Pierre Loti has lately written in an album published at Schweningen for
charity the following passages, which will be new to the majority of
English readers:--
'The end of April is the season of change, when the Judas trees
all along the shores of the Bosphorus are in flower. Nowhere
else in the world does one find so many Judas trees as here,
where the two extremities of Asia and of Europe are face to
face. There are violet-hued tufts and violet-hued alleys; an
excess of violet colour so intense, and so unusual, that one's
sight is dazzled and bewildered by it. And the wisteria too,
which garlands the old eaves of houses with its millions of
clusters, hangs out wreaths of a lighter lilac from all the
hamlets of grey timber which lean down over the water. This
Bosphorus is a great winding river, but a river which has in it
the life and the seduction of the sea. The hills on its two
shores are covered by palaces, by mosques, by cottages and by
tombs, all surrounded by and buried in gardens. And here in
the month of April, under this sky still veiled and softened by
the clouds of the North, there is a luxury of foliage and
blossom in which this violet tone of the Judas trees is
dominant, and shines beside the dark and ghost-like cypress
groves.
'There are on earth other places grander, and perhaps more
beautiful; certainly there are none of greater power to charm.
This scenery of the Bosphorus, from which no stranger ever
escapes, is due to the Oriental mystery which still broods on
it; it comes from the great closed harems of which the upper
storeys hang over the waves; it comes from the veiled women
whom we see in the shadow of the gardens, and in the slender
caiques which pass. But this Turkish witchery is fading, alas!
Year by year, more and more, great gaps are made in the ranks
of the ancient impenetrable buildings, with their grated
windows, which plunge their walls into the water and which one
could enter from the water, as at Venice; and with them go the
slender caiques, the costumes, and the women's veils.
'Already, even since last spring, Therapia seems to exist no
longer, masked as it is by a gigantic and hideous caravanserai;
the exquisite Anatoli Hissar is disfigured by an American
college, of a sinister ugliness, which has stuck itself above
the ancient castle with an imbecile air of domination.
'And everywhere it is the same story, whether on the shores of
Asia or the shores of Europe; frightful new buildings cumber
the ground and factory chimneys rise beside minarets of which
they are the miserable caricatures. In vain do the Judas trees
continue their beautiful flowering; the Bosphorus will soon
perish, destroyed by idiotic speculators. And the Turks, my
dear friends the Turks, have the indolence or fatalism to let
such destruction be wrought every day under their eyes!'
Thus Loti with his poet's soul, his prose which is a golden lyre; and it
seems to me as I translate his words that his lament for the Judas trees
and the Bosphorus is but the embodiment of a lament which sighs over the
whole world. The beauty of the earth is dying, dying like a creature
with a cancer in its breast.
The writer of the _Foundations of Belief_ thinks that the earth was made
for man; if this presumptuous conviction had indeed any foundation at
all what an ingrate would the recipient of the gift have proved himself,
what an imbecile, as Loti calls him!
The loss of beauty from the world is generally regarded as the purely
sentimental grievance of imaginative persons; but it is not so; it is a
loss which must impress its vacuity fatally on the human mind and
character. It tends, more than any other loss, to produce that apathy,
despondency, and cynical indifference which are so largely
characteristic of the modern temper.
The people are taught to think that all animal life may be tortured and
slaughtered at pleasure; that physical ills are to be feared beyond all
others, and escaped at all vicarious cost; that profit is the only
question of importance in commerce; that antiquity, loveliness, and
grace are like wild flowers, mere weeds to be torn up by a steam
harrow. This is not the temper which makes noble characters, or generous
and sensitive minds. It is the temper which accumulates wealth, and
which flies readily to war to defend that wealth; but which is
absolutely barren of all impersonal sympathy, of all beautiful creation.
Taken as a whole, artists have the kindliest natures and the happiest
temperaments of any body of men. Why? because their minds are always
more or less susceptible to the impressions and influences of
beauty--beauty of line, of hue, of proportion, of suggestion; beauty
alike of the near and of the far; and they surround themselves with
their own ideals of these in such measure as their powers permit. But,
even in artists, modern life tends to deform these ideals, and in any
exhibition of modern paintings ninety-nine out of a hundred of these
works will be ugly; they will display, perhaps, admirable technique,
complete mastery of detail, fine brush work, perhaps unexceptionable
drawing, but the combination of these qualities will produce merely a
sense of ugliness on the retina of the observer of them.
Unless the man of genius buries himself resolutely in the country and by
the sea, as Tennyson did, as Clausen does, he cannot altogether escape
the influence of the unloveliness of modern life. It would be impossible
to painters and poets to live in Regent's Park or the Avenue de
Villiers, in Cromwell Road or the Via Nazionale, or in any of the new
quarters of English or Continental towns, unless their instincts of
beauty had become dulled and dwarfed by the atmosphere around them; life
for any length of time would be insupportable to them under the
conditions in which it is of necessity lived in modern cities; and this
perversion of their natural instincts makes the tendency to replace
beauty by eccentricity and by weirdness fatally frequent. Their critics
obey the same influences, and modern art-criticism, like the recent
studies of Robert de la Sizzeranne on English painting, is characterised
by what appears to be a total incapacity to appreciate the quality of
beauty, a total insensibility to its absence from modern art.
In sculpture this is as remarkable as in painting, and is still more
alarming and painful, the ugliness of realism and of eccentricity being
a still more offensive blasphemy in marble than it is in colour. If the
most ordinary sense of beauty, as distinguished from deformity, were not
extinct in the world, would any one of the monuments erected within the
last half century be allowed to disfigure the cities of Europe? Carnot
in a frock coat lying in the arms of a female, supposed to represent
France, with his boots thrust out towards the spectator; Victor Emmanuel
in a cocked hat with his body like a swollen bladder stuck on two wooden
ninepins; Peabody sitting in an arm-chair as if he awaited a dentist;
old William of Prussia like a child's tin soldier magnified, and with
the greater men who made him dwarfed military manikins underneath;
black-metal Garibaldis, and Gordons, and Napiers, and Macmahons; Claude
Bernard in the act of mutilating a live dog--every imaginable
abomination in every street and square of every capital, and even of
every noticeable town, proclaim to all the quarters of the globe the
debasement of a once pure and lofty art, and the utter ineptitude and
vulgarity of modern taste. Of what use is it to attempt to educate the
nations when such things as these are set up in their midst?
An English archbishop at a recent Royal Academy banquet said that he
hoped the time was near at hand when every child in England would learn
to draw. Apart from the gross folly of teaching a child anything for
which its own natural talent does not pre-dispose it, and the injury
done to the world by the artificial manufacture of millions of
indifferent draughtsmen, what use can it be to attempt to awaken
perception of art in a generation which is begotten where art and nature
are alike persistently outraged?
It is entirely useless to multiply art schools, and desire that every
child should learn to draw, when all the tendencies of modern life have
become such that every rule of art is violated in it and every artistic
sense offended in an ordinary daily walk.
Amongst even the most cultured classes few have really any sensibility
to beauty. Not one in a thousand pauses in the hurried excitements of
social life to note beauty in nature; to art there is accorded a passing
attention because it is considered _chic_ to do so; but all true sense
of art must be lacking in a generation whose women wear the spoils of
tropical birds, slain for them, on their heads and skirts, and whose men
find their principal joy for nearly half the year in the slaughter of
tame creatures, and bespatter with blood the white hellebore of their
winter woods.
Beauty is daily more and more withdrawn from the general life of the
people. Fidgety and repressive bye-laws tend to suppress that element of
the picturesque which popular life by its liberties, and by its
open-air pastimes and peddlings, created for itself. The police are
everywhere, and street-life is joyless and colourless. Even within
doors, in the houses of poor people, the things of daily usage have lost
their old-world charm; the ugly sewing-machine has replaced the
spinning-wheel, the cooking-range the spacious open hearth, the veneered
machine-made furniture the solid home-made oaken chests and presses, a
halfpenny newspaper the old family Bible; whilst out of doors the lads
and lasses must not sing or dance, the dog must not play or bark, the
chair must not stand out on the pavement, the bells must not ring their
chimes, only the cyclist, or the automobilist, lord of all, may tear
along and leave broken limbs and bruised flesh of others behind him at
his pleasure.
If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of
mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling
could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest
aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it. Nor
would the auto-car with its stench of petroleum be tolerated for an
instant in lanes and roads. Nor could modern dress be endured for a day
were there any true sense of fitness, of harmony, and of colour extant
in modern times. Even the great Catholic pageants are spoiled in their
grouping and splendour by the dull crowds of ill-dressed, dingily clad
townsfolk which drown their effect like a vast tide of muddy water
rising over a garden of flowers. It is impossible for us, even when
looking at anything so fine in colour as the Carnival at Milan, the Fete
Dieu at Brussels, the Students' Festivals in Munich, or any other of the
great Continental processions, to judge of what their extreme beauty
must have been when not only the procession itself but all the people in
the streets, all the whole vast tide of sightseers, comprising even the
very beggars, were equally full of colour and 'composed' harmoniously
with the central figures.
A gorgeous spectacle of the streets now, whether it be popular,
military, or religious, is swamped in the mass of dull-coloured hues,
and grotesquely ugly head-gear, common to the whole population of a
city. Its effect may struggle as it will: it sinks under the
preponderating mass as a butterfly will be beaten down under a dirty,
drenching, city rain.
There is a modern custom in Italy which is typical of the havoc made by
avarice and indifference and commerce running together hand in hand. It
is the shocking habit of stripping all evergreen trees of their leaves
to sell them to chemists, gilders, dyers, and the managers of what in
France we call _pompes funebres_. Even magnolias are not spared, and
these magnificent trees stand naked and despoiled in nearly all the
gardens and parks all over the country. In every town there are now
offices for the consignment and purchase of these leaves; to strip and
sell, to buy and export them, has become a recognised trade, and
hundreds of tons weight are every year, from September to April, sent
out of Italy, chiefly to Germany, Austria and Russia. The injury done
to the trees is, of course, immeasurable. After a few seasons they
become anaemic, dry up, and slowly perish, whilst the aspect of the
gardens of which the bay, myrtle, box, laurel, arbutus, and magnolia
were of late such conspicuous ornaments is, of course, utterly changed
and ruined. Unless by some edict of the State the practice be speedily
stopped, another generation will see nothing of those avenues and groves
and alleys of evergreen foliage which have been the glory of Italian
palaces and villas since the days of the Caesars.
Follow the architectural history of any city, and you find it during the
last half-century the sorrowful record of a pitiful destruction. The
great gardens are always the first thing sacrificed. They are swept
away, and their places covered by brick and mortar with an incredible
indifference. Fine houses, even when of recent construction, like the
Pompeiian house of Prince Napoleon in Paris, are pulled down out of a
mere speculative mania to build something else, or to cut a long,
straight street as uninteresting and as unsuggestive as the boxwood
protractor which lies on a surveyor's desk.
The greatest crime, or one of the greatest crimes (for there are others
black as night), of which the nineteenth century has been guilty has
been the driving of the people out of long familiar homes in the name
and under the pretext of hygiene, but in fact for the enrichment of
contractors, town councillors, and speculators of every kind. It began
with Haussmann; it has continued in Paris, and everywhere else, with
delirious haste ever since his time, as a burglar may drag a grey-beard
to his death. The modern aediles with their court of ravenous parasites
cannot understand, would not deign even to consider, the sorrow of a
humble citizen driven out of a familiar little home with nooks and
corners filled with memories and a roof-tree dear to generations. Go
into an old street of any old city you will, and you will almost
certainly find a delight for the eye in archway and ogive, in lintel and
casement, in winding stair and leaning eave; in the wallflowers rooted
in the steps, in the capsicum which has seeded itself between the
stones, in the swallows' nests under the gargoyle, in the pots of basil
and mignonette on the window-sills. But the modern street with its
dreary monotony, its long and high blank spaces, its even surfaces where
not a seed can cling or a bird can build, what will it say to your eyes
or your heart? You will see its dull, pretentious uniformity repeated on
either side of you down a mile-long vista, and you will curse it.
It is natural that the people shut up in these structures crave for
drink, for nameless vices, for the brothel, the opium den, the cheap
eating-house and gaming booth; anything, anywhere, to escape from the
monotony which surrounds them and which leaves them no more charm in
life than if they were rabbits shut up in a physiologist's experimenting
cage, and fed on gin-soaked grains. No one in whom the aesthetic sense
was really awakened could dwell in a manufacturing city, or indeed in
any modern town. The 'flat,' whether in a 'first-class mansion,' or in a
'block' for the working man, would be more intolerable than a desert
island to anyone with a sense of the true charm of life, or, one may
add, any sensitiveness to the meaning of the word 'home'; that word
which is to be found in every language, though the English people do not
think so, and which is one of the sweetest and most eloquent in all
tongues. The Americans attach extreme pride to the fact that their
'sky-scrapers' are so advanced that your horses and carriage can be
carried up on a lift to the highest storey, and the nags, if it do not
make them dizzy, can survey the city in a bird's-eye view. But even this
supreme achievement of architects and engineers cannot lend to the cube,
shared with a score of others, the charm, the idiosyncrasy, the meaning,
the soul, which exhale from the smallest cottage where those who love
dwell all alone, through whose lattices a candle shines as a star to the
returning wanderer, and on whose lowly roof memory lies like a
benediction.
According to the statistics of modern cities the mass of middle-class
and labouring-class people change their lodgings or tenements every two
or three years; three years is even an unusually long time of residence.
What can a people who flit like this, continually, know of the real
meaning of a home?
The same restlessness and dissatisfaction which make these classes
change their residence so frequently, make the wealthier classes flit in
another way, from continent to continent, from capital to capital, from
one pleasure-place to another, from one house-party to another, from the
yacht to the _rouge-et-noir_ tables, from the bath to the coverside,
from the homewoods to the antipodes, in an endless gyration which
yields but little pleasure, but which they deem as necessary as cayenne
pepper with their hot soup.
I believe that this monotony and lack of interest in the towns which
they inhabit fatally affect the minds of those whose lot it is to go to
and from the streets in continual toil, and produce in them fatigue,
heaviness and gloom; what the scholar and the poet suffer from
articulately and consciously, the people in general suffer from
inarticulately and unconsciously. The gaiety of nations dies down as the
beauty around them pales and passes. They know not what it is that
affects them, but they are affected by it none the less, as a young
child is hurt by the darkness, though it knows not what dark or light
means.
Admit that the poorer people were ill-lodged in the Middle Ages, that
the houses were ill-lit, undrained, with the gutter water splashing the
threshold, and the eaves of the opposite houses so near that the sun
could not penetrate into the street. All this may have been so, but
around two-thirds of the town were gardens and fields, the neighbouring
streets were full of painted shrines, metal lamps, gargoyles, pinnacles,
balconies of hand-forged iron or hand-carved stone, solid doors, bronzed
gates, richly-coloured frescoes; and the eyes and the hearts of the
dwellers in them had wherewithal to feed on with pleasure, not to speak
of the constant stream of many-coloured costume and of varied pageant or
procession which was for ever passing through them. Then in the niches
there were figures; at the corners there were shrines; on the rivers
there were beautiful carved bridges, of which examples are still left
to our day in the Rialto and the Vecchio. There were barges with
picture-illumined sails, and pleasure-galleys gay to the sights, and
everywhere there were towers and spires, and crenulated walls, and the
sculptured fronts of houses and churches and monasteries, and close at
hand was the greenness of wood and meadow, the freshness of the
unsullied country. Think only what that meant; no miles on miles of
dreary suburban waste to travel; no pert aggressive modern villas to
make day hateful; no underground railway stations and subways; no
hissing steam, no grinding and shrieking cable trams; no hell of factory
smoke and jerry-builders' lath and plaster; no glaring geometrical
flower beds; but the natural country running, like a happy child laden
with posies, right up to the walls of the town.
The cobbler or craftsman, who sat and worked in his doorway, and saw the
whole vari-coloured life of a mediaeval city pass by him, was a very
different being to the modern mechanic, a cypher amongst hundreds, shut
in a factory room, amongst the deafening noise of cogwheel and pistons.
Even from a practical view of his position, his guilds were a very much
finer organisation than modern trades-unions, and did far more for him
in his body and his mind. In the exercise of his labour he could then be
individual and original, he is now but one-thousandth part of an inch in
a single tooth of a huge revolving cogwheel. The mediaeval house might be
in itself nothing more than a cover from bad weather, but all about it
there was infinite variety; all life in the street or alley was richly
coloured, even the gutter brawls were medleys of shining steel, and
broken plumes, and many-coloured coats, and broidered badges, a whirl of
bright hues, which sent a painter in joy to his palette.
Indoors there were the spinning-wheel, the copper vessels, the walnut
presses, the settle by the wide warm hearth, the shrine upon the stairs
which the women made fresh with flowers. The river was gay with blazoned
hulls and painted sails; over its bridges the processions of church or
guild passed like embroidered ribbons slowly unrolling; the workman had
a busy life, and often a perilous life, but one still blent with
leisure; and the mariners' tales of wondrous lands unknown lent to life
that witchery of the remote and unattainable, that delightful thrill of
mystery and awe, which to the omniscient and cynical modern soul seem
childishness too trivial for words.
Try and realise what life was like when Chaucer walked through Chepe,
when Henri de Valois entered Venice, when Philippe le Bel rode through
the oak woods of Vincennes, when Petrarca was crowned in Rome, when
William Shakespeare sauntered through Warwickshire lanes in cowslip
time. Read Michelet's description of a Flemish Burgher, and contrast it
with the existence of a shopkeeper in a modern town. Read Froude's
description of a sea-going merchantman of Elizabeth's days, and contrast
it with the captain of a modern liner. You will at once see how full of
colour and individuality were the former lives; how colourless,
unlovely, and deprived of all initiative are the latter. Being shorn of
freedom, interest, and beauty, modern life finds vent for the
feverishness which is cooped up in it in commercial gambling--gambling
of all kinds from the Stock Exchange to the tontine, from the foreign
loan to the suburban handicap--and existence is but one gigantic
lottery. Even when a man goes on an excursion of pleasure he will at
starting buy a penny ticket which insures his life for a hundred pounds
in case of accident! How can such a populace, always haunted by the fear
of death, possibly enjoy?
The great increase in cold-blooded and ferocious murders, done on slight
motive and with cynical indifference, is the natural issue of this way
of looking at life. Who has no reverence for his own life has naturally
none for the lives of others. When a man regards his own existence as a
mere parcel to be adequately paid for with a hundred pounds, it follows
as the night the day that he cannot regard the life of another as worth
twenty shillings. Even death itself is made grotesque by modern science,
and the arms and legs and headless trunks flung into the air by the
explosion of a bomb are robbed of that mute majesty which the dead body
claims by right of nature. They seem no more than shreds of cloth or
fragments of chopped wood. It is to be feared, moreover, that the
extreme facilities given by science for instantaneous and widespread
slaughter will lead gradually to greater indifference still in the
public mind to assassination, and it will become so common that it will
be scarcely regarded with disapproval.
Many verdicts in various countries show the growing indulgence of the
law to murders. In France and Italy especially even a cold-blooded
murder will meet scant punishment, whilst one due to sudden passion is
almost sure of being either wholly unpunished, or very lightly
sentenced. In many cases, even in England, the juries have been of an
extraordinary tenderness towards murderers whose guilt they were obliged
to admit. At Chester, in England, a few weeks ago, four young colliers
who set on and stoned another to death, and flung his body in a canal,
were sentenced by Mr Justice Lawrance to the punishment of four months
in prison for three of them, and nine months for the ringleader, and
nothing more.
Many men of violent temper would think so small a price well paid to rid
themselves of a foe or of a rival. The excuse for the colliers was that
they had all been drinking. This is an excuse very generally made in
these days of culture and compulsory education.
It will be said that this has nothing to do with the presence or absence
of beauty in national life. But it has much to do with the callousness
and apathy and egotism so general in national life; and the ugliness of
surrounding influences and poverty of design in the arts so common in
modern times are chief factors in generating this lamentable temper.
Happiness, and its companions goodwill and kindly sympathy, are
insensibly suggested and increased by what is beautiful, artistic, and
full of good colour and varied design. Even the physical aspect of man
is affected by that which it looks upon, that by which it is surrounded,
and the French woman was a wise mother who during her pregnancy went to
gaze upon the finest works of the Louvre. How much, on the contrary, may
the embryo be affected for ill by sordid, dreary, and unlovely
conditions which environ the parent during the period of gestation?
There can be, I think, no doubt that physical beauty is degenerating
rapidly, and the frequency with which the scrofulous mouth is seen in
children, even in children of the aristocracies, is alarming for the
future of the race. In the working classes the offspring must be fatally
affected by the poisonous trades, the sickening effluvia, the deadly
conditions amongst which modern commerce requires its slaves to spend
their lives.
Even the country fields are sullied by chemicals and stink of sulphates,
phosphates, and human excrements. Agriculture tends to become a mere
manufacture, like any other, surrounded by the din of pistons, the fumes
of vapour, the jar of wheels.
Beauty is the safest stimulant, the surest tonic, the most precious
inspiration; natural beauty first of all, and the beauty of the arts
closely following, twinlike handmaids to Aphrodite. But to perceive this
the mentally blind are as incapable as the physically blind; and such,
mental cecity is as general in these days as myopy is common in the
schoolrooms of this generation.
Every year all cities, and even all towns, are severed farther and
farther from the country; every year the electric wires multiply for
telegraph and telephone; the tramways and railways increase, the
sickening grinding noises common to these methods of locomotion fill the
air, and the extraordinary ugliness, which seems attached like a doom to
any modern invention, is multiplied on all sides. That, in an age which
considers itself educated, such hideous constructions as the great
wheels of Chicago and of Earl's Court should attract sane persons as a
diversion will alone prove how completely the instinct of correct taste,
with its accompanying abhorrence of deformity, has become extinct in all
modern crowds.
With the ever-increasing use of steam, the beauty of the sky yearly
grows dimmer and more veiled. That a race with any pretensions to
education and perception can live contentedly under such a sky as that
of London would appear an incredible fact, did we not know that it is an
indisputable one. Whoever revisits Paris after a few seasons' absence
finds the brilliancy of its life more and more dimmed with every decade
by the sullying of the atmosphere through the increase of factories,
railways and other works, and the invasion by the town of its once
beautiful girdle of wood, orchard, and garden. Every year national life
everywhere grows less varied, less picturesque, more unlovely, and every
year finds the people more contented to dwell with no other horizon than
a bank of smoke.
It was monstrous that the selection of the glades and pastures of the
New Forest, for military manoeuvres, should ever have been permitted
by the British War Office. But the mere fact that it _was_ monstrous,
that it was an offence to history and nature, that it disturbed and
distressed wild life, that it wounded and outraged the feelings of
residents and the sentiments of artists, was a reason all-sufficient to
make the modern temper brutally enamoured of the idea. Merely because
the despatch of the battalions and field batteries thither was a
vandalism, and caused pain to more aesthetic minds, military
manoeuvres in the New Forest became all at once a project to be
insisted on and carried out at all costs. The same outrage is now being
done to Stonehenge.
The modern temper cannot respect, cannot appreciate, cannot love, but it
can hate; and its hatred shows itself in damage and destruction
everywhere, whether it set fire to the noble old house of the Hanseatic
League at Antwerp, pull down the water towers of Dieppe, plant the
jerry-builder before the Lateran, drag a railway train up to Murren, or
trample down with ill-shod boy-soldiers the thyme and the bracken of the
Conqueor's woods and the turf which the Druids trod.
The modern temper resembles those children in Victor Hugo's romance who,
being left alone with the beautiful and ancient _Horae_, find no prank so
delightful as to tear from end to end the illuminated text of the book
and its perfect miniatures, clapping their hands as each fair thing
perishes. Nor is there any indication of the advent of anyone who will
take the book of the world from the destroying hands, and save what
still remains of its beauty.
There is, on the contrary, every sign that the future will see a still
greater domination of that rude, cold, and cruel temper which takes
pleasure in innovation and obliteration, and sneers, with contemptuous
conceit, at those who are pained by such acts of desecration. It is the
same sneer, the same leering and self-satisfied snigger, with which it
views the expression and evidence of pity for, and solidarity with, what
it is pleased to call the lower animals.
The Langdale Pikes are being pierced and blasted for iron foundries and
slate quarries. The great forest of La Haye near Nancy is being
destroyed by military fortifications, and by foundries and by factories.
All the valley of the Meuse and the Moselle is sullied with factory
smoke and blasting powder. The Bay of Amalfi and the shore of Posilippo
are defiled by cannon foundries. The Isle of St Elena at Venice is laid
waste to serve as a railway factory. All the Ardennes are scorched and
soiled, and sickened with stench of smoke and suffocating slag. The Peak
Country and the Derwent vales are being scarred and charred for railway
lines, mines, and factories. Amsterdam, so late the Venice of the North,
is becoming an unmeaning mass of modern insignificance and ugliness;
what has been done to the Venice of the South is such outrage that it
might wake Tiziano from under his weight of marble in the Frari Church,
and call the Veronese from his grave.
To destroy Trinity Hospital in London, and place a brewery in its place
is a joy and glory to the modern municipal soul. The Hotel Dessin in
Calais, made sacred to the name of Laurence Sterne, was a pleasant place
with an arched entrance and a large courtyard, round whose sides the
buildings were grouped; it had vines and greenery of all kinds, and over
the archway were little dormer windows. Behind it stretched fair gardens
of great extent, and beyond these was a theatre belonging to the hotel.
Of late years it had served as a museum for the town, and was thus
preserved intact; now it has been pulled down and razed to the ground,
and a huge commercial school built in its place. The funicular railways
are ruining the whole of the Swiss Alps; the greed of a few speculators
and the irreverent folly of the multitude combine to scar the sides of
the great mountains and gather on their summits troops of gaping
sightseers, to whom the solemnity of the Gletsch Alp or the virginity of
the Jungfrau are of no account.
Zermatt, so late a virgin stronghold of the Higher Alps, is now a mere
cockney excursion, and sixty thousand trippers invade its solitude with
every summer, plodding like camels in a string, vexing the air with
inane noises, offending the mountain stillness with songs to which the
bray of mules were music, insulting the crystal clearness of the heavens
with the intrusion of their own ludicrous, blatant and imbecile
personalities, incapable even of being silent and ashamed. The island of
Naxos, whose mere name brings before us so many classic memories in all
their loveliness and glory, is being broken up into chips by the
emery-workers, and is to be mined for aluminium.
The finest torrent in Scotland is about to be diverted from its course
and used for aluminium works. The glory of its waters is to be known no
more, merely that some engineers and manufacturers may fill their
pockets to the public loss; that some promoters and shareholders,
possessing large parliamentary influence, may add to their fortunes. To
speak of civilisation, which is a term implying culture, in the same
breath with a nation capable of such an action is ludicrous.
The fumes of these aluminium works will, when they are in full blast,
emit hydrofluoric acid gas which will destroy all the vegetation on Loch
Ness for miles. Yet such is the apathy and want of conscience in modern
generations that the annihilation of the Falls of Foyers appears
scarcely to meet with any general indignation.
There is no modern mania so dangerous as the present one for meddling
with water; no injury more conspicuous and irrevocable than the
perpetual interference with lake and stream and torrent.
The lakes of Maggiore, of Como, of Garda, are all being defiled by
factories and steam-engines; and even such a writer as De Voguee can look
contentedly forward to a time when such erections will disfigure both
banks of the Rhone.
The isles of Lake Leman serve for commercial and communal purposes.
Thirlmere and Loch Katrine have been violated, and all the other English
and Scotch lakes will be similarly ravaged. Fucina has been dried up as
a speculation, and Trasimene is threatened. The Rhone is already dammed
up, and tapped, and tortured, until all its rich alluvial deposits are
lost to the soil of Provence.
It would be easy to fill folios with the bare enumeration of places and
memories, of sites and scenes of which the destruction has been
accomplished within the last few years. To get money for the
preservation of anything is well-nigh impossible; but millions flow like
water when there is any scheme of destruction. In an age which prates
more than any other of its pride in education, the violation of every
law of taste, of every tie of association, of every rule of beauty, is
always greedily welcomed with a barbaric shout of triumph.
Lath and plaster circuses or theatres are erected by the Mausoleum of
Hadrian, and the miserable caged monkeys of a menagerie pull each
other's tails where Raffaele's pavillion stood amidst the
nightingale-filled ilex groves.
Frederic Harrison, in his admirable studies of Paris, cannot hide from
himself or his readers the loss to art and history which the
Haussmannising of the city began, the insanity of the Commune continued,
and the barbarism of the present Republic confirms. The ruin of Rome
since the Italian occupation is ten times worse and more offensive than
even such ruin as would have been entailed by a siege, for it is more
vulgar; shell and shot would have destroyed indeed, but they would not
have imbecilely and impudently reconstructed. The same sad change
awaits, if it has not already overtaken, every city of Europe, and alas!
even of Asia. The smoke fiend has entered Jerusalem, and the shriek of
the engines has scared the wild dove from her nest in the palm and
pomegranate. The Mount of Olives is 'a thing to be done,' and the
'scorcher,' sweating and grinning, drives his wheel through the
rose-thickets of Damascus.
Factory chimneys stand as thick in Bombay as in Birmingham, and black
trails of foul vapour float over Indus and Ganges; soon their curse will
reach the Euphrates. I believe I am correct in saying that the smoke
from the funnel of a great steamer or a large factory can be traced for
forty-five miles in its passage through the air. Imagine the effect on
atmosphere of the continual crossing and re-crossing on ocean routes of
tens of thousands of such steamships yearly, of the perpetual belching
of such fumes from the innumerable factory shafts annually increased in
every part of what is called the civilised world. To India, from England
alone, the export of machines and other material for factory erection
has been at the enormous rate of L70,000 monthly!
Only let us consider what this means, what destruction of pure light and
of fine atmosphere this involves for Hindostan.
The snow-white marbles of the temples, the ivory doors, the silver
gates, the rosy clouds, the lotus-laden waters, the golden dawns, the
magnolia woods, the camellia groves, the feathered flocks in the bamboo
aisles, will all vanish that the smoke fiend may reign alone and the
traders who live by him grow rich. The 'light of Asia' is forced to grow
foul and dark and sickly, and its radiant suns to be shrouded in
pestilent fog in order that the British Gradgrind may put by his 200 per
cent. and fold his hands complacently on his rotund belly.
Is the end worth the means?
Is modern trade in truth such a godhead descended on earth that all the
loveliness of earth and air, of sky and water should be sacrificed to
its demands?
We hear _ad nauseam_ of the gains of modern life, of what is called
civilisation: does no one count its losses? It might be well to do so.
It might act as a corrective to the inane self-worship which is at once
the most ill-founded and the most irritating feature of the age. Perhaps
other ages have in turn adored themselves in like manner, but there is
not in history any record of it. Its prophets, heroes, sages, each age
has either admired or execrated; but I do not think any age has so
admired itself as the present age, which has its prototype in William of
Germany standing between two sand banks and thinking himself greater
than Alexander because his engineers have succeeded in cutting for him a
ditch longer than usual.
The modern world is at this moment ruled by two enemies of all beauty:
these are commerce and militarism. What the one does not destroy, the
other tramples under foot. In earlier times war, terrible always, was
beautiful, like its goddess Bellona, in its savage splendour. Its camps,
its troops, its standards, its panoply, were all full of colour and of
pomp. Even so late as the Napoleonic wars its awfulness was blended with
beauty. Now the passage of an army is like the course of so many dirty
luggage trains filled with bales of wool or hampers of fish. Its
monstrous maw licks up all loveliness as all life which it finds in its
way. Its frightful steel cylinders belch death on every gracious and
happy thing. It is unenlivened by pageantry, as it is unredeemed by
courtesy. Bellona is no more a goddess, but a hag.
Socialism, which has the future of the world in its hands, will probably
be unable to abolish war, and will certainly not care for beauty or seek
to preserve it. The reconstruction of society which Socialism
contemplates will not be a state of things in which the interests of
either nature or art will be cherished. Collectivism must of necessity
be colourless; equality can afford none of those heights and depths,
those lights and shades, which are the essential charm of life as of
landscape. When all the arable earth is one huge allotment-ground, a
Corot will find no subject for his canvas, not even in his dreams, for
his dreams will be dead of inanition.
There can be, I think, no hope that this loss of beauty will not be
greater and greater with every year. The tendency, continually
increasing in the modern character, is to regard beauty and nature with
cynical indifference, stirred, when stirred at all, into active
insolence; such insolence as was expressed in the joke of the Chicago
citizen who called the plank-walks of his city 'the reafforesting of our
town.' It is a temper not merely brutal, but with a leer in it which is
more offensive than its brutality.
The great beauty which animal and bird life lends to the earth is doomed
to lessen and disappear. The automatic vehicle will render the horse
useless; and he will be considered too costly, and too slow, to be kept
even as a gambling toy. The dog will have no place in a world which has
no gratitude for such simple sincerity and faithful friendliness as he
offers. When wool, and horn, and leather, and meat foods have been
replaced by chemical inventions, cattle and sheep will have no more
tolerance than the wild buffalo has had in the United States. What are
now classed as big game will be exterminated in Asia and Africa, and
already in Europe we are told that the pleasure it affords to people to
kill them is the sole reason why stags, foxes, and gamebirds are allowed
to exist and multiply under artificial protection. All the charm which
the races of 'fur and feather' lend to the earth will be lost for ever;
for a type destroyed can never be recalled.
Every invention of what is called science takes the human race farther
and farther from nature, nearer and nearer to an artificial, unnatural
and dependent state. One seems to hear the laugh of Goethe's
Mephistopheles behind the hiss of steam; and in the tinkle of the
electric bell there lurks the chuckle of glee with which the Tempter
sees the human fools take as a boon and a triumph the fatal gifts he has
given.
What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own
soul? What shall it profit the world to put a girdle about its loins in
forty minutes when it shall have become a desert of stone, a wilderness
of streets, a treeless waste, a songless city, where man shall have
destroyed all life except his own, and can hear no echo of his heart's
pulsation save in the throb of an iron piston.
The engine tearing through the disembowelled mountain, the iron and
steel houses towering against a polluted sky, the huge cylinders
generating electricity and gas, the network of wires cutting across the
poisoned air, the overgrown cities spreading like scurvy, devouring
every green thing like locusts; haste instead of leisure, Neurasthenia
instead of health, mania instead of sanity, egotism and terror instead
of courage and generosity, these are the gifts which the modern mind
creates for the world. It can chemically imitate every kind of food and
drink, it can artificially produce every form of disease and suffering,
it can carry death in a needle and annihilation in an odour, it can
cross an ocean in five days, it can imprison the human voice in a box,
it can make a dead man speak from a paper cylinder, it can transmit
thoughts over hundreds of miles of wire, it can turn a handle and
discharge scores of death-dealing tubes at one moment as easily as a
child can play a tune on a barrel organ, it can pack death and horror up
in a small tin case which has served for sardines or potted herrings,
and leave it on a window-sill, and cause by it towers to fall, and
palaces to crumble, and flames to upleap to heaven, and living men to
change to calcined corpses; all this it can do, and much more. But it
cannot give back to the earth, or to the soul, 'the sweet wild freshness
of morning.' And when all is said of its great inventions and their
marvels and mysteries, are they more marvellous or more mysterious than
the changes of chrysalis and caterpillar and butterfly, or the rise of
the giant oak from the tiny acorn, or the flight of swallow and
nightingale over ocean and continent?
Man has created for himself in the iron beast a greater tyrant than any
Nero or Caligula. And what is the human child of the iron beast, what is
the typical, notable, most conspicuous creation of the iron beast's
epoch?
It is the Cad, vomited forth from every city and town in hundreds,
thousands, millions, with every holy day and holy-day. The chief
creation of modern life is the Cad; he is an exclusively modern
manufacture, and it may safely be said that the poorest slave in Hellas,
the meanest fellah in Egypt, the humblest pariah in Asia was a
gentleman beside him. The Cad is the entire epitome, the complete
blossom and fruit in one, of what we are told is an age of culture.
Behold him in the velodrome as he yells insanely after his kind as they
tear along on their tandem machines in a match, and then ask yourself
candidly, O my reader, if any age before this in all the centuries of
earth ever produced any creature so utterly low and loathsome, so
physically, mentally, individually, and collectively hideous? The helot
of Greece, the gladiator of Rome, the swash-buckler of Mediaeval Europe,
nay, the mere pimp and pander of Elizabethan England, of the France of
the Valois, of the Spain of Velasquez, were dignity, purity, courage in
person beside the Cad of this breaking dawn of the twentieth century;
the Cad rushing on with his shrill scream of laughter as he knocks down
the feeble woman or the yearling child, and making life and death and
all eternity seem ridiculous by the mere existence of his own
intolerable fatuity and bestiality.