That capable and ingenious writer, Mr. Arthur Symons, has included in a
book of essays recently published, I believe, an apologia for “London
Nights,” in which he says that morality should be wholly subordinated
to art in criticism, and he uses the somewhat singular argument that
art or the worship of beauty is the same in all ages, while morality
differs in every period and in every respect. He appears to defy his
critics or his readers to mention any permanent feature or quality in
ethics. This is surely a very curious example of that extravagant bias
against morality which makes so many ultra-modern aesthetes as morbid
and fanatical as any Eastern hermit. Unquestionably it is a very
common phrase of modern intellectualism to say that the morality of one
age can be entirely different to the morality of another. And like a
great many other phrases of modern intellectualism, it means literally
nothing at all. If the two moralities are entirely different, why do
you call them both moralities? It is as if a man said, “Camels in
various places are totally diverse; some have six legs, some have none,
some have scales, some have feathers, some have horns, some have wings,
some are green, some are triangular. There is no point which they have
in common.” The ordinary man of sense would reply, “Then what makes
you call them all camels? What do you mean by a camel? How do you know
a camel when you see one?” Of course, there is a permanent substance of
morality, as much as there is a permanent substance of art; to say that
is only to say that morality is morality, and that art is art. An
ideal art-critic would, no doubt, see the enduring beauty under every
school; equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring ethic under
every code. But practically some of the best Englishmen that ever lived
could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the
Brahmin. And it is equally true that practically the greatest group of
artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the Renaissance,
could see nothing but barbarism in the ethereal energy of Gothic.
This bias against morality among the modern aesthetes is nothing very
much paraded. And yet it is not really a bias against morality; it is
a bias against other people’s morality. It is generally founded on a
very definite moral preference for a certain sort of life, pagan,
plausible, humane. The modern aesthete, wishing us to believe that he
values beauty more than conduct, reads Mallarme, and drinks absinthe in
a tavern. But this is not only his favourite kind of beauty; it is
also his favourite kind of conduct. If he really wished us to believe
that he cared for beauty only, he ought to go to nothing but Wesleyan
school treats, and paint the sunlight in the hair of the Wesleyan
babies. He ought to read nothing but very eloquent theological sermons
by old-fashioned Presbyterian divines. Here the lack of all possible
moral sympathy would prove that his interest was purely verbal or
pictorial, as it is; in all the books he reads and writes he clings to
the skirts of his own morality and his own immorality. The champion of
l’art pour l’art is always denouncing Ruskin for his moralizing. If he
were really a champion of l’art pour l’art, he would be always
insisting on Ruskin for his style.
The doctrine of the distinction between art and morality owes a great
part of its success to art and morality being hopelessly mixed up in
the persons and performances of its greatest exponents. Of this lucky
contradiction the very incarnation was Whistler. No man ever preached
the impersonality of art so well; no man ever preached the
impersonality of art so personally. For him pictures had nothing to do
with the problems of character; but for all his fiercest admirers his
character was, as a matter of fact far more interesting than his
pictures. He gloried in standing as an artist apart from right and
wrong. But he succeeded by talking from morning till night about his
rights and about his wrongs. His talents were many, his virtues, it
must be confessed, not many, beyond that kindness to tried friends, on
which many of his biographers insist, but which surely is a quality of
all sane men, of pirates and pickpockets; beyond this, his outstanding
virtues limit themselves chiefly to two admirable ones—courage and an
abstract love of good work. Yet I fancy he won at last more by those
two virtues than by all his talents. A man must be something of a
moralist if he is to preach, even if he is to preach unmorality.
Professor Walter Raleigh, in his “In Memoriam: James McNeill Whistler,”
insists, truly enough, on the strong streak of an eccentric honesty in
matters strictly pictorial, which ran through his complex and slightly
confused character. “He would destroy any of his works rather than
leave a careless or inexpressive touch within the limits of the frame.
He would begin again a hundred times over rather than attempt by
patching to make his work seem better than it was.”
No one will blame Professor Raleigh, who had to read a sort of funeral
oration over Whistler at the opening of the Memorial Exhibition, if,
finding himself in that position, he confined himself mostly to the
merits and the stronger qualities of his subject. We should naturally
go to some other type of composition for a proper consideration of the
weaknesses of Whistler. But these must never be omitted from our view
of him. Indeed, the truth is that it was not so much a question of the
weaknesses of Whistler as of the intrinsic and primary weakness of
Whistler. He was one of those people who live up to their emotional
incomes, who are always taut and tingling with vanity. Hence he had no
strength to spare; hence he had no kindness, no geniality; for
geniality is almost definable as strength to spare. He had no god-like
carelessness; he never forgot himself; his whole life was, to use his
own expression, an arrangement. He went in for “the art of living”—a
miserable trick. In a word, he was a great artist; but emphatically not
a great man. In this connection I must differ strongly with Professor
Raleigh upon what is, from a superficial literary point of view, one of
his most effective points. He compares Whistler’s laughter to the
laughter of another man who was a great man as well as a great artist.
“His attitude to the public was exactly the attitude taken up by Robert
Browning, who suffered as long a period of neglect and mistake, in
those lines of ‘The Ring and the Book’—
“‘Well, British Public, ye who like me not,
(God love you!) and will have your proper laugh
At the dark question; laugh it! I’d laugh first.’
“Mr. Whistler,” adds Professor Raleigh, “always laughed first.” The
truth is, I believe, that Whistler never laughed at all. There was no
laughter in his nature; because there was no thoughtlessness and
self-abandonment, no humility. I cannot understand anybody reading
“The Gentle Art of Making Enemies” and thinking that there is any
laughter in the wit. His wit is a torture to him. He twists himself
into arabesques of verbal felicity; he is full of a fierce carefulness;
he is inspired with the complete seriousness of sincere malice. He
hurts himself to hurt his opponent. Browning did laugh, because
Browning did not care; Browning did not care, because Browning was a
great man. And when Browning said in brackets to the simple, sensible
people who did not like his books, “God love you!” he was not sneering
in the least. He was laughing—that is to say, he meant exactly what he
said.
There are three distinct classes of great satirists who are also great
men—that is to say, three classes of men who can laugh at something
without losing their souls. The satirist of the first type is the man
who, first of all enjoys himself, and then enjoys his enemies. In this
sense he loves his enemy, and by a kind of exaggeration of Christianity
he loves his enemy the more the more he becomes an enemy. He has a sort
of overwhelming and aggressive happiness in his assertion of anger; his
curse is as human as a benediction. Of this type of satire the great
example is Rabelais. This is the first typical example of satire, the
satire which is voluble, which is violent, which is indecent, but which
is not malicious. The satire of Whistler was not this. He was never in
any of his controversies simply happy; the proof of it is that he never
talked absolute nonsense. There is a second type of mind which
produces satire with the quality of greatness. That is embodied in the
satirist whose passions are released and let go by some intolerable
sense of wrong. He is maddened by the sense of men being maddened; his
tongue becomes an unruly member, and testifies against all mankind.
Such a man was Swift, in whom the saeva indignatio was a bitterness to
others, because it was a bitterness to himself. Such a satirist
Whistler was not. He did not laugh because he was happy, like
Rabelais. But neither did he laugh because he was unhappy, like Swift.
The third type of great satire is that in which he satirist is enabled
to rise superior to his victim in the only serious sense which
superiority can bear, in that of pitying the sinner and respecting the
man even while he satirises both. Such an achievement can be found in
a thing like Pope’s “Atticus” a poem in which the satirist feels that
he is satirising the weaknesses which belong specially to literary
genius. Consequently he takes a pleasure in pointing out his enemy’s
strength before he points out his weakness. That is, perhaps, the
highest and most honourable form of satire. That is not the satire of
Whistler. He is not full of a great sorrow for the wrong done to human
nature; for him the wrong is altogether done to himself.
He was not a great personality, because he thought so much about
himself. And the case is stronger even than that. He was sometimes not
even a great artist, because he thought so much about art. Any man
with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most
profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a
great deal about art. Art is a right and human thing, like walking or
saying one’s prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very
solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a
congestion and a kind of difficulty.
The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a
disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression
to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is
healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is
essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all
costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art
easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of
less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain,
which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are
able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning. There are
many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or
violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is
that it cannot produce any art.
Whistler could produce art; and in so far he was a great man. But he
could not forget art; and in so far he was only a man with the artistic
temperament. There can be no stronger manifestation of the man who is
a really great artist than the fact that he can dismiss the subject of
art; that he can, upon due occasion, wish art at the bottom of the sea.
Similarly, we should always be much more inclined to trust a solicitor
who did not talk about conveyancing over the nuts and wine. What we
really desire of any man conducting any business is that the full force
of an ordinary man should be put into that particular study. We do not
desire that the full force of that study should be put into an ordinary
man. We do not in the least wish that our particular law-suit should
pour its energy into our barrister’s games with his children, or rides
on his bicycle, or meditations on the morning star. But we do, as a
matter of fact, desire that his games with his children, and his rides
on his bicycle, and his meditations on the morning star should pour
something of their energy into our law-suit. We do desire that if he
has gained any especial lung development from the bicycle, or any
bright and pleasing metaphors from the morning star, that the should be
placed at our disposal in that particular forensic controversy. In a
word, we are very glad that he is an ordinary man, since that may help
him to be an exceptional lawyer.
Whistler never ceased to be an artist. As Mr. Max Beerbohm pointed out
in one of his extraordinarily sensible and sincere critiques, Whistler
really regarded Whistler as his greatest work of art. The white lock,
the single eyeglass, the remarkable hat—these were much dearer to him
than any nocturnes or arrangements that he ever threw off. He could
throw off the nocturnes; for some mysterious reason he could not throw
off the hat. He never threw off from himself that disproportionate
accumulation of aestheticism which is the burden of the amateur.
It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing
which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the
extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in
history. Their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded;
hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious. Hence people say
that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The modern artistic temperament cannot
understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote,
could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a
little town in Warwickshire. The explanation is simple enough; it is
that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so
got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did
not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a
sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an
ordinary man.
All very great teachers and leaders have had this habit of assuming
their point of view to be one which was human and casual, one which
would readily appeal to every passing man. If a man is genuinely
superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the
equality of man. We can see this, for instance, in that strange and
innocent rationality with which Christ addressed any motley crowd that
happened to stand about Him. “What man of you having a hundred sheep,
and losing one, would not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness,
and go after that which was lost?” Or, again, “What man of you if his
son ask for bread will he give him a stone, or if he ask for a fish
will he give him a serpent?” This plainness, this almost prosaic
camaraderie, is the note of all very great minds.
To very great minds the things on which men agree are so immeasurably
more important than the things on which they differ, that the latter,
for all practical purposes, disappear. They have too much in them of
an ancient laughter even to endure to discuss the difference between
the hats of two men who were both born of a woman, or between the
subtly varied cultures of two men who have both to die. The first-rate
great man is equal with other men, like Shakespeare. The second-rate
great man is on his knees to other men, like Whitman. The third-rate
great man is superior to other men, like Whistler.