Part 2

Chapter 24,045 wordsPublic domain

In an age in which the power of creation is weak, men will choose the easiest forms: those in which sustained elevation is not demanded and creation itself is eked out in various ways. The world of our day has therefore as its characteristic production the realistic novel, which in form is more loose, in content and execution more unequal, and in imaginative power less rich and inventive than poetic drama, or _any_ of the higher forms of literature. If we deduct from the modern "literary artist," the diarist, the sociologist, the reporter, and the collector of documents, there is not much left. For creation there is very little room in his works; perhaps it is as well!

_Compliments and Art_

The convention of gallantry observed by the sexes is the foundation of all refined understanding between them. For in the mutual game of compliment it is the spiritual attitude and not the spoken word that matters. There is truth in this attitude, however unreal the words may seem: a thousand times more truth than in the modern egalitarian, go-as-you-please camaraderie of the sexes. Here there is truth neither in the spirit nor in the letter. To be candid, about this new convention there is something faintly fatuous: the people who act thus are not subtle! Yet they are hardly to be blamed; it is the age that is at fault. There is no time for reflection upon men, women and manners, and consequently no refinement of understanding, no form in the true sense. We work so hard and have so little leisure that when we meet we are tired and wish to "stretch our legs," as Nietzsche said. It is far from our thoughts that a convention between men and women might be _necessary_; we are not disposed to inquire why this convention arose; it presents itself to us as something naively false; and we have time only to be unconventional.

The ceremonious in manners arose from the recognition that between the sexes there must be distance--respect as well as intimacy--understanding. The old gallantry enabled men and women to be intimate and distant at the same time: it was the perfection of the art of manners. Indeed, we can hardly have sufficient respect for this triumphant circumvention of a natural difficulty, whereby it was made a source of actual pleasure. But now distance and understanding have alike disappeared. The moderns, so obtuse have they become, see here no difficulty at all, consequently no need for manners: brotherhood--comradeship--laziness has superseded that. Nothing is any longer _understood;_ but a convention means essentially that something is understood. Indeed, it is already a gaucherie to explain the meaning of a good convention. But what can one do? Against obtuseness the only weapon is obtuseness.

In literature this decline into bad taste and denseness is most clearly to be seen. So incapable have readers become, so resourceless writers, that whatever is said now must be said right out; sex must be called sex; and no one has sufficient subtlety to suggest or to follow a suggestion. Hence, Realism. An artist has to write exactly what he means: the word must be word and nothing more. But this is to misunderstand art. For the words of the true artist undergo a transubstantiation and become flesh and blood, even spirit. His words are deeds--to say nothing of what he writes _between_ his lines! Realism in art and "comradeship" between the sexes are two misunderstandings, or, rather, two aspects of a misunderstanding. And that misunderstanding is perhaps attributable to a lack of leisure? And that to modern hurry? And that to the industrial system?

_A Modern Problem_

It has been observed again and again that as societies--forms of production, of government, and so on--become more complex, the mastery of the individual over his destiny grows weaker. In other words, the more man subjugates "nature," the more of a slave he becomes. The industrial system, for instance, which is the greatest modern example of man's subjugation of nature, is at the same time the greatest modern example of man's enslavement. What are we to think, then? Is the problem a moral one, and shall we say that a conquest of nature which is not preceded by a conquest of human nature is bound to be bad? In a society which has not surpassed the phase of slavery does every addition to man's power over nature simply intensify the slavery? Or is the problem intellectual? And when the intellect concentrates upon one branch of knowledge to the neglect of the other, is the outcome bound to be the enslavement of the others? For instance the nineteenth century devoted far more of its brains to industry than to politics--its politics, indeed, was merely the reflection of its industry--with the result that industry has now enslaved us all. Yes, it has enslaved us all--not merely the wage-earners, not merely the salariat! In the old days the workman, indeed, was a slave, but now the employer is a slave as well.

In this age, therefore, in which man appears as the helpless appendage of a machine too mighty for him, it is natural that theories of Determinism should flourish. It is natural, also, that the will should become weak and discouraged, and, consequently, that the power of creation should languish. And so the world of art has withered and turned barren. The artist needs above all things a sense of power; it is out of the abundance of this sense that he creates. But confronted with modern society, that vast machine, and surrounded by its hopeless mechanics and slaves, he feels the sense dying within him; nor does the evil cease there, for along with the sense of power, power itself dies.

Well, does not the moral become clearer and clearer? If art and literature are to flourish again, artists, writers, nay, the whole community must regain the sense of power. Therefore, economic emancipation first!

_Leisure and Good Things_

The very greatest danger confronts a people who renounce leisure: that people will become shallow--just consider England! For of all things noble it is hard to see the immediate utility: patience and reverence are needed before one can see in them a meaning at all. Art, literature and philosophy are not obvious goods: at the first glance they appear even repellent: alas, then, for them in an age of first glances! In such an age, it is true, they will not altogether disappear. Something worse will happen. They will be degraded, made obvious, misunderstood; in one word, popularized--the fate of our time. Society should be organized so as to give to its members the maximum of leisure; thus would the dissemination of art and philosophy be made at least possible. But society should at the same time provide for a privileged class of artists and philosophers, with _absolute_ leisure, who would work only when the inner compulsion made them. The second condition is at least as important as the first.

_Wanted: A History of Hurry_

Is there a critic who wishes to be at once edifying and entertaining? Let him write a history of hurry in its relation to literature and art. Has literature decayed as hurry has intensified? Have standards of balance, repose and leisured grace gradually shrunk since, say, the Industrial Revolution? Has the curtailment of the realm of literature, its reduction from the Romantic school to the Victorian circle and from that to the Decadent clique, been due to the everstrengthening encroachment of hurry? And has hurry now become finally triumphant so that our critics and even our artists and savants are nothing more than journalists? For certainly they seem to be so.

These are questions to be investigated by our historian.

_The Sex Novel_

How did the vogue of the sex novel arise? Perhaps from the great attention which was in the last century given to the sciences of biology and physiology; and perhaps, more especially from the popularization of these sciences. Love was, under the spell of science, translated by the novelists into sex. Not the psychology, but the physiology of love was found interesting: with the result that for the production of a modern novel one qualification alone is now necessary: a "knowledge of the simple facts of physiology," as the primer-writers say. Well, what is the remedy for this? Not a denial of physiology: those who have learned it cannot now erase it from their memory and become voluntarily ignorant. No; let, rather, the opposite course be taken! Let us popularize psychology as well!

_These Advanced People_

A. Free Love is all right in theory, but all wrong in practice. B. On the contrary! I think it is all right in practice, but all wrong in theory.

_Sex in Literature_

In English literature, until very modern times, sex was treated only within the limits of a very well-understood convention. From this convention the physiological was strictly excluded. Yet, of our classical writers, even in the most artificial periods, it cannot be said that they did not understand sex. No matter how "unreal" they might be in writing about Love, the physiological contingencies of Love were unmistakably implied in their works, but only, it is true, implied. The moderns, however, saw in this treatment of Love nothing but a convention, a "lie"; and they became impatient of the artificiality, as if art could be anything but artificial! To what was the change of attitude due? Not to a failure in the artistic convention: that was perfectly sound. No, it was the reader who had failed: a generation of readers had arisen who had not learnt the art of reading, who did not understand reading as a cultured amateur of the eighteenth century, for instance, understood it. Literature was to this reader a document, not an art. He had no eye for what is written between the lines--for symbolism, idealization, "literature." And it was to satisfy him that the realistic school arose: it arose, indeed, out of himself. In the realist the modern reader has become writer: the man who could not learn the art of reading has here essayed the more difficult art of writing--documentary art!

_History of a Realist_

Who will write a series of biographies of modern writers, illustrating this thesis: that they are nothing more than modern readers wielding a hasty pen? Such a set of memoirs would almost compensate us for having read the works of these writers. How interesting, for instance, it would be to know how many years--surely it would be years?--they spent in trying to understand literature before they dedicated themselves to its service. How interesting, again, to discover how many hours each day X, the celebrated novelist, devotes to contemplation, how many to writing for the newspapers, and how many to his present masterpiece. What! one hour's thought has actually preceded five hours' dictation! This revelation is, after all, not so startling. On second thought, these memoirs seem superfluous; we can read everything we wish to know of the moderns in their works.

Yet, for our better amusement, will not some one write his one and only novel, giving the true history of the novelist? A novel against novels! But for that we need a second Cervantes, yet how unlike the first! For on this occasion it is not Don Quixote that must be satirized, but Sancho Panza.

_Novelists by Habit_

All of us who read are novelists more or less nowadays: that is to say, we collect "impressions," "analyse" ourselves, make a pother about sex, and think that people, once they are divorced, live happily ever after. The habit of reading novels has turned us into this! When one of us becomes articulate, however--in the form of a novel--he only makes explicit his kinship with the rest; he proclaims to all the world that he is a mediocrity.

_The Only Course_

All the figures in this novel are paltry; we despise them, and, if we were in danger of meeting them in real life, would take steps to avoid them; yet such is the author's adroitness that we are led on helplessly through the narrative, through unspeakable sordidness of circumstance and soul, hating ourselves and him, and feeling nothing better than slaves. To rouse our anxiety lest Herbert lose five pounds, or Mabel find it impossible to get a new dress, this is art, this is modern art! But to feel _anxiety_ about such things is ignoble; and to live in a sordid atmosphere, even if it be of a book, is the part of a slave. And yet we cannot but admire. For in this novel what subtlety in the treatment there must be overlying the fundamental vulgarity of the theme! How is Art, which should make Man free, here transformed into a potent means for enslaving him! It is impossible to yield oneself to the sway of a modern realist without a loss in one's self-respect. To what is due this conspicuous absence of nobility in modern writers? But is the question, indeed, worth the asking? For to the artist and to him who would retain freedom of soul, there is only one course with the paltry in literature--to avoid it.

_The Average Man_

It is surely one of G. K. Chesterton's paradoxes that he praises the average man. For he is not himself an average man, but a man of genius; he does not write of the average man, but of grotesques; he is not read by the average man, but by intellectuals and the nonconformist middle-class. The true prophets of the average man are the popular realistic novelists. For they write of him and for him--yes, even when they write "for themselves," when they are "serious artists." Who, then, but them should extol him? It is their _métier_.

_The "New" Writers_

The fault of the most modern writers--and especially of the novelists--is not that they are too modern, but that they are too traditional. It is true, they are not traditional in the historical manner of G. K. Chesterton, who wishes to destroy one tradition--the modern tradition--in order to get back to another--the mediæval. To Mr. Chesterton tradition is a matter of selection; the dead tradition seems to him nobler than the living; and, deliberately, therefore, he would return to it. The new writers, however, follow a tradition also, though a much narrower one; they, too, believe in the past, but only, alas, in the immediate past; they are slaves to the generation which preceded theirs. In short, that which is disgusting in them is their inability to rise high enough to _see_ their little decade or two, and to challenge it, if they cannot from the standpoint of a nobler future, then, at least, from that of the noblest past. But how weak must a generation be which is not strong enough to challenge and supersede Arnold Bennett, for instance.

_The Modern Reader_

What is it that the modern reader demands from those who write for him? To be challenged, and again to be challenged, and evermore to be challenged--but on no account to be asked to accept a challenge, on no account to be expected to take sides! A seat at the tournament is all that he asks, where he may watch the most sincere and intrepid spirits of his time waging their desperate battle and spilling their life blood upon the sand. How he loves them when, with high gesture, they fling down their gauntlets and utter their blasphemies! His heart then exults within him; but, why? Simply because he is a connoisseur; simply because he _collects_ gauntlets!

_The Public_

Of the modern writers who are in earnest, Mr. Chesterton has had the most ironical fate: he has been read by the people who will never agree with him. To the average man for whom he writes he is an intellectual made doubly inaccessible by his orthodoxy and his paradoxy. It is the advanced, his _bête noire,_ who read him, admire him, and--disagree with him.

_Reader and Writer_

The modern reader loves to be challenged. The modern writer, if he is in earnest, however, is bound to challenge him. This is his greatest burden; that he _must_ fall a victim of the advanced idlers. But one day he thinks he see a way of escape. He has noticed that the reader desires not only to be challenged, but to be able to understand the challenge at a glance. And here he sees his advantage. I shall write, he says, to himself, in a manner beautiful, exact, and yet not easily understood; so I shall throw off the intellectual coquettes and secure my audience of artists, for my style is beautiful; an audience of critics, for my style is exact; an audience of patient, resolute, conscientious intellects, for my style is difficult. This, perhaps, was the conscious practice of Nietzsche. But he did not foresee that, for the benefit of the intellectual coquettes, who must have hold of new thoughts by one end or another, a host of popularizers would be born; he did not reckon with the Nietzscheans!

_Popularity_

How amazingly popular he is. Even the man in the street reads him. Yes; but it is because he has first read the man in the street.

_Middle Age's Betrayals_

It is not easy to tell by a glance what is the character of a young man; his soul has not yet etched itself clearly enough upon his body. But one may read a middle-aged man's soul with perfect ease; and not only his soul but his history. For when a man has passed five-and-forty, he looks--not what he is, perhaps--but certainly what he has been. If he has been invariably respectable, he is now the very picture of respectability. If he has been a man about town or a secret toper, the fact is blazoned so clearly on his face that even a child can read it. If he has studied, his very walk, to use a phrase of Nietzsche's, is learned. As for the poet, we know how terribly poetical he looks in middle age--poor devil! Well, to every one of you, I say, Beware!

_The Novelists and the Artist_

Is it the modern novelists who are to be blamed for the degraded image of the artist which lives in the minds of the cultured populace? Turgenieff in "On the Eve," and Henry James in "Roderick Hudson" display the artist simply as a picturesque waster, an oh so charming, impulsive, childlike, naïve waster. But, in doing so, they surely confused the artist with the man of artistic temperament. Of the artistic temperament, however, the great artists had very often little or nothing--far less, certainly, than either Shubin or Roderick. The great examples of last century, the Goethes, Ibsens, and Nietzsches, knew that there were qualities more essential to them than temperament; discipline, for instance, perseverance, truth to themselves, self-control. How is it possible, indeed, without these virtues--virtues of the most difficult and heroic kind--for the artist to bring his gifts to maturity, to become great? His discipline to beauty must be as severe as the discipline of the saint to holiness. And, then, how has his sensuousness been misconstrued and vulgarized; and treated precisely, indeed, as if it were the licentiousness of a present-day Tom Jones! That artists can be thought about in such a way proves only one thing, namely, in what poor esteem they are now held. We need a new ideal of the artist; or, failing that, an old one, that of Plato, perhaps, or of Leonardo, or of Nietzsche.

_Decadence and Health_

It is in the decadent periods that the most triumphantly healthy men--one or two--appear. The corrupt Italy of the Renaissance gave birth to Leonardo; the Europe of Gautier, Baudelaire and Wilde produced Nietzsche. In decadent eras both disease and health become more self-conscious; they are cultivated, enhanced and refined. It has been said that the best way to remain healthy is not to think of health. But lack of self-consciousness speaks here. Perhaps the Middle Ages were as diseased as our own--only they did not know it! Is decadence nothing more than the symptom of a self-conscious age? And is "objectivity" the antidote? Well, we might believe this if we could renounce our faith that mankind will yet become healthy--if we could become optimists in the present-day sense!

_Art in Modern Society_

An object of beauty has in modern surroundings a dangerous seduction which it did not possess in less hideous eras. In this is there to be found a contributory explanation of Decadence--the decadent being one who feels the power of beauty intensely, and the repulsion from his environment as intensely, and who plunges into the enjoyment of beauty madly, with abandonment? In a society, however, which was not hideous as ours is, and in which beauty was distributed widely over all the aspects and forms of existence, the intoxication of beauty would not be felt with the same terrible intensity; a beautiful object would be enjoyed simply as one among many lovely things. In short, it would be enjoyed in the manner of health, not in that of sickness. It is the _contrast_ that is dangerous; the aridity of modern life arouses a terrible thirst, which is suddenly presented with the spectacle of a beauty unaccountable and awful; and this produces a dislocation and convulsion of the very soul. So that the present-day artist, if he would retain his health--if he would remain an artist--must curb his very love of the beautiful, and treat beauty, when he meets it, as he always does, in the gutter, a little cynically. Otherwise he will lose his wits, and Art will become his Circe. Therefore, mockery and hard laughter--alas, that it _must_ be so!

_Art in Industry_

In those wildernesses of dirt, ugliness and obscenity, our industrial towns, there are usually art galleries, where the daintiest and most beautiful things, the flowers of Greek statuary, for instance, bloom among the grime like a band of gods imprisoned in a slum. The spectacle of art in such surroundings sometimes strikes us as being at once ludicrous and pathetic, like something delicate and lovely sprawling in the gutter, or an angel with a dirty face.

_Conventions_

The revolt against conventions in art, thought, life and manners may be due to at least more than one cause. It is usually ascribed to "vitality" which "breaks through" forms, because it desires to be "free." But common sense tells us that more than two or three of our friends abjure convention for an altogether different reason--to be candid, on account of a _lack_ of vitality resulting in laziness and the inability to endure restraint of any kind. And, for the others, we shall judge their "vitality" to be justified when they build new conventions worthy of observance, instead of running their heads finally into illimitable space. Or does their strength not go just so far? There is something suspicious about this vitality which cannot create: it resembles impotence so much! Heaven preserve the moderns from their "vitality"!

_"Vitality"_

When moderns talk of the "vitality" of their most lauded writer, what they mean is finally the size of his muscles, physical energy, or, at the most, strong emotions; not vigour of mind. Well, let us on no account make the opposite mistake and revile the large muscle and energetic feelings: they are admirable things. Let us point out, however, that vitality of emotion undisciplined by vitality of thought leads nowhere, is often disruptive and cannot build. But to build is our highest duty and our peculiar form of freedom--we who have realized that there is no freedom without power. As for the old freedom--it is only the slaves who are not already tired of it.

_Decadence_

The decisive thing, determining whether an artist shall be major or minor, is very often not artistic at all, but moral. Yes, though it shock our modern ears, let this be proclaimed! The more "temperament" an artist has, the more character he requires to govern it, to make it fruitful for him, if he would not have it get beyond control, and wreck both him and itself. And, consequently, the great artists show, as a rule, less "temperament" than the minor; they appear more self-contained and less "artistic." Indeed, they smile with the hint of irony at the merely "artistic."