Critical Studies Part 14

X

THE UGLINESS OF MODERN LIFE

Pierre Loti has lately written in an alb.u.m published at Schweningen for charity the following pa.s.sages, which will be new to the majority of English readers:--

'The end of April is the season of change, when the Judas trees all along the sh.o.r.es of the Bosphorus are in flower. Nowhere else in the world does one find so many Judas trees as here, where the two extremities of Asia and of Europe are face to face. There are violet-hued tufts and violet-hued alleys; an excess of violet colour so intense, and so unusual, that one's sight is dazzled and bewildered by it. And the wisteria too, which garlands the old eaves of houses with its millions of cl.u.s.ters, hangs out wreaths of a lighter lilac from all the hamlets of grey timber which lean down over the water. This Bosphorus is a great winding river, but a river which has in it the life and the seduction of the sea. The hills on its two sh.o.r.es are covered by palaces, by mosques, by cottages and by tombs, all surrounded by and buried in gardens. And here in the month of April, under this sky still veiled and softened by the clouds of the North, there is a luxury of foliage and blossom in which this violet tone of the Judas trees is dominant, and shines beside the dark and ghost-like cypress groves.

'There are on earth other places grander, and perhaps more beautiful; certainly there are none of greater power to charm.

This scenery of the Bosphorus, from which no stranger ever escapes, is due to the Oriental mystery which still broods on it; it comes from the great closed harems of which the upper storeys hang over the waves; it comes from the veiled women whom we see in the shadow of the gardens, and in the slender caques which pa.s.s. But this Turkish witchery is fading, alas!

Year by year, more and more, great gaps are made in the ranks of the ancient impenetrable buildings, with their grated windows, which plunge their walls into the water and which one could enter from the water, as at Venice; and with them go the slender caques, the costumes, and the women's veils.

'Already, even since last spring, Therapia seems to exist no longer, masked as it is by a gigantic and hideous caravanserai; the exquisite Anatoli Hissar is disfigured by an American college, of a sinister ugliness, which has stuck itself above the ancient castle with an imbecile air of domination.

'And everywhere it is the same story, whether on the sh.o.r.es of Asia or the sh.o.r.es of Europe; frightful new buildings c.u.mber the ground and factory chimneys rise beside minarets of which they are the miserable caricatures. In vain do the Judas trees continue their beautiful flowering; the Bosphorus will soon perish, destroyed by idiotic speculators. And the Turks, my dear friends the Turks, have the indolence or fatalism to let such destruction be wrought every day under their eyes!'

Thus Loti with his poet's soul, his prose which is a golden lyre; and it seems to me as I translate his words that his lament for the Judas trees and the Bosphorus is but the embodiment of a lament which sighs over the whole world. The beauty of the earth is dying, dying like a creature with a cancer in its breast.

The writer of the _Foundations of Belief_ thinks that the earth was made for man; if this presumptuous conviction had indeed any foundation at all what an ingrate would the recipient of the gift have proved himself, what an imbecile, as Loti calls him!

The loss of beauty from the world is generally regarded as the purely sentimental grievance of imaginative persons; but it is not so; it is a loss which must impress its vacuity fatally on the human mind and character. It tends, more than any other loss, to produce that apathy, despondency, and cynical indifference which are so largely characteristic of the modern temper.

The people are taught to think that all animal life may be tortured and slaughtered at pleasure; that physical ills are to be feared beyond all others, and escaped at all vicarious cost; that profit is the only question of importance in commerce; that antiquity, loveliness, and grace are like wild flowers, mere weeds to be torn up by a steam harrow. This is not the temper which makes n.o.ble characters, or generous and sensitive minds. It is the temper which acc.u.mulates wealth, and which flies readily to war to defend that wealth; but which is absolutely barren of all impersonal sympathy, of all beautiful creation.

Taken as a whole, artists have the kindliest natures and the happiest temperaments of any body of men. Why? because their minds are always more or less susceptible to the impressions and influences of beauty--beauty of line, of hue, of proportion, of suggestion; beauty alike of the near and of the far; and they surround themselves with their own ideals of these in such measure as their powers permit. But, even in artists, modern life tends to deform these ideals, and in any exhibition of modern paintings ninety-nine out of a hundred of these works will be ugly; they will display, perhaps, admirable technique, complete mastery of detail, fine brush work, perhaps unexceptionable drawing, but the combination of these qualities will produce merely a sense of ugliness on the retina of the observer of them.

Unless the man of genius buries himself resolutely in the country and by the sea, as Tennyson did, as Clausen does, he cannot altogether escape the influence of the unloveliness of modern life. It would be impossible to painters and poets to live in Regent's Park or the Avenue de Villiers, in Cromwell Road or the Via n.a.z.ionale, or in any of the new quarters of English or Continental towns, unless their instincts of beauty had become dulled and dwarfed by the atmosphere around them; life for any length of time would be insupportable to them under the conditions in which it is of necessity lived in modern cities; and this perversion of their natural instincts makes the tendency to replace beauty by eccentricity and by weirdness fatally frequent. Their critics obey the same influences, and modern art-criticism, like the recent studies of Robert de la Sizzeranne on English painting, is characterised by what appears to be a total incapacity to appreciate the quality of beauty, a total insensibility to its absence from modern art.

In sculpture this is as remarkable as in painting, and is still more alarming and painful, the ugliness of realism and of eccentricity being a still more offensive blasphemy in marble than it is in colour. If the most ordinary sense of beauty, as distinguished from deformity, were not extinct in the world, would any one of the monuments erected within the last half century be allowed to disfigure the cities of Europe? Carnot in a frock coat lying in the arms of a female, supposed to represent France, with his boots thrust out towards the spectator; Victor Emmanuel in a c.o.c.ked hat with his body like a swollen bladder stuck on two wooden ninepins; Peabody sitting in an arm-chair as if he awaited a dentist; old William of Prussia like a child's tin soldier magnified, and with the greater men who made him dwarfed military manikins underneath; black-metal Garibaldis, and Gordons, and Napiers, and Macmahons; Claude Bernard in the act of mutilating a live dog--every imaginable abomination in every street and square of every capital, and even of every noticeable town, proclaim to all the quarters of the globe the debas.e.m.e.nt of a once pure and lofty art, and the utter inept.i.tude and vulgarity of modern taste. Of what use is it to attempt to educate the nations when such things as these are set up in their midst?

An English archbishop at a recent Royal Academy banquet said that he hoped the time was near at hand when every child in England would learn to draw. Apart from the gross folly of teaching a child anything for which its own natural talent does not pre-dispose it, and the injury done to the world by the artificial manufacture of millions of indifferent draughtsmen, what use can it be to attempt to awaken perception of art in a generation which is begotten where art and nature are alike persistently outraged?

It is entirely useless to multiply art schools, and desire that every child should learn to draw, when all the tendencies of modern life have become such that every rule of art is violated in it and every artistic sense offended in an ordinary daily walk.

Amongst even the most cultured cla.s.ses few have really any sensibility to beauty. Not one in a thousand pauses in the hurried excitements of social life to note beauty in nature; to art there is accorded a pa.s.sing attention because it is considered _chic_ to do so; but all true sense of art must be lacking in a generation whose women wear the spoils of tropical birds, slain for them, on their heads and skirts, and whose men find their princ.i.p.al joy for nearly half the year in the slaughter of tame creatures, and bespatter with blood the white h.e.l.lebore of their winter woods.

Beauty is daily more and more withdrawn from the general life of the people. Fidgety and repressive bye-laws tend to suppress that element of the picturesque which popular life by its liberties, and by its open-air pastimes and peddlings, created for itself. The police are everywhere, and street-life is joyless and colourless. Even within doors, in the houses of poor people, the things of daily usage have lost their old-world charm; the ugly sewing-machine has replaced the spinning-wheel, the cooking-range the s.p.a.cious open hearth, the veneered machine-made furniture the solid home-made oaken chests and presses, a halfpenny newspaper the old family Bible; whilst out of doors the lads and la.s.ses must not sing or dance, the dog must not play or bark, the chair must not stand out on the pavement, the bells must not ring their chimes, only the cyclist, or the automobilist, lord of all, may tear along and leave broken limbs and bruised flesh of others behind him at his pleasure.

If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the ma.s.s of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could a.s.sume the ludicrous position necessary for it. Nor would the auto-car with its stench of petroleum be tolerated for an instant in lanes and roads. Nor could modern dress be endured for a day were there any true sense of fitness, of harmony, and of colour extant in modern times. Even the great Catholic pageants are spoiled in their grouping and splendour by the dull crowds of ill-dressed, dingily clad townsfolk which drown their effect like a vast tide of muddy water rising over a garden of flowers. It is impossible for us, even when looking at anything so fine in colour as the Carnival at Milan, the Fete Dieu at Brussels, the Students' Festivals in Munich, or any other of the great Continental processions, to judge of what their extreme beauty must have been when not only the procession itself but all the people in the streets, all the whole vast tide of sightseers, comprising even the very beggars, were equally full of colour and 'composed' harmoniously with the central figures.

A gorgeous spectacle of the streets now, whether it be popular, military, or religious, is swamped in the ma.s.s of dull-coloured hues, and grotesquely ugly head-gear, common to the whole population of a city. Its effect may struggle as it will: it sinks under the preponderating ma.s.s as a b.u.t.terfly will be beaten down under a dirty, drenching, city rain.

There is a modern custom in Italy which is typical of the havoc made by avarice and indifference and commerce running together hand in hand. It is the shocking habit of stripping all evergreen trees of their leaves to sell them to chemists, gilders, dyers, and the managers of what in France we call _pompes funebres_. Even magnolias are not spared, and these magnificent trees stand naked and despoiled in nearly all the gardens and parks all over the country. In every town there are now offices for the consignment and purchase of these leaves; to strip and sell, to buy and export them, has become a recognised trade, and hundreds of tons weight are every year, from September to April, sent out of Italy, chiefly to Germany, Austria and Russia. The injury done to the trees is, of course, immeasurable. After a few seasons they become anaemic, dry up, and slowly perish, whilst the aspect of the gardens of which the bay, myrtle, box, laurel, arbutus, and magnolia were of late such conspicuous ornaments is, of course, utterly changed and ruined. Unless by some edict of the State the practice be speedily stopped, another generation will see nothing of those avenues and groves and alleys of evergreen foliage which have been the glory of Italian palaces and villas since the days of the Caesars.

Follow the architectural history of any city, and you find it during the last half-century the sorrowful record of a pitiful destruction. The great gardens are always the first thing sacrificed. They are swept away, and their places covered by brick and mortar with an incredible indifference. Fine houses, even when of recent construction, like the Pompeiian house of Prince Napoleon in Paris, are pulled down out of a mere speculative mania to build something else, or to cut a long, straight street as uninteresting and as unsuggestive as the boxwood protractor which lies on a surveyor's desk.

The greatest crime, or one of the greatest crimes (for there are others black as night), of which the nineteenth century has been guilty has been the driving of the people out of long familiar homes in the name and under the pretext of hygiene, but in fact for the enrichment of contractors, town councillors, and speculators of every kind. It began with Haussmann; it has continued in Paris, and everywhere else, with delirious haste ever since his time, as a burglar may drag a grey-beard to his death. The modern aediles with their court of ravenous parasites cannot understand, would not deign even to consider, the sorrow of a humble citizen driven out of a familiar little home with nooks and corners filled with memories and a roof-tree dear to generations. Go into an old street of any old city you will, and you will almost certainly find a delight for the eye in archway and ogive, in lintel and cas.e.m.e.nt, in winding stair and leaning eave; in the wallflowers rooted in the steps, in the capsic.u.m which has seeded itself between the stones, in the swallows' nests under the gargoyle, in the pots of basil and mignonette on the window-sills. But the modern street with its dreary monotony, its long and high blank s.p.a.ces, its even surfaces where not a seed can cling or a bird can build, what will it say to your eyes or your heart? You will see its dull, pretentious uniformity repeated on either side of you down a mile-long vista, and you will curse it.

It is natural that the people shut up in these structures crave for drink, for nameless vices, for the brothel, the opium den, the cheap eating-house and gaming booth; anything, anywhere, to escape from the monotony which surrounds them and which leaves them no more charm in life than if they were rabbits shut up in a physiologist's experimenting cage, and fed on gin-soaked grains. No one in whom the aesthetic sense was really awakened could dwell in a manufacturing city, or indeed in any modern town. The 'flat,' whether in a 'first-cla.s.s mansion,' or in a 'block' for the working man, would be more intolerable than a desert island to anyone with a sense of the true charm of life, or, one may add, any sensitiveness to the meaning of the word 'home'; that word which is to be found in every language, though the English people do not think so, and which is one of the sweetest and most eloquent in all tongues. The Americans attach extreme pride to the fact that their 'sky-sc.r.a.pers' are so advanced that your horses and carriage can be carried up on a lift to the highest storey, and the nags, if it do not make them dizzy, can survey the city in a bird's-eye view. But even this supreme achievement of architects and engineers cannot lend to the cube, shared with a score of others, the charm, the idiosyncrasy, the meaning, the soul, which exhale from the smallest cottage where those who love dwell all alone, through whose lattices a candle shines as a star to the returning wanderer, and on whose lowly roof memory lies like a benediction.

According to the statistics of modern cities the ma.s.s of middle-cla.s.s and labouring-cla.s.s people change their lodgings or tenements every two or three years; three years is even an unusually long time of residence.

What can a people who flit like this, continually, know of the real meaning of a home?

The same restlessness and dissatisfaction which make these cla.s.ses change their residence so frequently, make the wealthier cla.s.ses flit in another way, from continent to continent, from capital to capital, from one pleasure-place to another, from one house-party to another, from the yacht to the _rouge-et-noir_ tables, from the bath to the coverside, from the homewoods to the antipodes, in an endless gyration which yields but little pleasure, but which they deem as necessary as cayenne pepper with their hot soup.

I believe that this monotony and lack of interest in the towns which they inhabit fatally affect the minds of those whose lot it is to go to and from the streets in continual toil, and produce in them fatigue, heaviness and gloom; what the scholar and the poet suffer from articulately and consciously, the people in general suffer from inarticulately and unconsciously. The gaiety of nations dies down as the beauty around them pales and pa.s.ses. They know not what it is that affects them, but they are affected by it none the less, as a young child is hurt by the darkness, though it knows not what dark or light means.

Admit that the poorer people were ill-lodged in the Middle Ages, that the houses were ill-lit, undrained, with the gutter water splashing the threshold, and the eaves of the opposite houses so near that the sun could not penetrate into the street. All this may have been so, but around two-thirds of the town were gardens and fields, the neighbouring streets were full of painted shrines, metal lamps, gargoyles, pinnacles, balconies of hand-forged iron or hand-carved stone, solid doors, bronzed gates, richly-coloured frescoes; and the eyes and the hearts of the dwellers in them had wherewithal to feed on with pleasure, not to speak of the constant stream of many-coloured costume and of varied pageant or procession which was for ever pa.s.sing through them. Then in the niches there were figures; at the corners there were shrines; on the rivers there were beautiful carved bridges, of which examples are still left to our day in the Rialto and the Vecchio. There were barges with picture-illumined sails, and pleasure-galleys gay to the sights, and everywhere there were towers and spires, and crenulated walls, and the sculptured fronts of houses and churches and monasteries, and close at hand was the greenness of wood and meadow, the freshness of the unsullied country. Think only what that meant; no miles on miles of dreary suburban waste to travel; no pert aggressive modern villas to make day hateful; no underground railway stations and subways; no hissing steam, no grinding and shrieking cable trams; no h.e.l.l of factory smoke and jerry-builders' lath and plaster; no glaring geometrical flower beds; but the natural country running, like a happy child laden with posies, right up to the walls of the town.

The cobbler or craftsman, who sat and worked in his doorway, and saw the whole vari-coloured life of a mediaeval city pa.s.s by him, was a very different being to the modern mechanic, a cypher amongst hundreds, shut in a factory room, amongst the deafening noise of cogwheel and pistons.

Even from a practical view of his position, his guilds were a very much finer organisation than modern trades-unions, and did far more for him in his body and his mind. In the exercise of his labour he could then be individual and original, he is now but one-thousandth part of an inch in a single tooth of a huge revolving cogwheel. The mediaeval house might be in itself nothing more than a cover from bad weather, but all about it there was infinite variety; all life in the street or alley was richly coloured, even the gutter brawls were medleys of shining steel, and broken plumes, and many-coloured coats, and broidered badges, a whirl of bright hues, which sent a painter in joy to his palette.

Indoors there were the spinning-wheel, the copper vessels, the walnut presses, the settle by the wide warm hearth, the shrine upon the stairs which the women made fresh with flowers. The river was gay with blazoned hulls and painted sails; over its bridges the processions of church or guild pa.s.sed like embroidered ribbons slowly unrolling; the workman had a busy life, and often a perilous life, but one still blent with leisure; and the mariners' tales of wondrous lands unknown lent to life that witchery of the remote and unattainable, that delightful thrill of mystery and awe, which to the omniscient and cynical modern soul seem childishness too trivial for words.

Try and realise what life was like when Chaucer walked through Chepe, when Henri de Valois entered Venice, when Philippe le Bel rode through the oak woods of Vincennes, when Petrarca was crowned in Rome, when William Shakespeare sauntered through Warwickshire lanes in cowslip time. Read Michelet's description of a Flemish Burgher, and contrast it with the existence of a shopkeeper in a modern town. Read Froude's description of a sea-going merchantman of Elizabeth's days, and contrast it with the captain of a modern liner. You will at once see how full of colour and individuality were the former lives; how colourless, unlovely, and deprived of all initiative are the latter. Being shorn of freedom, interest, and beauty, modern life finds vent for the feverishness which is cooped up in it in commercial gambling--gambling of all kinds from the Stock Exchange to the tontine, from the foreign loan to the suburban handicap--and existence is but one gigantic lottery. Even when a man goes on an excursion of pleasure he will at starting buy a penny ticket which insures his life for a hundred pounds in case of accident! How can such a populace, always haunted by the fear of death, possibly enjoy?

The great increase in cold-blooded and ferocious murders, done on slight motive and with cynical indifference, is the natural issue of this way of looking at life. Who has no reverence for his own life has naturally none for the lives of others. When a man regards his own existence as a mere parcel to be adequately paid for with a hundred pounds, it follows as the night the day that he cannot regard the life of another as worth twenty shillings. Even death itself is made grotesque by modern science, and the arms and legs and headless trunks flung into the air by the explosion of a bomb are robbed of that mute majesty which the dead body claims by right of nature. They seem no more than shreds of cloth or fragments of chopped wood. It is to be feared, moreover, that the extreme facilities given by science for instantaneous and widespread slaughter will lead gradually to greater indifference still in the public mind to a.s.sa.s.sination, and it will become so common that it will be scarcely regarded with disapproval.

Many verdicts in various countries show the growing indulgence of the law to murders. In France and Italy especially even a cold-blooded murder will meet scant punishment, whilst one due to sudden pa.s.sion is almost sure of being either wholly unpunished, or very lightly sentenced. In many cases, even in England, the juries have been of an extraordinary tenderness towards murderers whose guilt they were obliged to admit. At Chester, in England, a few weeks ago, four young colliers who set on and stoned another to death, and flung his body in a ca.n.a.l, were sentenced by Mr Justice Lawrance to the punishment of four months in prison for three of them, and nine months for the ringleader, and nothing more.

Many men of violent temper would think so small a price well paid to rid themselves of a foe or of a rival. The excuse for the colliers was that they had all been drinking. This is an excuse very generally made in these days of culture and compulsory education.

It will be said that this has nothing to do with the presence or absence of beauty in national life. But it has much to do with the callousness and apathy and egotism so general in national life; and the ugliness of surrounding influences and poverty of design in the arts so common in modern times are chief factors in generating this lamentable temper.

Happiness, and its companions goodwill and kindly sympathy, are insensibly suggested and increased by what is beautiful, artistic, and full of good colour and varied design. Even the physical aspect of man is affected by that which it looks upon, that by which it is surrounded, and the French woman was a wise mother who during her pregnancy went to gaze upon the finest works of the Louvre. How much, on the contrary, may the embryo be affected for ill by sordid, dreary, and unlovely conditions which environ the parent during the period of gestation?

There can be, I think, no doubt that physical beauty is degenerating rapidly, and the frequency with which the scrofulous mouth is seen in children, even in children of the aristocracies, is alarming for the future of the race. In the working cla.s.ses the offspring must be fatally affected by the poisonous trades, the sickening effluvia, the deadly conditions amongst which modern commerce requires its slaves to spend their lives.

Even the country fields are sullied by chemicals and stink of sulphates, phosphates, and human excrements. Agriculture tends to become a mere manufacture, like any other, surrounded by the din of pistons, the fumes of vapour, the jar of wheels.

Beauty is the safest stimulant, the surest tonic, the most precious inspiration; natural beauty first of all, and the beauty of the arts closely following, twinlike handmaids to Aphrodite. But to perceive this the mentally blind are as incapable as the physically blind; and such, mental cecity is as general in these days as myopy is common in the schoolrooms of this generation.

Every year all cities, and even all towns, are severed farther and farther from the country; every year the electric wires multiply for telegraph and telephone; the tramways and railways increase, the sickening grinding noises common to these methods of locomotion fill the air, and the extraordinary ugliness, which seems attached like a doom to any modern invention, is multiplied on all sides. That, in an age which considers itself educated, such hideous constructions as the great wheels of Chicago and of Earl's Court should attract sane persons as a diversion will alone prove how completely the instinct of correct taste, with its accompanying abhorrence of deformity, has become extinct in all modern crowds.

With the ever-increasing use of steam, the beauty of the sky yearly grows dimmer and more veiled. That a race with any pretensions to education and perception can live contentedly under such a sky as that of London would appear an incredible fact, did we not know that it is an indisputable one. Whoever revisits Paris after a few seasons' absence finds the brilliancy of its life more and more dimmed with every decade by the sullying of the atmosphere through the increase of factories, railways and other works, and the invasion by the town of its once beautiful girdle of wood, orchard, and garden. Every year national life everywhere grows less varied, less picturesque, more unlovely, and every year finds the people more contented to dwell with no other horizon than a bank of smoke.

It was monstrous that the selection of the glades and pastures of the New Forest, for military manoeuvres, should ever have been permitted by the British War Office. But the mere fact that it _was_ monstrous, that it was an offence to history and nature, that it disturbed and distressed wild life, that it wounded and outraged the feelings of residents and the sentiments of artists, was a reason all-sufficient to make the modern temper brutally enamoured of the idea. Merely because the despatch of the battalions and field batteries thither was a vandalism, and caused pain to more aesthetic minds, military manoeuvres in the New Forest became all at once a project to be insisted on and carried out at all costs. The same outrage is now being done to Stonehenge.

The modern temper cannot respect, cannot appreciate, cannot love, but it can hate; and its hatred shows itself in damage and destruction everywhere, whether it set fire to the n.o.ble old house of the Hanseatic League at Antwerp, pull down the water towers of Dieppe, plant the jerry-builder before the Lateran, drag a railway train up to Murren, or trample down with ill-shod boy-soldiers the thyme and the bracken of the Conqueor's woods and the turf which the Druids trod.

The modern temper resembles those children in Victor Hugo's romance who, being left alone with the beautiful and ancient _Horae_, find no prank so delightful as to tear from end to end the illuminated text of the book and its perfect miniatures, clapping their hands as each fair thing perishes. Nor is there any indication of the advent of anyone who will take the book of the world from the destroying hands, and save what still remains of its beauty.

There is, on the contrary, every sign that the future will see a still greater domination of that rude, cold, and cruel temper which takes pleasure in innovation and obliteration, and sneers, with contemptuous conceit, at those who are pained by such acts of desecration. It is the same sneer, the same leering and self-satisfied sn.i.g.g.e.r, with which it views the expression and evidence of pity for, and solidarity with, what it is pleased to call the lower animals.

The Langdale Pikes are being pierced and blasted for iron foundries and slate quarries. The great forest of La Haye near Nancy is being destroyed by military fortifications, and by foundries and by factories.

All the valley of the Meuse and the Moselle is sullied with factory smoke and blasting powder. The Bay of Amalfi and the sh.o.r.e of Posilippo are defiled by cannon foundries. The Isle of St Elena at Venice is laid waste to serve as a railway factory. All the Ardennes are scorched and soiled, and sickened with stench of smoke and suffocating slag. The Peak Country and the Derwent vales are being scarred and charred for railway lines, mines, and factories. Amsterdam, so late the Venice of the North, is becoming an unmeaning ma.s.s of modern insignificance and ugliness; what has been done to the Venice of the South is such outrage that it might wake Tiziano from under his weight of marble in the Frari Church, and call the Veronese from his grave.