LITERARY TOTEMS
Illa tamen gravior, quae cum discumbere coepit
laudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae,
committat vates et comparat, inde Maronem
atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.
cedunt grammatici, vincuntur rhetores, omnis
turba tacet, nec causidicus nec praeco loquetur,
altera nec mulier. Verborum tanta cadit vis,
tot pariter pelves ac tintinnabula dicas
pulsari. Jam nemo tubas, nemo aera fatiget;
una laboranti poterit succerrere Lunae.
imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis;
nam quae docta nimis cupit et facunda videri,
crure tenus medio tunicas succingere debet,
caedere Silvano porcum, quadrante lavari.
non habeat matrona, tibi quae iuncta recumbit,
dicendi genus, aut curvum sermone rotato
torqueat enthymema, nec historias sciat omnes,
sed quaedam ex libris et non intellegat. Odi
hanc ego quae repetit volvitque Palaemonis artem
servata semper lege et ratione loquendi
ignotosque mihi tenet antiquaria versus
nec curanda viris opicae castigat amicae
verba: soloecismum liceat fecisse marito.
JUVENAL: Satire VI.
I
While there is excellent authority for the statement that the Holy
Roman Empire was not holy nor Roman nor an empire, the reader of
mediaeval history has, for a century and a half, been left without
an equally trenchant definition of what that empire was. In like
manner, while it is comparatively easy for the student of modern
manners to assert that "literary London" is neither London nor
literary, he might find it difficult to amplify this in positive
terms unless he described it as "cultured Kensington." The first
phrase, like its baffling brethren "a man-about-town" and "the
Oxford manner," to which reference has already been made, is part
of modern currency and is tendered by the press and accepted by the
public without a thought on either side whether it represents any
value as an idea. Is the literary London to which newspapers refer
synonymous with the committee of the Authors' Society? Is it to be
found, of a Sunday afternoon, at Mrs. Leo Hunter's house? Does it
lurk, unrecognised and fiercely retiring, in that district which
cabmen call Chelsea and more poetic spirits "the Latin Quarter of
London"?
Or is it but a flight of fancy, like "the upper ten" or "the middle
classes"?
Regret is sometimes expressed that there is no assembly in which
all men-of-letters can gather and explain--in a phrase beloved of
H. G. Wells--"what they are up to." Though the experiment had often
been tried, it has always failed. There is, indeed, an abundance of
literary societies which meet for dinner and damnable iteration in
honour of one or other "immortal memory"; there is a plethora of
the larger, looser associations which have been formed to entertain
authors and, in sheer lust for culture, to submit to their
lectures. There are houses from which no author is long secure;
there are clubs, founded to aid their members in life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness, where authors meet in large numbers. But
there is no one literary clearing-house, there is nothing that can
be called "literary London." For this, the unreflecting world is
not always sufficiently grateful.
The first business of a poet, it may be submitted, is to write
poetry rather than to talk about what he has written; the
second, to write it by himself, as the pure, unaided expression
of his genius, rather than to labour under the limitations and
confusions of a school; the third, to let his poetry stand as its
own explanation and apology to the critics and to the public.
If, in the end, his readers persist in wishing to discuss it
with him, he may not always be able to escape, though he may
forestall disappointment by warning them that, because a man can
express himself on paper, he need not be able to express himself
in conversation and that the poet in hours of idleness is not
necessarily better worth meeting than the dentist on holiday. This
_caveat_ once entered, he can offer no further resistance, short
of a blunt refusal, to the hostesses who are still eager to secure
"the distinguished author" of this or that: sooner or later his
neck will be bent over their dinner-tables.
There follows one of two inevitable results: the author, from
modesty or self-consciousness, curvets and shies from the one
subject which he has been summoned to discuss and takes refuge in
the Russian ballet and Ascot;[50] or else he resigns himself to his
apotheosis and gobbles more complimentary sugar-plums than are good
for his soul's digestion; he is fated to spoil the party or to be
spoiled by it.
Next in the preparation of his spiritual downfall comes the bland
assumption that the creator must also be a critic; when he has
adequately descanted upon his own books, he will be required to
give an opinion on the books of others. These, unless he loftily
(but impressively) refuse to admit that there have been poets
since Shelley, he never wholly condemns for fear of seeming vain
or small-minded, though he may sometimes admit that he has not had
time to read them; it is easier to disparage by flattery and to
say that his rival has not yet done his best work or that he will
never give rein to his genius until he is less influenced by the
spell of Swinburne (within an hour this has been crystallised into
the judgement that "X writes such dreadful Swinburne-and-water");
it is easier still to shake a regretful head and to hope that X is
not sacrificing Art to Popularity. As a rule the creator-critic
praises vehemently, thus gaining for himself a reputation for
generosity and doing service to a friend who is doing him the
same service at that moment in another part of London. Mutual
admiration and log-rolling have not changed since Du Maurier
satirised them in the _Punches_ of the eighties; and the gentle
art of self-advertisement has at least not diminished in the
resourcefulness of its technique during the last forty years. There
are, however, so many opportunities of securing a wider publicity
that the author who shews himself off in a drawing-room is wasting
his time and energy: the columns of the press are already open to
him, and, as his new book draws near to publication, he can always
direct attention to himself by inaugurating a discussion on the
pagan tendency of modern poetry or on the victimisation of young
poets by unscrupulous editors; he can let himself be persuaded into
speaking at public dinners and having his speeches reported; he can
be affably at hand when professional writers of paragraphs are
short of copy. If it be his ambition to keep his name before the
public, he can without difficulty emulate the methods of one author
who backed himself to be mentioned in the press on every day of the
year--and won his wager. It may be doubted, nevertheless, whether
public or private popularity-seeking is good for the fibre of a
man's soul.
If a writer should avoid the food and flattery of the professional
lion-hunter, so, for a different reason, he should resist the
temptation to closet himself with those who are plying the same
trade. If it produce nothing else, the inevitable discussion of
himself and of his work produces self-consciousness; and a man
will commonly achieve less valuable results by harkening for the
applause of a clique or by trying to follow lines and tendencies
set by a committee. The great work of art is individual; and,
though a painter may have his school, though the technique of
painting is usually taught in a school, there is no ground for
thinking that a man may be taught to write by those who are
themselves learning.
As an author should work by himself to produce what is in him,
so, when he has produced it, he should neither explain nor
complain. It is perhaps a counsel of perfection to say that
authors and critics should never meet. Mr. Walkley has expounded
this difficulty in dramatic criticism: is the critic to eschew
the actor's company? Is he to rise from the same dinner-table and
slay his friend in print? Should he disparage a friend for fear of
partiality or praise an unknown playwright because he is unknown?
The difficulties are not less great when the novelist and his
critic are on terms of friendship; but literature and criticism
both suffer when this personal relationship is used to influence
the author or the critic. As a rule the press, turning its back
on the brutalities of the early nineteenth century, encourages the
new writer and relieves its feelings at the expense of one who is
considered to be "established"; in dramatic criticism it generally
ignores the newcomer and atones later for its neglect by praising
indiscriminately the man who has won his niche. Either practise may
be considered as at least no more senseless than any other which
criticises the writer rather than the book that he has written. No
reasonable man will object so long as criticism is independent of
personal obligations, advertisement-revenue, æsthetic prejudice and
private predilections; so long, too, as the reviewer is neither a
careless young man in a hurry to create on his own account, nor an
embittered old man who has tried and failed; so long, finally, as
the critic brings to his task as much experience, self-discipline
and labour as the author has given to his.
The danger which threatens the deliberate formation of a literary
society is that authors and critics will both lose something of
their independence. In other callings there is often a rigid
etiquette to protect social intercourse from professional abuse:
the barrister who dines too regularly with solicitors will expose
himself to suspicion, and the surgeon is expected to shew by his
demeanour that his guests are friends and not potential patients.
Among writers there is no recognised etiquette and, though the
man whose friendship with reviewers secures him a good press may
be despised by some, he is envied by more. This is no new vice;
and its ill effects are limited by the logic of facts, whereby a
good press cannot for ever sell bad books. Vested interests in
criticism only become formidable to literature when the spheres
of creation and criticism overlap and when critic-creators combine
to organise a crusade. The complaint has of late been heard that
literary criticism in London is being syndicated: six or eight
papers are said to be inspired by four or five critic-creators who
set their own standard of taste and value, praise one another's
work and advance across literary no-man's-land in massed formation.
It is easy to make too much of this. The amiable practise of mutual
back-patting has always existed; the honest zealots of literature
have always tried to define a formula for exclusive literary
salvation; and those who stood outside the ring have always fumed
and protested.[51] Is there anything new in Fleet Street? Or in
those who accept Fleet Street at a pontifical valuation? When
will authors learn how very little influence the press can exert
over a book? The favourable review of a good book may hasten its
recognition; the unfavourable review of a bad book may retard that
measure of success which even the worst book achieves; but, after
the first indeterminate months of life, favourable reviews will not
sell a bad book, nor unfavourable kill a good.[52]
If, then, an author shews to disadvantage at his apotheosis
enforced and if he cannot be left alone with fellow-authors lest
he preach that his doxy is orthodoxy and that every other doxy is
heterodoxy, is there any virtue in a literary clearing-house where
any one man of letters can be sure, sooner or later, of finding
every other? The _salon_ is not acclimatised to London; while it
flourishes in Dublin and Paris, it languishes here for want of a
hostess to inspire it. Daily and nightly throughout the year there
are parties at which eminent men of letters are present in force,
with a flanking claque of women who have expressed vague desire
to meet them; the general judgement on them is as true now as the
particular judgement which Oscar Wilde passed some thirty years
ago on "Lady Brandon," who "tried to found a _salon_, and only
succeeded in opening a restaurant."
II
If there is no literary London, most men of letters must have
encountered a widespread belief that there should be, even that
there is. The appropriate atmosphere is sedulously cultivated;
undaunted explorers divide the map into private reservations.
Left to themselves and in the absence of a general meeting-place,
authors--who are at heart quite normally human, liking and
disliking what other men like and dislike--assemble in ordinary
clubs and ordinary houses. In the first they are still liable
to be from time to time disturbed by an epidemic delusion that
they are conversationalists of unusual power and charm: more than
one club has suffered from the belief that, because A and B are
authors, they must be conversationalists and that, because they
are conversationalists, the club must be exceptionally well worth
joining; when the premises are sound, more than one club has been
ruined by the reputation of its conversationalists; the performers
become occasionally despotic and tiresome; and, as in the long run
even club bores die, their death leaves among their mute audiences
no one to succeed them.
Despite this recurrent danger, certain clubs stand apart from
the rest in the love which they inspire among authors. For them
the Athenæum ranks first, with its long list of members who have
achieved distinction in literature; and the privilege of membership
carries with it, by implication, the honour of having been weighed
and found worthy of admission to a society which is without
rival, among the clubs of the world, for the volume and variety
of its learning. To the Reform Club and to its literary roll from
Thackeray to Wells reference has already been made; the Garrick can
on occasion mobilise an even braver army of authors; and the Savile
list is not to be ignored. To men of more Bohemian intention, the
Savage has long made a catholic appeal; and the Beefsteak, with
its genius for securing a little of the best of everything, has
not disdained the man of letters. The clubs in which a veneration
for Dickens or Thackeray, Johnson or Omar Khayyám furnishes a
pretext to the members for dining together are too numerous to be
set out, but no club or group of clubs can constitute anything
that may be called literary London; and, though each may foster
friendships which might otherwise have been retarded, it remains
true for normal men that the largest number of the pleasantest
meetings takes place in private houses where the author is invited
as a friend instead of being summoned as a purveyor of "literary"
atmosphere. There is no law against mental vivisection; but authors
might welcome one.
It is not necessary to seek a more recondite explanation than that
they are wonderfully like the rest of their fellow-creatures and
should be treated no differently. They eat and sleep, they marry
and beget children, they entertain and are entertained, they serve
on juries and pay income-tax, for all the world as though they were
bill-brokers and average-adjusters; if they know their own subject
as well as a staff-officer and a cotton-spinner know theirs, it
takes little longer to discern their limitations. "All mad--but
wonderfully decent" was the verdict passed by Master Stubbs, the
budding banker, on M. and Mde. Berthelini in _Providence and a
Guitar_; but the modern imaginative artist is almost distressingly
sane and practical; of the leading English novelists several began
as schoolmasters, one or two as barristers, one as a solicitor's
clerk, another as a merchant-seaman. It is hard to believe that
they enjoy being treated as a class apart. A few, indeed, may wear
eccentric clothes, for reasons of health, comfort or eccentricity,
but then so do a few cabinet ministers, peers of the realm, civil
servants and masters of hounds; a few have pronounced mannerisms,
but then so have certain bishops, bankers and family-solicitors.
A sparse handful may segregate themselves in an artistic secret
society, but this same boyish trait can be found in religion,
politics and finance. When the conscientiously eccentric have been
eliminated, such authors as are to be found in London incline to
the same collective average as any other class: there are bores
and prigs, rich and poor, puffed-up and humble, dandies and
scarecrows, courtiers and hobbledehoys, fanatics and men of the
world; and it is only when a man differentiates his species by
frank advertisement or by less frank posturing about his art that
the rest of humanity has to be careful.
Of convincing any one but an author that this contention is true
no hope need be entertained: the glamour and mystery of art are
as indestructible as the appeal of the stage. An atmosphere is
cultivated for the artist and imposed upon him. "With Rothenstein,"
says Max Beerbohm in his tender study of Enoch Soames, "I paid my
first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another
haunt of intellect and daring, the domino room of the Café Royal.
"There, on that October evening--there, in that exuberant vista of
gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors
and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the
painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical
conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of
dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and 'This
indeed,' said I to myself, 'is life!'
"It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermouth. Those who knew
Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by
name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and
wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables, or of
tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me
because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had
twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein,
in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen
him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale,
with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard--or
rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly
curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking
person; but in the 'nineties odd apparitions were more frequent,
I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era--and I
was sure this man was a writer--strove earnestly to be distinct
in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft
black hat of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey
waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed
to be romantic. I decided that 'dim' was the _mot juste_ for him.
I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on the _mot
juste_, that Holy Grail of the period...."
* * * * *
Max Beerbohm was writing of 1893; and, though it is presumption to
criticise this sketch of the domino room, he has not explicitly
described one aspect of the Café Royal which was observable in that
year, which is observable still and which, no doubt, will endure
as long as the building itself. Though the cape, perhaps because
it was waterproof, failed to be romantic, it enclosed a spirit
hungry for romance; the Café Royal is still full of souls no less
hungry, though it has never yet succeeded in being romantic. Odd
apparitions are frequent enough; some writers of this era try to
be distinct in aspect; they have not outgrown their keenness for
the _mot juste_; and all their spirit's striving is of Bohemian
intention. In the hour before dinner vermouth is still drunk; there
is still a hum of presumably cynical conversation.
The Café Royal, indeed, changes but little because it satisfies an
unchanging need: a literary conception of Bohemian life has created
a demand for its embodiment in a "haunt of intellect and daring,"
tentatively Parisian if a little self-conscious, very fearless if
never quite at ease. Year after year, wide-eyed new generations
say to themselves, "This indeed is life." The Café Royal is
more than a literary institution, it is a social safety-valve:
romance, after its little seething, disappears in steam; an hour's
cynical conversation, a glass or two of vermouth, a display of the
distinctive aspect enable many a young man to return home healed
in spirit to tidy himself and to reappear next morning as a sober,
laborious and punctual British subject.
If chance or design closed this safety-valve, the pent passion
for romance would be driven inwards until it exploded in the
very heart of domesticity. Intellectual adolescence must play at
Bohemianism as youth plays at soldiers; it is better to restrict
the game to one lawful area than to allow it to rage unconfined,
for the English home is not adapted to absinthe-drinking, and a
general repudiation of morality shocks without elevating. Under
the unsettling influence of war, which closed the Café Royal at
night before the taste for literary romance had been satisfied,
there was a severe outbreak of studio-parties at which every one
shewed himself conscientiously unrestrained and fearless; poets and
painters discussed the aims and methods of their art; strange food
and drink appeared disconcertingly; conversation was carried on in
shouts; there was more colour than line in the dresses; every one
sat on the floor until the host gave the signal for dancing; only
Virginian cigarettes were smoked; and, at the end, it was never
possible to find a taxi. It is to be hoped that the artists worked
the better for this breezy liberation of soul; it is to be wished
that they had done more and talked less of what they were going to
do; but it is to be realised that they were unwitting and perhaps
unwilling victims of a conspiracy to make London literary.
This craving finds its frankest expression in the meetings of
certain more formal literary seminars. Here, though the dresses,
the intellectual freedom and the insufficiency of chairs are the
same, there is strict procedure: the guest of the evening is
received with deference and heard with attention; there follows
a grave debate in which conventional compliments usher in a set
speech of destructive criticism; after a vote of thanks, the
address is once more examined in the candid atmosphere of lemonade
and sandwiches, and the guest is asked whether he really meant all
that he said. Rash is the man who trifles with such earnest desire
for improvement: he might well find himself not invited a second
time.
III
So much for the atmosphere which is imposed upon an author.
If he be more man than peacock, flattery will bring him less
gratification than embarrassment; and he may ask in modesty and
wrath why he should be subjected to treatment from which others are
exempt. The barrister is not forced to expound the principles of
pleading to a hushed dinner-table; no one collects a party to meet
the chairman of an insurance-company. The answer, presumably, would
be that, while there is a legal London and a financial London, no
one has yet created a literary London and all are entitled to try.
The initial procedure is commonly the same. Dotted over a wide
expanse between Chelsea and St. John's Wood are scores of houses
in which one determined woman has, in the first instance, caught
and tamed a single author: he is as much a member of the family as
the butler; and his employer would be justly incensed if any one
tried to tempt him away with an offer of better wages. At first
he is a prize in himself, and in his honour parties are given
until his owner has established her reputation as a patron of
literature; later he is a decoy for other prizes; and B., who might
not come of his own accord, is invited to meet A. Here the artistic
ambition is reinforced by the social: the Duchess of Stilton, who
has hitherto ignored Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, is lured by the
bait of Mr. Cimabue Brown and Mr. Postlethwaite; and the churl who
tosses all invitations unread into his waste-paper-basket may quite
possibly do for the Duchess of Stilton what he has always refused
to do for Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns. _Noblesse oblige_ has been
freely rendered: "One must be obliging to duchesses." From this
point the game develops automatically; and the triumphant hostess
realises her ambition as the acknowledged ruler of one or other
postal district of London. If any one would meet this Bloomsbury
impressionist or that Hampstead sculptor, he must meet him in her
house; she has proclaimed her reservation, and henceforth, so long
as she can maintain herself, Westminster or Pimlico, Chelsea or
Golders Green, with all that they contain, are hers. Ceasing to
court others, she is herself courted.
Whether she is repaid in the result for her necessary first
humiliations she alone can decide. Her pretensions are ridiculed
by those who accept her hospitality; she is too busy adding to her
acquaintances to spare time for making friends; and amid all the
insincerity of her life the one thing brutally sincere is the
ingratitude of those who treat her house as a free menagerie. So it
has been since the days of Du Maurier; but, in spite of satire and
ridicule, her breed continues. Perhaps her only alternative is to
look after a husband and children; perhaps she is consoled by the
magnitude of her achievement in founding a _salon_ on the strength
of a resident poet; perhaps she is unconscious of the figure which
she cuts. Literary snobbishness is no more attractive than any
other kind; and it is to be hoped that she sins of ignorance rather
than of malice.
If, no longer hoping, some continue to wish that her breed were
less hardy, that is because all efforts to create a literary London
inspire misgivings for the free development of literature. It is
an author's own fault if he submits to being petted by otherwise
sensible men and women who will lavish on novelists, actors,
musicians and artists a flattery of which they cannot spare one
thousandth part for scientists, philosophers, humanitarians and
the great industrial rulers;[53] it is a fault for which he shares
responsibility with his maker if he allows his head to be turned by
it.
The danger to author and reader from any organised or even
stimulated literary discussion is one which he cannot control; and,
realising that there is, indisputably, a "musical London" and that
its existence has sent musical snobbishness to a premium and the
freedom of musical development to a discount, he fears the same
fate for literature. It is the common vice of the _salon_, of the
critical syndicate (if such exist) and of any unofficial "academy"
that they tend equally to pass premature judgements and to force
uniformity upon the hangers-on. They hustle their heroes into the
Pantheon or the pauper-grave before life is out of their bodies.
Prizes are now awarded for the best imaginative work of the year.
The critics are already trying to decide which of the younger men
and women are qualified to succeed H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett.
Macaulay himself could not have displayed a wilder passion for
class-lists and labels.
Side by side with the thoughtful articles which undertake to spot
literary winners are articles no more thoughtful but perhaps
playfully philosophical in which to-day's tipsters expose the
folly of their predecessors. Who now reads Mrs. Humphry Ward? Yet
it is less than forty years since _Robert Elsmere_ marked her out
as the successor to George Eliot. Who now reads George Eliot?
"Herbert Spencer," recalls Mr. Edmund Gosse, "... expressed a
strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for
the London library no novels should be bought 'except, of course,
those of George Eliot.' While she lived, critics compared her with
Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar.... For Lord
Acton at her death 'the sun had gone out'; and that exceedingly
dogmatic historian observed, _ex cathedra_, that no writer had
'ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but
disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes
had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered
like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.' It is very
dangerous," adds Mr. Gosse judiciously, "to write like that...."
In fifty years' time will any one read Herbert Spencer? Or Lord
Acton?[54] It was stated at the time of George Meredith's death
that his executors refused for him the honour of burial in
Westminster Abbey because one of them believed that in a hundred
years' time he would be unread; his admirers are even now divided
over the question whether he was a great novelist who wrote less
great poetry or a great poet who wrote less great novels. The
same fate lies ahead of Thomas Hardy. Battle has already been
joined over the body of Henry James: to one school he is the
great analytical psychologist who revolutionised novel-writing,
the perfect artist, the subtile craftsman with the inimitably
personal style; to another he is the pretentious, untidy amateur,
the man who never learned to select or to compress, the pompous
pet of a Chelsea group, the windy impostor with thumbs for fingers
who partially buried under involution his lack of style and his
ignorance of punctuation. One school swears by "the novels of the
middle period"; another harks back to _Roderick Hudson_; a third
prays _The Turn of the Screw_ in aid and proclaims him less a
novelist than a master of the short story; one of the three most
highly esteemed living English novelists likens him to an elephant
trying to pick up peas with its trunk; and he was decorated with
the Order of Merit.
What hardly any one will do is to suspend judgement; and the first
business of literary society is to ensure that judgement shall not
be suspended. Not only has a label to be fixed, but the humblest
amateur feels obliged to say whether it was rightly fixed: praise
and proscription are bandied among those who have hardly learned to
read and those who have never been trained to think. When the Henry
James cult became fashionable, he received equally rapt devotion
from those who disliked him, from those who did not understand
him and from those who had not read him. James was elevated into
a literary standard; he collected a following of disciples; those
who flattered him by imitation were flattered in turn by his
frank approval. The bellow of the herd drowned the voice of the
individual. In all the calendar of critical crime there is no more
soul-destroying dishonesty than a second-hand opinion.
IV
The same premature labelling may be seen in "musical London" with
the appearance of every new composer and the exhumation of every
old score. While Verdi is tolerated and Gounod deplored, Ravel
is--at the moment--a safe winner, and a liking for Delius commands
respect, Debussy holds his own; Richard Strauss is still a bone
of friendly contention; de Lara and Ethel Smyth are encouraged as
British composers by a perplexed audience which has been taught to
distrust British compositions; but "musical London" has decided
that it is time for a reaction against Puccini.
Does "musical London" ever turn an introspective eye to watch the
manufacture of musical opinion? The spectator who wanders from
box to box on the first night of a new opera, may see the gentle
herd-hypnotism at work.
_The Honest Ignoramus, who goes to Covent Garden to see his friends
between the acts._ "Well, what d'you think of it?"
_The Languid Woman who will not give herself away._ "I heard it in
Monte Carlo, you know, this winter."
_A Voice._ It's a pure crib from _The Barber_.
_Another._ Rossini and water.
_Another._ It's quite too deliciously old-fashioned.
_The Honest Ignoramus strays into the next box, shedding some of
his honesty by the way._ "Rather Rossini and water, don't you
think? I don't know anything about it, of course, but it seemed to
_me_ a mere up-to-date _Barber_."
_A Voice._ It's very modern certainly. I confess I'm rather
old-fashioned....
He moves on. "D'you like all this modern stuff? If we _are_ to have
Rossini----"
_A Voice (impressively)._ He gets no value from his orchestra ...
Rossini? Who's talking about Rossini?...
_He beats a retreat and recuperates in the corridor._
_A Voice._ I was lunching with George to-day. He'd been to one of
the rehearsals and he said that no one since Wagner had understood
the wood-wind like this man. A pure genius. I'm giving you his
actual words. Whether it'll _pay_ I can't tell. It's rather modern
for Covent Garden....
_The Honest Ignoramus returns to the first box._ "Only one more
act? I'm rather enjoying this. I suppose some people would call
it a bit modern, but it's rather a relief to find a man who's not
afraid to use his orchestra. The, er, wood-wind...."
_All (gratefully)._ "Too wonderful!... Were you here on
Thursday?..."
The press-notices next day will add a few more technical terms,
but regular attendants at the opera can say whether this is a
caricature of the manner in which contemporary musical opinion is
formed.[55] None will wait to think; few will shew the courage
to express their own unsupported feelings; every one will pass a
criticism of some kind. And, when the aggregate judgement has been
launched, all will be half converted to it. Perhaps only financial
good or harm is done to a contemporary work, but "musical London"
will not so circumscribe its criticism: there must be an opinion on
everything, a label for every one; and against the verdict of the
hour there is, in all eternity, no appeal.
Here, indeed, is the weakness of all artistic criticism: the critic
is as greatly influenced by atmosphere, fashion and the æsthetic
limitations of a period as the creator; sometimes it is the same
atmosphere, and each new novel by George Eliot was acclaimed a
classic because her critics believed as strongly in her formula as
she did; sometimes the atmosphere is different, and readers in this
generation may praise Wordsworth and belittle Byron as vehemently
as another generation praised Byron and belittled Wordsworth. Will
it never be understood that in æsthetic taste there can be no
finality?
There is little harm in awarding a Nobel or a Hawthornden prize
if we remember that the judges are breathing the same atmosphere
as the candidates and that their verdict concerns an author of
their own generation; in forty years' time their taste may
seem as grotesquely perverted as that of the mid-Victorians who
exhausted their superlatives on George Eliot or of the assassin
who struck down Keats. That is the price exacted of the critic by
posterity for the infallibility which he enjoys in his lifetime.
The harm is done when these verdicts are accepted at second-hand
by a public which has not read the evidence nor heard the trial.
It is neither practicable nor desirable that the work of to-day
should be pusillanimously referred to the judgement of to-morrow;
but an artistic assessment, to have any value, must be the sum
of individual and independent opinions. That independence would
disappear with the birth of a literary London. The propaganda of
a coterie, the direction of critics, the explanations of authors
and the herd-voice of literary society narrow artistic sympathy
and stunt artistic originality. Long may England be spared the
unofficial Academy.