WE MODERNS:
ENIGMAS AND GUESSES
By EDWIN MUIR
Edited with Introduction by H. L. Mencken
NEW YORK ALFRED. A. KNOPF
MCMXX
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE OLD AGE,
II. ORIGINAL SIN,
III. WHAT IS MODERN?
IV. ART AND LITERATURE,
V. CREATIVE LOVE,
VI. THE TRAGIC VIEW.
INTRODUCTION
That a young Scotsman, reacting from the vast emotional assault of
the late ferocious war, should have withdrawn himself into an ivory
tower in Glasgow town, and there sat himself down in heroic calm
to wrestle with the vexatious and no doubt intrinsically insoluble
problems of being and becoming--this was surely nothing to cause,
whispers among connoisseurs of philosophical passion, for that grim,
persistent, cold-blooded concern with the fundamental mysteries of the
world has been the habit of the Scots ever since they emerged from
massacre and blue paint. From blue paint, indeed, the transition was
almost instantaneous to blue souls, and the conscience of Britain,
such as it is, has dwelt north of the Cheviot Hills ever since.
Find a Scot, and you are at once beset by a metaphysician, or, at
all events, by a theologian. But for a young man of those damp,
desolate parts, throwing himself into the racial trance, to emerge
with a set of ideas reaching back, through Nietzsche and even worse
heretics, to the spacious, innocent, somewhat gaudy days of the Greek
illumination--for such a fellow, so bred and circumscribed, to come
out of his tower with a concept of life as a grand and glittering
adventure, a tremendous spectacle, an overpowering ecstasy, almost
an orgy--such a phenomenon was, and is, quite sufficient to lift the
judicious eyebrow. Yet here is this Mr. Edwin Muir of Caledonia bearing
just that outlandish contraband, offering just that strange flouting
of all things traditionally Scotch. What he preaches in the ensuing
aphorisms is the emancipation of the modern spirit from its rotting
heritage of ingenuous fears and exploded certainties. What he denounces
most bitterly is the abandonment of a world that is beautifully
surprising and charming to the rule of sordid, timid and unimaginative
men--the regimentation of ideas in a system that is half a denial of
the obvious and half a conglomeration of outworn metaphors, all taken
too literally. And what he pleads for most eloquently, with his cold,
reserved northern eloquence, is the whole-hearted acceptance of "life
as a sacrament,... life as joy triumphing over fate,... life made
innocent,... life washed free from how much filth of remorse, guilt,
contempt, 'sin'."...
It goes without saying that the red hand of Nietzsche is in all
this. The Naumburg Antichrist, damned for five years running by
the indignation of all right-thinking men, has made steady and
enormous progress under cover. There has never been a time, indeed,
when his notions enjoyed a wider dispersion or were poll-parrotted
unwittingly by greater numbers of the righteous. Excessive draughts
of the democratic cure-all, swallowed label, cork, testimonials and
all, have brought Christendom to bed with _Katzenjammer--_and there
stands the seductive antidote in its leering blue bottles. Where would
philosophical opponents of Bolshevism be without Nietzsche? Who would
devise arguments for them, eloquence for them, phrases for them? On all
sides one hears echoes of him--often transformed from his harsh bass
to a piping falsetto, but nevertheless recognizable enough. Any port
in a storm! If God is asleep, then turn to the Devil! The show offers
the best laughing that heathen have enjoyed, perhaps, since the Hundred
Years' War. And there is an extra snicker in the fact that Scotland,
once again, seems to resume the old trade of intellectual smuggling.
If one Scot is to the front with so forthright a piece as "We Moderns,"
then surely there must be a thousand other Scots hard at it in a
_pianissimo_ manner. Thus, I suppose, the crime of Carlyle is repeated
on a wholesale scale, and once again the poor Sassenach is inoculated
with pathogenic Prussian organisms. On this side of the ocean the
business is less efficiently organized; we have no race of illicit
metaphysicians on our border. But the goods come in all the same. I
have heard more prattling of stale Nietzscheism of late, from men
bearing the flag in one hand and the cross in the other, than I ever
heard in the old days from parlour anarchists and unfrocked priests.
Nietzsche, belatedly discovered by a world beset by terrors too great
for it and mysteries too profound, becomes almost respectable, nay,
almost Episcopalian!
What ails it, at bottom, is the delusion that all the mysteries, given
doctors enough, theories enough, pills enough, may be solved--that it
is all a matter of finding a panacea, unearthing a prophet, passing
a bill. If it turns to Nietzsche, however gingerly and suspiciously,
it will turn only to fresh disappointment and dismay, for Nietzsche
is no quack with another sure cure, but simply an iconoclast who shows
that all the sure cures of the past and present have failed, and
_must_ fail--and particularly the sure cure of the mob, the scheme
of determining the diagnosis by taking a vote, the notion that the
medicine which most pleases the grossest palates is the medicine to get
the patient upon his legs. Nietzsche is no reformer; he is an assassin
of reformers; if he preaches anything at all, it is that reform is
useless, illusory--above all, unnecessary. The patient is really not
dying at all. Let him get up and dance! Let him pick up his bed and
employ it upon the skulls of his physicians! Life is not a disease to
be treated with boluses and philtres, not an affliction to be shirked
and sentimentalized, but an adventure to be savoured and enjoyed--life,
here and now, is the highest imaginable experience. What the world
needs is not a cure for it, but room for it, freedom for it, innocent
zest for it. So accepted and regarded, half of its terrors vanish at
once, and even its unescapable catastrophes take on a certain high
stateliness, a fine æsthetic dignity. This is the tragic view that Mr.
Muir cries up--life as joy triumphing over fate. "For the character of
tragedy is not negative and condemnatory, but deeply affirmative and
joyous." The ideal man is not the time-serving slave of Christendom,
in endless terror of God, forever flattering and bribing God, but the
Nietzschean _Ja-sager,_ the yes-sayer, facing destiny courageously and
a bit proudly, living to the full the life that lies within his grasp
in the present, accepting its terms as he finds them, undaunted by the
impenetrable shadows that loom ahead.
What Mr. Muir, following Nietzsche, is most dissatisfied with in the
modern spirt is its intolerable legalism--its fatuous frenzy to work
everything out to nine places of constabulary decimals, to establish
windy theories and principles, to break the soul of man to a rule.
In part, of course, that effort is of respectable enough origin. It
springs from intelligent self-assertion, healthy curiosity, the sense
of competence; it is a by-product of the unexampled conquests of nature
that have gone on in the modern age. But in other parts it is no more
than a by-product of the democratic spirit, the rise of the inferior,
the emancipation of the essentially in competent. Science is no
longer self-sufficient, isolated from moral ideas, an end in itself;
it tends to become a mere agent of mob tyranny; it takes on gratuitous
and incomprehensible duties and responsibilities; like the theology
that it has supplanted, it has friendlier and friendlier dealings with
the secular arm. And art, too, begins to be poisoned by this moral
obsession of the awakened proletariat. It ceases to be an expression
of well-being, of healthy functioning, of unpolluted joy in life, and
becomes a thing of obscure and snuffling purposes, a servant of some
low enterprise of the cocksure. The mob is surely no scientist and no
artist; it is, in fact, eternally the anti-scientist, the anti-artist;
science and art offer it unscalable heights and are hence its enemies.
But in a world dominated by mob yearnings and mob passions, even
science and art must take on some colour from below. The enemies, if
they cannot be met and overthrown on a fair field, can at least be
degraded. And when the mob degrades, it always degrades to moral tunes.
Morality is its one avenue to superiority--false but none the less
soothing. It can always be good. It can always dignify its stupidity,
its sordidness and its cowardice with terms borrowed from ethical
revelation. The good man is a numskull, but nevertheless he is good.
Mr. Muir has at the modern spirit on many other counts, but nearly
all of them may be converted with more or less plausibility into an
objection to its ethical obsession, its idiotic craze to legislate
and admonish. When he says, for example, that realism in the novel
and the drama is hollow, he leaves his case but half stated; there
is undoubtedly a void where imagination, feeling and a true sense
of the tragic ought to be, but it is filled with the common garbage
of mob thinking, to wit, with the common garbage of moral purpose.
All of the chief realists, from Zola to Barbusse, are pre-eminently
moralists disguised as scientists; what one derives from them, reading
them sympathetically, is not illumination but merely indignation. They
are always violently against something--and that something is usually
the fact that the world is not as secure and placid a place as a
Methodist Sunday-school. Their affectation of moral agnosticism need
deceive no one. They are secretly appalled (and delighted) by their
own "scientific" pornographies, just as their brethren of the vice
crusades are appalled and delighted. Realism, of course, can never be
absolute. It must always stress something and leave out something. What
it commonly stresses is the colossal failure of society to fit into
an orderly scheme of causes and effects, virtues and rewards, crimes
and punishments. What it leaves out is the glow of romance that hangs
about that failure--the poignant drama of blind chance, the fascination
of the unknowable. The realists are bad artists because they are
anæsthetic to beauty. And a good many scientists are bad scientists
for precisely the same reason. In their hands the gorgeous struggle of
man against the mysteries and foul ambuscades of nature is converted
into a banal cause before a police court, with the complainant put
on the stand to prove that his own hands are clean. One cannot read
some of the modern medical literature, particularly on the side of
public hygiene, without giving one's sympathy to the tubercle bacilli
and the spirochætæ. Science of that sort ceases to be a fit concern
for men of dignity, superior men, gentlemen; it becomes a concern for
evangelists, uplifters, bounders. Its aim is no longer to penetrate
the impenetrable, to push forward the bounds of human knowledge, to
overreach the sinister trickeries of God; its aim is simply to lengthen
the lives of human ciphers and to reinforce their delusion that they
confer a favour upon the universe by living at all. Worse, it converts
the salvation of such vacuums into a moral obligation, and sets up
the absurd doctrine that human progress is furthered by diminishing
the death-rate in the Balkans, by rescuing Georgia crackers from the
hookworm and by reducing the whole American people, the civilized
minority with the barbarian mass, to a race of teetotalling ascetics,
full of pious indignations and Freudian suppressions.
The western world reeks with this new sentimentality. It came on in
Europe with the fall of feudalism and the rise of the lower orders.
Even war, the last surviving enterprise of natural man, has been
transformed from a healthy play of innocent instincts into a combat
of moral ideas, nine-tenths of them obviously unsound. It no longer
offers a career to a Gustavus Adolphus, a Prince Eugene or a Napoleon
I. It loses even the spirit of gallant adventure that dignified the
theological balderdash of the Crusades--in which, as every one knows,
the balderdash was quickly absorbed altogether by the adventure. It
becomes the business of specialists in moral indignation. The modern
general must not only know the elements of military science; he
must also show some of the gifts of a chautauqua orator, including
particularly the gift of right-thinking; it would do him more harm
to speak of his opponent with professional politeness, as one lawyer
might speak of another, than it would do him to lose an important
battle. Worse, war gets out of the hands of soldiers altogether. It
becomes an undertaking of boob-bumpers, spy-hunters, emotion-pumpers,
propaganda-mongers--all sorts of disgusting cads. Its great prizes
tend to go, not to the men fighting in the field, but to the man
manufacturing shells, alarms, and moral indignation. At the time of
the last great series of wars it was said that every musketeer of
France carried a marshal's baton in his haversack. The haversack of the
musketeer now contains only official literature, informing him of the
causes of the war as most lately determined, the names of its appointed
moral heroes, and the penalties for discussing its aims, for swapping
tobacco with the boys on the other side, and for inviting a pretty
peasant-girl into his shell-hole. The baton is being fought for by a
press-agent, a labour leader and a Y.M.C.A. secretary.
It is against such degradations that Mr. Muir raises his voice, and
in particular against such degradations in the field of the fine
arts. The superficial, I daresay, will mistake him (once they get
over the sheer immorality of his relation to Nietzsche) as simply one
more pleader for _l'art pour l'art--_one more prophet of a superior
and disembodied æstheticism. Well, turn to his singularly acute and
accurate estimate of Walter Pater: there is the answer to that error.
He has, in fact, no leanings whatsoever in any such direction. The
thing he argues for, despite all his fury against the debasement of
art to mob uses, is not an art that shall be transcendental, but an
art that shall relate itself to life primarily and unashamedly, an art
that shall accept and celebrate life. He preaches, of course, out of
season. There has never been a time in the history of the world when
the natural delight of man in himself was held in greater suspicion.
Christianity, after two thousand years, seems triumphant at last.
From the ashes of its barbaric theology there arises the phoenix of
its maudlin sentimentality; the worship of inferiority becomes its
dominating cult. In all directions that worship goes on. It gives a new
colour to politics, and not only to politics, but also to the sciences
and the arts. Perhaps we are at the mere beginning of the process. The
doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God is now defended
and propagated by machine guns; it becomes a felony to deny it; one is
already taxed in America to make good the lofty aspirations of Poles,
Jugo-Slavs and Armenians. In England there are signs of a further step.
An Ehrlich or a Koch, miraculously at work there, might be jailed for
slitting the throat of a white rat: all the lower animals, too, it
appears, are God's creatures. So viewed, a guinea-pig becomes the peer
of a Beethoven, as a farm-hand is already the peer of a Bach. It is too
late to turn back; let us hope that the logic of it is quickly worked
out to its unescapable conclusion. Once the _pediculus vestimenti_ and
the streptococcus are protected, there will be a chance again, it may
be, for the law of natural selection to achieve its benign purgation.
Meanwhile, Mr. Muir cannot expect his ideas to get much attention.
A gaudy parade is passing and the populace is busy cheering.
Nevertheless, they were ideas worth playing with, and they are now
worth printing and pondering. It seems to me that, in more than one
way, they help to illuminate the central æsthetic question--the problem
as to the nature and function of artistic representation. They start
from Nietzschean beginnings, but they get further than Nietzsche ever
got. His whole æsthetic was hampered by the backwardness of psychology
in his time. He made many a brilliant guess, but more than once he was
hauled up rather sharply by his ignorance of the machinery of thought.
Mr. Muir not only has Nietzsche behind him; he also has Freud, as he
shows, for example, in §145. Beyond him there is still a lot of room.
He will not stop the parade--but he will help the next man.
* * * * *
Edwin Muir was born in the Orkney Islands in 1887. His father was a
small crofter there. When he was fourteen years old the family moved
to Glasgow. Within four years his father, his mother and two older
brothers died, and he was forced to fend for himself. He became a
clerk in a Glasgow office and remained there until very recently, when
he moved to London. Like all other young men with the itch to write, he
tried poetry before prose, and his first verses were printed in _The
New Age._ But his discovery of Nietzsche, at the age of twenty-two,
exerted such a powerful influence upon him that he soon turned to
prose, and five or six years later his first philosophical speculations
were printed, again in _The New Age._ They attracted attention and were
republished in book-form, in 1918, as "We Moderns." At the last minute
the author succumbed to modesty and put the _nom de plume_ of Edward
Moore upon his book. But now, in this American edition (for which he
has made certain revisions), he returns to his own name.
H. L. MENCKEN.
I
THE OLD AGE
1
_The Advanced_
Among the advanced one observes a strange contradiction: the existence
in one and the same person of confidence and enthusiasm about certain
aspects of life along with diffidence and pessimism about life
itself. The advanced have made up their minds about all the problems
of existence but not about the problem of existence. In dealing with
these problems they find their greatest happiness; they are there
sure-footed, convinced and convincing. But brought face to face with
that other problem, how helpless, vacillating and spiritless are they!
What! are propaganda, reform, and even revolution, perchance, with many
of them simply their escape from their problem?
2
_The Intellectual Coquettes_
An intellectual coquetry is one of the worst vices of this age. From
what does it arise? From fear of a decision? Or from love of freedom?
It cannot be from the latter, for to abstain from a choice is not
freedom but irresponsibility. To be free, is, on the contrary, itself
a choice, a decision involving, in its acceptance, responsibility. And
it is responsibility that the intellectual coquettes fear: rather than
admit that one burden they will bear all the others of scepticism,
pessimism and impotence. To accept a new gospel, to live it out in all
its ramifications, is too troublesome, too dangerous. The average man
in them pleads, "Be prudent! Where may not this resolution lead you?
Through what perils? Into what hells?" And so they remain in their
prison house of doubt, neither Pagans nor Christians, neither Theists
nor Atheists, ignorant of the fact that they are slaves and that a
decision would set them free.
But in the end the soul has its revenge, for their coquetry destroys
not only the power but the will to choose. To flirt with dangerous
ideas in a graceful manner: that becomes their destiny. For the
intellectual coquette, like other coquettes, dislikes above everything
passion--passion with its seriousness, sincerity and--demand for a
decision.
3
_Modern Realism_
How crude and shallow is the whole theory of modern realism: a
theory of art by the average man for the average man! It makes art
intelligible by simplifying or popularizing it; in short, as Nietzsche
would say, by vulgarizing it. The average man perceives, for instance,
that there is in great drama an element of representation. Come, he
says, let us make the representation as "thorough" as possible! Let
every detail of the original be reproduced! Let us have life as it
is lived! And when he has accomplished this, when representation has
become reproduction, he is very well pleased and thinks how far he has
advanced beyond the poor Greeks. But it is hardly so! For the Greeks
did not aim at the reproduction but at the interpretation of life,
for which they would accept no symbol less noble than those _ideal_
figures which move in the world of classical tragedy. To the Greeks,
indeed, the world of art was precisely this world: not a paltry,
sober and conscientious dexterity in the "catching" of the aspects
of existence (nothing so easy!), but a symbolizing of the deepest
questions and enigmas of life--a thing infinitely more noble, profound
and subtle than realistic art. The Greeks would have demanded of
realism, Why do you exist? What noble end is served by the reproduction
of ordinary existence? Are you not simply superfluous--and vilely
smelling at that? And realism could have given no reply, for the truth
is that realism _is_ superfluous. It is without a _raison d'être._
The average man, however, takes a second glance at classical tragedy
and reaches a second discovery. There is something enigmatical,
he finds, behind the Greek clearness of representation, something
unexplained; in short, a problem. This problem, however, is not
sufficiently clear. Let us state our problems clearly, he cries! Let
us have problems which can be recognized at a glance by every one! Let
us write a play about "the marriage question," or bad-housing, or the
Labour Party! But, again, the theory of the Greeks, at least before
Euripides, was altogether different. The "problem" in their tragedies
was precisely not a problem which could be stated in a syllogism or
solved in a treatise: it was the eternal problem, and it was not stated
to be "solved."
Thus the Moderns, in their attempt to simplify art, to understand it
or misunderstand it--what does it matter which word is used?--have
succeeded in destroying it. The realistic and the "problem" drama alike
are for the inartistic. The first is drama without a _raison d'être,_
the second is a _raison d'être_ without drama.
4
_The Modern Tragic_
In realistic novels and dramas a new type of the tragic has been
evolved. It may be called tragedy without a meaning. In classical
and Shakespearean tragedy, the inevitable calamities incident to
human existence were given significance and nobility by the poets.
That interpretive power of drama was, indeed, the essential thing to
the great artists, to whom representation was only a means. But the
realists with their shallow rationalizing of art have changed all
that. They have cut out the essential part of drama so as to make the
other part more "complete": in short, their tragedy is now simply
"tragedy" in the newspaper sense. And it is obvious that this kind
of "art" is much easier to produce than tragedy in the grand style:
one has not even to read a meaning into it. This absence of meaning,
however, is itself, in the long run, made to appear the last word of an
unfathomably ironical wisdom. And in this light, how much modern wisdom
is understood! The superficiality which can see only the surface here
parades as the profundity which has dived into every abyss and found it
empty. No! it is not tragedy but the modern tragedian who is without a
_raison d'être!_
5
_Realism as a Symptom of Poverty_
In an age in which the power of creation is weak, men will choose the
easiest forms: those in which sustained elevation is not demanded and
creation itself is eked out in various ways. The world of our day has
therefore as its characteristic production the realistic novel, which
in form is more loose, in content and execution more unequal, and
in imaginative power less rich and inventive than poetic drama, or
_any_ of the higher forms of literature. If we deduct from the modern
"literary artist," the diarist, the sociologist, the reporter, and the
collector of documents, there is not much left. For creation there is
very little room in his works; perhaps it is as well!
6
_Compliments and Art_
The convention of gallantry observed by the sexes is the foundation
of all refined understanding between them. For in the mutual game of
compliment it is the spiritual attitude and not the spoken word that
matters. There is truth in this attitude, however unreal the words
may seem: a thousand times more truth than in the modern egalitarian,
go-as-you-please camaraderie of the sexes. Here there is truth
neither in the spirit nor in the letter. To be candid, about this new
convention there is something faintly fatuous: the people who act thus
are not subtle! Yet they are hardly to be blamed; it is the age that is
at fault. There is no time for reflection upon men, women and manners,
and consequently no refinement of understanding, no form in the true
sense. We work so hard and have so little leisure that when we meet
we are tired and wish to "stretch our legs," as Nietzsche said. It is
far from our thoughts that a convention between men and women might be
_necessary_; we are not disposed to inquire why this convention arose;
it presents itself to us as something naively false; and we have time
only to be unconventional.
The ceremonious in manners arose from the recognition that
between the sexes there must be distance--respect as well as
intimacy--understanding. The old gallantry enabled men and women to
be intimate and distant at the same time: it was the perfection of
the art of manners. Indeed, we can hardly have sufficient respect for
this triumphant circumvention of a natural difficulty, whereby it was
made a source of actual pleasure. But now distance and understanding
have alike disappeared. The moderns, so obtuse have they become,
see here no difficulty at all, consequently no need for manners:
brotherhood--comradeship--laziness has superseded that. Nothing is any
longer _understood;_ but a convention means essentially that something
is understood. Indeed, it is already a gaucherie to explain the
meaning of a good convention. But what can one do? Against obtuseness
the only weapon is obtuseness.
In literature this decline into bad taste and denseness is most
clearly to be seen. So incapable have readers become, so resourceless
writers, that whatever is said now must be said right out; sex must
be called sex; and no one has sufficient subtlety to suggest or to
follow a suggestion. Hence, Realism. An artist has to write exactly
what he means: the word must be word and nothing more. But this
is to misunderstand art. For the words of the true artist undergo
a transubstantiation and become flesh and blood, even spirit. His
words are deeds--to say nothing of what he writes _between_ his
lines! Realism in art and "comradeship" between the sexes are two
misunderstandings, or, rather, two aspects of a misunderstanding. And
that misunderstanding is perhaps attributable to a lack of leisure? And
that to modern hurry? And that to the industrial system?
7
_A Modern Problem_
It has been observed again and again that as societies--forms of
production, of government, and so on--become more complex, the mastery
of the individual over his destiny grows weaker. In other words, the
more man subjugates "nature," the more of a slave he becomes. The
industrial system, for instance, which is the greatest modern example
of man's subjugation of nature, is at the same time the greatest
modern example of man's enslavement. What are we to think, then? Is
the problem a moral one, and shall we say that a conquest of nature
which is not preceded by a conquest of human nature is bound to be
bad? In a society which has not surpassed the phase of slavery does
every addition to man's power over nature simply intensify the slavery?
Or is the problem intellectual? And when the intellect concentrates
upon one branch of knowledge to the neglect of the other, is the
outcome bound to be the enslavement of the others? For instance the
nineteenth century devoted far more of its brains to industry than
to politics--its politics, indeed, was merely the reflection of its
industry--with the result that industry has now enslaved us all. Yes,
it has enslaved us all--not merely the wage-earners, not merely the
salariat! In the old days the workman, indeed, was a slave, but now the
employer is a slave as well.
In this age, therefore, in which man appears as the helpless appendage
of a machine too mighty for him, it is natural that theories of
Determinism should flourish. It is natural, also, that the will should
become weak and discouraged, and, consequently, that the power of
creation should languish. And so the world of art has withered and
turned barren. The artist needs above all things a sense of power; it
is out of the abundance of this sense that he creates. But confronted
with modern society, that vast machine, and surrounded by its hopeless
mechanics and slaves, he feels the sense dying within him; nor does the
evil cease there, for along with the sense of power, power itself dies.
Well, does not the moral become clearer and clearer? If art and
literature are to flourish again, artists, writers, nay, the whole
community must regain the sense of power. Therefore, economic
emancipation first!
8
_Leisure and Good Things_
The very greatest danger confronts a people who renounce leisure: that
people will become shallow--just consider England! For of all things
noble it is hard to see the immediate utility: patience and reverence
are needed before one can see in them a meaning at all. Art, literature
and philosophy are not obvious goods: at the first glance they appear
even repellent: alas, then, for them in an age of first glances! In
such an age, it is true, they will not altogether disappear. Something
worse will happen. They will be degraded, made obvious, misunderstood;
in one word, popularized--the fate of our time. Society should be
organized so as to give to its members the maximum of leisure; thus
would the dissemination of art and philosophy be made at least
possible. But society should at the same time provide for a privileged
class of artists and philosophers, with _absolute_ leisure, who would
work only when the inner compulsion made them. The second condition is
at least as important as the first.
9
_Wanted: A History of Hurry_
Is there a critic who wishes to be at once edifying and entertaining?
Let him write a history of hurry in its relation to literature and
art. Has literature decayed as hurry has intensified? Have standards
of balance, repose and leisured grace gradually shrunk since, say, the
Industrial Revolution? Has the curtailment of the realm of literature,
its reduction from the Romantic school to the Victorian circle and
from that to the Decadent clique, been due to the everstrengthening
encroachment of hurry? And has hurry now become finally triumphant so
that our critics and even our artists and savants are nothing more than
journalists? For certainly they seem to be so.
These are questions to be investigated by our historian.
10
_The Sex Novel_
How did the vogue of the sex novel arise? Perhaps from the great
attention which was in the last century given to the sciences of
biology and physiology; and perhaps, more especially from the
popularization of these sciences. Love was, under the spell of science,
translated by the novelists into sex. Not the psychology, but the
physiology of love was found interesting: with the result that for the
production of a modern novel one qualification alone is now necessary:
a "knowledge of the simple facts of physiology," as the primer-writers
say. Well, what is the remedy for this? Not a denial of physiology:
those who have learned it cannot now erase it from their memory and
become voluntarily ignorant. No; let, rather, the opposite course be
taken! Let us popularize psychology as well!
11
_These Advanced People_
A. Free Love is all right in theory, but all wrong in practice. B. On
the contrary! I think it is all right in practice, but all wrong in
theory.
12
_Sex in Literature_
In English literature, until very modern times, sex was treated only
within the limits of a very well-understood convention. From this
convention the physiological was strictly excluded. Yet, of our
classical writers, even in the most artificial periods, it cannot
be said that they did not understand sex. No matter how "unreal"
they might be in writing about Love, the physiological contingencies
of Love were unmistakably implied in their works, but only, it is
true, implied. The moderns, however, saw in this treatment of Love
nothing but a convention, a "lie"; and they became impatient of the
artificiality, as if art could be anything but artificial! To what
was the change of attitude due? Not to a failure in the artistic
convention: that was perfectly sound. No, it was the reader who had
failed: a generation of readers had arisen who had not learnt the art
of reading, who did not understand reading as a cultured amateur of
the eighteenth century, for instance, understood it. Literature was to
this reader a document, not an art. He had no eye for what is written
between the lines--for symbolism, idealization, "literature." And it
was to satisfy him that the realistic school arose: it arose, indeed,
out of himself. In the realist the modern reader has become writer: the
man who could not learn the art of reading has here essayed the more
difficult art of writing--documentary art!
13
_History of a Realist_
Who will write a series of biographies of modern writers, illustrating
this thesis: that they are nothing more than modern readers wielding a
hasty pen? Such a set of memoirs would almost compensate us for having
read the works of these writers. How interesting, for instance, it
would be to know how many years--surely it would be years?--they spent
in trying to understand literature before they dedicated themselves to
its service. How interesting, again, to discover how many hours each
day X, the celebrated novelist, devotes to contemplation, how many to
writing for the newspapers, and how many to his present masterpiece.
What! one hour's thought has actually preceded five hours' dictation!
This revelation is, after all, not so startling. On second thought,
these memoirs seem superfluous; we can read everything we wish to know
of the moderns in their works.
Yet, for our better amusement, will not some one write his one and
only novel, giving the true history of the novelist? A novel against
novels! But for that we need a second Cervantes, yet how unlike
the first! For on this occasion it is not Don Quixote that must be
satirized, but Sancho Panza.
14
_Novelists by Habit_
All of us who read are novelists more or less nowadays: that is to say,
we collect "impressions," "analyse" ourselves, make a pother about
sex, and think that people, once they are divorced, live happily ever
after. The habit of reading novels has turned us into this! When one of
us becomes articulate, however--in the form of a novel--he only makes
explicit his kinship with the rest; he proclaims to all the world that
he is a mediocrity.
15
_The Only Course_
All the figures in this novel are paltry; we despise them, and, if we
were in danger of meeting them in real life, would take steps to avoid
them; yet such is the author's adroitness that we are led on helplessly
through the narrative, through unspeakable sordidness of circumstance
and soul, hating ourselves and him, and feeling nothing better than
slaves. To rouse our anxiety lest Herbert lose five pounds, or Mabel
find it impossible to get a new dress, this is art, this is modern art!
But to feel _anxiety_ about such things is ignoble; and to live in a
sordid atmosphere, even if it be of a book, is the part of a slave.
And yet we cannot but admire. For in this novel what subtlety in the
treatment there must be overlying the fundamental vulgarity of the
theme! How is Art, which should make Man free, here transformed into a
potent means for enslaving him! It is impossible to yield oneself to
the sway of a modern realist without a loss in one's self-respect. To
what is due this conspicuous absence of nobility in modern writers? But
is the question, indeed, worth the asking? For to the artist and to him
who would retain freedom of soul, there is only one course with the
paltry in literature--to avoid it.
16
_The Average Man_
It is surely one of G. K. Chesterton's paradoxes that he praises the
average man. For he is not himself an average man, but a man of
genius; he does not write of the average man, but of grotesques; he is
not read by the average man, but by intellectuals and the nonconformist
middle-class. The true prophets of the average man are the popular
realistic novelists. For they write of him and for him--yes, even when
they write "for themselves," when they are "serious artists." Who,
then, but them should extol him? It is their _métier_.
17
_The "New" Writers_
The fault of the most modern writers--and especially of the
novelists--is not that they are too modern, but that they are too
traditional. It is true, they are not traditional in the historical
manner of G. K. Chesterton, who wishes to destroy one tradition--the
modern tradition--in order to get back to another--the mediæval. To
Mr. Chesterton tradition is a matter of selection; the dead tradition
seems to him nobler than the living; and, deliberately, therefore, he
would return to it. The new writers, however, follow a tradition also,
though a much narrower one; they, too, believe in the past, but only,
alas, in the immediate past; they are slaves to the generation which
preceded theirs. In short, that which is disgusting in them is their
inability to rise high enough to _see_ their little decade or two, and
to challenge it, if they cannot from the standpoint of a nobler future,
then, at least, from that of the noblest past. But how weak must a
generation be which is not strong enough to challenge and supersede
Arnold Bennett, for instance.
18
_The Modern Reader_
What is it that the modern reader demands from those who write for
him? To be challenged, and again to be challenged, and evermore to be
challenged--but on no account to be asked to accept a challenge, on no
account to be expected to take sides! A seat at the tournament is all
that he asks, where he may watch the most sincere and intrepid spirits
of his time waging their desperate battle and spilling their life blood
upon the sand. How he loves them when, with high gesture, they fling
down their gauntlets and utter their blasphemies! His heart then exults
within him; but, why? Simply because he is a connoisseur; simply
because he _collects_ gauntlets!
19
_The Public_
Of the modern writers who are in earnest, Mr. Chesterton has had the
most ironical fate: he has been read by the people who will never agree
with him. To the average man for whom he writes he is an intellectual
made doubly inaccessible by his orthodoxy and his paradoxy. It is the
advanced, his _bête noire,_ who read him, admire him, and--disagree
with him.
20
_Reader and Writer_
The modern reader loves to be challenged. The modern writer, if he is
in earnest, however, is bound to challenge him. This is his greatest
burden; that he _must_ fall a victim of the advanced idlers. But one
day he thinks he see a way of escape. He has noticed that the reader
desires not only to be challenged, but to be able to understand the
challenge at a glance. And here he sees his advantage. I shall write,
he says, to himself, in a manner beautiful, exact, and yet not easily
understood; so I shall throw off the intellectual coquettes and secure
my audience of artists, for my style is beautiful; an audience of
critics, for my style is exact; an audience of patient, resolute,
conscientious intellects, for my style is difficult. This, perhaps, was
the conscious practice of Nietzsche. But he did not foresee that, for
the benefit of the intellectual coquettes, who must have hold of new
thoughts by one end or another, a host of popularizers would be born;
he did not reckon with the Nietzscheans!
21
_Popularity_
How amazingly popular he is. Even the man in the street reads him. Yes;
but it is because he has first read the man in the street.
22
_Middle Age's Betrayals_
It is not easy to tell by a glance what is the character of a young
man; his soul has not yet etched itself clearly enough upon his
body. But one may read a middle-aged man's soul with perfect ease;
and not only his soul but his history. For when a man has passed
five-and-forty, he looks--not what he is, perhaps--but certainly what
he has been. If he has been invariably respectable, he is now the very
picture of respectability. If he has been a man about town or a secret
toper, the fact is blazoned so clearly on his face that even a child
can read it. If he has studied, his very walk, to use a phrase of
Nietzsche's, is learned. As for the poet, we know how terribly poetical
he looks in middle age--poor devil! Well, to every one of you, I say,
Beware!
23
_The Novelists and the Artist_
Is it the modern novelists who are to be blamed for the degraded
image of the artist which lives in the minds of the cultured
populace? Turgenieff in "On the Eve," and Henry James in "Roderick
Hudson" display the artist simply as a picturesque waster, an oh so
charming, impulsive, childlike, naïve waster. But, in doing so, they
surely confused the artist with the man of artistic temperament.
Of the artistic temperament, however, the great artists had very
often little or nothing--far less, certainly, than either Shubin or
Roderick. The great examples of last century, the Goethes, Ibsens,
and Nietzsches, knew that there were qualities more essential to them
than temperament; discipline, for instance, perseverance, truth to
themselves, self-control. How is it possible, indeed, without these
virtues--virtues of the most difficult and heroic kind--for the
artist to bring his gifts to maturity, to become great? His discipline
to beauty must be as severe as the discipline of the saint to holiness.
And, then, how has his sensuousness been misconstrued and vulgarized;
and treated precisely, indeed, as if it were the licentiousness of a
present-day Tom Jones! That artists can be thought about in such a way
proves only one thing, namely, in what poor esteem they are now held.
We need a new ideal of the artist; or, failing that, an old one, that
of Plato, perhaps, or of Leonardo, or of Nietzsche.
24
_Decadence and Health_
It is in the decadent periods that the most triumphantly healthy
men--one or two--appear. The corrupt Italy of the Renaissance gave
birth to Leonardo; the Europe of Gautier, Baudelaire and Wilde
produced Nietzsche. In decadent eras both disease and health become
more self-conscious; they are cultivated, enhanced and refined. It
has been said that the best way to remain healthy is not to think
of health. But lack of self-consciousness speaks here. Perhaps the
Middle Ages were as diseased as our own--only they did not know it! Is
decadence nothing more than the symptom of a self-conscious age? And
is "objectivity" the antidote? Well, we might believe this if we could
renounce our faith that mankind will yet become healthy--if we could
become optimists in the present-day sense!
25
_Art in Modern Society_
An object of beauty has in modern surroundings a dangerous seduction
which it did not possess in less hideous eras. In this is there to be
found a contributory explanation of Decadence--the decadent being one
who feels the power of beauty intensely, and the repulsion from his
environment as intensely, and who plunges into the enjoyment of beauty
madly, with abandonment? In a society, however, which was not hideous
as ours is, and in which beauty was distributed widely over all the
aspects and forms of existence, the intoxication of beauty would not
be felt with the same terrible intensity; a beautiful object would be
enjoyed simply as one among many lovely things. In short, it would be
enjoyed in the manner of health, not in that of sickness. It is the
_contrast_ that is dangerous; the aridity of modern life arouses a
terrible thirst, which is suddenly presented with the spectacle of a
beauty unaccountable and awful; and this produces a dislocation and
convulsion of the very soul. So that the present-day artist, if he
would retain his health--if he would remain an artist--must curb his
very love of the beautiful, and treat beauty, when he meets it, as he
always does, in the gutter, a little cynically. Otherwise he will lose
his wits, and Art will become his Circe. Therefore, mockery and hard
laughter--alas, that it _must_ be so!
26
_Art in Industry_
In those wildernesses of dirt, ugliness and obscenity, our industrial
towns, there are usually art galleries, where the daintiest and most
beautiful things, the flowers of Greek statuary, for instance, bloom
among the grime like a band of gods imprisoned in a slum. The spectacle
of art in such surroundings sometimes strikes us as being at once
ludicrous and pathetic, like something delicate and lovely sprawling in
the gutter, or an angel with a dirty face.
27
_Conventions_
The revolt against conventions in art, thought, life and manners may
be due to at least more than one cause. It is usually ascribed to
"vitality" which "breaks through" forms, because it desires to be
"free." But common sense tells us that more than two or three of our
friends abjure convention for an altogether different reason--to be
candid, on account of a _lack_ of vitality resulting in laziness and
the inability to endure restraint of any kind. And, for the others,
we shall judge their "vitality" to be justified when they build new
conventions worthy of observance, instead of running their heads
finally into illimitable space. Or does their strength not go just so
far? There is something suspicious about this vitality which cannot
create: it resembles impotence so much! Heaven preserve the moderns
from their "vitality"!
28
_"Vitality"_
When moderns talk of the "vitality" of their most lauded writer,
what they mean is finally the size of his muscles, physical energy,
or, at the most, strong emotions; not vigour of mind. Well, let us
on no account make the opposite mistake and revile the large muscle
and energetic feelings: they are admirable things. Let us point out,
however, that vitality of emotion undisciplined by vitality of thought
leads nowhere, is often disruptive and cannot build. But to build is
our highest duty and our peculiar form of freedom--we who have realized
that there is no freedom without power. As for the old freedom--it is
only the slaves who are not already tired of it.
29
_Decadence_
The decisive thing, determining whether an artist shall be major or
minor, is very often not artistic at all, but moral. Yes, though it
shock our modern ears, let this be proclaimed! The more "temperament"
an artist has, the more character he requires to govern it, to make
it fruitful for him, if he would not have it get beyond control,
and wreck both him and itself. And, consequently, the great artists
show, as a rule, less "temperament" than the minor; they appear more
self-contained and less "artistic." Indeed, they smile with the hint of
irony at the merely "artistic."