Yes! Why is this the chief characteristic of our art? What secret
instincts are responsible for this inveterate distaste? But, first, is
it true that we have it?
To stand still and look at a thing for the joy of looking, without
reference to any material advantage, and personal benefit, either to
ourselves or our neighbours, just simply to indulge our curiosity! Is
that a British habit? I think not.
If, on some November afternoon, we walk into Kensington Gardens, where
they join the Park on the Bayswater side, and, crossing in front of the
ornamental fountain, glance at the semicircular seat let into a dismal
little Temple of the Sun, we shall see a half-moon of apathetic figures.
There, enjoying a moment of lugubrious idleness, may be sitting an old
countrywoman with steady eyes in a lean, dusty-black dress and an old
poke-bonnet; by her side, some gin-faced creature of the town, all blousy
and draggled; a hollow-eyed foreigner, far gone in consumption; a bronzed
young navvy, asleep, with his muddy boots jutting straight out; a
bearded, dreary being, chin on chest; and more consumptives, and more
vagabonds, and more people dead-tired, speechless, and staring before
them from that crescent-shaped haven where there is no draught at their
backs, and the sun occasionally shines. And as we look at them,
according to the state of our temper, we think: Poor creatures, I wish I
could do something for them! or: Revolting! They oughtn't to allow it!
But do we feel any pleasure in just watching them; any of that intimate
sensation a cat entertains when its back is being rubbed; are we
curiously enjoying the sight of these people, simply as manifestations of
life, as objects fashioned by the ebb and flow of its tides? Again, I
think, not. And why? Either, because we have instantly felt that we
ought to do something; that here is a danger in our midst, which one day
might affect our own security; and at all events, a sight revolting to us
who came out to look at this remarkably fine fountain. Or, because we
are too humane! Though very possibly that frequent murmuring of ours:
Ah! It's too sad! is but another way of putting the words: Stand aside,
please, you're too depressing! Or, again, is it that we avoid the sight
of things as they are, avoid the unedifying, because of what may be
called "the uncreative instinct," that safeguard and concomitant of a
civilisation which demands of us complete efficiency, practical and
thorough employment of every second of our time and every inch of our
space? We know, of course, that out of nothing nothing can be made, that
to "create" anything a man must first receive impressions, and that to
receive impressions requires an apparatus of nerves and feelers, exposed
and quivering to every vibration round it, an apparatus so entirely
opposed to our national spirit and traditions that the bare thought of it
causes us to blush. A robust recognition of this, a steadfast resolve
not to be forced out of the current of strenuous civilisation into the
sleepy backwater of pure impression ism, makes us distrustful of attempts
to foster in ourselves that receptivity and subsequent creativeness, the
microbes of which exist in every man: To watch a thing simply because it
is a thing, entirely without considering how it can affect us, and
without even seeing at the moment how we are to get anything out of it,
jars our consciences, jars that inner feeling which keeps secure and
makes harmonious the whole concert of our lives, for we feel it to be a
waste of time, dangerous to the community, contributing neither to our
meat and drink, our clothes and comfort, nor to the stability and order
of our lives.
Of these three possible reasons for our dislike of things as they are,
the first two are perhaps contained within the third. But, to whatever
our dislike is due, we have it--Oh! we have it! With the possible
exception of Hogarth in his non-preaching pictures, and Constable in his
sketches of the sky,--I speak of dead men only,--have we produced any
painter of reality like Manet or Millet, any writer like Flaubert or
Maupassant, like Turgenev, or Tchekov. We are, I think, too deeply
civilised, so deeply civilised that we have come to look on Nature as
indecent. The acts and emotions of life undraped with ethics seem to us
anathema. It has long been, and still is, the fashion among the
intellectuals of the Continent to regard us as barbarians in most
aesthetic matters. Ah! If they only knew how infinitely barbarous they
seem to us in their naive contempt of our barbarism, and in what we
regard as their infantine concern with things as they are. How far have
we not gone past all that--we of the oldest settled Western country, who
have so veneered our lives that we no longer know of what wood they are
made! Whom generations have so soaked with the preserve "good form" that
we are impervious to the claims and clamour of that ill-bred
creature--life! Who think it either dreadful, or 'vieux jeu', that such
things as the crude emotions and the raw struggles of Fate should be even
mentioned, much less presented in terms of art! For whom an artist is
'suspect' if he is not, in his work, a sportsman and a gentleman? Who
shake a solemn head over writers who will treat of sex; and, with the
remark: "Worst of it is, there's so much truth in those fellows!" close
the book.
Ah! well! I suppose we have been too long familiar with the
unprofitableness of speculation, have surrendered too definitely to
action--to the material side of things, retaining for what relaxation our
spirits may require, a habit of sentimental aspiration, carefully
divorced from things as they are. We seem to have decided that things
are not, or, if they are, ought not to be--and what is the good of
thinking of things like that? In fact, our national ideal has become the
Will to Health, to Material Efficiency, and to it we have sacrificed the
Will to Sensibility. It is a point of view. And yet--to the philosophy
that craves Perfection, to the spirit that desires the golden mean, and
hankers for the serene and balanced seat in the centre of the see-saw, it
seems a little pitiful, and constricted; a confession of defeat, a
hedging and limitation of the soul. Need we put up with this, must we
for ever turn our eyes away from things as they are, stifle our
imaginations and our sensibilities, for fear that they should become our
masters, and destroy our sanity? This is the eternal question that
confronts the artist and the thinker. Because of the inevitable decline
after full flowering-point is reached, the inevitable fading of the fire
that follows the full flame and glow, are we to recoil from striving to
reach the perfect and harmonious climacteric? Better to have loved and
lost, I think, than never to have loved at all; better to reach out and
grasp the fullest expression of the individual and the national soul,
than to keep for ever under the shelter of the wall. I would even think
it possible to be sensitive without neurasthenia, to be sympathetic
without insanity, to be alive to all the winds that blow without getting
influenza. God forbid that our Letters and our Arts should decade into
Beardsleyism; but between that and their present "health" there lies full
flowering-point, not yet, by a long way, reached.
To flower like that, I suspect, we must see things just a little more--as
they are!
1905-1912.