SHOCKING AS A FINE ART
“Thrice I have patted my God on the head that men might call me
brave.”--_Tomlinson_, by RUDYARD KIPLING.
Closely related to the new dandyism and the search for reality by
means of mood and sensation in their more sophisticated forms came the
gentle art of astonishing the middle class. The one was in the nature
of a by-product of the other. Young bloods of the period delighted to
_épater le bourgeois_, as the phrase went, and with experience a
new kind of art came into vogue: the art of shocking. In a sense the
necessity was thrust upon the younger generation by the unimaginative
opposition their demand for more life encountered at the hands of the
autocracy of elderly respectability. It was really a contest between
the stupidity of vitality and the vitality of stupidity. For if those
in authority had occasional doubts as to their own material importance
they had none about their virtue and righteousness. No one, indeed,
had ever contested their right to such views, and these views were
supported by the full weight of traditional opinion. It was hardly
surprising that they should look with suspicion upon the restiveness of
the younger generation, because that unrest was not the conventional
sowing of wild oats: a custom conventionally recognised from earliest
times as the natural safety valve of turbulent youth. It was a far more
subtle thing. To let off steam and settle down into the steady and
respectable run of life is one thing, and comprehensible to elderly
folk who have been through the process, but to let off steam and refuse
to settle down seemed serious folly, especially when arguments were
advanced in defence of what, in the elderly point of view, was nothing
less than outrageous conduct. The bewildered elders of the Nineties
were faced with that dilemma.
At the same time, the gospel of _épater le bourgeois_ was in
the main less an actuality than an idea seeking expression in life
and using Art as its advocate. True it had its practical exponents,
but these were generally confined to the more literary and artistic
circles, and for the general public they became a part of the mythology
of the Nineties even during the decade. Rumours of strange wickedness
were heard in many directions. Names were mentioned; and certain
artists and minor poets gained repute by their alleged association
with vice. It was fashionable in “artistic” circles to drink absinthe
and to discuss its “cloudy green” suggestiveness; and other hitherto
exotic drugs were also called into the service of these dilettanti of
sin. Certain drugs seemed to gather about them an atmosphere of romance
during these years, and all sorts of stimulants and soporifics, from
incense and perfumes to opium, hashish, and various forms of alcohol,
were used as means to extend sensation beyond the range of ordinary
consciousness, along with numerous well-known and half-known physical
aids to passionate experience. The age was extraordinarily sensitive,
for instance, to the suggestiveness of sex. The subject was discussed
with a new interest and a new frankness in essays and novels and
plays; but for one person interested in the medico-legal sides of the
questions raised, a dozen must have been drawn to the subject by a
craving for forbidden fruit. Thus sex-inquisitiveness awoke slumbering
aberrations in some and suggested them to others, with the result that
definite perverse practices became associated with the “advanced”
movement.
The appearance in literature and art of this new outlook upon life
bore with it all the attractiveness of novelty and daring, and the
irritation such things arouse among a people who have lived for
many years under the impression that morals, and even ideas, were
more or less fixed. But the very spirit of the time contested such
complaisance. An imp of disquiet was abroad, scattering notes of
interrogation like confetti of fire among cherished principles and
customs. The young men enjoyed the fun as they rushed about smashing
up the intellectual and moral furniture of their parents. A generation
nourished by the high normalities of Tennyson and Browning, which
had thought Matthew Arnold (the critic) rather daring, and which had
been nearly scared out of its Swinburne and its Rossetti by Robert
Buchanan’s attack on “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” had every reason
to be horrified by the appearance of Ibsen and Nietzsche. Many shook
their heads ominously and took refuge in _Locksley Hall_:
“Authors--essayist, atheist, novelist, realist, rhymester, play
your part,
Paint the mortal shame of nature with the living hues of Art.
Rip your brothers’ vices open, strip your own foul passions bare;
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence--forward--naked--let them
stare.”
Others took the change in better humour, and either joined the dance or
became interested spectators.
Influences behind the art of shocking were not entirely French, though
the French decadents played their part. Throughout the whole of the
period English publishers were issuing excellent translations of modern
masterpieces from many European idea-centres, and in this way such
writers as Tolstoy, Ibsen, Zola, Nietzsche, D’Annunzio and Turgenev
became familiar aids to advanced thought in this country. Hitherto the
language barrier had left these writers the property of the cultured
classes, as was the case with the French decadents, the chief of whom
have not even now been given adequate representation in English. The
introduction of such writers was like the opening up of a new country
to be immediately settled by ardent colonists. Their ideas were eagerly
absorbed and, what is more interesting, used in a vigorous criticism
of life. But there is little doubt that the first foreign ethical
influence of the period was Henrik Ibsen, whose method of criticising
conventional morals by means of drama had a profound effect upon
thinking people and dramatists. Nietzsche was known only to the few
who read German at the beginning of the decade, but before the death of
the old century the first attempt at a complete edition of the works of
Friedrich Nietzsche was made by Henry & Co. The enterprise, however,
aroused so little interest that it was abandoned after the production
of four volumes. It was not until 1896 that any general interest in
Nietzsche’s ideas began in this country. In that year Havelock Ellis
contributed a study of the German philosopher to _The Savoy_, and
there were several other notices and criticisms in the reviews. The
earliest reference to Nietzsche in the literature of the period is to
be found in George Egerton’s _Keynotes_ (1892), but there are several
pages devoted to his ideas in the _Sentences and Paragraphs_ of John
Davidson (1893), who seems to have been the only writer of the time to
have come directly under the spell of the Nietzschean philosophy. The
earliest British journal avowedly upholding an “egoistic philosophy”
was started in 1898, under the title of _The Eagle and the Serpent_. It
bore beneath its title these words from _Zarathustra_: “The proudest
animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun have set out
to reconnoitre”; and for further explanation the following:--
“_Dedicated to the Philosophy of Life Enunciated by Nietzsche,
Stirner, Thoreau and Goethe_, THE EAGLE AND THE SERPENT _labours
for the Recognition of New Ideals in Politics and Sociology, in
Ethics and Philosophy, in Literature and Art_.
* * * * *
A RACE OF ALTRUISTS IS NECESSARILY A RACE OF SLAVES.
A RACE OF FREEMEN IS NECESSARILY A RACE OF EGOISTS.
THE GREAT ARE ONLY GREAT BECAUSE WE ARE ON OUR KNEES. LET US
RISE!”
This curious and entertaining little paper was published at first
bi-monthly, and then occasionally and fitfully, until the last number
appeared in 1902.
One foreign influence making for frankness of expression was that of
Emile Zola, whose books were issued in a well-translated, although
somewhat expurgated, edition, at a popular price. Thousands of these
were sold and read, thus preparing the way for the books of our native
realists like George Moore, whose _Esther Waters_ gave one of the
most violent shocks of the period; Arthur Morrison, with his _Tales
of Mean Streets_ and _A Child of the Jago_, and Somerset
Maugham’s _Liza of Lambeth_.
Under such influences the art of shocking rattled along merrily
enough, and claimed many devotees. These may be divided roughly into
two classes: the Individual and the Social. In the former there were
the typical men of the literary movement of the Nineties and their
followers, astonishing either from innate addiction to caprice,
irrepressibility of whim, love of experiment or, as was often the case
with the rank and file, mere cussedness. Certain demonstrations in the
art of shocking recall the story of the man who, seeing the father
of decadent poetry, remarked to a friend: “There goes Baudelaire. I
wager he is going to sleep _under_ the bed to-night instead of
_in_ it, just to astonish it.” Among the art products of the more
important members of this class stand the paradoxes of Oscar Wilde,
the pictures of Aubrey Beardsley, the early poems of Arthur Symons and
the satires of Max Beerbohm. But many of the writers who might have
astonished the middle classes by administering artistic shocks put
other qualities into their art and filled their lives with astonishing
incidents. Nothing is more remarkable in looking back at the Nineties
than to note how Death has gathered to himself so many of the period’s
most characteristic and most interesting figures. All of these men
“lived their own lives,” and when whim or Fate led them along perilous
paths they suffered the consequences. Most of them died young, several
were scarcely more than youths; some died of diseases which might have
been checked or prevented in more careful lives; some were condemned
to death at an early age by miserable maladies, and some were so
burdened by the malady of the soul’s unrest that they voluntarily
crossed the borderland of life. It would seem as if these restless
and tragic figures thirsted so much for life, and for the life of the
hour, that they put the cup to their lips and drained it in one deep
draught: perhaps all that was mortal of them felt so essential to the
Nineties that life beyond the decade might have been unbearable. Oscar
Wilde died in 1900 at the age of forty-four; Aubrey Beardsley died
in 1898, aged twenty-six; Ernest Dowson, in 1900, aged thirty-three;
Charles Conder, in 1909, aged forty-one; Lionel Johnson, in 1902, aged
thirty-five; Hubert Crackanthorpe, in 1896, aged thirty-one; Henry
Harland, in 1905, aged forty-four; Francis Thompson, in 1907, aged
forty-eight; and John Davidson, in 1909, aged fifty-two.
The second section of those who astonished the middle classes was
composed of revolutionists and reformers who shocked by expressing
the newly awakened social consciousness which demanded change in the
affairs of the State--wider margins of personal freedom and better
opportunities of life and comfort for all. First among these came
Bernard Shaw, who introduced a new subjective daring into dialectics
and social controversy, avowedly designed to shock, prod and irritate
the social consciousness of the bourgeoisie into practical moral
and economic zeal. Grant Allen wrote _The Woman Who Did_, also
in the same spirit, to draw attention to the difficulties of our
marriage customs. The direct influence behind this group, although
he did not supply it with all its ideas, was Ibsen. The Norwegian
dramatist-philosopher suggested the attitude of the moral revolt.
It was he, and not Nietzsche, who first taught the Englishman and
Englishwoman to “transvalue their values,” to examine with a critical
and restless eye the moral scaffolding of their civilisation, and to
suggest to them where they would find weaknesses. And the result was
that the middle classes were more shocked by this attack than by any
other astonishing thing of the period--save the fall of Oscar Wilde.
Different in aim and method as these two classes of artists in
astonishment may have been, they were each the outcome of the same
demand for more freedom, more experience, more sensation, more life.
What was happening in England was but the echo of what had been
happening in Western Europe for a couple of decades. The idea of
self-realisation, as old as Emerson, and older, was at the root of the
modern attitude. The younger generation became acutely conscious of
parental control. Turgenev had interpreted the attitude in its broader
aspects in _Fathers and Children_, which was published in Russia
as long ago as 1862. But the nihilism of Turgenev’s great creation,
Bazarov, was not at the back of the English revolt, except in a common
desire of freedom. Nor were the men of the Nineties wholly absorbed in
material experiences. Every physical excess of the time went hand in
hand with spiritual desire. The soul seemed to be trying the way of
the flesh with calamitous desperation. Long years of Puritanism and
rationalism had proved the folly of salvation by morality and salvation
by reason, so in a fit of despair the unsatisfied spirit of the age
sought respite in salvation by sin. The recognition of sin was the
beginning of the revolt against rationalism and the beginning of the
revival of mysticism. The latter revealed itself in the Theosophical
movement, in the sudden popularity of Maurice Maeterlinck, and in
numerous conversions to Rome, the first and last home of Christian
mysticism.
The decadence was a form of soul-sickness, and the only cure for the
disease was mysticism. But there was also another form of the soul’s
unrest which sprang more out of excessive vitality straining at the
leash of custom. It was the unrest of an age which had grown too big
for its boots. New conceptions of life and morality and mankind were
demanded. Generations had been brought up in the faith that there were
no ideas higher than man and God. Many were reasserting the democratic
faith that the voice of the people was the voice of God. But Max
Stirner and Henrik Ibsen were gradually insinuating the idea that the
highest of all things was not mankind but the self, the individual ego,
and thus preparing the way for Nietzsche, who foretold the supersession
of man: “Man is a bridge connecting animal and superman--a bridge
thrown across a precipice.”
But the Nietzschean idea, as I have pointed out, did not reach this
country until the later Nineties. Ibsen was the social stimulus
to revolt. His plays were being read and acted, and the idea of a
self-centred personality was generally accepted by the “intellectuals.”
“So to conduct one’s life as to realise oneself--this seems to me
the highest attainment possible to a human being,” Ibsen had written
to Björnson; and again in a letter to George Brandes he had said:
“The great thing is not to allow oneself to be frightened by the
venerableness of an institution. The state has its roots in Time: it
will have its culmination in Time. Greater things than it will fall;
all religion will fall. Neither the conceptions of morality nor those
of art are eternal. To how much are we really obliged to pin our faith?
Who will vouch for it that two and two do not make five up in Jupiter?”
Those words were written as far back as 1871, but it took twenty
years for their sense as expressed in the plays of Ibsen to be fully
appreciated. By the middle of the Nineties the attitude was so much to
the taste that many were quite ready to say, and in a way prove, that
it was not necessary to go as far as Jupiter to find two and two making
five.
In the main, however, the majority were content to prove that two and
two made four; but they insisted upon proving it for themselves; that
the proof was already established and long since taken for granted was
quite sufficient to arouse the gravest suspicions. “Whenever people
agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong,” said Cecil Graham, in
_Lady Windermere’s Fan_, voicing a characteristic whim. This
superior attitude was, of course, far from the general attitude of
the masses. They probably knew little of those adventures among ideas
and sensations which occupied more leisured and more cultured people.
The art of shocking the middle classes existed mainly among members
of that class. It was an internal revolt. “Nothing,” said Arthur
Symons, “not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional
vice; and the desire to ‘bewilder the middle classes’ is itself
middle class”: which is perfectly true, but the tendency is not to be
belittled for all that. It showed that the bourgeoisie was capable of
producing critics of itself, however distasteful these proved to be.
The earliest critics of the middle classes had always arisen within
the pale even when they had been Socialists, as in the instances of
Ferdinand Lassalle, Karl Marx and, in our own time, William Morris,
H. M. Hyndman and Bernard Shaw. The conversion to Socialism of that
genius of bewilderment, Oscar Wilde, must not be taken too seriously
from the Socialistic point of view, as to a large extent, the famous
essay on _The Soul of Man under Socialism_ was little more than
an elaborately shocking admission; for it must not be forgotten that
it was a much more daring thing to announce oneself a Socialist then
than now--it was almost as daring for a middle-class girl to go out
unchaperoned, and shocked almost as much.
Literature was drawn into the firing line of the times. Novels and
plays not only became more outspoken, but sentences became more
epigrammatic and thoughts more paradoxical. No one could say how the
most innocent of sentences might explode in its last word, any more
than one could prophesy what somersault one’s favourite belief might
take in its latest incarnation. Surprises lurked in the most surprising
literary places as though to reflect and keep time with the reshuffling
of habits and conventions. And just as modern literature has gained in
brightness by the experience, so the adventure has familiarised us with
the need of variety in personality and of wider margins of freedom for
its expression.