Chapter 14

Few, indeed, can look steadily at their own times. To the ephemera that tossed on the waters of the past the ripples were mountainous; to us the past is a sad, grey lake, scarcely ruffled, from which emerge the tall lights of art and thought. It must be a defective sense of proportion, I think, that makes people who cite Aristophanes, but never heard of Conon, who are deep in _Paradise Lost_ but neither know nor care who won the battle of Lowestoft, assert so confidently that this is no time for art. Let them, for their own sakes, consider what sort of figure in history one would cut who had adjured young Shakespeare--thirty years of age and, if one may draw inferences from tradition, able at least to shoot--to give over his precious fooling and join the expeditionary force in Portugal. Yet the moment was grave: we had lost _The Revenge_ and failed ignominiously before Cadiz; we still expected invasion. Shakespeare and the rest of them might surely have done something for their country.

FOOTNOTE:

[24] This essay was written for a Hampstead literary society--I forget the name--and read some time in October 1914. It was printed the following year in the _International Journal of Ethics_.

BEFORE THE WAR

[Sidenote: _Cambridge Magazine May 1917_]

It is to me a strange thing that since the beginning of the war Utopia-building has gone on more merrily than ever. Almost every one has a scheme for social reconstruction; and of these schemes, though most are of that familiar kind which discovers in compulsory strike-arbitration the true and only panacea, some are in themselves attractive enough, being more or less intelligent attempts to combine Socialist economics with the maximum of personal liberty. And yet I can take no interest in any of them, though my apathy, I know, vexes my friends who complain that in old days, before the war, no castle-builder was more reckless than I.

Very true: but things have changed since then. Before the war England was immensely rich; and the upper classes, before the war, were beginning to find barbarism boring. Consequently the lower and lower-middle, as they got money and pushed up towards the light, entered a world that could afford to be liberal, about which floated, vaguely enough, ideas that in time might have been turned to good account. That is where the Edwardian-Georgian age differed most hopefully from the Victorian. In Victorian days when a man became rich or ceased to be miserably poor he still found himself in a society where money-making was considered the proper end of existence: intellectually he was still in the slums. In the spring of 1914 society offered the new-comer precisely what the new-comer wanted, not cut-and-dried ideas, still less a perfect civilization, but an intellectual flutter, faint and feverish no doubt, a certain receptivity to new ways of thinking and feeling, a mind at least ajar, and the luxurious tolerance of inherited wealth. Not, I suppose, since 1789 have days seemed more full of promise than those spring days of 1914. They seem fabulous now, and a fairy-tale never comes amiss.

The generation that takes its first look at the world in the years that follow the war will hardly be persuaded that in the years that just preceded it the governing class was drifting out of barbarism. Yet so it was. The brighter and better educated, at any rate, were beginning to discover that clever people are more entertaining than stupid ones, and that social experiment is as good an extravagance as another. England was fantastically rich; and some of the very rich allowed some of the very clever to wheedle from them great sums of money, knowing all the time that these would be applied to such unsettling activities as the education of thankless labourers or anti-sweating propaganda. Even towards Art rolled a few coppers; indeed, the best painter in England tells me that about this time he was earning as much as two hundred a year. It was thought odd but not shameful in Mr. Thomas Beecham to spend some part of his father's fortune on producing modern music and the operas of Mozart. In fact, it was coming to be a question whether there was anything essentially ridiculous about a musician, a poet, or a Socialist. _Punch_ was rarely seen in the best houses. For a few dizzy years it was wildly surmised that to found a civilization might be as thrilling as to found a family, and that one could be as romantic and snobbish about Art as about bull-dogs or battleships. To be open-minded became modish; people with interesting, subversive things to say were encouraged to talk--always provided they talked with an air of not taking quite seriously what they said. The poor were repressed as firmly as ever, but the job was left to such paid bullies as constables, magistrates, and judges, whom the nicer patricians employed, but took leave to despise.

In 1914 what in England is called "Society" gave promise of becoming what it had not been since the French Revolution--something that a fastidious person could tolerate. It was becoming open-minded. Now open-mindedness is the _sine qua non_ of what is called "brilliant society," and brilliant society is by far the best manure with which to fertilize the soil in which revolutions are to be cultivated. Only when Society becomes clever and inquisitive, and wants to be amused, does it open its doors to reformers, and only in such society can most reformers--reformers, that is to say, who have not been born with an exceptional gift of self-criticism--acquire that sense of humour and dash of cynicism lacking which they perish.

Society to be good must be open-minded; without that there can be neither wit nor gaiety nor conversation worth the name. Prejudices and pruderies, respect of persons, reverence of sentiments, and consideration for the corns of the dull are fatal. On such terms even fun and high spirits soon degenerate to buffoonery and romps. There must be no closed subjects at the mention of which faces lengthen, voices become grave, and the air thickens with hearty platitudes: the intellect must be suffered to play freely about everything and everybody. Wit is the very salt and essence of society, and you can no more have wit that hurts nothing Queen Victoria respected than you can have truth that hurts nothing she believed. Now wit is purely an affair of the intellect, and so is society when it is at all good; no one but a fool dreams of going there for fine feelings and profound emotions. But the intellect to be nimble must be free: 'tis a sprite will play you the prettiest tricks an you give it the run of the house; close but one door though, and it sits sulking in the lobby. Delightful are the games it can play you: wit, irony, criticism, thrilling ideas, visions of fantastic anarchy and breathless generalizations--all these it can give; but the earth and all things above and below must be its toy-box; from the deferential intellect expect nothing better than puns, anecdotes, comfortable platitudes, elaborate facetiousness, and the _Saturday Westminster_.

I do not suggest that in the spring of 1914 English society was brilliant or anything of that sort: I think it was tired of being merely decent. One or two fine ladies had made open-mindedness and a taste for ideas fashionable: _snobisme_ was doing the rest. And we may as well recognize, without more ado, that, Athens and Florence being things of the past, a thick-spread intellectual and artistic _snobisme_ is the only possible basis for a modern civilization. Thanks chiefly to the emergence of a layer of this rich and rotten material one had hopes in 1914 of some day cultivating a garden in which artists and writers would flourish and prophets learn not to be silly. Society before the war showed signs of becoming what French society before the Revolution had been--curious, gay, tolerant, reckless, and reasonably cynical. After the war I suppose it will be none of these things. Like the eighteenth century, having learnt its lesson, it will borrow a sober tone and simpler tastes from the _bourgeoisie_.

For the Edwardian culture did not go very deep; the country gentlefolk and elder business men, the middling professionals and half-pay officers, never abandoned the Victorian tradition. They could not but deplore the imprudence of their too affable leaders, whom, nevertheless, it was their duty and pleasure to admire. They knew that Mr. Balfour was addicted to the plays of Bernard Shaw, that Anatole France had been entertained at the Savoy, and that Cunninghame Graham--a man who was once sent to prison for rioting--sat down to dinner at the tables of the nobility. It made them uneasy and irritable; it also made them fancy that they, too, should keep abreast of the times. So they let their wives subscribe to some advanced fashion-paper with Beardsleyesque-Brunelleschi drawings and felt, quite rightly, that it was rather nasty. The heart of England was sound. All over the country were homes in which ladies were permitted neither to smoke cigarettes nor read the plays of Ibsen nor pronounce, without a shudder, the name of Mr. Lloyd George. By the majority the use of cosmetics was still reckoned a sin, Wagner a good joke, and Kipling a good poet. The _Spectator_ was still read. Nevertheless, the student of paulo-pre-war England will have to recognize that for a few delirious years a part of the ruling faction--cosmopolitan plutocrats and some of the brisker peeresses--listened more willingly to the clever than to the good. There was a veneer of culture or, as I have hinted, of intellectual _snobisme_.

Heaven may delude those whom it wills to destroy, but the very infirmities of its favourites it shapes to their proper advantage. The governing classes of Europe effectually upset the apple-carts of their fanciful friends by getting into a war. When that happened these dream-pedlars surely should have perceived that the game was up. They had always known that only by devoting its first half to the accumulation of wealth and culture could the twentieth century hope in its second to make good some part of its utopic vision. Wealth was the first and absolute necessity: Socialism without money is a nightmare. To live well man must be able to buy some leisure, finery, and elbow-room. Anything is better than a poverty-stricken communism in which no one can afford to be lazy or unpractical.

If, as seems probable, the energies of Europe during the next fifty years must be devoted to re-amassing the capital that Europe has squandered, the concentration on business will be as fatal to the hopes of social reformers as the poverty that provokes it. One foresees the hard, unimaginative view of life regaining the ascendancy, laborious insensibility re-crowned queen of the virtues, "Self-help" by Smiles again given as a prize for good conduct, and the grand biological discovery that the fittest to survive do survive adduced again as an argument against income-tax. When one remembers the long commercial tyranny that followed the Napoleonic wars, the tyranny under which money-making became the chief duty of man, under which Art foundered and middle-class morality flourished, one grows uneasy. And if one cannot forget the stragglers from the Age of Reason, the old, pre-Revolutionary people who, in the reign of Louis XVIII, cackled obsolete liberalism, blasphemed, and span wrinkled intrigues beneath the scandalized brows of neo-Catholic grandchildren, one becomes exceedingly sorry for oneself.

Even before the war we were not such fools as to suppose that a new world would grow up in a night. First had to grow up a generation of civilized men and women to desire and devise it. That was where the intellectual dilettanti came in. Those pert and unpopular people who floated about propounding unpleasant riddles and tweaking up the law wherever it had been most solemnly laid down were, in fact, making possible the New Age. Not only did they set chattering the rich and gibbering with rage the less presentable revolutionaries, it was they who poured out the ideas that filtered through to the trades-union class; and, if that class was soon to create and direct a brand-new State, it was high time that it should begin to handle the sort of ideas these people had to offer. Doubtless the trade-unionists would have developed a civilization sweeter and far more solid than that which flitted so airily from _salon_ to studio, from Bloomsbury to Chelsea; before long, I dare say, they would have dismissed our theories as heartless and dry and absurd to boot; in the end, perhaps, they would have had our heads off--but not, I think, until they had got some ideas into their own. The war has ruined our little patch of civility as thoroughly as a revolution could have done; but, so far as I can see, the war offers nothing in exchange. That is why I take no further interest in schemes for social reconstruction.

THE END

INDEX OF NAMES

Abbas, Shah, 163

Abbassi, Riza, 162

Abraham, Miss E., 13, 132

Adeney, 178

Æschylus, 32

Alexander, 24

Alfieri, 33

Anet, Claude, 157, 159, 160

Angelo, Michael, 185

Archer, 29

Archibald, Raymond Clare, 82, 84

Archimedes, 242

Ariosto, 55

Aristophanes, 99-103, 106-111, 246

Aristotle, 25, 34

Arnold, Matthew, 86

Asselin, 186

_Athenæum_, the, 3, 4, 5

Auchinleck, Laird of, 80

Bach, 240

Bakst, 129, 131

Balfour, 252

Balzac, 99

Beecham, Sir Thomas, 249

Begbie, Harold, 232

Bell, Vanessa, 206, 207, 228, 229

Bennett, Arnold, 1, 3, 8, 9-11, 13-15

Bergson, 89

Berkley, 89

Behzad, 156, 159, 161-163

Binyon, 135

Björnsen, 14

Blake, 125, 214

Bloy, Léon, 89

Bonnard, 194, 200, 211, 215

Boswell, James, 74-81

Botticelli, 140, 211

Bougereau, 222

Bourget, Paul, 15

Brock, Clutton, 146-149, 151

Brougham, Lord, 56

Browne, Sir Thomas, 56

Buchanan, Robert, 51

_Burlington Magazine_, the, 7, 157, 159, 163, 188, 216

Byron, Lord, 94, 115, 117, 118, 124

Cæsar, 24

_Cambridge Magazine_, the, 7

Canning, 57

Carlyle, Alexander, 97

Carlyle, Mrs., 94, 96, 97

Carlyle, Thomas, 75, 82-98, 152

Cato, 24, 25

Catullus, 99

Cézanne, 11, 28-30, 183, 194, 195, 196, 201, 206, 209, 211, 215, 216, 225, 226

Champaigne, Philippe de, 219

Chardin, 196, 218

Châteaubriand, 86

Chaucer, 100

Chesterton, G. K., 88, 106

Chrysostom, St., 100

Cicero, 94

Cimabue, 157

Clairmont, Claire, 117, 119-121

Clarke, Mrs., 51

Claude, 213

Cole, Sir Henry, 51

Coleridge, 14

Coleridge, Miss Mary, 41-49

Conder, 205

Conon, 246

Conrad, Joseph, 11, 14

Constable, 214, 218

Creighton, 86

Crome, 214

Dante, 99

Darwin, 98, 125

Davies, Randall, 165, 166, 168, 170-173

Delaunay, 183, 215

Derain, 181, 200, 211, 215

Dixon, Canon, 48

Doren, Carl Van, 62-65

Dostoievsky, 13, 213

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 14

Drummond, Malcolm, 178

Edwards, George, 133

Emerson, 86

Epictetus, 86

Epstein, 176, 228, 229

Etchells, 178

Faguet, 88

Ferrers, 88

Fildes, Sir Luke, 181

Finch, Madame Renée, 178

FitzGerald, 94, 129

Flammarion, MM., 17

Flaubert, 108

Forman, H. Buxton, 115

France, Anatole, 11, 22, 90, 252

Francis, Sir Philip, 74-76 St., 86

Freeman, A., 62, 64, 65

Friesz, 181, 200, 215

Frith, 170

Fry, Roger, 170, 216, 226

Galsworthy, John, 11, 12, 132

Galt, 10

Garnett, Richard, 51

Garrod, 133

Gauguin, 181, 195, 211, 215, 216, 225, 226

George V, 177

George, Lloyd, 253

Gertler, Mark, 203, 204, 228

Gibbon, 99

Giles, Prof., 135

Gill, Eric, 229

Gilman, 177

Ginner, 178

Giotto, 157, 161, 206

Glaber, 242

Godwin, 86

Gogh, Van, 181, 211, 215, 225, 226

Goldoni, 33, 51

Goncharova, 207, 215

Gordon, Margaret, 82, 83

Gore, S. F., 177, 184

Gournay, Mlle. de, 18

Grahame, Cunninghame, 252

Grant, Duncan, 196, 202, 205, 206, 228, 229

Gray, 94

Greco, El, 206, 211

Gris, 200

Hals, Frans, 140

Hamilton, 186

Hao, Ch'êng, 243

Hardie, Keir, 111

Hardy, Thomas, 10, 11

Harvey, Martin, 128

Henner, 222

Herbin, 181

Herramaneck, 159

Hobson, 188, 189, 191

Homer, 13, 41

Horace, 39, 91

l'Hote, 181, 200

Houghton, Lord, 51

Hoyles, Lady, 84

Hume, David, 76, 80

Ibsen, Henrik, 28-40, 253

Ingres, 197

_International Journal of Ethics_, the, 7

Irving, Sir Henry, 192

James, Henry, 127

John, 205, 210

Johnson, Samuel, 14, 20, 76, 77, 80, 81, 147

Jones, Inigo, 214

Jonson, Ben, 4

Kandinsky, 215

Keats, 41, 102, 202

Kevorkian, 158

Kipling, Rudyard, 15, 145, 225, 253

Kokan, Shiba, 143, 145

Korin, 140

Kublai Khan, 245

Laforgue, 10, 213

Lamb, Charles, 94, 96, 200

Laprade, 215

Larionoff, 215

Laurenciu, Marie, 207

Leopardi, 94

Lespinasse, Julie de, 94

Lesueur, 205

Lewis, Wyndham, 175, 176, 182, 183, 199, 228, 229

Lippi, Lippo, 211

London, Bishop of, 151

Macaulay, 147

Maillol, 211, 215, 226, 229

Mallarmé, 213

Manguin, 194

Mantegna, 197

Marchand, 181, 194-198, 200, 201, 202, 206, 215

Marinetti, 88

Marivaux, 9, 10

Marquet, 181, 215

Mathews, Elkin, 32

Matisse, Henri, 10, 181, 194, 196, 200, 211, 215, 226

McEvoy, 210

Meredith, 120, 127

Mérimée, 94

Meyer-Riefstahl, 160

Mill, 89

Milton, 13, 41

Mirek, Aga, 162, 163

Mohamed, Sultan, 161, 162

Montagu, Lady Mary, 94

Montaigne, 17-27

Montgomerie, Miss Margaret, 79

Moore, George, 11, 12, 15

Morgan, Pierpont, 157

Morris, William, 146-155

Mozart, 70, 249

Murray, Prof. Gilbert, 127, 128

_Nation_, the, 7

Nevinson, 186

_New Age_, the, 3

_New Statesman_, the, 7

Nicholson, 129

Nietzsche, 213

_Nineteenth Century_, the, 52

Norton, Mrs., 122

Ogilvie, Mrs., 178

Okakura, 135

Okio, 144, 145

Oliphant, Mrs., 10

Orpen, 129, 210

Pallas, 7

Paoli, 80

Paul, Herbert, 52

Peacock, Thomas Love, 50-73

Péguy, 90

Philippe, Charles-Louis, 10

Phillips, Stephen, 129

Picasso, 10, 181, 184, 194, 195, 196, 200, 215, 216, 219, 226

Pichard, Mrs. Louise, 178

Piret, Fernand, 177

Pissarro, Camille, 179

Pissarro, Lucien, 178

Plato, 86, 90, 99, 100, 114

Pollock, Sir Frederick, 51

Poynter, Sir Edward, 210

_Punch_, 100, 249

Puvis, 228

Pythagoras, 86

Rabelais, 99

Raphael, 156, 160, 161, 213

Reinhardt, 129, 130, 131

Renan, 86

Renoir, 196, 216, 227

Rimbaud, 213

Roberts, Ellis, 28, 31, 32, 33, 39, 40

Roberts, 199, 228

Rogers, Bickley, 101

Rostand, 129

Rousseau, 201, 211

Ruck, Arthur, 159, 160

Russell, Bertrand, 90

Rutter, 179

Sainte-Beuve, 26

Saintsbury, Prof., 51, 53

Saunders, Miss Helen, 178

Seccombe, Thomas, 74, 75

Segonzac, 215

Severini, 181

Sévigné, Madame de, 94

Shakespeare, 4, 10, 14, 32, 56, 99, 100, 108, 125, 246

Shaw, Bernard, 106, 132, 252

Shelley, 51, 68, 69, 115, 116-118, 120-125, 150

Shelley, Mary, 119

Sichel, Miss, 43, 47

Sickert, Walter, 175, 184, 195, 209, 224

Socrates, 24, 105

Sophocles, 34, 41, 55, 126

_Spectator_, the, 253

Spedding, James, 51

Spenser, Stanley, 199, 228

Stanhope, 86

Steer, 205, 210

Stephen, Leslie, 147

Sterne, 56, 60

Stevens, Alfred, 226

Stockmann, 39

Stone, Major, 74

Strowski, Fortunat, 17

Swift, 94

Swinburne, 89, 125, 128, 152

Tabari, 158

Tchekov, 213

Temple, Rev. W. J., 74, 77, 78

Tennyson, Alfred, 151, 152, 225

Thackeray, 13

Thucydides, 104

_Times_, the, 100

Titian, 185, 211

Tolstoy, Leo, 89

Trelawny, Edward John, 115-125

Turner, 214, 228

Velasquez, 140

Veuillard, 194

Victoria, Queen, 99

Vigée Lebrun, Madame, 207

Vignier, 157

Vivarini, 219

Vlaminck, de, 200, 201, 202, 215

Voltaire, 94, 99

Wagner, 11, 253

Waller, Edmund, 29

Walpole, Horace, 94

Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 12

Watteau, 140

Wells, H. G., 9, 11, 12, 13, 88, 232

Welsh, Jane, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97

Whistler, 140, 152

Whitman, Walt, 151

Whitworth, Geoffrey, 1, 2

Woolf, Virginia, 11

Wordsworth, 240

Wren, 214

Yeats, J. B., 178

Young, Dr. Arthur Button, 53, 64

Zola, 126, 127

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ART

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PRESS OPINIONS ON "ART" BY CLIVE BELL

"A book of absorbing interest. No one who reads it will, I am sure, find the brief and somewhat comprehensive title either arrogant or misleading. It contains some of the profoundest, truest and most courageous considerations stated with connected and well-supported conviction. The book is not only racy and readable, but--rarest of all things on this subject--it is comprehensible. The value of the book as an illuminant to thought on painting is henceforth impossible to ignore."--Mr. WALTER SICKERT in the _New Age_.

"Certainly one of the most brilliant, provocating, suggestive things that have ever been written on the subject. What a breath of fresh air this iconoclast brings in with him, what masses of mouldy snobbism he sweeps into the dust-heap, how salutary even for the idols themselves is such a thorough turning out! It will be seen that this is a book that all who care for art must read; the surprising good fortune that has befallen them is that it is so eminently readable."--Mr. ROGER FRY in the _Nation_.

"By reason of its originality of thought and virility of expression Mr. Clive Bell's "Art" is entitled to rank as a remarkable contribution to the literature of art. The contemporary movement has found no abler defender and exponent."--_Glasgow Herald._

"Lovers of art owe Mr. Clive Bell thanks for the most stimulating, not to say the most provoking, book on art that has recently appeared."--_Athenæum._

"Mr. Bell says many wise and witty things. Few people will agree with them all, many will get angry with the remorselessness of his logic, but nobody can read the book through carefully without clearing up their own minds on the subject and incidentally acquiring a sounder understanding of what art is and means."--_Sunday Times._

"He utters paradoxes as if they were the tritest things in the world; all epigram and impudence he trails his coat assiduously, and, while his brilliance is vastly entertaining, his method of bouncing us into liking what he likes, and hating what he hates, is likely to infuriate quite as many readers as it takes by storm."--_Manchester Guardian._

"The rather sterile literature of art criticism has been seriously enriched by a brilliant if wilful manifesto. The refreshing absence of obscurity common to art criticism will be particularly welcome. For genuine students the book possesses significant form, and will be indispensable."--_Westminster Gazette._

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"This book is of first-rate importance. But nobody need be frightened of it on that account. Unlike most important works on the theory of art, it is thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end. Its main thesis is a generalization which, if true, is applicable to all schools and all epochs. The book is stimulating and suggestive."--_Cambridge Review._

"Mr. Bell's book has been generally recognized as the most interesting and stimulating appreciation that has yet appeared in this country of the movement which we call post-impressionism. The book is, however, much wider in its scope. A book upon æsthetics at once serious (on the whole), sane, and extremely entertaining."--_Welsh Outlook._

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