Part 6

But one or two interesting ideas can be found in Futurist speculations, essays, lectures, books, etc.--indeed, the Futurists can be interesting everywhere but in their pictures. And this is the difficulty of all such movements--the lack of the final fulfilment. I will not put it offensively, as by saying that they write a beautiful prospectus, but there are no funds. I do not mean it like that. I will put it poetically by saying that there are beautiful leaves and flowers, but there is no fruit. There are leaves of learning enough to fill a library; there are flowers of rhetoric enough to last a session. They are all about a picture: and there is no picture. Thus Mr. Nevinson, the eminent English Futurist, has explained that pictorial art should be as independent of natural facts as music is: it should not imitate, but utter. Of music, of course, the remark is true, and fairly familiar. Certainly three notes on a piano can bring tears to the eyes by reminding us of a dead friend: though certainly the first noise is not the noise he made when whistling to his dog, nor the second the noise he made when kicking his boots off, nor the third the noise he made when blowing his nose. Perhaps the three notes are noises he could never have made: perhaps he was unmusical, like many magnificent people--I am unmusical myself. Perhaps, I say, he was unmusical: yet music can express him. This is an interesting fact; but it is only one fact, and the examination of a few others would have shown Mr. Nevinson the shallowness of his artistic philosophy.

But Mr. Nevinson and the Futurists, having never seen a fact before in their lives, clutch hold of this one and rush after the car of progress like poor baby-laden charwomen after a motor-bus. Their deduction is this: As his favourite song recalls the friend, though it contains none of his grunts, snorts, or sneezes, so his portrait would better recall his appearance if it contained no trace of his eyes, nose, mouth, hair (if any), masculine sex, anthropoid or erect posture, or any other oddity by which his friends were in the habit of distinguishing him from a lamp-post or a large whale, or from the works of Creation in general. Mr. Nevinson says that the most pungent and passionate emotions (such, presumably, as we have about friendship and even about love) can be conveyed by planes, mathematical proportions, arbitrary or abstract colours, arrangements of line, and all the things we most of us instinctively associate with carpets, if not with oilcloth. “It is possible,” he says. It is. It is not a contradiction in terms. But if I say, “It is possible by arranging a tomato, ten pearl buttons, a copy of the second and last number of a Tariff Reform weekly, one wooden leg, three odd boots, and a bag with a hole in it, to induce your worst enemy to burst into tears and give you a million pounds in conscience money,” then, if you are a Monist and a fool, you will answer that it could not happen. But if you are an Agnostic and a Christian, you will answer that you tried it on with your worst creditor, and it didn’t work with him. Nor would the planes, angles, abstract colours work with him. They don’t work with you; they don’t work with me; they don’t work with anybody. And the reason simply is that these philosophers, like so many modern philosophers, do not possess the patience to see what they are taking for granted. Have you ever seen a fellow fail at the high jump because he had not gone far enough back for his run? That is Modern Thought. It is so confident of where it is going to that it does not know where it comes from.

The quite simple fallacy is this. The only thing we know about the things we call the Arts is that when they are good they all stir the soul in a somewhat similar way. Their roots in savagery or civilization are so different and so dark, their relations to utility or practical life are so prodigiously contrasted, the mere time or space they occupy is so unequal in every case, the psychological explanations of their very existence are so inconsistent and anarchic, that we simply do not know whether in one single point we can argue from one art to another. We do not know enough about it, and there is an end of the matter. For instance, many have compared classic poetry with classic architecture; and anyone who has ever felt the virginity and dignity of either will know what such a comparison means. Milton spoke of “building” a line of poetry; and nobody seems able to talk about sonnets without talking about marble. But in technical fact the analogy is only a fancy, after all. Treat it for one moment as Mr. Nevinson treats the analogy between music and painting, and it is pure, preposterous nonsense--like Futurism.

Who will deny that height, or the appearance of height, is one of the effects of architecture? Who has not read or said or felt that some wall seemed too enormous for any mortals to have made, that some domes seemed to occupy heaven, or that some spire seemed to strike him out of the sky? But who, on the other hand, ever said that his sonnet was printed higher up on the page than somebody else’s sonnet? Who ever either praised or disliked a piece of verse according to its vertical longitude? Who ever said, “My sonnet occupied five volumes of the _Times_, but you _should_ see it pasted all in one piece”? Who ever said, “I have written the tallest triolet on earth”?

Mr. Nevinson will bring a tear to my eye by exhibiting a pattern and calling it a picture on the same day when he induces me to read two hundred leading articles in the _Times_ simply by calling them a tower. They have many of the qualities of a tower: they are long; they are symmetrical; they are all built out of the same old bricks; they sometimes stand upright, like the Tower of Giotto; they more often lean very much, like the Tower of Pisa; they most frequently fall down altogether, and fall on the wrong people, like the Tower of Siloam. One could pursue such abstract fancies for ever, but the simple fact remains--and it is a fact of the senses. The thing is not a tower, because it does not tower. And the Futurist picture is not a picture, because it does not depict. Why one art can do without shapes, and another without words, and another without movement, and another without massiveness, and why each of these is necessary to one or other of them separately--all this we shall know when we know what art means. And I cannot say that the Futurists have helped us much in finding out.

The Evolution of Emma

Among the many good critical tributes to the genius of Jane Austen, to the fine distinction of her humour, the sympathetic intimacy of her satire, the easy exactitude of her unpretentious style, which have appeared in celebration of her centenary, there is one criticism that is naturally recurrent: the remark that she was quite untouched by the towering politics of her time. This is intrinsically true; nevertheless it may easily be used to imply the reverse of the truth. It is true that Jane Austen did not attempt to teach any history or politics; but it is not true that we cannot learn any history or politics from Jane Austen. Any work so piercingly intelligent of its own kind, and especially any work of so wise and humane a kind, is sure to tell us much more than shallower studies covering a larger surface. I will not say much of the mere formality of some of the conventions and conversational forms; for in such things it is not only not certain that change is important, but it is not even certain that it is final. The view that a thing is old-fashioned is itself a fashion; and may soon be an old fashion. We have seen this in many recurrences of female dress; but it has a deeper basis in human nature. The truth is that a phrase can be falsified by use without being false in fact; it can seem stale without being really stilted. Those who see a word as merely worn out, fail to look forward as well as back. I know of two poems by two Irish poets of two different centuries, essentially on the same theme; the lover declaring that his love will outlast the mere popularity of the beauty. One is by Mr. Yeats and begins: “Though you are in your shining days.” The other is by Tom Moore and begins: “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms.” The latter language strikes us as ridiculously florid and over-ripe; but Moore was far from being ridiculous. Believe me (as he would say), it was no poetaster who wrote those hackneyed words about the silent harp and the heart that breaks for liberty. And if English were read some day by strangers as a classic language, I am not sure that “endearing” would not endure as a better word than “shining”; or even that (after some repetition and reaction) it might not seem as strained to say “shining” as to say “shiny.” Yet Mr. Yeats also is a great poet, as I called him last week; only the printer or somebody altered it to a “good” one--a mysteriously moderate emendation. Similarly, when one of Jane Austen’s heroines wants to say that the hero is a good fellow, she expresses confidence in what she calls “his worth.” This goads her younger modern readers to madness; yet in truth the term is far more philosophic and eternal than the terms they would use themselves. They would probably say he was “nice,” and Jane Austen would indeed be avenged. For the best of her heroes, Henry Tilney, himself foresaw and fulminated against the unmeaning ubiquity of that word, a prophet of the pure reason of his age, seeing in a vision of the future the fall of the human mind.

Negatively, of course, the historic lesson from Jane Austen is enormous. She is perhaps most typical of her time in being supremely irreligious. Her very virtues glitter with the cold sunlight of the great secular epoch between mediæval and modern mysticism. In that small masterpiece, _Northanger Abbey_, her unconsciousness of history is itself a piece of history. For Catherine Morland was right, as young and romantic people often are. A real crime _had_ been committed in Northanger Abbey. It is implied in the very name of Northanger Abbey. It was the crucial crime of the sixteenth century, when all the institutions of the poor were savagely seized to be the private possessions of the rich. It is strange that the name remains; it is stranger still that it remains unrealized. We should think it odd to go to tea at a man’s house and find it was still called a church. We should be surprised if a gentleman’s shooting box at Claybury were referred to as Claybury Cathedral. But the irony of the eighteenth century is that Catherine was healthily interested in crimes and yet never found the real crime; and that she never really thought of it as an abbey, even when she thought of it most as an antiquity.

But there is a positive as well as a negative way in which her greatness, like Shakespeare’s, illuminates history and politics, because it illuminates everything. She understood every intricacy of the upper middle class and the minor gentry, which were to make so much of the mental life of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is said that she ignored the poor and disregarded their opinions. She did, but not more than all our Governments and all our Acts of Parliaments have done. And at least she did consistently ignore them; she ignored where she was ignorant. Well it would have been for the world if others had ignored the working-class until they understood it as well as she did the middle class. She was not a student of sociology; she did not study the poor. But she did study the students--or at least the social types which were to become the students of the poor. She knew her own class, and knew it without illusions; and there is much light on later problems to be found in her delicate delineation of vanities and snobberies and patronage. She had to do with the human heart; and it is that which cometh out of the heart that defileth a nation, philanthropy, efficiency, organization, social reform. And if the weaker brethren still wonder why we should find in Baby Week or Welfare Work a dangerous spirit, from which its best adherents find it hard to free themselves, if they doubt how such a danger can be reconciled with the personal delicacy and idealism of many of the women who work such things, if they think that fine words or even fine feelings will guarantee a respect for the personality of the poor, I really do not know that they could do better than sit down, I trust not for the first time, to the reading of _Emma_.

For all this that has happened since might well be called the Evolution of Emma. That unique and formidable institution, the English Lady, has, indeed, become much more of a public institution; that is, she has made the same mistakes on a much larger scale. The softer fastidiousness and finer pride of the more gracious eighteenth-century heroine may seem to make her a shadow by comparison. It seems cruel to say that the breaking off of Harriet’s humbler engagement foreshadows the indiscriminate development of Divorce for the Poor. It seems horrible to say that Emma’s small matchmaking has in it the seed of the pestilence of Eugenics. But it is true. With a gentleness and justice and sympathy with good intentions, which clear her from the charge of common cynicism, the great novelist does find the spring of her heroine’s errors, and of many of ours. That spring is a philanthropy, and even a generosity, secretly founded on gentility. Emma Woodhouse was a wit, she was a good woman, she was an individual with a right to her own opinion; but it was because she was a lady that she acted as she did, and thought she had a right to act as she did. She is the type in fiction of a whole race of English ladies, in fact, for whom refinement is religion. Her claim to oversee and order the social things about her consisted in being refined; she would not have admitted that being rich had anything to do with it; but as a fact it had everything to do with it. If she had been very much richer, if she had had one of the great modern fortunes, if she had had the wider modern opportunities (for the rich) she would have thought it her duty to act on the wider modern scale; she would have had public spirit and political grasp. She would have dealt with a thousand Robert Martins and a thousand Harriet Smiths, and made the same muddle about all of them. That is what we mean about things like Baby Week--and if there had been a baby in the story, Miss Woodhouse would certainly have seen all its educational needs with a brilliant clearness. And we do not mean that the work is done entirely by Mrs. Pardiggle; we mean that much of it is done by Miss Woodhouse. But it is done because she _is_ Miss Woodhouse and not Martha Muggins or Jemina Jones; because the Lady Bountiful is a lady first, and will bestow every bounty but freedom.

It is noted that there are few traces of the French Revolution in Miss Austen’s novels; but, indeed, there have been few traces of it in Miss Austen’s country. The peculiarity which has produced the situation I describe is really this: that the new sentiment of humanitarianism has come, when the old sentiment of aristocracy has not gone. Social superiors have not really lost any old privileges; they have gained new privileges, including that of being superior in philosophy and philanthropy as well as in riches and refinement. No revolution has shaken their secret security or menaced them with the awful peril of becoming no more than men. Therefore their social reform is but their social refinement grown restless. And in this old teacup comedy can be found, far more clearly appreciated than in more ambitious books about problems and politics, the psychology of this mere restlessness in the rich, when it first stirred upon its cushions. Jane Austen described a narrow class, but so truthfully that she has much to teach about its after adventures, when it remained narrow as a class and broadened only as a sect.

The Pseudo-Scientific Books ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There is a certain kind of modern book which must, if possible, be destroyed. It ought to be blown to pieces with the dynamite of some great satirist like Swift or Dickens. As it is, it must be patiently hacked into pieces even by some plodding person like myself. I will do it, as George Washington said, with my little hatchet; though it might take a long time to do it properly. The kind of book I mean is the pseudo-scientific book. And by this I do not mean that the man who writes it is a conscious quack or that he knows nothing; I mean that he proves nothing; he simply gives you all his cocksure, and yet shaky, modern opinions and calls it science. Books are coming out with so-called scientific conclusions--books in which there is actually no scientific argument at all. They simply affirm all the notions that happen to be fashionable in loose “intellectual” clubs, and call them the conclusions of research. But I am no more awed by the flying fashions among prigs than I am by the flying fashions among snobs. Snobs say they have the right kind of hat; prigs say they have the right kind of head. But in both cases I should like some evidence beyond their own habit of staring at themselves in the glass. Suppose I were to write about the current fashions in dress something like this: “Our ignorant and superstitious ancestors had straight hat-brims; but the advance of reason and equality has taught us to have curly hat-brims; in early times shirt-fronts are triangular, but science has shown that they ought to be round; barbaric peoples had loose trousers, but enlightened and humane peoples have tight trousers,” and so on, and so on. You would naturally rebel at this simple style of argument. You would say--“But, hang it all, give us some facts. Prove that the new fashions are more enlightened. Prove that men think better in the new hats. Prove that men run faster in the new trousers.”

I have just read a book which has been widely recommended, which is introduced to the public by Dr. Saleeby, and which is, I understand, written by a Swiss scientist of great distinction. It is called _Sexual Ethics_, by Professor Forel. I began to read the book, therefore, with respect. I finished reading it with stupefaction. The Swiss Professor is obviously an honest man, though too Puritanical to my taste, and I am told that he does really know an enormous lot about insects. But as for the conception of proving a case, as for any notion that a “new” opinion needs proof, and that it is not enough, when you knock down great institutions, to say that you don’t like them--it is clear that no such conceptions have ever crossed his mind. Science says that man has no conscience. Science says that man and woman must have the same political powers. Science says that sterile unions are morally free and without rule. Science says that it is wrong to drink fermented liquor. And all this with a splendid indifference to the two facts--first, that “Science” does not say these things at all, for numbers of great scientists say exactly the opposite; and second, that if Science did say these things, a person reading a book of rationalistic ethics might be permitted to ask why. Professor Forel may have mountains of evidence which he has no space to exhibit. We will give him the benefit of that doubt, and pass on to points where any thinking man is capable of judging him.

Where this sort of scientific writer is seen in all his glory is in his first abstract arguments about the nature of morality. He is immense; he is at once simple and monstrous, like a whale. He always has one dim principle or prejudice: to prove that there is nothing separate or sacred about the moral sense. Professor Forel holds this prejudice with all possible decorum and propriety. He always trots out three arguments to prove it; like three old broken-kneed elephants. Professor Forel duly trots them out. They are supposed to show that there is no such thing positively existing as the conscience; and they might just as easily be used to show that there are no such things as wings or whiskers, or toes or teeth, or boots or books, or Swiss Professors.

The first argument is that man has no conscience because some men are quite mad, and therefore not particularly conscientious. The second argument is that man has no conscience because some men are more conscientious than others. And the third is that man has no conscience because conscientious men in different countries and quite different circumstances often do very different things. Professor Forel applies these arguments eloquently to the question of human consciences; and I really cannot see why I should not apply them to the question of human noses. Man has no nose because now and then a man has no nose--I believe that Sir William Davenant, the poet, had none. Man has no nose because some noses are longer than others or can smell better than others. Man has no nose because not only are noses of different shapes, but (oh, piercing sword of scepticism!) some men use their noses and find the smell of incense nice, while some use their noses and find it nasty. Science therefore declares that man is normally noseless; and will take this for granted for the next four or five hundred pages, and will treat all the alleged noses of history as the quaint legends of a credulous age.

I do not mention these views because they are original, but exactly because they are not. They are only dangerous in Professor Forel’s book because they can be found in a thousand books of our epoch. This writer solemnly asserts that Kant’s idea of an ultimate conscience is a fable because Mohammedans think it wrong to drink wine, while English officers think it right. Really he might just as well say that the instinct of self-preservation is a fable because some people avoid brandy in order to live long, and some people drink brandy in order to save their lives. Does Professor Forel believe that Kant, or anybody else, thought that our consciences gave us direct commands about the details of diet or social etiquette? Did Kant maintain that, when we had reached a certain stage of dinner, a supernatural voice whispered in our ear “Asparagus”; or that the marriage between almonds and raisins was a marriage that was made in heaven? Surely it is plain enough that all these social duties are deduced from primary moral duties--and may be deduced wrong. Conscience does not suggest “asparagus,” but it does suggest amiability, and it is thought by some to be an amiable act to accept asparagus when it is offered to you. Conscience does not respect fish and sherry; but it does respect any innocent ritual that will make men feel alike. Conscience does not tell you not to drink your hock after your port. But it does tell you not to commit suicide; and your mere naturalistic reason tells you that the first act may easily approximate to the second.

Christians encourage wine as something which will benefit men. Teetotallers discourage wine as something that will destroy men. Their conscientious conclusions are different, but their consciences are just the same. Teetotallers say that wine is bad because they think it moral to say what they think. Christians will not say that wine is bad because they think it immoral to say what they don’t think. And a triangle is a three-sided figure. And a dog is a four-legged animal. And Queen Anne is dead. We have, indeed, come back to alphabetical truths. But Professor Forel has not yet even come to them. He goes on laboriously repeating that there cannot be a fixed moral sense, because some people drink wine and some people don’t. I cannot imagine how it was that he forgot to mention that France and England cannot have the same moral sense, because Frenchmen drive cabs on the right side of the road and Englishmen on the left.

The Humour of King Herod