I said just now: "If any of our American soldiers look up at the niches
in the portal of a French cathedral they are likely to be struck first
of all by" such and such things.
In our new Army all the arts and professions are represented, and if the
soldier in question happens to be a sculptor, an architect, or an art
critic, he will certainly note what I have pointed out; but if he is not
a trained observer, the chances are that he will not even look up.
The difference is that in France almost every one has the seeing eye,
just as almost every one has the hearing ear. It is not a platitude,
though it may be a truism, to say that the French are a race of
artists: it is the key that unlocks every door of their complex
psychology, and consequently the key that must be oftenest in the
explorer's hand.
The gift of the seeing eye is, obviously, a first requisite where taste
is to prevail. And the question is, how is the seeing eye to be
obtained? What is the operation for taste-blindness? Or is there any;
and are not some races--the artistically non-creative--born as
irremediably blind as Kentucky cave-fishes?
The answer might be _yes_, in the case of the wholly non-creative races.
But the men of English blood are creative artists too: theirs is the
incomparable gift of poetic expression. And any race gifted with one
form of artistic originality is always acutely appreciative of other
cognate forms of expression. There has never been a race more capable
than the English of appreciating the great plastic creators, Greece,
Italy and France. This gift of the critical sense in those arts wherein
the race does not excel in original expression seems an inevitable
by-product of its own special endowment. In such races taste-blindness
is purely accidental, and the operation that cures it is the long slow
old-fashioned one of education. There is no other.
The artist races are naturally less dependent on education: to a certain
degree their instinct takes the place of acquired discrimination. But
they set a greater store on it than any other races because they
appreciate more than the others all that, even to themselves, education
reveals and develops.
It is just because the French are naturally endowed with taste that they
attach such importance to cultivation, and that French standards of
education are so infinitely higher and more severe than those existing
in Anglo-Saxon countries. We are too much inclined to think that we have
disposed of the matter when we say that, in our conception of life,
education should be formative and not instructive. The point is, the
French might return, what are we to be formed for? And, in any case,
they would not recognise the antithesis, since they believe that, to
form, one must instruct: instruct the eye, the ear, the brain, every one
of those marvellous organs of sense so often left dormant by our
Anglo-Saxon training.
It used to be thought that if savages appeared unimpressed by the
wonders of occidental art or industry it was because their natural
_hauteur_ would not let them betray surprise to the intruder. That
romantic illusion has been dispelled by modern investigation, and the
traveller now knows that the savage is unimpressed because _he does not
see_ the new things presented to him. It takes the most complex
assemblage of associations, visual and mental, to enable us to discover
what a picture represents: the savage placed before such familiar
examples of the graphic art as "The Infant Samuel" or "His Master's
Voice" would not _see_ the infant or the fox-terrier, much less guess
what they were supposed to be doing.
As long as America believes in short-cuts to knowledge, in any
possibility of buying taste in tabloids, she will never come into her
real inheritance of English culture. A gentleman travelling in the
Middle West met a charming girl who was a "college graduate." He asked
her what line of study she had selected, and she replied that she had
learnt music one year, and languages the next, and that last year she
had "learnt art."
It is the pernicious habit of regarding the arts as something that can
be bottled, pickled and absorbed in twelve months (thanks to "courses,"
summaries and abridgments) that prevents the development of a real
artistic sensibility in our eager and richly endowed race. Patience,
deliberateness, reverence: these are the fundamental elements of taste.
The French have always cultivated them, and it is as much to them as to
the eagle-flights of genius that France owes her long artistic
supremacy.
From the Middle Ages to the Revolution all the French trade-guilds had
their travelling members, the "Compagnons du Tour de France." Not for
greed of gold, but simply from the ambition to excel in their own craft,
these "companions," their trade once learned, took their staves in hand,
and wandered on foot over France, going from one to another of the
cities where the best teachers of their special trades were to be found,
and serving an apprenticeship in each till they learned enough to
surpass their masters. The "tour de France" was France's old way of
acquiring "Efficiency"; and even now she does not believe it can be
found in newspaper nostrums.