-hazard houses.
"But we are improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few
new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic,
English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive
new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness,
through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is
all. No grand, systematic, reconstructive plan, no rising to the height
of the occasion and the Empire! You tinker away at a Shaftesbury Avenue.
Parochial, all of it. And there you get the real secret of our futile
attempts at making a town out of our squalid village. The fault lies all
at the door of the old Corporation, and of the people who made and still
make the old Corporation possible. For centuries, indeed, there was
really no London, not even a village; there was only a scratch
collection of contiguous villages. The consequence was that here, at the
centre of national life, the English people grew wholly unaccustomed to
the bare idea of a town, and managed everything piecemeal, on the petty
scale of a country vestry. The vestryman intelligence has now overrun
the land; and if the London County Council ever succeeds at last in
making the congeries of villages into--I do not say a city, for that is
almost past praying for, but something analogous to a second-rate
Continental town, it will only be after long lapse of time and violent
struggles with the vestryman level of intellect and feeling.
London had many great disadvantages to start with. She lay in a dull and
marshy bottom, with no building stone at hand, and therefore she was
forecondemned by her very position to the curse of brick and stucco,
when Bath, Oxford, Edinburgh, were all built out of their own quarries.
Then fire destroyed all her mediæval architecture, leaving her only
Westminster Abbey to suggest the greatness of her losses. But
brick-earth and fire have been as nothing in their way by the side of
the evil wrought by Gog and Magog. When five hundred trembling ghosts of
naked Lord Mayors have to answer for their follies and their sins
hereafter, I confidently expect the first question in the appalling
indictment will be, "Why did you allow the richest nation on earth to
house its metropolis in a squalid village?"
We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacrifice much. And his hateful
name is Vested Interest.
XIII.
_CONCERNING ZEITGEIST._
A certain story is told about Mr. Ruskin, no doubt apocryphal, but at
any rate characteristic. A young lady, fresh from the Abyss of
Bayswater, met the sage one evening at dinner--a gushing young lady, as
many such there be--who, aglow with joy, boarded the Professor at once
with her private art-experiences. "Oh, Mr. Ruskin," she cried, clasping
her hands, "do you know, I hadn't been two days in Florence before I
discovered what you meant when you spoke about the supreme
unapproachableness of Botticelli." "Indeed?" Ruskin answered. "Well,
that's very remarkable; for it took me, myself, half a lifetime to
discover it."
The answer, of course, was meant to be crushing. How should _she_, a
brand plucked from the burning of Bayswater, be able all at once, on the
very first blush, to appreciate Botticelli? And it took the greatest
critic of his age half a lifetime! Yet I venture to maintain, for all
that, that the young lady was right, and that the critic was wrong--if
such a thing be conceivable. I know, of course, that when we speak of
Ruskin we must walk delicately, like Agag. But still, I repeat it, the
young lady was right; and it was largely the unconscious, pervasive
action of Mr. Ruskin's own personality that enabled her to be so.
It's all the Zeitgeist: that's where it is. The slow irresistible
Zeitgeist. Fifty years ago, men's taste had been so warped and distorted
by current art and current criticism that they _couldn't_ see
Botticelli, however hard they tried at it. He was a sealed book to our
fathers. In those days it required a brave, a vigorous, and an original
thinker to discover any merit in any painter before Raffael, except
perhaps, as Goldsmith wisely remarked, Perugino. The man who went then
to the Uffizi or the Pitti, after admiring as in duty bound his High
Renaissance masters, found himself suddenly confronted with the Judith
or the Calumny, and straightway wondered what manner of strange wild
beasts these were that some insane early Tuscan had once painted to
amuse himself in a lucid interval. They were not in the least like the
Correggios and the Guidos, the Lawrences and the Opies, that the men of
that time had formed their taste upon, and accepted as their sole
artistic standards. To people brought up upon pure David and
Thorvaldsen, the Primavera at the Belle Arti must naturally have seemed
like a wild freak of madness. The Zeitgeist then went all in the
direction of cold lifeless correctness; the idea that the painter's soul
counted for something in art was an undreamt of heresy.
On your way back from Paris some day, stop a night at Amiens and take
the Cathedral seriously. Half the stately interior of that glorious
thirteenth century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgaw
monstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and _baroque_ period. There they
sprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings to
the utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of the
noblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, any
workman can see at a glance how ugly and how disfiguring those floppy
creatures are; it is impossible to look at them without saying to
oneself: "Why don't they clear away all this high-faluting rubbish, and
let us see the real columns and arches and piers as their makers
designed them?" Yet who was it that put them there, those unspeakable
angels in muslin drapery, those fly-away nymphs and graces and seraphim?
Why, the best and most skilled artists of their day in Europe. And
whence comes it that the merest child can now see instinctively how out
of place they are, how disfiguring, how incongruous? Why, because the
Gothic revival has taught us all by degrees to appreciate the beauty and
delicacy of a style which to our eighteenth century ancestors was mere
barbaric mediævalism; has taught us to admire its exquisite purity, and
to dislike the obstrusive introduction into its midst of incongruous and
meretricious Bernini-like flimsiness.
The Zeitgeist has changed, and we have changed with it.
It is just the same with our friend Botticelli. Scarce a dozen years
ago, it was almost an affectation to pretend you admired him. It is no
affectation now. Hundreds of assorted young women from the Abyss of
Bayswater may rise any morning here in sacred Florence and stand
genuinely enchanted before the Adoration of the Kings, or the Venus who
floats on her floating shell in a Botticellian ocean. And why? Because
Leighton, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Strudwick,
have led them slowly up to it by golden steps innumerable. Thirty years
ago the art of the early Tuscan painters was something to us Northerners
exotic, strange, unconnected, archæological. Gradually, it has been
brought nearer and nearer to us on the walls of the Grosvenor and the
New Gallery, till now he that runs may read; the ingenuous maiden,
fished from the Abyss of Bayswater, can drink in at a glance what it
took a Ruskin many years of his life and much slow development to attain
to piecemeal.
That is just what all great men are for--to make the world accept as a
truism in the generation after them what it rejected as a paradox in the
generation before them.
Not, of course, that there isn't a little of affectation, and still more
of fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people,
incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, are
anxious only to be told what they "ought to admire, don't you know," and
will straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up an
admiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Two
aspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, æsthetic
species, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi.
They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame the
magic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look a
little nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro," she
cried, with a revulsion of disgust; "this is only Aless." And
straightway they went off from the spot in high dudgeon at having been
misled as they supposed into examining the work of "another person of
the same name."
Need I point the moral of my apologue, in this age of enlightenment, by
explaining, for the benefit of the junior members, that the gentleman's
full name was really Alessandro, and that both abbreviations are
impartially intended to cover his one and indivisible personality? The
first half is official, like Alex.; the second affectionate and
familiar, like Sandy.
Still, even after making due allowance for such humbugs as these, a vast
residuum remains of people who, if born sixty years ago, could never by
any possibility have been made to see there was anything admirable in
Lippi, Botticelli, Giotto; but who, having been born thirty years ago,
see it without an effort. Hundreds who read these lines must themselves
remember the unmistakable thrill of genuine pleasure with which they
first gazed upon the Fra Angelicos at San Marco, the Memlings at Bruges,
the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, those
are real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, the
bare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness.
Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preaching
of the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers and
the preachers are but a little ahead of the age they live in. They see
things earlier; they help to lead us up to them; but they do not wholly
produce the revolutions they inaugurate. Humanity as a whole develops
consistently along certain pre-established and predestined lines. Sooner
or later, a certain point must inevitably be reached; but some of us
reach it sooner, and most of us later. That's all the difference. Every
great change is mainly due to the fact that we have all already attained
a certain point in development. A step in advance becomes inevitable
after that, and one after another we are sure to take it. In one word,
what it needed a man of genius to see dimly thirty years ago, it needs a
singular fool not to see clearly nowadays.
XIV.
_THE DECLINE OF MARRIAGE._
Men don't marry nowadays. So everybody tells us. And I suppose we may
therefore conclude, by a simple act of inference, that women in turn
don't marry either. It takes two, of course, to make a quarrel--or a
marriage.
Why is this? "Young people nowadays want to begin where their fathers
left off." "Men are made so comfortable at present in their clubs."
"College-bred girls have no taste for housekeeping." "Rents are so high
and manners so luxurious." Good heavens, what silly trash, what puerile
nonsense! Are we all little boys and girls, I ask you, that we are to
put one another off with such transparent humbug? Here we have to deal
with a primitive instinct--the profoundest and deepest-seated instinct
of humanity, save only the instincts of food and drink and of
self-preservation. Man, like all other animals, has two main functions:
to feed his own organism, and to reproduce his species. Ancestral habit
leads him, when mature, to choose himself a mate--because he loves her.
It drives him, it urges him, it goads him irresistibly. If this profound
impulse is really lacking to-day in any large part of our race, there
must be some correspondingly profound and adequate reason for it. Don't
let us deceive ourselves with shallow platitudes which may do for
drawing-rooms. This is philosophy, even though post-prandial. Let us try
to take a philosophic view of the question at issue, from the point of
vantage of a biological outlook.
Before you begin to investigate the causes of a phenomenon _quelconque_,
'tis well to decide whether the phenomenon itself is there to
investigate.