the _Empress of Ireland_ occurs, that man recovers his ancient dread
of the sea. We have grown comfortably intimate with the sea. We use it
as a highway of business and pleasure with as little hesitation as the
land. The worst we fear from it is the discomfort of sea-sickness, and
we are inclined to treat that half-comically, like a boy's sickness
from tobacco. There are still a few persons who are timid of it, as
the more civilised among us are timid of forests: they cannot sleep if
they are near its dull roar, and they hate, like nagging, the damnable
iteration of its waves. For most of us, however, the sea is a
domesticated wonder. We pace its shores with as little nervousness as
we walk past the bears and lions in the Zoological Gardens. With less
nervousness, indeed, for we trust our bodies to the sea in little
scoops of wood, and even fling ourselves half-naked into its waters as
a luxury--an indulgence bolder than any we allow ourselves with the
tamest lions. Let an accident occur, however--let a ship go down or a
bather be carried out in the wash of the tide--and something in our
bones remembers the old fears of the monster in the waters. We realise
suddenly that we who trust the sea are like the people in other lands
who live under the fiery mountains that have poured death on their
ancestors time and again. We are amazed at the faith of men who
rebuild their homes under a volcano, but the sea over which we pass
with so smiling a certainty is more restless than a volcano and more
clamorous for victims. Originally, man seems to have dreaded all
water, whether of springs or of rivers or of the sea, in the idea that
it was a dragon's pasture. There is no myth more universal than that
of the beast that rises up out of the water and demands as tribute the
fairest woman of the earth. Perseus rescued Andromeda from such a
monster as this, and it is as the slayer of a water beast that St.
George lives in legend, however history may seek to degrade him into a
dishonest meat contractor. Not that it was always a maiden who was
sacrificed. Probably in the beginning the sea-beast made no
distinction of sex among its victims. In many of the legends, we find
it claiming men and women indifferently. In the story of Jonah, it
demands a male victim, and in many countries to-day there are men who
will not rescue anyone from drowning on the ground that if you
disappoint the sea of one victim it will sooner or later have you,
whether you are male or female, for your pains. These men regard the
sea as some men regard God--a beneficent being, if you get on the
right side of it. They see it as the home of one who is half-divinity
and half-monster, and who, when once his passion for sacrifice has
been satisfied, will look on you with a shining face. Hence all these
gifts to it of handsome youths and well-born children. Hence the
marriage to it of soothing maidens. In the latter case, no doubt,
there is also the idea of a magical marriage, which will promote the
fertility of water and land. Matthew Arnold's _Forsaken Merman_, if
you let the anthropologists get hold of it, will be shown to be but
the exquisite echo of some forgotten marriage of the sea.
These superstitions may reasonably enough be considered as for the
most part dramatisations of a sense of the sea's insecurity. We have
ceased to believe in dragons and mermaids, chiefly because
civilisation has built up for us a false sense of security, and you
can arrange in any of Cook's branch offices to spend your week-end
silent upon a peak in Darien, commanding the best views of the
Pacific. We have, as it were, advertised the sea till it seems as
innocuous as a patent medicine. We no more expect to be injured by it
than to be poisoned at our meals. We have lost both our fears and our
wonders, and as we glide through the miraculous places of Ocean we no
longer listen for the song of the Sirens, but sit down comfortably to
read the latest issue of the Continental edition of the _Daily Mail_.
It is a question whether we have lost or gained more by our podgy
indifference. Sometimes it seems as if there were a sentence of "Thou
fool" hanging over us as we lounge in our deck-chairs. In any case the
men who were troubled by the fancy of Scylla and Charybdis, and were
conscious of the nearness of Leviathan, and saw without surprise the
rising of islands of doom in the sunset went out none the less
high-heartedly for their fears. We are sometimes inclined to think
that no one ever quite enjoyed the wonders of the sea before the
nineteenth century. We have been brought up to believe that all the
ancients regarded the sea, with Horace, as the sailor's grave and that
that was the end of their emotions concerning it. Even in the
eighteenth century, it has been dinned into us, men took so little
impartial pleasure in the sea that a novel like _Roderick Random_,
though full of nautical adventures, does not contain three sentences
in praise of its beauty. This has always seemed to me to be great
nonsense. No doubt, men were not so much at their ease with the sea in
the old days as they are now. But be sure the terrors of the sea did
not stun the ancients into indifference to its beauty any more than
the terrors of tragedy stupefy you or me into insensitiveness. There
is a sense of all the magnificence of the sea in the cry of Jonah:
All thy billows and thy waves passed over me.
Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight;...
The waters compassed me about, even to the soul:
The depth closed me round about,
The weeds were wrapped about my head.
I went down to the bottoms of the mountains.
There is perhaps more of awe than of the pleasure of the senses in
this. It has certainly nothing of the "Oh, for the life of the
sailor-lad" jollity of the ballad-concert. But, then, not even the
most enthusiastic sea-literature of this sea-ridden time has. Mr
Conrad, who has found in the sea a new fatherland--if the phrase is
not too anomalous--never approaches it in that mood of flirtation that
we get in music-hall songs. He is as conscious of its dreadful
mysteries as the author of the _Book of Jonah_, and as aware of its
terrors and portents as the mariners of the _Odyssey_. He discovers
plenty of humour in the relations of human beings with the sea, but
this humour is the merest peering of stars in a night of tragic irony.
His ships crash through the tumult of the waves like creatures of
doom, even when they triumph as they do under the guidance of the
brave. His sea, too, is haunted by invisible terrors, where more
ancient sailors dreaded marvels that had shape and bulk. Mr
Masefield's love of the sea is to a still greater extent dominated by
tragic shadows. There are few gloomier poems in literature than
_Dauber_ in spite of the philosophy and calm of its close. It is only
young men who have never gone farther over the water than for a sail
at Southend who think of the sea as consistently a merry place. Not
that all sailors set out to sea in the mood of Hamlet. The praise of
the sea life that we find in their chanties is the praise of cheerful
men. But it is also the praise of men who recognise the risks and
treacheries that lurk under the ocean--a place of perils as manifestly
as any jungle in the literature of man's adventures and fears. Perhaps
it is necessary that the average man should ignore this dreadful
quality in the sea: it would otherwise interfere too much with the
commerce and the gaiety of nations. And, after all, an ocean liner is
from one point of view a retreat from the greater dangers of the
streets of London. But the imaginative man cannot be content to regard
the sea with this ignorant amiableness. To him every voyage must still
be a voyage into the unknown "where tall ships founder and deep death
waits." He is no more impudently at home with the sea than was
Shakespeare, who, in "Full fathom five thy father lies," wrote the
most imaginative poem of the sea in literature. Even Mr Kipling, who
has slapped most of the old gods on the back and pressed penny Union
Jacks into their hands, writes of the sea as a strange world of
fearful things. When he makes the deep-sea cables sing their "song of
the English," he aims at conveying the same sense of awe that we get
when we read how Jonah went down in the belly of the great fish.
Recall how the song of the deep-sea cables begins:
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white
sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred
cables creep.
Mr Kipling's particularisations of the "blind white sea-snakes" and
"level plains of ooze" achieve nothing of the majesty of the far
simpler "bottoms of the mountains" in the song of Jonah. But, when we
get behind the more vulgar and prosaic phrasing, we see that the mood
of Mr Kipling and the Hebrew author is essentially the same.
It is, nevertheless, man's constant dream that he will yet be able to
defeat these terrors of the sea. He sees himself with elation as the
conqueror of storms, and makes his plans to build a ship that no
accident can sink either in a wild sea or a calm. Before the _Titanic_
went down many people thought that the great discovery had been made.
The _Titanic_ went forth like a boast, and perished from one of the
few accidents her builders had not provided against, like a victim of
Nemesis in a Greek story. After that, we ceased to believe in the
unsinkable ship; but we thought at least that, if only ships were
furnished with enough boats to hold everyone on board, no ship would
ever again sink on a calm night carrying over a thousand human beings
to the bottom. Yet the _Empress of Ireland_ had apparently boats
enough to save every passenger, and now she has gone down with over a
thousand dead in shallow water at the mouth of a river which, the
_Times_ insists, is at least as safe for navigation as the English
Channel, and much safer than the Thames. It is as though the great
machines we have invented were not machines of safety, but machines of
destruction. They have us in their grip as we thought we had the sea
in ours. They do but betray us, indeed, in a new manner into an
ancient snare--the snare of a power that, like Leviathan,
Esteemeth iron as straw,
And brass as rotten wood.
We must, no doubt, go on dreaming that we shall master the sea, and
that we shall do it with machines perfectly under our control. But, if
we are wise, we shall dream humbly and put off boasting until we are
dead and quite sure that the triumph has been ours. It would be
inhuman, I admit, never to feel a thrill of satisfaction at man's
plodding success in breaking the sea and the air to his uses, in the
discovery of fire, in converting the lightning into an illumination
for nurseries. But we still perish by fire and flood, by wind and
lightning. We use them, but it is at our peril. It is as though we
were favoured strangers in the elements, but assuredly we are not
conquerors. Mr Wells in _The World Set Free_ makes one of his
characters in the pride of human invention shake his fist at the sun
and cry out, "I'll have you yet." It would have seemed to the Greeks
blasphemy, and it still seems folly for man, a hair-pin of flesh
half-hidden in trousers, to talk so. There is no victory that man has
yet been able to achieve over matter that he does not before long
discover has merely delivered him into a new servitude.
XXVI
THE FUTURISTS
The appearance of the first number of _Blast_ ought to put an end to
the Futurist movement in England. One can forgive a new movement for
anything except being tedious: _Blast_ is as tedious as an attempt to
play Pistol by someone who has no qualification for the part, but whom
neither friends nor the family clergyman can persuade into the decency
of silence. It may be urged that _Blast_ does not represent Futurism,
but Vorticism. But, after all, what is Vorticism but Futurism in an
English disguise--Futurism, one might call it, bottled in England, and
bottled badly? One has only to compare the pictures of the Vorticists
recently shown at the Goupil Gallery with the pictures of the Italian
Futurists which are being shown at the Dore to see that the two groups
differ from each other not in their aims, but in their degrees of
competence. No one going through the gallery of Italian paintings and
sculpture could fail to see that Boccioni, with all his freakishness,
his hideousness, his discordant introduction of real hair, glass eyes,
and so forth into his statuary, is an artist powerful both in
imagination and in technique. His study of a woman in a balcony is of
a kind to bring an added horror into a night of human sacrifices in
the Congo. His representation of Matter destroys the appetite like a
nightmare that has escaped from the obscene bowels of the sea. It
produces, one cannot deny, an emotional effect, like some loathsome
and shapeless thing. Compare with it most of the work that is being
done in England under Futurist inspiration and you will see the
immense difference in mere power. How seldom, apart from the work of
Mr Nevinson and one or two others, one finds among the latter a
picture that is more interesting to the imagination than a metal
toast-rack! You see a picture that looks like a badly opened
sardine-tin, and you discover that it is called "Portrait of Mother
and Infant." You see another that looks as if someone had taken a pair
of scissors and cut a Union Jack into squares and triangles, and had
then rearranged the pieces at random in a patchwork quilt, and this,
in turn, is labelled, say, "Tennyson reading _In Memoriam_ to Queen
Victoria." In either case, if the thing were done once, it might be
funny. But the young artists are not content to have done it once.
They keep on emptying the contents of ragbags and dustbins on to
canvases in the most wearisome way. After a time one can neither laugh
at them nor take them seriously. One can simply repeat the name of
their new review with violent sincerity.
It is not, however, with the Futurists themselves that one's chief
quarrel is. It is with the people who do not support the Futurists,
but will not condemn them for fear of going down to posterity in the
same boat as the people who once ridiculed Wagner and the
Impressionists. This fear of the laughter of posterity is surely the
last sign of decadence. It is the kind of thing that, in the religious
world, would prevent you from criticising the Prophet Dowie or Mrs
Eddy. It would compel you to take all new movements seriously simply
because they were new. It would lead you to suspend your judgment
about the Tango till you were in your grave and your grandchild could
come and whisper posterity's verdict to your tombstone. It is, I
agree, a fine thing to have a hospitable mind for new things--to be
able to greet a Wordsworth or a Manet appreciatively on his first
rising. Artists have the right to demand that their work shall be
judged, not according to whether it fits in with certain old
standards, but by its new power of affecting the emotions and the
imagination. Great artists are continually extending the boundaries of
their art, and there are, in the last resort, no rules to judge art by
except that the artist must by one means or another succeed in
bringing something to life. Boccioni satisfies the test in his
sculpture, and therefore we must praise him, whether we like his
methods or not. The majority of the Futurists, on the other hand,
produce no more effect of life than a diagram in Euclid which has been
crossed and blotted out with inks of various colours.
Even, however, when, as in the case of the sculptures of Boccioni and
the paintings of Severini, we admit that a brilliant imagination is at
work, we are not necessarily committed to belief in the methods
through which that imagination happens to express itself. It is
possible to enjoy Whitman's poetry without believing that he has laid
down the essential lines for the poetry of the future. One may agree
that Boccioni and Severini have justified their methods by results as
far as they themselves are concerned; this does not mean that one
agrees with them when they preach the adoption of their methods by
artists in general. One takes the Futurist movement seriously, indeed,
only because various clever men have joined it, and because young
Italians, more than most of us, seem to be justified in some form of
violent reaction against a past that oppresses them. Whether Futurism
is merely the growing pains of a rejuvenated Italy, or whether it is a
genuine manifestation of the old passion for violence which first
showed itself on the day on which Cain killed Abel, it is difficult at
times to say. Probably it is a little of both. "We wish," says
Marinetti, praising violence like any Prussian, in a famous manifesto,
"to glorify war--the only health-giver of the world--militarism,
patriotism, the destructive aim of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas
that kill, the contempt for women." And, again: "We shall extol
aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quickstep, the
somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff." It is very like Mr
Kipling at the age of fourteen writing for a school magazine, if you
could imagine a Kipling emancipated from religion and belief in
British law and order. Later, as Marinetti proceeds to foretell the
day on which the Futurists shall be slain by their still more
Futuristic successors, the schoolboy wakes once more in him. "And
Injustice, strong and healthy," he writes,--how one envies the fine
flourish with which he does it!--"will burst forth radiantly in their
eyes. For art can be naught but violence, cruelty, and injustice."
One need not be too solemn with writing like that. It may be growing
pains, or it may be a new jingoism of the individual, but, whichever
it is, it is amusing nonsense. One begins to swear only when people
above the school age insist upon taking it seriously as though it
might contain a new gospel for humanity. It contains no new gospel at
all. It is merely an entertaining restatement of an egoism of a kind
that man was trying to discard before the days of bows and arrows. It
is a schoolboyish plea for the revival of the tomahawk. It is a
war-song played in a city street on the bottom of a tin can. It has no
more to do with art than a display of penny fireworks, an imitation of
barking dogs at the calves of old gentlemen, or the escapades of
Valentine Vox. It has no relation to art whatsoever except from the
fact that Marinetti himself is an exceedingly clever writer, as one
may see from almost any of his manifestoes. One may turn for an
example of his manner to the following passage from his summons to the
young to destroy the museums, the libraries, and the academies ("those
cemeteries of wasted efforts, those calvaries of crucified dreams,
those ledgers of broken attempts!"):
Come, then, the good incendiaries with their charred fingers!...
Here they come! Here they come!... Set fire to the shelves of the
libraries! Deviate the course of canals to flood the cellars of the
museums!... Oh! may the glorious canvases drift helplessly! Seize
pick-axes and hammers! Sap the foundations of the venerable cities!
The oldest amongst us is thirty; we have, therefore, ten years
at least to accomplish our task. When we are forty, let others,
younger and more valiant, throw us into the basket like useless
manuscripts!... They will come against us from afar, from everywhere,
bounding upon the lightsome measure of their first poems, scratching
the air with their hooked fingers, and scenting at the academy doors
the pleasant odour of our rotting minds, marked out already for the
catacombs of the libraries.
* * * * *
That is a vivid piece of humour. It is as amusing as Marinetti's
portrait of himself at the Dore Gallery--a portrait the head of which
is a clothes brush and the hat a tobacco tin--a toy which would be in
its right place, not at an exhibition of paintings, and sculpture, but
in the nursery squares of Mrs Bland's Magic City.
As a matter of fact, however, Futurism as an artistic method seems to
have only the slightest connection with Marinetti's
neo-Zarathustraisms. The Futurist painters give us, not the blood
that Marinetti calls for, but diagrams as free from implications of
bloodshed as a weather-chart or the illustrations in an engineering
journal. These artists are not primarily concerned with protesting
against the conversion of Italy into a "market for second-hand
dealers." They aim at inventing a new kind of art which shall be able
to paint, not objects in terms of form and colour, but the movements
of objects and the states of mind of those who see them. They have
invented a jargon about "simultaneousness," "dynamism," "ambience,"
and so forth, which is about as impressive as the writings of Mrs
Eddy; and they paint in the same jargon in which they write. "Paint
the soul, never mind the legs and arms," recommended the cleric in
_Fra Lippo Lippi_. "Paint the simultaneousness, never mind the legs
and arms," is the golden rule of the Futurists. They have conceived a
strange contempt for the visible world. They tell us that a running
horse "has not four legs, but twenty," but that is no reason for
leaving the horse entirely out of the picture, as some of the
enthusiasts do. They do not realise that our sensations about horse
and the movements of horse can only be painted in terms of horse--that
art is not a dissipation of life into wavy lines and dots and dashes,
but the opposite. There may be a science of Futurism in which the
"force-lines" of a horse or a motor car may be part of a useful
diagram. These arbitrary lines, however, have no more to do with
imaginative art than the plus and minus signs in arithmetic.
Occasionally, of course, there is an obvious symbolism in the lines as
in the charging angles which represent the dynamism of a motor car.
But this is merely speed expressed by a commonplace symbol instead of
by a symbolic impression of the flying car itself. This is an
intellectual game rather than an art. Occasionally it gives us a
wonderful piece of broken impressionism; but the stricter Futurists
are symbolistic beyond all understanding. Their work is like an
allegory, to the meaning of which one has no key--an allegory printed
in the hieroglyphs of an unknown language.
XXVII
A DEFENCE OF CRITICS