Masques & Phases Part 19

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, Credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus, Orabunt causas melius, coelique meatus Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent: Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

'You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to see that art shall one day flourish in England. _I too much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far_.' Yet in 1754 Chippendale had published his Cabinet Makers' Guide; and the next fifty years was to see the production of all that beautiful English furniture of which we are so justly proud, and which we forge with such surprising skill. It was the next fifty years that saw the production of the beautiful English pottery which we prize so highly, and it was the next hundred years that was to be the period of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Crome, Cotman, Alfred Stevens, and Turner, who died in 1851, just when the Pre-Raphaelites were supposed to be inaugurating the decay of that which Gray denied the existence, nearly one hundred years before.

Though the scope of my discussion is limited to literature and art, it would be paltry to confine our inquiries within limited horizons.

Painting and architecture, alas, are not the whole of life; the fine arts are only the flowers of existence; they are useful as humanising elements; but they are not indispensable. That vague community among whom we arbitrarily place those with whom we disagree--the Philistines--get on very well without them. But even Philistines have to reckon with Religion and Science, and in a lesser degree with Philosophy.

That powerful trinity affects our every-day life. Philosophy is so cloistered, so difficult to understand, that we seldom hear of its decay; though we are constantly told that some branch of science is being neglected, or owing to a religious revival that its prestige is becoming undermined; its truths are becoming falsehoods. I am not a man of science, not even a student, only a desultory reader. Yet I suggest that, as was pointed out in the case of the fine arts, certain branches of the divine scholarship, if I may call it so, may be arrested temporarily in any development they may have reached. Let us take medicine. Medicine is primarily based upon the study of anatomy or structure--physiology--or the scheme of structure carried out in life; and upon botany and chemistry as representing the vegetable and mineral worlds where the remedies are sought. Anatomy soon reaches a finite position, when a sufficient number of careful dissections has been made; the other divisions used to look like promising endless development; but there is reason to suppose that they too, as far as medicine is concerned, have reached a sterile perfection.

The microscope is perfected up to a point which mechanicians think cannot be improved upon; so that those ultimate elements of physiology which depend upon the observation of minute structure are known to us. To put it crudely, we cannot discover any more germs, whose presence is hidden from us by mere minuteness, unless we can improve our machinery, and that, we are told, is an improbable event. I will not labour the point by applying it to botany, which is very obvious, or to chemistry, where it is not so clear. But it _is_ clear that owing to a feeling that not much more is to be got from minute observation with the tools at our disposal, the brightest intellects and most inventive clairvoyant work are shunted into more imaginative channels. There are no men who guess so brilliantly as men of science, so that science, in that respect, has attained the dignity of Theology. I suppose that the startling theories propounded by Sir Oliver Lodge and others will be taken as evidence of the decay of science. But the human intellect, especially if it is scientific, cannot, I imagine, like actors, go on repeating or feigning the same emotion. It must leave for the moment as apparently completed one branch of knowledge to which it may return again after developing some less mature branch on which the attention of the most learned investigators is for a time wholly concentrated. The tree of knowledge is an evergreen, and in science, no more than in arts, is there any decay. When Darwin published his great _Origin of Species_ which was hailed as a revelation, not only by scientific men, but by intelligent laymen, religious people became very much alarmed. They talked about the decay of faith, and ascribed any falling off in the offertories to the shillings spent on visiting the monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens.

Younger sons and less gifted members of clever families were no longer destined for Holy Orders; as we were descended from apes it would have seemed impious. They were sent to Cambridge to pursue a so-called scientific career, which was crowned by the usual aegrotat in botany instead of a pa.s.s in history. The falling off in candidates for Holy Orders seriously alarmed some of our Bishops; and Darwin--the gentle, delightful Darwin--became what the Pope had been to our ancestors. I need not point out how groundless these fears happily proved to be. The younger intellects of the country simply became more interested for the moment in the cross-breeding of squirrels, than in the internecine difficulties of the Protestant church on Apostolic succession, the number of candles on the altar, and the legality of incense. Now, I rejoice to say, there is a healthy revival of interest and a healthy difference of opinion on all these important religious questions. We must never pay serious attention to the alarmists who tell us that the churches and sects are seeing their last days. Macaulay has warned us never to be too sanguine about the Church of Rome. The moments of her greatest trials produced some of her greatest men--Ignatius Loyola, Philip Neri, and Francis Xavier. Do you think the Church is decaying because the congregations are banished from France, and the Concordat has come to an end? I tell you it will only stimulate her to further conquests; it is the beginning of a new life for the Catholic Church in France. If the Anglican Church were to be disestablished to-morrow, I would regard it as a Sandow exercise for the hardworking, splendid intellects of the Establishment. The Nonconformists--well, they never talk about their own decline; of all the divisions of Christianity they always seem to me heartily to enjoy persecution; and like myself, I never knew them to admit the word _decadence_ into their vocabulary, at least about themselves. I hold them up to you as examples. Let us all be Nonconformists in that respect.

I do not ask you to adopt the habit against which Matthew Arnold directed one of his witty essays, the habit of expressing a too unctuous satisfaction with the age and time in which we are living. That was the intellectual error of the Eighteenth Century. There are problems of poverty, injustice, disease, and unhappiness, which should make the most prosperous and most selfish of us chafe; but I do urge that we should not suspect the art and literature of our time, the intellectual manifestations of our age, whether scientific or literary. I urge that we do not sit on the counter in order to cry 'stinking fish,' and observe that this is merely an age of commerce. An overweening modesty in us seems to persuade us that it is quite impossible we should be fortunate enough to be the contemporaries of great men. The fact that we know them personally sometimes undermines our faith; contemporary contempt for a great man is too often turned on the contemporaries. Do not let us look upon genius, as Schopenhauer accused some people of doing, 'as upon a hare which is good to eat when it has been killed and dressed up, but so long as it is alive only good to be shot at.' And if our intellectuals are not all Brobdingnagians, they are not all Liliputians. It seems to me ungenerous to make sweeping and deprecating a.s.sertions about our own time; it is also dangerous. The contemporary praise of unworthy work, ephemeral work--there is always plenty of that, we know--is forgotten; and (though it does not decay) perishes with the work it extolled. But unsound criticism and foolish abuse of great work is remembered to the confusion of the critics. Think of the reception accorded to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Sh.e.l.ley, Rossetti, and Swinburne.

I remember that excellent third-rate writer, W. E. H. Lecky, making a speech at a dinner of the Authors' Society, in which he said that he was sorry to say there were no great writers alive, and no stylists to compare with those who had pa.s.sed away. A few paces off him sat Walter Pater, George Meredith, and Mr. Austin Dobson. Tennyson, though not present at the banquet, was president of the Society, and Ruskin was still alive. When Swinburne's 'Atalanta in Calydon' appeared, another third-rate writer, James Russell Lowell, a.s.sured the world that its author was no poet, because there was no thought in the verse. Four years ago, at a provincial town in Italy, when one of the Italian ministers, at the opening of some public building, said that united Italy owed to the great English poet Swinburne a debt which it could never forget, the inhabitants cheered vociferously. This was no idle compliment; every one in Italy knows who Swinburne was. I will not hazard to guess the extent of the ovation which the names of Lowell and Lecky would receive, but I think the incident is a fair sign that English poetry has not decayed.

In the _Daily Mail_ I saw once an interview with an inferior American black-and-white draughtsman at Berlin. He was asked his opinion about a splendid exhibition of old English pictures being held there, and took occasion to say 'what the pictures demonstrate is not that the English women of the eighteenth century were conspicuously lovely, but the artists who painted them possessed secrets of reproduction which posterity has failed to inherit.' I would like to reply 'Rot, rot, rot;'

but that would imply a belief in decay. I suggest to the same critic that he should visit one of the 'International Exhibitions,' where he will see the pictures of Mr. Charles Hazelwood Shannon. Such a stupid view from an American is particularly amazing, because in Mr. John Singer Sargent, we (by _we_ I mean America and ourselves) possess an artist who is certainly the peer of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and personally I should say a much greater painter than Reynolds. A hundred years hence, perhaps people at Berlin (the most critical and cultivated capital in the world) will be bending before the 'Three Daughters of Percy Wyndham,' the 'd.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland,' the 'Marlborough Family,' and many another masterpiece of Mr. Sargent and Mr. Charles Shannon. The same American critic says that our era of mediocrity will continue; so I am full of hope. Even the existence of America does not depress me: nor do I see in it a symptom of decay; if it produces much that is distasteful in the way of tinned meat, it gave us Mr. John Sargent and Mr. Henry James, and it took away from England Mr. Richard Le Gallienne.

I should be the last to invite you not to discriminate about the present.

We must be cautious in estimating the very popular writers or painters of our time; but we must not dismiss them because they are popular. We should be tall enough to worship in a crowd. Let our criticism be aristocratic, our taste fastidious, and let our sympathies be democratic and catholic. d.i.c.kens, I suppose, is one of the most popular writers who ever lived, and yet he is part of the structure of our literature; but as d.i.c.kens is dead, I prefer to mention the names of three living writers, who are also popular, and have become corner-stones of the same building--Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. H. G. Wells. 'There are at all times,' says Schopenhauer, 'two literatures in progress running side by side, but little known to each other; the one real, the other only apparent. The former grows into permanent literature: it is pursued by those who live _for_ science or poetry. The other is pursued by those who live _on_ science or poetry; but after a few years one asks where are they? where is the glory that came so soon and made so much clamour?' We are happy if we can discriminate between those two literatures.

While we should remember that there are at all times intellects whose work is more for posterity than for the present; work which appeals, perhaps, only to the few, that of artists whose work has no purchasers, writers whose books may have publishers but few readers, we must be cautious about accepting the verdict of the dove-cot. There are many obscure artists and writers whose work, though admired by a select few, remains very properly obscure, and will always remain obscure; it is of no value intellectually; the world should know nothing of its inferior men. Sometimes, however, it is these inferior men who are able to get temporary places as critics, and inform us in leading articles that ours is an age _of Decadence_. Every new drama, every work of art which possesses individuality or gives a fresh point of view or evinces development of any kind, is held up as an instance of Decay. '_L'ecole decadent_' was a phrase invented as a jest in 1886, I believe by Monsieur Bourde, a journalist in Paris. It was eagerly adopted by the Parisians, and soon floated across the Channel. Used as a term of reproach, it was accepted by the group of poets it was intended to ridicule. I need not remind you that the master of that school was Paul Verlaine, the immortal poet who enlarged the scope of French verse--the poet who achieved for French poetry what I am told the so-called decadent philosopher Nietzsche has done for German prose. Unfortunately I do not know German, and it seems almost impossible to add to the German language. But Nietzsche, I am a.s.sured by competent authorities, has performed a similar feat to that of Luther on the issue of his Bible.

When, therefore, we hear of decadence in literature or art, even if we accept Mr. Balfour's definition of its symptom--'_the employment of an over-wrought technique_'--we must remember that Decadence and Decay have now different meanings, though originally they meant the same sort of thing. An over-wrought technique is characteristic of the decadent school of France, particularly of Mallarme, and some of our own decadents. Walter Pater and Sir Thomas Browne. The existence of writers adopting an over-wrought technique, however, is not (and Mr. Balfour would repudiate the idea) a sign of decay as commonplace moralists would have us believe, but of realised perfection. Pater is the most perfect prose writer we ever produced. The Euphuists of the sixteenth century were of course decadents, and I think you will admit that they did not herald any decay in our literature.

The truth is that men after a certain age, if not on the crest of the waves themselves, become bored with counting the breakers, and decide that the tide is going out. You must often have had arguments with friends on this subject when walking by the sea. The water seems to be receding; you can see that there is an ebb; and then an unusually long wave comes up and wets your feet. Great writers are guilty of a similar error without any intention of contriving a literary conceit (as I suspect many a past outcry to have been). Even Pater declared that he would not disturb himself by reading any contemporary literature published by an author who did not exist before 1870. He never read Stevenson or Kipling. Now that is a terrible state to be in; it is a symptom of premature old age; not physical but mental old age.

The art of the present day is not architecture, painting, or literature.

It is the art of remaining young. It is the art of life. It is a science. The fairer, the stronger, the better s.e.x--shall I call its members our equals or our superiors?--have always realised this. Indeed, they have employed ingenious mechanical contrivances for arresting the march of time or that physical decay of which we are all victims.

Sometimes they may be said to have indulged in an over-wrought technique, which may be the reason why we are told that every woman is at heart a decadent. Otto Weininger certainly thought so. I have always regretted that the male s.e.x was precluded by prejudice from following their example. I regret somewhat acutely the desuetude of the periwig.

So we can take an example from women--they are so often our theme, let them be our examples in a symbolical sense. If we choose, we too can remain young intellectually, sensitive to new impressions, new impulses and new revelations, whether of science or art. The Greeks of the fifth century, and even of the age of St. Paul, preserved their youth by cultivating the superb gift of curiosity, delightful anxiety about the present and future. William Morris once described the Whigs as careless of the past, ignorant of the present, and fearful of the future. Whatever your politics are, do not be like the Whigs as described by William Morris. Cultivate a feminine curiosity. I used to be told the old story of Blue Beard as a warning against that particular failing. I see in it a much profounder moral. It is the emanc.i.p.ation of woman; and a.s.serts her right, if not to vote, at least to be curious. Her curiosity rid the world of a monster, and in her curiosity we see the nucleus of the new drama. That little blood-stained key unlocked for us the cupboard where the family skeleton had been left too long in the cold; it was time that he joined the festive board, or, at least, appeared on the boards: and now, I am glad to say, he has done so; and he is called new-fangled. Do not let us call things 'new-fangled.' New-fangled medicine probably saves fifty per cent. of the population from premature death. Do not speak of the 'crudity of youth.' Youth is sometimes crude. It is better than being rude. It is an error to mock at the single virtue a possible offender may possess. I observe that men of science remain younger intellectually, and even physically, than artists or men of letters. I believe it is because to them science is always full of surprises and fresh impressions. They know there is practically no end to their knowledge; and that in the study of science there is no decay, whatever they may detect in the crust of the earth or on the face of heaven. They are never satisfied with the past. They look to youth and its enthusiasms for realising their own dreams and developing their own hypotheses. And as there are great men of science to-day, so, too, there are great men of letters, great poets, and great painters, some of whose names you may not have heard. But when you do hear of them I beg of you not to regard any of them as symptoms of decay, even if their technique is elaborate and over-wrought. The _early_ work of every modern painter is over-elaborate and over-wrought, just as all the work of early painters is over-elaborate and over-wrought. Do not greet the dawn as though it were a lowering sunset. Listen, and, with William Blake, you may hear the sons of G.o.d shouting for joy. If your mind is bent on decay, read that neglected poet, Byron. He thought the romantic movement, of which he became the accidental centre, a symptom of decay.

Read any period of history and its literature, and you will find the same cry reiterated. When you have read an old book go out and buy a new one.

When you have sold your old masters, go out and buy new masters.

Aladdin's maid is one of the wronged characters of legend. . . . Of the Pierian spring there are many fountains. Yet it is a spring which never runs dry; though it flows with greater freedom at one season than at another, with greater volume from one fountain than some other. In the glens of Parna.s.sus there are hidden flowers always blooming; though, to the binoculars of the tourist, the mountain seems unusually barren. You will find that youth does not vanish with the rose, that you need never close the sweet-scented ma.n.u.script of love, science, art or literature.

In them youth returns like daffodils that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty: or like the snapdragons which Cardinal Newman saw blossoming on the wall at Oxford, and which became for him the symbol of hope. For us they may stand as the symbol of realisation and the immortality of the human intellect, in which there has been no decay since the days of Tubal Cain.

_To_ J. G. LEGGE, ESQ.