Masques & Phases Part 18

To the Pic de Nere, 3.75 hrs. from Luz, there and back 6.5 hrs.; a delightful excursion, which can be made on horseback part of the way: guide 12, horse 10 fr.; _adders abound_.

For synthetic prose you will have to go to Tacitus to find the equal of that pa.s.sage. No more is heard of the excursion. 'We leave Luz by the Barege road,' the text goes on to say. Reflections and picturesque word- painting are left for Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Arthur Symons, and Murray.

In _Southern Italy_, Baedeker yields to softer and more Virgilian influences. The purple patches are longer and more frequent. On page 99 we learn not only how to get to Baiae, but that

Luxury and profligacy, however, soon took up their abode at Baiae, and the desolate ruins, which now alone encounter the eye, point the usual moral!

And from the preface to the same guide we obtain this remarkable advice:--

The traveller should adopt the Neapolitan custom of rejecting fish that are not quite fresh.

But it is certain educational works, popular in my childhood, that have yielded the more exotic Elethian blossoms for my Anthology. There are pa.s.sages I would not willingly let die. In one of these books general knowledge was imparted after the manner of Magnall: 'What is the world?

The earth on which we live.' 'Who was Raphael?' 'How is rice made?'

After such desultory interrogatives, without any warning, came Question 15: 'Give the character of Prince Potemki':--

Sordidly mean, ostentatiously prodigal, filthily intemperate and affectedly refined. Disgustingly licentious and extravagantly superst.i.tious, a brute in appet.i.te, vigorous though vacillating in action.

Until I went to the University, a great many years afterwards, I never learnt who Potemki was. At the age of seven he stood to me for what 'Timberio' still is for Capriote children. My teacher obviously did not know. She always evaded my inquiries by saying, 'You will know when you are older, darling.' Suspecting her ignorance, I became pertinacious.

'When I am as old as you?' was my ungallant rejoinder. I had to write the character out a hundred times. Then one Christmas Day I ventured to ask my father, who said I would find out about him in Gibbon. But I knew he was not speaking the truth, because he laughed in a nervous, peculiar way, and added that since I was so fond of history I must go to Oxford when I was older. I loathed history, and inwardly resolved that Cambridge should be my University. My mother admitted entire ignorance of Potemki's ident.i.ty; and on my sketching his character (for I was proud of the knowledge), said he was obviously a 'horrid' man. His personality shadowed my childhood with a deadly fascination, which has not entirely worn away; producing the same sort of effect on me as an imaginary portrait by Pater.

In a semi-geographical work called _Near Home; or, Europe Described_, published by Hatchards in the fifties (though my friend, Mr. Arthur Humphreys, denies all knowledge of it), I can recall many stereos of dialectic cast in a Socratic mould:--

_Q_. What is the religion of the Italians? _A_. They are Roman Catholics.

_Q_. What do the Roman Catholics worship? _A_. Idols and a piece of bread.

_Q_. Would not G.o.d be very angry if He knew the Italians worshipped idols and a piece of bread? _A_. G.o.d IS very angry.

Mr. Augustine Birrell, if still interested in educational phenomena, will not be surprised to learn that when I reached to man's estate I 'embraced the errors of Rome,' as my historical manual would have phrased it.

I pity the child who did not learn universal history from Collier. How tame are the periods of Lord Acton, the Rev. William Hunt, Froude, Freeman, Oman, Round, even Macaulay, and little Arthur, beside the rich Elethian periods of William Francis Collier. Not Berenson, not Byron, not Beerbohm, have given us such a picture of Venice as Collier in describing the Council of Ten:--

The ten were terrible; but still more terrible were the three inquisitors--two black, one red--appointed in 1454. Deep mystery hung over the three. They were elected by the ten; none else knew their names. Their great work was to kill; and no man--doge, councillor, or inquisitor--was beyond their reach. Secretly they p.r.o.nounced a doom; and ere long the stiletto or the poison cup had done its work, or the dark waters of the lagoon had closed over a life. The spy was everywhere. No man dared to speak out, for his most intimate companions might be on the watch to betray him. Bronze vases, shaped like a lion's mouth, gaped at the corner of every square to receive the names of suspected persons. Gloom and suspicion haunted gondola and hearth!!

It is owing to Collier that I know at least one fact about the Goths who took Rome, 'having reduced the citizens to feed on mice and nettles, A.D.

546,' a diet to which many of the hotel proprietors in the imperial city still treat their clients.

But let _Bellows' Dictionary_, a friend and instructor of riper years, close my list of great examples and my theme. The criticism is apposite to myself, and its only oddity--its Elethian quality, if I may say so--is its presence in that marvellous miniature whose ingenious author you would never suspect could have found room for such portentous observations in the small duodecimo to which he confined himself:--

Unaffected language is the inseparable accompaniment of natural refinement; but that affectation which would make up for paucity of thought by overstrained expression is a mark of vulgarity from which no accident of social position can redeem those who are guilty of it.

_To_ MORE ADEY, ESQ.

THERE IS NO DECAY.

_A Lecture delivered in the Old Bluecoat School, Liverpool, on February 12th, 1908_.

'In every age there is some question raised as to its wants and powers, its strength and weakness, its great or small worth and work; and in every age that question is waste of time and speech. To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only as an age of small souls; the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation. Each century has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or material glory; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wave of emulous impotence set up against the weakness of the age.'--SWINBURNE.

Before the invention of printing, or let me say before the cheapening of printing, the lecturer was in a more fortunate position than he is to- day; because, if a learned man, he was able to give his audience certain pieces of information which he could be fairly sure _some_ of his listeners had never heard before. The arrival in town or city of Abelard, Paracelsus, or Erasmus, to take the first instances occurring to me, must have been a great event, the importance of which we can scarcely appreciate at the present day. It must have excited our forefathers, at least as much as the arrival of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in any large city, excites I imagine, all of us to-day. But multiplication of books has really rendered lecturers, as instructors, mere intellectual Oth.e.l.los; their occupation is gone; the erudition of the ages is now within reach of all; though educational books were fairly expensive within living memory. You owe, therefore, a debt of grat.i.tude to the _Times_ and the _Daily Mail_ for bringing Encyclopaedias of all kinds into the range of the shallowest purse and in contact with the shallowest heads in the community.

But in case your learned professors have not contributed all their hidden lore and scholarship to the cheap Encyclopaedias, and still allow their learning to leak out at lectures, you may have come expecting instruction from me on some neglected subject. If that is so, I must confess myself at once an impostor. I have no information to give you. I a.s.sume your erudition to compensate for my own lack of it. There are no facts which I might bring before you that you cannot find stated more clearly in valuable manuals or works of reference, if you have not mastered them already. There is no scientific or philosophic theory which I might propound that you could not hear with greater benefit from others.

Briefly, I have no orange up my sleeve.

Let there be no deception or disappointment. I want you to play with an idea as children play at ball--not football--but the old game of catch.

And out of this discussion, for I trust that you will all differ, if not with me, at least with each other, trains of thought may be quickened; mental gra.s.sland ploughed up; hidden perspectives unveiled. Above all, I would stimulate you to an appreciation of your contemporaries and of contemporary literature, contemporary drama, and contemporary art.

Every few years distinguished men lift their voices, and tell us that all is over, _decay has begun_. The obscure and the anonymous echo the sentiment in the London Press. With the fall of any Government its supporters prophesy the rapid decomposition of the Empire; in the pulpit eloquent preachers of every sect and communion, thundering against the vices of Society, declare that Society is breaking up. Of course, not being in Society, I am hardly in a position to judge; and the vices I know only at second-hand--from the preachers. Yet I see no outward signs of decay in Society; it dresses quite as well, in some ways better than, it did. Society eats as much, judging from the size and number of new restaurants; its patronises as usual the silliest plays in London, and buys in larger quant.i.ties than ever the idiotic novels provided for it.

Have you ever been to a bazaar in aid of Our Dumb Friends' League? Well, you see Society _there_, I can tell you; it is not dumb. And the conversation sounds no less vapid and no less brilliant than we are told it was in the eighteenth century; the dresses and faces are quite as pretty. But much as I should like to discuss the decay of English Society and the English nation, I feel that such lofty themes are beyond my reach. I am concerned only with the so-called decay of humbler things, the abstract manifestations of the human intellect, the Arts and Sciences. And lest, weary at the end of my discourse, you forget the argument or miss it, let me state at once what I wish to suggest, nay, what I wish to a.s.sert, _there is no such thing as decay_. Decay is an intellectual Mrs. Harris, a highly useful ent.i.ty wherewith the journalistic Gamps try to frighten Betsy Prig. Of course an obvious objection to my a.s.sertion is the truism that everything has a life; and that towards the end of that natural life we are correct in speaking of approaching decay. With physical phenomena, however, I am not dealing, though I may say, by the way, that there are many examples of human intellect maturing in middle life or extreme old age. William Blake's masterpiece, the ill.u.s.trations to the Book of Job, were executed when he was sixty-eight, a few years before his death. The late Lord Kelvin is an example of an unimpaired intellect. Still, it must be admitted that while nations may be destroyed by conquest, or by conquering too much and becoming absorbed by the conquered, and that ancient buildings may be pulled down or restored, so, too, conventions in literature and schools of art have been brought to an end by war, plague, or death--ostensibly brought to an end. But it is an error to suppose that art or literature, because their development was artificially arrested, were in a state of decay.

The favourite object-lesson of our childhood was the Roman Empire.

'Here's richness,' as Mr. Squeers said, here was decline, and Gibbon wrote his prose epic from that point of view. I hardly dare to differ with the greatest of English historians, but if we approach his work in the scientific spirit with which we should always regard history, we shall find that Gibbon draws false deductions from the undisputed facts, the unchallenged a.s.sertions of his history. Commencing with the Roman Empire almost in its cradle, he sees in every twist of the infant limbs prognostications of premature decline in a dispensation which by his own computation lasted over fourteen hundred years. It is safe enough to prophesy about the past. Everything I admit has a life, but I do not consider old age decay any more than I think exuberant youth immature childhood; death may be only arrested development and life itself an exhausted convention. Have you ever tried to count the number of reasons Gibbon gives (each one is a princ.i.p.al reason) for the cause of Roman decline? His philosophy reminds me of Flaubert's hero, who observed that if Napoleon had been content to remain a simple soldier in the barracks at Ma.r.s.eilles, he might still be on the throne of France. If we really accept Gibbon's view of history, I am not surprised that any one should be nervous about the British Empire. The great intellectual idea of the Roman dominion, arrested indeed by barbarian invasion, philosophically never decayed. Some of it was embalmed in Byzantium--particularly its artistic and literary sides; its religious forces were absorbed by the Roman Church, as Hobbes pointed out in a very wonderful pa.s.sage; its humanism and polity became the common property of the European nations of to-day. Gibbon's work should have been called 'The Rise and Progress of Greco-Roman Civilisation.' That is not such a good t.i.tle, but it would have been more accurate. And if you compare critically the history of any manifestation of the human intellect, religion, literature, painting, architecture, or science, you will find that the development of one expressive force has been momentarily arrested while some other manifestation is a.s.serting itself synchronously with the supposed decay in a manifestation whose particular history you are studying. Always regard the deductions of the historian with the same scepticism that you regard the deductions of fiscal politicians.

Every one knows the charming books by writers more learned than I can pretend to be, where the history of Italian art is traced from Giotto downwards; the story of Giotto and the little lamb, now, alas! entirely exploded; of Cimabue's Madonna being carried about in processions, and now discovered to have been painted by some one else! Then on to Ma.s.saccio through the delightful fifteenth century until you see in the text-book in large print, like the flashes of harbour lights after a bad Channel crossing, RAPHAEL, MICHAEL ANGELO, DA VINCI. But when you come to the seventeenth century, Guido Reni, the Carracci, and other painters (for the present moment out of fashion), painters whose work fetches little at Christie's, the art critic and historian begin to snivel about decay; not only of Italian art, but of the Italian peninsula; and their sobs will hardly ever allow them to get as far as Longhi, Piazetta, and Tiepolo, those great masters of the eighteenth century.

But we know, painters certainly must know if they look at old masters at all, that Tiepolo, if he was the last of the old masters, was also the first of the moderns; it was his painting in Spain which influenced Goya, and Goya is not only a deceased Spanish master, he is a European master of to-day. You can trace his influence through all the great French figure-painters of the nineteenth century down to those of the New English Art Club, though they may not have actually known they were under his influence. Painting commences with a childish naturalism, such as you see on the walls of pre-historic caves; that is why savages always prefer photographs to any work of art, and why photographers are always so savage about works of art. Gradually this childish naturalism develops into decoration; it becomes stylistic. The decoration becomes perfected and sterile; then there arises a more sophisticated generation, longing for naturalism, for pictorial _vraisemblance_, without the childishness of the cave pictures. And their new art develops at the expense of decoration; it becomes perfect and sterile. What is commonly called decay is merely stylistic development. The exquisite art of Byzantium was wrongly considered as the debas.e.m.e.nt of Greco-Roman art. It was really the decorative expansion of it; the conventionalising of exaggerated realism. The same might have happened in Europe after the Baroque and Rococo fashions had their day; politics and commerce interfered. The intensely artificial painting of France, to which Diderot objected so much, had become perfect and sterile. Then (happily or unhappily, in whichever direction your tastes lie) the French Revolution, by a pathetic misunderstanding of cla.s.sical ideals, paved the way for the naturalism of the misnamed Romantic school. We were told, a short time ago, that Sienese painting antic.i.p.ated by a few years the Florentine manifestations of Cimabue and Giotto, but Mr. Berenson has pointed out that Sienese art is not the beginning but the end of an exquisite convention, the quintessence of Byzantium. In the Roscoe collection at Liverpool you have one of the most superb and precious examples of this delicate, impeccable and decadent art: 'Christ found in the Temple,' by Simone di Martini.

In Egyptian art, again, compare the pure naturalism of the wonderful Egyptian scribe of the Louvre, belonging, I am told, to the fifth or sixth dynasty, with the hieratic and conventional art of the twelfth dynasty; while in the eighteenth dynasty you get a reversion to realism, which critics have the audacity to call a 'revival of art.' But you might just as well call it decayed, as indeed they do call some of the most magnificent Ptolemaean remains, simply because they happen to belong to a certain date which, by Egyptian reckoning, may be regarded as very recent. Just now we very foolishly talk in accents of scorn about the early Victorian art, of which I venture to remind you Turner was not the least ornament. Of course commercial and political events often interrupt the gestation of the arts, or break our idols in pieces.

Another generation picks up the fragments and puts them together in the wrong way, and that is why it is so confusing and interesting; but there is no reason to be depressed about it. Only iconoclasm need annoy us. In histories of English literature too often you find the same att.i.tude when the writer comes to a period which he dislikes. Restoration Comedy is often said to be a period of debas.e.m.e.nt, and with Tennyson the young student is given to understand that English literature ceased altogether.

But perhaps there are more modern text-books where the outlook is less gloomy. If, instead of reading the history of literature, you read the literature itself, you will find plenty of instances of writers at the most brilliant periods complaining of decay.

George Putman, in the _Art of English Poesy_, published in 1589, when English poetry was starting on a particularly glorious period, says, 'In these days all poets and poesy are despised, they are subject to scorn and derision,' and 'this proceeds through the barbarous ignorance of the time--in _other ages it was not so_.' Then Jonson, in his 'Discoveries,'

lamenting the decline of literature, says, 'It is the disease of the age, and no wonder if the world, growing old, begins to be infirm.' There are hundreds of others which will immediately occur to you, from Chaucer to Tennyson, though Pope made n.o.ble protests on behalf of his contemporaries. You have only got to compare these lachrymose observations with the summary of the year's literature in any newspaper--'literary output' is the detestable expression always used--and you will find the same note of depression. 'The year has not produced a single masterpiece. Glad as we have been to welcome Mr. Blank's verse, "Larkspurs" cannot be compared with his first delicious volume, "Tealeaves," published thirty years ago.' Then turn to the review in the same paper of 'Tealeaves' thirty years ago. 'Coa.r.s.e animalism draped in the most seductive hues of art and romance, we will not a.n.a.lyse these poems, we will not even pretend to give the reasons on which our opinion is based.' Or read the incisive 'Musings without Method,' in _Blackwood's Magazine_, on contemporary literature and contemporary things generally.

Again, every painter is told that his work is not as good as last year, and that we have no one like t.i.tian or Velasquez. The Royal Academy is always said to be worse than usual. I have known the summer exhibitions at Burlington House for twenty years. Let me a.s.sure you throughout that period they have always been quite as bad as they are now. But we do not want painters like t.i.tian or Velasquez; we want something else. If painters were like t.i.tian or Velasquez they would not be artists at all.

When Velasquez went to Rome he was told he ought to imitate Raphael; had he done so should we regard him as the greatest painter in the world? If Rossetti had merely been another Fra Angelico or one of the early artists from whom he derived such n.o.ble inspiration, should we regard him as we do, as even the fierce young modern art student does, as one of the greatest figures in English art of the nineteenth century? In the latter part of that century I think he is the greatest force in English painting. I would reserve for him the largest print in my manual of English art. But have we declined since the death of Rossetti? On the contrary, I think we have advanced and are advancing. You must not think I am depreciating the past. The past is one of my witnesses. The past was very like our present; it nearly always depreciated itself intellectually and materially.

We all of us think of Athens in the fifth century as a golden period of great men, when every genius was appreciated, but you know that they put Pheidias in prison. And take the instance of Euripides. The majority of his countrymen said he was nothing to the late Aeschylus. He was chiefly appreciated by foreigners, as you will remember if you are able to read 'Balaustion's Adventure' (so much more difficult than Euripides in the original Greek). Listen to what Professor Murray says:--

His contemporary public denounced him as dull, because he tortured them with personal problems; as malignant, because he made them see truths they wished not to see; as blasphemous and foul-minded, because he made demands on their religious and spiritual natures which they could neither satisfy nor overlook. They did not know whether he was too wildly imaginative or too realistic, too romantic or too prosaic, too childishly simple or too philosophical--Aristophanes says he was all these things at once. They only knew that he made them angry and that they could not help listening to him.

Does not that remind you a little of what was said all over England of Mr. Bernard Shaw? Of what is still said about him in many London houses to-day? If some one praises him, the majority of people will tell you that he is overrated. Does it not remind you of the reception which Ibsen's plays met when they were first produced here: when they gave an impetus to that new English drama which I understand is decaying, though it seems to me to be only beginning--the new English Drama of Mr.

Granville Barker, Mr. Housman, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Galsworthy, and Mr. Masefield?

Every year the patient research of scholars by the consultation of original doc.u.ments has caused us to readjust our historical perspective.

Those villains of our childhood, Tiberius, Richard III., Mary Tudor, and others, have become respectable monarchs, almost model monarchs, if you compare them with the popular English view of the present King of the Belgians, the ex-Sultan of Turkey, and the present Czar of Russia. It is realised that contemporary journalism gave a somewhat twopence coloured impression of Kings and Queens, who were only creatures of their age, less admirable expressions of the individualism of their time. And just as historical facts require readjustment by posterity, so our critical estimate of intellectual and aesthetic evolution requires strict revision. We must not accept the glib statement of the historian, especially of the contemporary historian, that at certain periods intellectual activity and artistic expression were decaying or did not exist. If a convention in one field of intellectual activity is said by the historian or chronicler to be approaching termination or to be decaying, as he calls it, we should test carefully his data and his credentials. But, a.s.suming he is right, there will always be found some compensating reaction in another sphere of intellectual activity which is in process of development; and through which, by some divine alchemy, providence, or nature, call it what you will, a new manifestation will be made to the world. The arts which we suppose to have perished, of which, indeed, we write affecting epitaphs, are merely hibernating; the intellect which is necessary for their production and nutrition is simply otherwise employed; while, of course, you must make allowances for the appreciations of posterity, change of fashion and taste. From the middle of the sixteenth century down to nearly the middle of the nineteenth, the Middle Ages were always thought of as the Dark Ages. Scarcely any one could appreciate either the pictorial art or architecture of mediaevalism; those who did so always had to apologise for their predilection. The wonders of Gothic art were furtively relished by a few antiquaries; and, at certain periods, by men like Beckford and Walpole, as agreeable drawing-room curiosities. The Romantic movement commenced by Chatterton enabled us to revise a limited and narrow view, based on insufficient information. It was John Ruskin, in England, who made us see what a splendid heritage the Middle Ages had bequeathed to us. Ruskin and his disciples then fell into the error of turning the tables on the Renaissance, and regarded everything that deviated from Gothic convention as _debased_; the whole art of the eighteenth century was anathema to them. The decadence began, according to Ruskin, with Raphael. Out of that ingenious error, or synchronous with it, began the brilliant movement of the Pre-Raphaelites in the middle of the last century. And when the Pre-Raphaelites appeared, every one said the end of Art had arrived. d.i.c.kens openly attacked them; Thackeray ridiculed the new tendencies; every one, great and small, spoke of decay and decline. The French word _Decadence_ had not crept into use. However, the weary t.i.tan staggered on, as Matthew Arnold said, and when Mr. Whistler's art dawned on the horizon, Ruskin was among the first to see in it signs of decay.

Except the poetry of Swinburne, never has any art met with such abuse. An example of the immortal painter now adorns the National Gallery of _British_ painting, which is cared for--oh, irony of circ.u.mstances--by one of the first prophets of impressionism in this country, or, rather, let me say, one of the first English critics--Mr. D. S. MacColl.

But you will now ask how do I account for those periods when apparently the liberal arts are supposed not to have existed? I maintain they did exist, or that human intellect was otherwise employed. The excavations of prehistoric cities are evidences of my contention. Because things are destroyed we must not say they have decayed; if evidences are scarce, do not say they never existed. Our architecture, for example, took five hundred years to develop out of the splendid Norman through the various transitions of Gothic down to the perfection of the English country house in Elizabethan and Jacobean times. If church architecture was decaying, domestic architecture was improving. _Architecture is, of course, the first and most important of all the arts_, and when the human intellect is being used up for some other purpose there is a temporary cessation; there is never any decay of architecture. The putting up of ugly buildings is merely a sign of growing stupidity, not of declining intellect or decaying taste. Jerry-building is the successful compet.i.tion of dishonesty against competency. Do not imagine that because the good architects do not get commissions to put up useful or beautiful buildings they do not exist. The history of stupidity and the history of bad taste must one day engage our serious attention. There is no decay, alas, even in stupidity and bad taste.

The suddenness with which the literature of the sixteenth century developed in England has been explained, I know, by the Reformation. But you should remember the other critics of art, who ascribe the barrenness of our painting and the necessity of importing continental artists, also to the Reformation. I suggest that the intellectual capacity of the nation was directed towards literature, politics and _religious_ controversy, rather than to art and religion. I cannot think there was any scarcity of the artistic germ in the English nation which had already expressed itself in the great Abbeys and Churches, such as Glas...o...b..ry, Tintern, Fountains, and York. And you must remember that the minor art of embroidery, the '_opus anglicanum_' (which flourished for three centuries previous to the Reformation), was famous throughout Europe.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the big men, Swift, Pope, and Addison, having pa.s.sed away, the Augustan age of English literature seemed exhausted. It was a time of intellectual dyspepsia; every one was much too fond of ruins; people built sham ruins on their estates. Rich men, who could afford the luxury, kept a dilapidated hermit in a cavern.

Their chief pleasure on the continent was measuring ruins in the way described so amusingly by Goldsmith in _The Citizen of the World_. Though no century was more thoroughly pleased with itself, I might almost say smugly self-satisfied, the men of that century were always lamenting the decline of the age. The observations of Johnson and Goldsmith I need scarcely repeat. But here is one which may have escaped your notice. It is not a suggestion of decline, but an a.s.sertion of non-existence. Gray, the poet, the cultivated connoisseur, the Professor of History, writing in 1763 to Count Algarrotti, says: 'Why this nation has made no advances. .h.i.therto in painting and sculpture it is hard to say; the fact is undeniable, and we have the vanity to apologise for ourselves as Virgil did for the Romans: