picture, or a symphony that lead people to describe the work as
patriotic are purely adventitious and have nothing to do with its
aesthetic significance. Wordsworth's so-called patriotic sonnets, in so
far as they are works of art--and what superb works of art they
are!--are as appreciable in Berlin as in London. They appeal as directly
to the aesthetic sensibility of any German who can read English and
appreciate poetry as to the sensibility of an Englishman; and unless a
man be aesthetically sensitive he will never really appreciate them no
matter where he was born. The state of mind which art provokes and which
comprehends and reacts to art is one in which nationality has ceased to
exist. I am not saying that an ardent patriot cannot appreciate art; I
say that when he appreciates it he is carried into a world in which
patriotism becomes meaningless. If he has not been carried into that
world he has not appreciated art. I shall not deny that at the present
moment an Englishman may find something peculiarly sympathetic in the
ideas and memories associated with the poetry of Wordsworth. It is
conceivable that a Frenchman may find unpalatable certain memories and
ideas associated with the music, or more probably with the name, of
Bach. But these memories and ideas are not a part of the music; they are
only the contribution of an unaesthetic auditor. The man who says that he
can no longer appreciate the music of Bach merely admits that he has
never appreciated the music of any one.
Two things above all others give value to a civilization, art and
thought. It were well that those even who cannot appreciate Beauty and
Truth should bear this in mind. Instead of blustering about this being
no time for art they should rejoice that there are some who, rising
above tumultuous circumstance, continue to create and speculate. So long
as a sense of art and the disinterested passion for truth persist, the
world retains some right to respectful consideration; once these
disappear its fate becomes a matter of indifference. The continued
existence of a stupid and insensitive world, incapable of aesthetic
rapture or metaphysical ecstasy, is not particularly desirable. It may
be wise to wage war for the sake of civilization; that is a question of
probabilities with which I am not at present concerned: but a war that
leaves the world poorer in art or thought is, whatever its political
consequences, a victory for barbarism and for humanity a disaster. A
nation that would defend the cause of civilization must remain
civilized; and that a nation may emerge civilized from fierce and
exhausting war, that it may preserve unabated its power for good, it is
necessary that during its horrid and circumscribing labours there should
have been men who, detached and undismayed, continued to serve interests
higher and wider than the interests of any State or confederacy. In
times of storm and darkness it is the part of artists and philosophers
to tend the lamp. This duty they perform unconsciously by simply minding
their own business.
Artists and philosophers and those who are apt to handle truth and
beauty are, in fact, the vestals of civility. To be sure, they are not
appointed or elected, neither are they consecrate nor shorn nor always
chaste; nevertheless, they tend the lamp. Because they alone can project
their thoughts and feelings far beyond the frontiers of States and
Empires, because their sympathies and interests are universal, because
they can lose themselves in timeless abstractions, because their kingdom
is not of this world, they alone in times of division and calamity and
shortsighted passion can keep the flame alive. Thus do they
unintentionally serve the State. So far as they are concerned their
beneficence is quite adventitious, their service supererogatory. For
they do not live to serve humanity, but to serve their masterful and
inhuman passion; by serving that faithfully they save the world. Let
them continue to think and feel, watching, untroubled, the cloudless
heavens, till men, looking up from their beastly labours, again catch
sight of the unchanging stars.
_Mens equa in arduis_: calm and unconcerned in the hurricane: the mind
set steadily on indestructible things: that, I think, is how it should
be in these days with artists and philosophers. When the Roman soldiers
entered Syracuse they found Archimedes absorbed in a mathematical
problem. He never raised his head and they killed him where he sat.
I want to save those nice, cultivated people who go about saying that
this is no time for art from doing some harm and making themselves
ridiculous. To them, not to the artists, is my mission. They are in
danger of becoming coarse and absurd and of saying things that their
enemies will never allow them to forget. They are not formidable:
besides, art is fearless. For art cannot die; neither can the desire for
art. If history teaches nothing else worth remembering, it teaches that.
Artists will create though they must starve for it, and art we will have
though our days be numbered. Artists and those who care for art may be a
mere handful in the human mass, but theirs is the passionate faith that
conquers somehow in spite of battles and holds the world in fee.
Art survives: the state of this chilly, quarrelsome little planet has
never grown so desperate that artists have lost faith. After all, why
should they? Art is not less important because some men are bad and most
are wretched; and it is no part of an artist's business to straighten
out the contortions of humanity. "The loss of hue to river-banks,"
observed Ch'eng Hao, the Sung poet, "is the river-banks' affair." Art
has seen worse days than these. Between 937 and 1059, if we may believe
Glaber, there were forty-eight years of pestilence and famine. From
Constantinople to Exeter the world was one miserable sore. Cannibalism
became chronic. In the market-place of Tournus human joints were
exposed for sale. Man had sunk to such depths of impotence that the
wolves came out and disputed with him the mastery of Europe. War seems
to have been the only activity for which the leaders of the people were
not too feeble: let us hope that they kept honour bright and preserved
nicely the balance of Neustria, Austria, and the kingdom of Italy. And
over all hung, as well it might, the terror of judgment and the end of
the world. Yet art survived. The years that lie round about the
millennium are precisely those in which artists seem to have been unable
almost to do wrong. Then it was that the aesthetic sense, rising calm
above confusion, detached and remote from human woes, expressed itself
gravely in that early Romanesque architecture and sculpture which
remains the imperishable glory of the Middle Age.
There have been wars as great as this; there may be greater. Empires and
continents have gone down and may again go down into misery. Art
survives. What remains of Egypt but her monuments? In Babylonia there
were kings and princes before the coming of the Assyrians; there were
statesmen, generals, and priests: but the glory and story of that land
would be for us a vague, bad dream were it not that the sculpture of the
vanquished Sumerians remains splendid and unobscure. Kublai Khan, that
conquerer of China and scourge of all the East, lives, if he live at
all, in the verse of an English poet, while the art of the people he
came to destroy is the great glory of Asia and the inspiration of half
the world.
To be or not to be thinking about art is not a matter of choice. Art is
imperious. As well tell an artist not to breathe as not to create.
Artists will be artists; and so far as I can see the spirit has never
foundered in the wreck of material things. If those ancient ministers of
the devil, fire and sword, pestilence and famine, could not force men to
stop creating and feeling, I do not suppose that journalists and
politicians and inactive colonels and fire-eating curates will be more
successful. There never was a time that was no time for art. In the
darkness of the darkest ages the aesthetic sense shines clear. Were not
the masterpieces of Attic comedy written in a beleagured State in the
throes of a disastrous war? And was it not in 1667 that England suffered
what has been called her greatest humiliation? Certainly it was in 1667
she received her greatest epic.
Few, indeed, can look steadily at their own times. To the ephemera that
tossed on the waters of the past the ripples were mountainous; to us the
past is a sad, grey lake, scarcely ruffled, from which emerge the tall
lights of art and thought. It must be a defective sense of proportion, I
think, that makes people who cite Aristophanes, but never heard of
Conon, who are deep in _Paradise Lost_ but neither know nor care who won
the battle of Lowestoft, assert so confidently that this is no time for
art. Let them, for their own sakes, consider what sort of figure in
history one would cut who had adjured young Shakespeare--thirty years of
age and, if one may draw inferences from tradition, able at least to
shoot--to give over his precious fooling and join the expeditionary
force in Portugal. Yet the moment was grave: we had lost _The Revenge_
and failed ignominiously before Cadiz; we still expected invasion.
Shakespeare and the rest of them might surely have done something for
their country.
FOOTNOTE:
[24] This essay was written for a Hampstead literary society--I forget
the name--and read some time in October 1914. It was printed the
following year in the _International Journal of Ethics_.
BEFORE THE WAR
[Sidenote: _Cambridge Magazine May 1917_]
It is to me a strange thing that since the beginning of the war
Utopia-building has gone on more merrily than ever. Almost every one has
a scheme for social reconstruction; and of these schemes, though most
are of that familiar kind which discovers in compulsory
strike-arbitration the true and only panacea, some are in themselves
attractive enough, being more or less intelligent attempts to combine
Socialist economics with the maximum of personal liberty. And yet I can
take no interest in any of them, though my apathy, I know, vexes my
friends who complain that in old days, before the war, no castle-builder
was more reckless than I.
Very true: but things have changed since then. Before the war England
was immensely rich; and the upper classes, before the war, were
beginning to find barbarism boring. Consequently the lower and
lower-middle, as they got money and pushed up towards the light, entered
a world that could afford to be liberal, about which floated, vaguely
enough, ideas that in time might have been turned to good account. That
is where the Edwardian-Georgian age differed most hopefully from the
Victorian. In Victorian days when a man became rich or ceased to be
miserably poor he still found himself in a society where money-making
was considered the proper end of existence: intellectually he was still
in the slums. In the spring of 1914 society offered the new-comer
precisely what the new-comer wanted, not cut-and-dried ideas, still less
a perfect civilization, but an intellectual flutter, faint and feverish
no doubt, a certain receptivity to new ways of thinking and feeling, a
mind at least ajar, and the luxurious tolerance of inherited wealth.
Not, I suppose, since 1789 have days seemed more full of promise than
those spring days of 1914. They seem fabulous now, and a fairy-tale
never comes amiss.
The generation that takes its first look at the world in the years that
follow the war will hardly be persuaded that in the years that just
preceded it the governing class was drifting out of barbarism. Yet so it
was. The brighter and better educated, at any rate, were beginning to
discover that clever people are more entertaining than stupid ones, and
that social experiment is as good an extravagance as another. England
was fantastically rich; and some of the very rich allowed some of the
very clever to wheedle from them great sums of money, knowing all the
time that these would be applied to such unsettling activities as the
education of thankless labourers or anti-sweating propaganda. Even
towards Art rolled a few coppers; indeed, the best painter in England
tells me that about this time he was earning as much as two hundred a
year. It was thought odd but not shameful in Mr. Thomas Beecham to spend
some part of his father's fortune on producing modern music and the
operas of Mozart. In fact, it was coming to be a question whether there
was anything essentially ridiculous about a musician, a poet, or a
Socialist. _Punch_ was rarely seen in the best houses. For a few dizzy
years it was wildly surmised that to found a civilization might be as
thrilling as to found a family, and that one could be as romantic and
snobbish about Art as about bull-dogs or battleships. To be open-minded
became modish; people with interesting, subversive things to say were
encouraged to talk--always provided they talked with an air of not
taking quite seriously what they said. The poor were repressed as firmly
as ever, but the job was left to such paid bullies as constables,
magistrates, and judges, whom the nicer patricians employed, but took
leave to despise.
In 1914 what in England is called "Society" gave promise of becoming
what it had not been since the French Revolution--something that a
fastidious person could tolerate. It was becoming open-minded. Now
open-mindedness is the _sine qua non_ of what is called "brilliant
society," and brilliant society is by far the best manure with which to
fertilize the soil in which revolutions are to be cultivated. Only when
Society becomes clever and inquisitive, and wants to be amused, does it
open its doors to reformers, and only in such society can most
reformers--reformers, that is to say, who have not been born with an
exceptional gift of self-criticism--acquire that sense of humour and
dash of cynicism lacking which they perish.
Society to be good must be open-minded; without that there can be
neither wit nor gaiety nor conversation worth the name. Prejudices and
pruderies, respect of persons, reverence of sentiments, and
consideration for the corns of the dull are fatal. On such terms even
fun and high spirits soon degenerate to buffoonery and romps. There must
be no closed subjects at the mention of which faces lengthen, voices
become grave, and the air thickens with hearty platitudes: the intellect
must be suffered to play freely about everything and everybody. Wit is
the very salt and essence of society, and you can no more have wit that
hurts nothing Queen Victoria respected than you can have truth that
hurts nothing she believed. Now wit is purely an affair of the
intellect, and so is society when it is at all good; no one but a fool
dreams of going there for fine feelings and profound emotions. But the
intellect to be nimble must be free: 'tis a sprite will play you the
prettiest tricks an you give it the run of the house; close but one door
though, and it sits sulking in the lobby. Delightful are the games it
can play you: wit, irony, criticism, thrilling ideas, visions of
fantastic anarchy and breathless generalizations--all these it can give;
but the earth and all things above and below must be its toy-box; from
the deferential intellect expect nothing better than puns, anecdotes,
comfortable platitudes, elaborate facetiousness, and the _Saturday
Westminster_.
I do not suggest that in the spring of 1914 English society was
brilliant or anything of that sort: I think it was tired of being merely
decent. One or two fine ladies had made open-mindedness and a taste for
ideas fashionable: _snobisme_ was doing the rest. And we may as well
recognize, without more ado, that, Athens and Florence being things of
the past, a thick-spread intellectual and artistic _snobisme_ is the
only possible basis for a modern civilization. Thanks chiefly to the
emergence of a layer of this rich and rotten material one had hopes in
1914 of some day cultivating a garden in which artists and writers would
flourish and prophets learn not to be silly. Society before the war
showed signs of becoming what French society before the Revolution had
been--curious, gay, tolerant, reckless, and reasonably cynical. After
the war I suppose it will be none of these things. Like the eighteenth
century, having learnt its lesson, it will borrow a sober tone and
simpler tastes from the _bourgeoisie_.
For the Edwardian culture did not go very deep; the country gentlefolk
and elder business men, the middling professionals and half-pay
officers, never abandoned the Victorian tradition. They could not but
deplore the imprudence of their too affable leaders, whom, nevertheless,
it was their duty and pleasure to admire. They knew that Mr. Balfour was
addicted to the plays of Bernard Shaw, that Anatole France had been
entertained at the Savoy, and that Cunninghame Graham--a man who was
once sent to prison for rioting--sat down to dinner at the tables
of the nobility. It made them uneasy and irritable; it also made
them fancy that they, too, should keep abreast of the times. So
they let their wives subscribe to some advanced fashion-paper with
Beardsleyesque-Brunelleschi drawings and felt, quite rightly, that it
was rather nasty. The heart of England was sound. All over the country
were homes in which ladies were permitted neither to smoke cigarettes
nor read the plays of Ibsen nor pronounce, without a shudder, the name
of Mr. Lloyd George. By the majority the use of cosmetics was still
reckoned a sin, Wagner a good joke, and Kipling a good poet. The
_Spectator_ was still read. Nevertheless, the student of paulo-pre-war
England will have to recognize that for a few delirious years a part of
the ruling faction--cosmopolitan plutocrats and some of the brisker
peeresses--listened more willingly to the clever than to the good. There
was a veneer of culture or, as I have hinted, of intellectual
_snobisme_.
Heaven may delude those whom it wills to destroy, but the very
infirmities of its favourites it shapes to their proper advantage. The
governing classes of Europe effectually upset the apple-carts of their
fanciful friends by getting into a war. When that happened these
dream-pedlars surely should have perceived that the game was up. They
had always known that only by devoting its first half to the
accumulation of wealth and culture could the twentieth century hope in
its second to make good some part of its utopic vision. Wealth was the
first and absolute necessity: Socialism without money is a nightmare. To
live well man must be able to buy some leisure, finery, and elbow-room.
Anything is better than a poverty-stricken communism in which no one can
afford to be lazy or unpractical.
If, as seems probable, the energies of Europe during the next fifty
years must be devoted to re-amassing the capital that Europe has
squandered, the concentration on business will be as fatal to the hopes
of social reformers as the poverty that provokes it. One foresees the
hard, unimaginative view of life regaining the ascendancy, laborious
insensibility re-crowned queen of the virtues, "Self-help" by Smiles
again given as a prize for good conduct, and the grand biological
discovery that the fittest to survive do survive adduced again as an
argument against income-tax. When one remembers the long commercial
tyranny that followed the Napoleonic wars, the tyranny under which
money-making became the chief duty of man, under which Art foundered and
middle-class morality flourished, one grows uneasy. And if one cannot
forget the stragglers from the Age of Reason, the old, pre-Revolutionary
people who, in the reign of Louis XVIII, cackled obsolete liberalism,
blasphemed, and span wrinkled intrigues beneath the scandalized brows
of neo-Catholic grandchildren, one becomes exceedingly sorry for
oneself.
Even before the war we were not such fools as to suppose that a new
world would grow up in a night. First had to grow up a generation of
civilized men and women to desire and devise it. That was where the
intellectual dilettanti came in. Those pert and unpopular people who
floated about propounding unpleasant riddles and tweaking up the law
wherever it had been most solemnly laid down were, in fact, making
possible the New Age. Not only did they set chattering the rich and
gibbering with rage the less presentable revolutionaries, it was they
who poured out the ideas that filtered through to the trades-union
class; and, if that class was soon to create and direct a brand-new
State, it was high time that it should begin to handle the sort of ideas
these people had to offer. Doubtless the trade-unionists would have
developed a civilization sweeter and far more solid than that which
flitted so airily from _salon_ to studio, from Bloomsbury to Chelsea;
before long, I dare say, they would have dismissed our theories as
heartless and dry and absurd to boot; in the end, perhaps, they would
have had our heads off--but not, I think, until they had got some ideas
into their own. The war has ruined our little patch of civility as
thoroughly as a revolution could have done; but, so far as I can see,
the war offers nothing in exchange. That is why I take no further
interest in schemes for social reconstruction.
THE END
INDEX OF NAMES
Abbas, Shah, 163
Abbassi, Riza, 162
Abraham, Miss E., 13, 132
Adeney, 178
Aeschylus, 32
Alexander, 24
Alfieri, 33
Anet, Claude, 157, 159, 160
Angelo, Michael, 185
Archer, 29
Archibald, Raymond Clare, 82, 84
Archimedes, 242
Ariosto, 55
Aristophanes, 99-103, 106-111, 246
Aristotle, 25, 34
Arnold, Matthew, 86
Asselin, 186
_Athenaeum_, the, 3, 4, 5
Auchinleck, Laird of, 80
Bach, 240
Bakst, 129, 131
Balfour, 252
Balzac, 99
Beecham, Sir Thomas, 249
Begbie, Harold, 232
Bell, Vanessa, 206, 207, 228, 229
Bennett, Arnold, 1, 3, 8, 9-11, 13-15
Bergson, 89
Berkley, 89
Behzad, 156, 159, 161-163
Binyon, 135
Bjornsen, 14
Blake, 125, 214
Bloy, Leon, 89
Bonnard, 194, 200, 211, 215
Boswell, James, 74-81
Botticelli, 140, 211
Bougereau, 222
Bourget, Paul, 15
Brock, Clutton, 146-149, 151
Brougham, Lord, 56
Browne, Sir Thomas, 56
Buchanan, Robert, 51
_Burlington Magazine_, the, 7, 157, 159, 163, 188, 216
Byron, Lord, 94, 115, 117, 118, 124
Caesar, 24
_Cambridge Magazine_, the, 7
Canning, 57
Carlyle, Alexander, 97
Carlyle, Mrs., 94, 96, 97
Carlyle, Thomas, 75, 82-98, 152
Cato, 24, 25
Catullus, 99
Cezanne, 11, 28-30, 183, 194, 195, 196, 201, 206, 209, 211, 215, 216,
225, 226
Champaigne, Philippe de, 219
Chardin, 196, 218
Chateaubriand, 86
Chaucer, 100
Chesterton, G. K., 88, 106
Chrysostom, St., 100
Cicero, 94
Cimabue, 157
Clairmont, Claire, 117, 119-121
Clarke, Mrs., 51
Claude, 213
Cole, Sir Henry, 51
Coleridge, 14
Coleridge, Miss Mary, 41-49
Conder, 205
Conon, 246
Conrad, Joseph, 11, 14
Constable, 214, 218
Creighton, 86
Crome, 214
Dante, 99
Darwin, 98, 125
Davies, Randall, 165, 166, 168, 170-173
Delaunay, 183, 215
Derain, 181, 200, 211, 215
Dixon, Canon, 48
Doren, Carl Van, 62-65
Dostoievsky, 13, 213
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 14
Drummond, Malcolm, 178
Edwards, George, 133
Emerson, 86
Epictetus, 86
Epstein, 176, 228, 229
Etchells, 178
Faguet, 88
Ferrers, 88
Fildes, Sir Luke, 181
Finch, Madame Renee, 178
FitzGerald, 94, 129
Flammarion, MM., 17
Flaubert, 108
Forman, H. Buxton, 115
France, Anatole, 11, 22, 90, 252
Francis, Sir Philip, 74-76
St., 86
Freeman, A., 62, 64, 65
Friesz, 181, 200, 215
Frith, 170
Fry, Roger, 170, 216, 226
Galsworthy, John, 11, 12, 132
Galt, 10
Garnett, Richard, 51
Garrod, 133
Gauguin, 181, 195, 211, 215, 216, 225, 226
George V, 177
George, Lloyd, 253
Gertler, Mark, 203, 204, 228
Gibbon, 99
Giles, Prof., 135
Gill, Eric, 229
Gilman, 177
Ginner, 178
Giotto, 157, 161, 206
Glaber, 242
Godwin, 86
Gogh, Van, 181, 211, 215, 225, 226
Goldoni, 33, 51
Goncharova, 207, 215
Gordon, Margaret, 82, 83
Gore, S. F., 177, 184
Gournay, Mlle. de, 18
Grahame, Cunninghame, 252
Grant, Duncan, 196, 202, 205, 206, 228, 229
Gray, 94
Greco, El, 206, 211
Gris, 200
Hals, Frans, 140
Hamilton, 186
Hao, Ch'eng, 243
Hardie, Keir, 111
Hardy, Thomas, 10, 11
Harvey, Martin, 128
Henner, 222
Herbin, 181
Herramaneck, 159
Hobson, 188, 189, 191
Homer, 13, 41
Horace, 39, 91
l'Hote, 181, 200