Beauty and Knowledge
CLEVER young people find it amusing to sneer at the old-fashioned ideal
of combining instruction with amusement--a stupid Victorian ideal, we
are told, which a progressive generation has cast aside. Too hastily,
perhaps--too inconsiderately. "Work while you work and play while you
play" is a motto dealing with a big question, and one to which there are
at least two sides. Entirely to divorce amusement and instruction--may
not this tend to make the one dull and the other silly? In this, as in
some other matters, our generation might well learn a little from its
ancestors. In many ways no doubt we have far surpassed the simple ideals
of our forefathers, but in the matter of amusements, in the matter of
beauty, in the matter of teaching children things without boring them,
or giving powders really and truly concealed in jam--have we advanced so
much?
To begin with, the world is much uglier than it was. At least England
is, and France, and Belgium, and Italy, and I do not suppose that
Germany, so far ahead of us with airships, is far behind in the ugliness
which seems to be, with the airship, the hall-mark of a really advanced
nation.
We are proud, and justly, of the enormous advances made in the last
sixty years in education, sanitation, and all the complicated and heavy
machinery of the other 'ations, the 'ologies, and the 'isms; but in
these other matters how is it with us? We have grown uglier, and the
things which amuse no longer teach.
For a good many years now--more than three hundred--old men have said
"Such things and such were better in our time." And always the young
have disbelieved the saying, which in due course came from their own
lips. Has it ever occurred to any one that the reason why old people say
this is quite the simplest of all reasons? They say it because it is
_true_, and true in our land in quite a special manner. The chariot
wheels of advancing civilisation must always furrow some green fields,
grind some fair flowers in the dust. But the chariot wheels in which
civilisation to-day advances grows less and less like a chariot and more
and more like a steam-roller, and unless we steer better there will
very soon be few flowers left to us.
Those of us who have reached middle age already see that the old men
spoke truly. Things are not what they were. Without dealing with frauds
and adulterations and shoddy of all sorts we can see that things are not
so good as they were, nor yet so beautiful.
And I do not think that this means just that we are growing old, and
that the fingers of Time have rubbed the bloom from the fruit of Life.
Because those things which must be now as they used to be, trees,
leaves, rivers, and the laughter of little children, flowers, the sea at
those points where piers are impracticable, and mountains--the ones
stony and steep enough to resist the jerry-builder and the funicular
railway--still hold all, and more than all, their old magic and delight.
It seems that it is not only that the ugly and unmeaning things have
grown, like a filthy fungus, over the sheer beauty of the world, but
that the things that people mean to be beautiful are not beautiful, and
the things they mean to be interesting lack interest.
And the disease is universal: it attacks new things as well as old. The
cinematographs even, newest of the new, as things went in the old
world; already the canker has eaten them up. In the first year of
Picture Palaces we all crowded to see beautiful pictures of beautiful
places: Niagara, the Zambesi Falls, the Grand Canyon. The comic pieces
were perhaps French, but they were certainly funny. Also we saw the way
the world lived, when it was the other side of the world: "Elephants
a-piling teak," naked savages, or as near naked as don't matter, moving
in ceremonial dance before the idols that were the gods of their deep
dangerous faith. Dramas of love and death and pity and poverty. Quite
often in the early days the cinematograph tale was of some workman
driven by want to the theft of a loaf. It is true that the story
generally ended in his conviction and the adoption of his charming baby
girl by the wife of the _Juge d'Instruction_, but all the same people
saw some one poor and sad and tempted, and were sorry and sad for his
sake. Also we had tales of Indians with men that rode amain, and horses
that one longed to bestride, such beauties they were, all fire and
delicate strong temperament. War dramas too there were, where the hero
left his sweetheart, and turned coward perhaps, redeeming himself with
magnificent completeness in the splendid _debacle_ of a forlorn hope.
That is all over. Already the sordid, heavy hand that smears commercial
commonplace on all the bright facets of romance has obscured the vivid
possibilities of the cinematograph. We have now for fun the elaborate
hurting of one American person by another American person; for scenery,
American flat-iron buildings; for romance the incredibly unimportant
emotions of fleshy American actresses and actors. There are two girls,
good and bad; two men, bad and good. In the end the good man gets the
good girl, which is, of course, as it should be, or would be if we could
believe in any moral quality in these fat-faced impersonators. You don't
care a bit who wins, but none the less, the four of them mouth and mop
and mow and make faces at you through five interminable acts, and when
the good young man marries the good young woman in a parlour grossly
furnished according to American ideals, you feel that both of them are
well punished for their unpardonable existence. All real and delicate
romance has, we observe, been wiped out by the cinematograph.
[Illustration: THE HALL OF PEARL AND RED]
It has long been the fashion to sneer at the Crystal Palace, and indeed
the poor dear has gone from bad to worse. There are exhibitions there
all exactly like all other exhibitions: Switch-backs, _Montagnes
Russes_, Silhouettes, Tumble-scumbles, Weary waves, Threepenny thrills
(where you hustle against strangers and shriek at the impact). But once
the Crystal Palace was otherwise. In the Victorian days we sneer at,
when our fathers could not see that there was any quarrel between
knowledge and beauty, both of whom they loved, they built the Crystal
Palace as a Temple vowed to these twin Deities of their worship. Think
what the Crystal Palace was then. Think what its authors intended it to
be. Think what, for a little time, it was. A place of beauty, a place
where beauty and knowledge went hand in hand. It is quite true that a
Brobdingnagian Conservatory does not seem so beautiful to us as it did
to the Prince Consort and Sir Joseph Paxton. It is true that even in the
palmiest days of the Crystal Palace you barked your shins over iron
girders--painted a light blue, my memory assures me--and that the boards
of the flooring were so far apart that you could lose, down the cracks
of them, not only your weekly sixpence or your birthday shilling, but
even the sudden unexpected cartwheel (do they still call a crown that?)
contributed by an uncle almost more than human. It is true that the
gravel of the paths in the "grounds" tired your feet and tried your
temper, and that the adventure ended in a clinging to bony fingers and
admonitions from nurse "not to drag so." But on the other hand. . . .
Think of the imagination, the feeling for romance that went to the
furnishing of the old Crystal Palace. There was a lake in the grounds of
Penge Park. How would our twentieth century _entrepreneurs_ deal with a
lake? We need not pause to invent an answer. We know it would be
something new and nasty. How did these despised mid-Victorians deal with
it? They set up, amid the rocks and reeds and trees of the island in
that lake, life-sized images of the wonders of a dead world. On a great
stone crouched a Pterodactyl, his vast wings spread for flight. A
mammoth sloth embraced a tree, and I give you my word that when you came
on him from behind, you, in your six years, could hardly believe that he
was not real, that he would not presently leave the tree and turn his
attention to your bloused and belted self. (Little boys wore caps with
peaks then, and blouses with embroidered collars.) Convinced, at last,
by the cold feel of his flank to your fat little hand, that he was but
stone, you kept, none the less, a memory of him that would last your
life, and make his name, when you met it in a book, as thrilling as the
name of a friend in the list of birthday honours. There was an
Ichthyosaurus too, and another chap whose name I forget, but he had a
scalloped crest all down his back to the end of his tail. And the
Dinosaurus . . . he had a round hole in his antediluvian stomach: and,
with a brother--his own turn to come next, as in honour bound--to give
you a leg-up, you could explore the roomy interior of the Dinosaur with
feelings hardly to be surpassed by those of bandits in a cave. It is
almost impossible to over-estimate the Dinosaurus as an educational
influence. On your way back to the Palace itself you passed Water
Temples surrounded by pools where water-lilies grew. Afterwards, when
you read of tanks and lotuses and India, you knew what to think.
There were Sphinxes--the correct plural was told you by aunts, and you
rejected it on the terrace--and, within, more smooth water with marble
at the edge and more lilies, and goldfish, palms, and ferns, and humming
pervasive music from the organ. There were groves or shrubberies; you
entered them a-tremble with a fearful joy. You knew that round the next
corner or the next would be black and brown and yellow men; savages,
with their huts and their wives and their weapons, their
looking-glass-pools and their reed tunics, so near you that it was only
a step across a little barrier and you could pretend that you also were
a black, a brown, or a yellow person, and not a little English child in
a tunic, belt, and peaked cap. You never took the step, but none the
less those savages were your foes and your friends, and when you met
them in your geography you thrilled to the encounter.
Further, there were Courts; I first met Venus, the armless wonder of
Milo, and Hermes, embodied vision of Praxiteles, and the Discobolus,
whom we all love, and who is exactly like Mr. Graham Wallas in youth, in
the Grecian Court. In the Egyptian Court there were pictured pillars,
and the very word Egypt is to me for their sake a Word of Power to this
day. And the Spanish Court, the court of the Alhambra, the lovely
mosaic, the gold and the blue and the red, the fountain, the marble, the
strange unnatural beauty of the horseshoe arches. . . .
I shall never see the Alhambra now, but it is because of the Spanish
Court at the Crystal Palace that there will always be an empty ache in
my thought, an ache of the heart, a longing that is not all pain, at its
name, a feeling like a beautiful dwarf despair, in that I never shall
see that blue and red and golden glory, and the mystery of its strange
mis-shapen arches that open to the whole world of dreams.
Say of the Mid-Victorians what you will; they did at least know, when
they set them, the seeds of Romance. Think of Euston Station: those
glorious pillars, the magnificent dream of an Egyptian building to loom
through the Egyptian darkness of London's fogs. And the architecture of
Egypt was too expensive, and Euston remains, a magnificent memorial--the
child of genius stunted by finance.
There was Madame Tussaud's too, a close link with the French Revolution:
the waxen heads of kings and democrats, the very guillotine itself. And
Madame Tussaud's daughter, with the breathing breast that seemed alive,
and the little old woman in the black bonnet, Madame herself, who had
seen the rise of Republics and the deaths of kings. These things, last
time I trod those halls, were put in the shade, their place usurped by
vulgar tableaux, explaining to the bored spectators what happens to a
vulgar young man with a wife whose skirt is much too short in front and
her hair very badly done, if he leaves his home for the society of
sirens and cardsharpers. The tableaux were cheap and nasty, and taught
one nothing that one could not learn from the _Police News_.
Once there were nightingales that sang in the gardens on Loampit Hill.
Now it is all villas. Once the Hilly Fields were hilly fields where the
children played, and there were primroses. Once the road from Eltham to
Woolwich was a grassy lane with hedges and big trees in the hedges, and
wild pinks and Bethlehem stars, and ragged robin and campion. Now the
trees are cut down and there are no more flowers. It is asphalt all the
way, and here and there seats divided by iron rods so that tired tramps
should not sleep on them. And the green fields by Mottingham where the
kingcups used to grow, and the willows by the little stream, they are
eaten up by yellow caterpillars of streets all alike, all horrible;
while in London old handsome houses are tenements, and children play on
the dirty doorsteps of them with dead mice and mutton bones for toys. In
the country women wear men's tweed caps instead of sunbonnets, and
Hinde's curlers by day instead of curl papers (which if you were pretty,
looked like wreaths of white roses) by night. And everything is getting
uglier and uglier. And no one seems to care. And only the old people
remember that things were not always ugly, remember how different
things were--once.
[Illustration: A CHINESE TEMPLE.]
Therefore I would plead with all those who have to do with children to
resist and to denounce uglification wherever they may meet with it, and
to remember that there is knowledge which goes hand in hand with beauty.
To show a child beautiful things, and to answer as well all the
questions he will ask about them, to charm and thrill his imagination
with pictures and statues and models of the wonders of the world, to
familiarise the child with beauty, so that he knows ugliness when he
meets it, and hates it for the outrage it is to the beauty he has known
and loved ever since he was very little--this is worth doing. If we
would make beauty the dear rule of a man's life, and ugliness the hated
exception, we should make beauty as familiar to the child as the air he
breathes, and if we associate knowledge with beauty the child will love
them both.