Some people in England are beginning to realize that while we have been
"saving civilization," first from Germans, and then from Bolsheviks, we
have come near losing it ourselves. [Q] This disquieting truth has been
borne in on them by various signs and portents, not least by the utter
collapse of taste. At life's feast we are like people with colds in
their heads: we have lost all power of discrimination. As ever, "Dido,
Queen of Carthage," and better things than that, are caviare to the
general: what is new, and worse, to our most delicate epicures bloater
paste is now caviare.
[Footnote Q: Written in March 1919.]
At a London dinner-party even a peeress, even an American lady who
has married a peer, dare not commit herself to an adverse literary
judgement--except in the case of notoriously disaffected writers--for
the very good reason that she does not know where to go for a literary
judgement that shall be above reproach. We have as little confidence in
our critics as in our ministers. Indeed, since all our officers, and
most of our privates, took to publishing pages of verse or, at any rate,
of prose that looks odd enough to be verse, the habit of criticism has
been voted unpatriotic. To grudge a man in the trenches a column of
praise loud enough to drown for a moment the noise of battle would have
seemed ungrateful and, what is worse, fastidious. Our critics were
neither; they did their bit: and no one was surprised to hear the stuff
with which schoolboys line their lockers described as "one of the
truest, deepest, and most moving notes that have been struck since the
days of Elizabeth."
This sort of thing was encouraging at the time, and kept our lads in
good heart; but, in the long run, it has proved demoralizing to our
critics as well as to their clients. For, now that the war is over,
those who so loyally proclaimed that any bugle-boy was a better musician
than any fiddler find themselves incapable of distinguishing, not only
between fiddlers, but even between buglers. Perhaps it was natural that
when, during the war, T.S. Eliot, about the best of our young poets--if
ours I may call him--published _Prufrock_, no English paper, so far as
I know, should have given him more than a few words of perfunctory
encouragement: natural that when Virginia Woolf, the best of our younger
novelists, and Middleton Murry published works of curious imagination
and surprising subtlety, critics, worn in the service of Mr. Bennett of
the Propaganda Office and our Mr. Wells, should not have noticed that
here were a couple of artists: but is it not as strange as sad that our
patriot geese, time out of mind a nation's oracles, should still be
unable to tell us whether Lieutenant Brooke, Captain Nicholls, Major
Grenfell, or Lieut.-Colonel Maurice Baring is the greatest poet of this
age?
And in painting and music things are no better. Even our old prejudices
are gone. All is welcome now, except real art; and even that gets
splashed in the wild outpour of adulation. To admire everything is,
perhaps, a more amiable kind of silliness than to admire nothing: it is
silliness all the same. Also, it has brought taste to such a pass that,
except the Russian ballet, there was not last winter [R] in London one
entertainment at which a person of reasonable intelligence could bear
to spend an hour. As for the ballet, it was a music-hall turn, lasting
fifteen minutes, which the public seemed to like rather better than the
performing dogs and distinctly less than the ventriloquist. The public
accepted it because it accepts whatever is provided. Nevertheless, the
subtler of our music-hall comedians have obviously been ordered to
coarsen their methods or clear out, and the rare jokes that used to
relieve the merry misery of our revues and plays are now dispensed with
as superfluous.
[Footnote R: The winter 1918-19.]
The war is not entirely to blame: the disease was on us long before
1914. War, however, created an atmosphere in which it was bound to
prevail. Active service conditions are notoriously unfavourable to the
critical spirit. The army canteen need not tempt its customers: neither
need the ordinary shop under a rationing system: and, it must be
confessed, the habit of catering for colonial soldiers has not tended to
make our public entertainments more subtle or amusing. But the disease
of which taste is sick unto death has been on us these fifty years. It
is the emporium malady. We are slaves of the trade-mark. Our tastes are
imposed on us by our tradesmen, under which respectable title I include
newspaper owners, booksellers' touts, book-stall keepers, music-hall
kings, opera syndicates, picture-dealers, and honest bagmen.
As for the tradesman, he is no longer an expert any more than the critic
or the impressario is. No longer a merchant, no longer a shop-keeper
even, he is to-day a universal provider. Fifty years ago the nice
housewife still prided herself on knowing the right place for
everything. There was a little man in a back street who imported just
the coffee she wanted, another who blended tea to perfection, a third
who could smoke a ham as a ham should be smoked. All have vanished now;
and the housewife betakes herself to the stores. We no longer insist on
getting what we like, we like what we get. The March Hare's paradox has
ceased to be paradoxical. For five years Europe has been doing what it
was told to do; for five years our experts have subjected their critical
sense to a sense of patriotism and a desire to keep in with the
majority; at last the producers themselves have lost their sense of
values and can no longer test the quality of their own productions.
There are no standards.
Let no one imagine that standards are, like police regulations, things
that can be imposed by authority. Standards exist in the mind, where
they grow out of that personal sense of values which is one of the twin
pillars on which civilization rests. All that authority can do is to
stimulate and sharpen that sense by subtle education and absolute
sincerity. The critic can put good things in another man's way and
present them in a sympathetic light; also, he can resolutely refuse ever
to pretend that he likes what he does not like. Standards are imposed
from above in the sense that people who have the ability and leisure to
cultivate their sense of values will, if they take advantage of their
opportunities, inevitably influence those less favourably placed. In the
fine arts, certainly, taste is bound to be very much directed by people
blest with peculiar gifts and armed with special equipment. But, besides
taste in the fine arts, there is such a thing as taste in life; a power
of discerning and choosing for one's self in life's minor matters; and
on this taste in life, this sense of the smaller values, is apt to
flourish that subtler and more precious æsthetic sense. Without this
taste no civilization can exist; for want of it European civilization is
seemingly about to perish.
Take the thing at its lowest. A rich, good-humoured fellow, replete
with a fabulously expensive but distressingly ill-chosen dinner in a
magnificently ill-furnished and over-lit restaurant, excited by Saumur
(recommended as "Perrier Jouet, 1911") and a great deal of poor
conversation drowned, for the most part, by even noisier music, may be
heard to say, as he permits the slovenly waiter to choose him the most
expensive cigar--"That will do, sonny, the best's good enough for me."
The best is not good enough for anyone who has standards; but the modern
Englishman seems to have none. To go to the most expensive shop and buy
the dearest thing there is his notion of getting the best. You may dine
at any of the half-dozen "smartest" restaurants in London, pay a couple
of pounds for your meal, and be sure that a French commercial traveller,
bred to the old standards of the provincial ordinary, would have sent
for the cook and given him a scolding. It is not to be supposed that the
most expensive English restaurants fail to engage the most expensive
French chefs; they are engaged, but they soon fall below the mark
because there is no one to keep them up to it. The clients have no
standards. Go to the opera and look at the rich ladies' frocks: they
might have come out of an antimacassar factory. They express no sense of
what is personally becoming nor a sense of insolent luxury even: they
bear witness to an utter lack of standards, and they cost a great deal
of money. The best is good enough for these fine ladies, and their best
is the dressmaker's most expensive.
This is no mere question of fashions and conventions. If standards go,
civilization goes. To hear people talk you might suppose there had never
been such things as dark ages. Not only have there been dark ages,
there has been an unmeasured tract of pre-historic savagery, and sharp
eyes--notably those of Louis Weber--are beginning to detect certain
similarities between this age and that. The peculiarity of the historic
age, man's brilliant age, the age of civilization, is the conservatism
of its technique and its spiritual restlessness. In the pre-historic age
man's best energies were apparently devoted to perfecting the means
to material existence. Improving the instrument was the grand
preoccupation. From the old stone age to the new, from that to bronze,
and from bronze to iron is the story of pre-historic development. Then
follow some forty centuries during which man rests content with his
instrument. Between the Minoan age and the Industrial Revolution his
technical discoveries are insignificant by comparison with his spiritual
adventures. Content with the plough, the wagon, and the loom, man turns
the sharp edge of his mind to things of the mind, considers himself in
all his relations, thinks, feels, states, expresses, concerns himself
with spiritual, rather than material, problems. With the Industrial
Revolution begins the third act. Again human intelligence and ingenuity
concentrate on the prehistoric problem--the perfecting of the
instrument. For a hundred years Europe marches merrily back towards
barbarism. Then, at the very moment when she is becoming alarmed and
self-critical, at the very moment when she is wondering how she is to
reconcile her new material ambitions with the renascent claims of the
spirit, comes a war that relegates to the dust-bin or the gaol all that
is not of immediate practical utility. The smoke of battle drifts
slowly away and reveals a situation almost hopeless. We have lost our
standards, our taste in life: we have lost the very thing by which we
recognized that there were such things as spiritual values.
In one of his early essays Renan points out that the proper apology for
the old French aristocracy is that it performed the proper function of
a leisured class. It maintained standards. Unlike the English, it
concerned itself neither with politics nor with money-making, nor yet
with local affairs: it stood apart, "formant dans la nation une classe
qui n'avait d'autre souci que les choses libérales." Renan recognized
that a leisured class is the source of civilization; whether he also
recognized that there is no earthly reason why a leisured class should
be the ruling class is not clear. In Europe we have now no leisured
class; we have only a number of rich men, mere wealth-producers, who
perform for high wages the useful functions that miners and milkmaids
perform for low ones. Our leisured class, moribund before the war, died
peacefully in its sleep the year before last. There is no class on this
side the Atlantic to insist on quality now. But if, as I am told, we all
owe money to America, has not America acquired, along with her financial
supremacy, certain moral obligations? Has she not become the leisured
class of the world, and, as such, responsible to civilization for the
maintenance of those standards without which civilization falls? If so,
it is for America to insist in the fine arts on some measure of talent
and intelligence, in society on decent manners, in life on a critical
attitude: it is for her to reaffirm those standards of excellence below
which neither art nor thought nor manners nor merchandize shall be
suffered to fall: for her to teach us once again to be fastidious, to
embolden us to say to a poet, a painter, a politician, a newspaper
proprietor, or even to a _maître d'hôtel_--"This is not good enough."
America possesses the means; she can crack the only whip that carries
much conviction nowadays. Whether she has the will to use it is quite
another matter.