Act II.
Scene: Brocken House, Park Lane.
The top of the Grand Staircase. Lord and Lady Walpurge receiving their guests. The greatest taste is shown in the decorations, which are lent for the occasion of the play free of charge, owing to the deserved popularity of Mr. George Alexander. Furniture supplied by Waring, selected by Mr. Percy Macquoid; Old Masters by Agnew & Son, P. & D. Colnaghi, Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell; Wigs by Clarkson. A large, full-length Reynolds, seen above the well of staircase; r. a Gainsborough, l. a Hoppner. The party is not very smart, rather intellectual and plutocratic; well-known musicians and artists in group r., and second-rate literary people l. An
Irish peer and a member of the White Rose League are the only ‘Society’ present. There are no actors or actresses. Faust, who has aged considerably since the Prologue, is an obvious failure, and is seen talking to a lady journalist. Mephistopheles, disguised as a Protectionist Member of Parliament, is in earnest conversation with Lord Walpurge. Footman announcing the guests: The Bishop of Hereford, Mr. Maldonado, Mr. Andrew Undershaft, Mr. Harold Hodge, Mrs. Gorringe, Mr. and Mrs. Aubrey Tanqueray, &c.
Lady Walpurge (archly). Ah, Mr. Tanqueray, you never forwarded me my photographs; it is nearly three weeks ago since I sent you a cheque for them.
Tanqueray. Labby has been poisoning your mind against me. You shall have a proof to-morrow!
Footman. Mr. Gillow Waring.
Lady Walpurge. I was so afraid you were not coming. My husband thought you would give us the slip.
Waring. How charming your decorations are! You must give me some ideas for my new yacht, you have such perfect taste.
Maldonado. Walpurge! what will you take for that Reynolds? Or will you swap it for my Velasquez?
Walpurge. My dear Maldo, I always do my deals through—
Footman. Mr. Walter Dowdeswell.
Walpurge. Through Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell; and you, my dear Maldo, if you want to get rid of your Velasquez, ought to join the National Art Collections Fund, or go and see—
Footman. Mr. Lockett Agnew. ’Er ’Ighness the Princess Swami.
Enter the Princess Salomé.
Lady Journalist. Fancy having that woman here. She is not recognised in any decent society, she is nothing but an adventuress; talks such bad French, too. Have you ever seen her, Doctor Faustus?
Faust. Yes, I have met her very often in Germany. Though the Emperor would not receive her at first, she is much admired in Europe.
Lady Journalist (hedging). I wonder
where she gets her frocks? They must be worth a good deal.
Faust. From Ricketts and Shannon, if you want to know.
Lady Journalist. Dear Doctor, you know everything! Let me see: Ricketts and Shannon is that new place in Regent Street, rather like Lewis and Allenby’s, I suppose?
Faust. Yes, only different.
Irish Peer (to Faust). Do you think Lady Walpurge will ever get into Society?
Faust. Not if she gives her guests such wretched coffee.
Lady Journalist. It’s nothing to her tea. I’ve never had such bad tea. Besides, she cannot get actors or actresses to come to her house.
Lady Walpurge (overhearing). I expect Sir Herbert and Lady Beerbohm Tree here to-night, and perhaps Viola. (Sensation.)
[Enter, hurriedly, Mr. C. T. H. Helmsley.] Mr. Alexander, a moment with you! A most important telegram has just arrived.
Faust (reading). ‘Handed in at Greba Castle, 10.15. Reply paid. Do not close with Stephen Phillips until you have seen my
play of Gretchen, same subject, five acts and twelve tableaux.—Hall Caine.’ Where is Mr. Stephen Phillips? [Stephen Phillips advances.] My dear Phillips, I think we will put up Harold Hodge instead. ‘The Last of the Anglo-Saxon Editors,’ by the last Anglo-Saxon poet.
Curtain.
(1906.)
To W. Barclay Squire, Esq.
SHAVIANS FROM SUPERMAN.
Donna Ana has vanished to sup her man at the Savoy; the Devil and the Statue are descending through trap, when a voice is heard crying, ‘Stop, stop’; the mechanism is arrested and there appears in the empyrean Mr. Charles Hazelwood Shannon, the artist, with halo.
The Devil (while Shannon regains his breath). Really, Mr. Shannon, this is a great pleasure and quite unexpected. I am truly honoured. No quarrel I hope with the International? Pennell quite well? How is the Whistler memorial getting on?
Shannon. So-so. To be quite frank I had no time to prepare for Heaven, and earth has become intolerable for me. (Seeing the Statue.) Is that a Rodin you have there?
The Devil. Oh! I forgot, let me introduce you. Commander! Mr. C. H. Shannon, a most distinguished painter, the English Velasquez, the Irish Titian, the Scotch Giorgione, all in one. Mr. Shannon, his Excellency the Commander.
Shannon. Delighted, I am sure. The real reason for my coming here is that I could stand Ricketts no longer. Ricketts the artist I adore. Ricketts the causeur is delightful. Ricketts the enemy, entrancing. Ricketts the friend, one of the best. But Ricketts, when designing dresses for the Court, Trench, and other productions, is not very amiable.
The Statue (sighing). Ah! yes, I know Ricketts.
The Devil (sighing). We all know Ricketts. Never mind, he shall not come here. I shall give special orders to Charon. Come on to the trap and we can start for the palace.
Shannon. Ah! yes. I heard you were moving to the Savoy. Think it will be a success?
[They descend and no reply is heard. Whisk! Mr. Frank Richardson on this occasion does not appear; void and emptiness; the fireproof curtain may be lowered here in accordance with the County Council regulations; moving portraits of deceased, and living dramatic critics can be thrown without risk of ignition on the curtain by magic lantern.
The point of this travesty will be entirely lost to those who have not read ‘Man and Superman.’ It is the first masterpiece in the English literature of the twentieth century. It is also necessary to have read the dramatic criticisms in the daily press, and to have some acquaintance with the Court management, the Stage Society, and certain unlicensed plays; and to know that Mr. Ricketts designs scenery. This being thoroughly explained, the Curtain may rise; discovering a large Gothic Hall, decorated in the 1880 taste. Allegories by Watts on the wall—‘Time cutting the corns of Eternity,’ ‘Love whistling down the ear of Life,’ ‘Youth catching Crabs,’ &c. Windows by Burne-Jones and Morris. A Peacock Blue Hungarian Band playing music on Dolmetsch instruments by Purcell, Byrde, Bull, Bear, Palestrina, and Wagner, &c. Various well-known people crowd the Stage. Among the living may be mentioned Mr. George Street; Mr. Max Beerbohm and his brother; Mr. Albert Rothenstein and his brother, &c. The company is intellectual and artistic; not in any way smart. The Savile and Athenæum Clubs are well represented, but not the Garrick, the Gardenia, nor any of the establishments in the vicinity of Leicester Square. The Princess Salomé is greeting
some of the arrivals—The Warden of Keble, The President of Magdalen Coll., Oxford, and others—who stare at her in a bewildered fashion.
The Devil. Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen, for his Excellency the Commander. (A yellowish pallor moves over the audience; effect by Gordon Craig.)
The Statue. It was my intention this evening to make a few observations on flogging in the Navy, Vaccination, the Censor, Vivisection, the Fabian Society, the Royal Academy, Compound Chinese Labour, Style, Simple Prohibition, Vulgar Fractions, and other kindred subjects. But as I opened the paper this morning, my eye caught these headlines: ‘Future of the House of Lords,’ ‘Mr. Edmund Gosse at home,’ ‘The Nerves of Lord Northcliffe,’ ‘Interview with Mr. Winston Churchill,’ ‘Reported Indisposition of Miss Edna May.’ A problem was thus presented to me. Will I, shall I, ought I to speak to my friends here—ahem!—and elsewhere, on the subject about which they came to hear me speak. (Applause.) No. I said; the bounders must be disappointed; otherwise
they will know what to expect. You must always surprise your audience. When it has been advertised (sufficiently) that I am going to speak about the truth, for example, the audience comes here expecting me to speak about fiction. The only way to surprise them is to speak the truth and that I always do. Nothing surprises English people more than truth; they don’t like it; they don’t pay any attention to those (such as my friend Mr. H. G. Wells and myself) who trade in truth; but they listen and go away saying, ‘How very whimsical and paradoxical it all is,’ and ‘What a clever adventurer the fellow is, to be sure.’ ‘That was a good joke about duty and beauty being the same thing’—that was a joke I did not make. It is not my kind of joke—but when people begin ascribing to you the jokes of other people, you become a living—I was going to say statue—but I mean a living classic.
The Devil. I thought you disliked anything classic?
The Statue. Ahem! only dead classics—especially when they are employed to protect romanticism. Dead classics are the protective
tariffs put on all realism and truth by bloated idealism. In a country of plutocrats, idealism keeps out truth: idealism is more expensive, and therefore more in demand. In America, there are more plutocrats, and therefore more idealists . . . as Mr. Pember Reeves has pointed out in New Zealand . . .
The Devil. But I say, is this drama?
The Statue. Certainly not. It is a discussion taking place at a theatre. It is no more drama than a music-hall entertainment, or a comic opera, or a cinematograph, or a hospital operation, all of which things take place in theatres. But surely it is more entertaining to come to a discussion charmingly mounted by Ricketts—discussion too, in which every one knows what he is going to say—than to flaccid plays in which the audience always knows what the actors are going to say better often than the actors. The sort of balderdash which Mr. --- serves up to us for plays.
The Devil (peevish and old-fashioned). I wish you would define drama.
Hankin (advancing). Won’t you have tea, Commander? It’s not bad tea.
The Statue. I was afraid you were going to talk idealism.
Hankin (aside). Excuse my interrupting, but I want you to be particularly nice to the Princess Salomé. You know she was jilted by the Censor. She has brought her music.
The Devil. You might introduce her to Mrs. Warren. But I am afraid the Princess has taken rather too much upon herself this evening.
The Statue. Yes, she has taken too much; I am sure she has taken too much.
A Journalist. Is that the Princess Salomé who has Mexican opals in her teeth, and red eyebrows and green hair, and curious rock-crystal breasts?
The Devil. Yes, that is the Princess Salomé.
Shannon. I know the Princess quite well. Ricketts makes her frocks. Shall I ask her to dance?
The Devil. Yes, anything to distract her attention from the guests. These artistic English people are so easily shocked. They don’t understand Strauss, nor indeed anything
until it is quite out of date. I want to make Hell at least as attractive as it is painted; a place as well as a condition within the meaning of the Act. Full of wit, beauty, pleasure, freedom—
The Statue. Ugh—ugh.
Shannon. Will you dance for us, Princess?
Salomé. Anything for you, dear Mr. Shannon, only my ankles are a little sore to-night. How is dear Ricketts? I want new dresses so badly.
Shannon. I suppose by this time he is in Heaven. But won’t you dance just to make things go? And then the Commander will lecture on super-maniacs later on!
Salomé. Señor Diavolo, what will you give me if I dance to-night?
The Devil. Anything you like, Salomé. I swear by the dramatic critics.
Hankin (correcting). You mean the Styx.
The Devil. Same thing. Dance without any further nonsense, Salomé. Forget that you are in England. This is an unlicensed house.
[Salomé dances the dance of the Seven Censors.
The Devil (applauding). She is charming. She is quite charming. Salomé, what shall I do for you? You who are like a purple patch in some one else’s prose. You who are like a black patch on some one else’s face. You are like an Imperialist in a Radical Cabinet. You are like a Tariff Reformer in a Liberal-Unionist Administration. You are like the Rokeby Velasquez in St. Paul’s Cathedral. What can I do for you who are fairer than—
Salomé. This sort of thing has been tried on me before. Let us come to business. I want Mr. Redford’s head on a four-wheel cab.
The Devil. No, not that. You must not ask that. I will give you Walkley’s head. He has one of the best heads. He is not ignorant. He really knows what he is talking about.
Salomé. I want Mr. Redford’s head on a four-wheel cab.
The Devil. Salomé, listen to me. Be reasonable. Do not interrupt me. I will give you William Archer’s head. He is charming—a cultivated, liberal-minded critic. He is
too liberal. He admires Stephen Phillips. I will give you his dear head if you release me from my oath.
Salomé. I want Mr. Redford’s head on the top of a four-wheel cab. Remember your oath!
The Devil. I remember I swore at—I mean by—the dramatic critics. Well, I am offering them to you. Exquisite and darling Salomé, I will give you the head of Max Beerbohm. It is unusually large, but it is full of good things. What a charming ornament for your mantelpiece! You will be in the movement. How every one will envy you! People will call upon you who never used to call. Others will send you invitations. You will at last get into English society.
Salomé. I want Mr. Redford’s head on the top of a four-wheel cab.
The Devil. Salomé, come hither. Have you ever looked at the Daily Mirror? Only in the Daily Mirror should one look. For it tells the truth sometimes. Well, I will give you the head of Hamilton Fyfe. He is my best friend. No critic is so fond of the drama as Hamilton Fyfe. (Huskily.) Salomé, I
will give you W. L. Courtney’s head. I will give you all their heads.
Salomé. I have the scalps of most critics. I want Mr. Redford’s head on a four-wheel cab.
The Devil. Salomé! You do not know what you ask. Mr. Redford is a kind of religion. He represents the Lord Chamberlain. You know the dear Lord Chamberlain. You would not harm one of his servants, especially when they are not insured. It would be cruel. It would be irreligious. It would be in bad taste. It would not be respectable. Listen to me; I will give you all Herod’s Stores . . . Salomé. Shannon was right. You have taken too much, or you would not ask this thing. See, I will give you Mr. Redford’s body, but not his head. Not that, not that, my child.
Salomé. I want Mr. Redford’s head on a four-wheel cab.
The Devil. Salomé, I must tell you a secret. It is terrible for me to have to tell the truth. The Commander said that I would have to tell the truth. Mr. Redford has no head!
[The audience long before this have begun to put on their cloaks, and the dramatic
critics have gone away to describe the cold reception with which the play has been greeted. All the people on the stage cover their heads except the statue, who has become during the action of the piece more and more like Mr. Bernard Shaw. Curtain descends slowly.
(1907.)
To Arthur Clifton, Esq.
SOME DOCTORED DILEMMA.
A New Epilogue for the Last Performance of Mr. Shaw’s Play.
Though Mr. Bernard Shaw has set the fashion in prologues for modern plays, his admirers were not altogether satisfied with the epilogue to The Doctor’s Dilemma. It is far too short; and leaves us in the dark as to whom ‘Jennifer Dubedat’ married. Epilogues, as students of English drama remember, were often composed by other authors. The following experiment ought to have come from the hand of Mr. St. John Hankin, that master of Dramatic Sequels, but his work on the ‘Cassilis Engagement’ deprived Mr. Shaw of the only possible collaborator.
[Scene: A Bury Street Picture Gallery—Messrs. Gersaint & Co. The clock strikes ten, and Sir Colenso Ridgeon is seen going out rather crestfallen by centre door. Mr. Gersaint, the manager, is nailing up a notice
(‘All works of art, for art’s sake or sale; prices on application. Catalogue 1s.). Mr. Jack Stepney, the secretary, is receiving the private view cards from the visitors who are trooping in; some sneak catalogues as they enter, and on being asked for payment protest and produce visiting cards and press vouchers instead of shillings. Artists, Royal Academicians, Mr. Edmund Gosse, and other members of the House of Lords discovered; men of letters, art critics, connoisseurs, journalists, collectors, dealers, private viewers, impostors, dramatic critics, poets, pickpockets, politicians crowd the stage. From time to time Jack Stepney places a red star on the picture frames in the course of the action.]
J. Stepney. I thought all the pictures had been bought by Dr. Schutzmacher.
Gersaint. So they were, my boy, but he has wired saying they are all to be put up for sale at double the price; capital business, you see we shall get two commissions.
J. Stepney. Yes, sir. It is fortunate Mrs. Dubedat did not have the prices marked in the Catalogue.
Gersaint. You mean Mrs. Schutzmacher. (Drives in last nail).
J. Stepney. Yes, sir.
Enter a striking-looking-man, not unlike a Holbein drawing, at a distance: but on nearer inspection, as he comes within range of the footlights, he is more like an Isaac Oliver or Nicholas Lucidel. He examines the notice and sniffs.
s.l.m.n.u.h.d. Which are the works of Art?
Edmund Gosse. Can you tell me who that is? He is one of the few people I don’t know by sight. A celebrity of course; and do point out any obscurities. Every one is so distinguished. It is rather confusing.
Gersaint. That is the Holland Park Wonder, so-called because he lives at the top of a tower in Holland Park—the greatest Art Connoisseur in England. Mr. Charles Ricketts, the greatest—
Edmund Gosse. Thank you; thank you.
Mr. Frederick Wedmore (interrupting). Can you tell me whether the frames are included in the prices of the pictures?
J. Stepney. No, sir. They are stock frames, the property of the Gallery, and are only lent for the occasion.
Mr. Frederick Wedmore. Then I fear I
cannot buy; a naked picture without a frame is useless to me.
Charles Ricketts. Do you think I could buy a frame without a picture?
Joseph Pennell. I say Ricketts, it seems a beastly shame we didn’t get this show for the International. It would have been good ‘ad.’ What’s the use of Backers? I see they’re selling well.
Charles Ricketts. But, my dear Pennell, you’re doing the Life, aren’t you?—the real Dubedat?
Joseph Pennell. Oh, yes, but the family have injuncted Heinemann from publishing the letters: Mr. Justice Kekewich will probably change his opinion when the weather gets warmer. It is only an interim injunction.
Charles Ricketts. A sort of Clapham Injunction.
Sir William Richmond, K.C.B., R.A. If I had known what a stupendous genius Dubedat was, I should have given him part of the ‘New Bailey’ to decorate.
D. S. MacColl. Let us be thankful he’s as dead as Bill Bailey.
Sir Charles Holroyd (smoothing things
over). I think we ought to have an example for the Tate. (MacColl winces.) The Chantrey Bequest—(MacColl winces again)—might do something; and I must write to Lord Balcarres. The National Arts Collections Fund may have something over from the subscriptions to the Rokeby Velasquez; but I want to see what Colvin is going to choose for the British Museum.
Sidney Colvin. I think we might have this drawing; it stands on its legs. A most interesting fellow Dubedat. He reminds me of Con—
George Moore. Not Stevenson, though he had no talent whatever. My dear Mr. Colvin, have you ever read ‘Vailima Letters’? I have read parts of them.
Sidney Colvin (coldly). Ah, really! Did you suffer very much?
Sir Hugh P. Lane. Do you think, Mr. Gersaint, the artist’s widow would give me one of the pictures for the Dublin Gallery? We have no money at all. I have no money, but all the artists are giving pictures: Sargent, Shannon, Lavery, Frank Dicksee; and Rodin is giving a plaster cast.
Gersaint. How charming and insinuating you are, Sir Hugh. We can make special reductions for the Dublin Gallery, but you can hardly expect charitable bequests from picture dealers.
Sir Hugh P. Lane. Oh! but Dowdeswell, Agnew, Sulley, Wertheimer, P. and D. Colnaghi, and Humphry Ward are all giving me pictures. Now, look here, I’ll buy these five drawings, and you can give me these two. I’ll give you a Gainsborough drawing in exchange for them. It has a very good history. First it belonged to Ricketts, then to Rothenstein, then Wilson Steer, and then to the Carfax Gallery, and . . . then it came into my possession, and all that in three months. (Bargain concluded.)
Mr. Pffungst (aside). But is there any evidence that it belonged to Gainsborough?
Sir Hugh P. Lane (turning to a titled lady). Oh, do come to tea next Saturday. I want to show you my new Titian which I have just bought for 2100l.
Titled Lady. Sir Hugh, can you tell me who Mrs. Dubedat is now?
Sir Hugh P. Lane. Oh, yes. She married
Dr. Schutzmacher, the specialist on bigamy only this morning.
Titled Lady. How interesting. I should like to meet her. Dresses divinely, I’m told.
Sir Hugh P. Lane. She’s coming to tea next Saturday; such good tea, too!
Titled Lady. That will be delightful.
St. John hankin (loftily). Can you tell me whether this charmian artist is pronounced Dubédat or Dubèdat?
W. P. Ker (in deep Scotch). Non Dubitat. (He does not speak again.)
P. G. Konody. Oh, Mr. Phillips, do tell me exactly what you think of this artist!
Claude Phillips. I think he wanted a good smacking.
P. G. Konody. Ah, yes, his art has a smack about it. (Aside.) Good heading for the Daily Mail, ‘Art with a smack.’ (Writes in catalogue.)
Will Rothenstein. When I see pictures of this kind, my dear Gersaint, they seem to me to explain your existence. An artist without a conscience . . . (Sees Roger Fry.) My dear Fry, what are you doing here? Buying for New York? (Laughs meaningly.)
Roger Fry. Oh, no; but I hear Gersaint has a very fine picture by the Maîtresse of the Moulin Rouge. Weale says it is School of Gheel (pronounced Kail).
Will Rothenstein. Kail Yard I should think; do look at these things.
Roger Fry (vaguely). Who are they by? Oh, yes, Dubedat, of course.
[Fry and Rothenstein regard picture with disdain; it withers under their glance. Stage illusion by Maskelyne and Theodore Cook. Stepney places a red star on it.
Gersaint. Well, Mr. Bowyer Nichols, I hope we shall have a good long notice in the Westminster Gazette. Now if there is any drawing . . .
Bowyer Nichols (very stiffly). No, there isn’t. I don’t think the Exhibition sufficiently important; everything seems to me cribbed: most of the pictures look like reproductions of John, Orpen or Neville Lytton.
Gersaint. Ah, no doubt, influenced by Neville Lytton. That portrait of Mr. Cutler Walpole has a Neville Lytton feeling. Neville Lytton in his earlier manner.
Enter Sir Patrick Cullen, Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonnington and Sir Colenso Ridgeon.
Sir C. Ridgeon. Ah, Sir Patrick, I have just heard that the pictures are for sale; now I am going to plunge a little. I think they will rise in value; and by the way I want to ask your opinion as a scientific man. If I treat four artists with virus obscænum for three weeks, what will be the condition of the remaining artists in the fourth week?
Sir P. Cullen. Colenso, Colenso, you ought to have been a senior wrangler and then abolished.
Sir C. Ridgeon. What a cynic you are. All the same I’ve had great successes, though Dubedat was one of our failures. A rather anæmic member of the New English Art Club come to me for treatment, and in less than a year he was an Associate of the Royal Academy; what do you say to that?
Sir P. Cullen. Out of Phagocyte, out of mind.
Sir R. B. B. My dear Sir Patrick, how prejudiced you are. Take MacColl’s case: a typical instance of morbus ferox ars nova
anglicana: under dear Colenso he became an official at the Tate.
Sir C. Ridgeon. Then there’s Sir Charles Holroyd, you remember his high tempera?
Sir P. Cullen. There has been a relapse I hear from the catalogue.
Sir R. B. B. How grossly unfair; that is a false bulletin issued by the former nurse: ‘the evil that men do lives after them.’
Sir P. Cullen. My dear B. B., this is not Dubedat’s funeral. Do you think Bernard Shaw will like the new epilogue?
Bernard Shaw. He will; I’m shaw.
L. C. C. Inspector. Excuse me, is Mr. Vedrenne here? Ah, yes! There is Mr. Vedrenne. Will you kindly answer some of my questions? Is that door on the left a real door? In case of fire I cannot allow property doors; the actors might be seized with stage fright, and they must have, as Sir B. B. would say, ‘their exits and their entrances.’
Vedrenne. Everything at the Court Theatre, my dear sir, is real. Ask Mr. Franks, he will tell you the door is not even a jar. The art, the acting, the plays, even the audience is real, except a few dramatic critics I
cannot exclude. I admit the audience looks improbable at matinées; out of Court is a truth in art of which we are only dimly beginning to understand the significance. [Noise outside.
Enter Jennifer, dressed in deep mourning.
Jennifer (with a bright smile). Mr. Vedrenne, I have just had a telegram saying that my husband, Leo, was killed in his motor after leaving me at the Synagogue. His last words were: ‘Jennifer, promise me that you will wear mourning if I die, merely to mark the difference between Dubedat and myself.’ This afternoon I am going to marry Blenkinsop. How are the sales going?
Vedrenne. Well, I think we might have the catechism or the churching of heroines. What is your name?
Jennifer. Jennifer.
Vedrenne. Where did you get that name?
Jennifer. From Bernard Shaw in my baptism.
Mr. Redford (Licenser of Plays). Mr. Shaw, I really must point out that this passage comes from the Anglican Prayer-book. Are you aware of that? I have a suggestion of my own for ending the play.
Bernard Shaw. Oh, shut up! Let us have my ten commandments.
Granville Barker. My dear Shaw, you sent them to Wells for revision and he lost them in the Tube. I can remember the first one, ‘Maude spake these words and said: “Thou shalt have none other Shaws but me.”’
Bernard Shaw. How careless of Wells. I remember the second: ‘Do not indulge in craven imitation.’
W. L. Courtney. The third commandment runs: ‘Thou shalt not covet George Alexander.’
Granville Barker. One of them runs: ‘Do not commit yourself to Beerbohm Tree, though his is His Majesty’s . . . ’ But we shall never get them right. We must offer a reward for their recovery. I vote that Walkley now says the credo. That, I think, expresses every one’s sentiment.
A. B. Walkley (reluctantly). I believe in Bernard Shaw, in Granville Barker, and (heartily) in The Times.
William Archer. Plaudite, missa est.
(1907.)
Curtain.
THE JADED INTELLECTUALS. A Dialogue.
Scene: The Smoking-room of the Elivas Club.
Characters: Laudator Temporeys, ætat. 54, a distinguished literary critic, and Luke Cullus, a rich connoisseur of art and life. They are not smoking nor drinking spirits. One is sipping barley water, the other Vichy.
Luke Cullus. You are a dreadful pessimist!
Laudator Temporeys. Alas! there is no such thing in these days. We are merely disappointed optimists. When Walter Pater died I did not realise that English literature expired. Yet the event excited hardly any interest in the Press. Our leading weekly, the Spectator, merely mentioned that Brasenose College, Oxford, had lost an excellent Dean.
L. C. I can hardly understand you. Painting, I admit, is entirely a lost art, so far as England is concerned. The death of Burne-Jones
brought our tradition to an end. I see no future for any of the arts except needlework, of which, I am told, there is a hopeful revival. But in your fields of literature, what a number of great names! How I envy you!
L. T. Who is there?
L. C. Well, to take the novelists first: you have the great Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Maurice Hewlett . . . I can’t remember the names of any others just at present. Then take the poets: Austin Dobson, my own special favourite; and among the younger men, A. E. Housman, Laurence Housman, Yeats, Arthur Symons, Laurence Binyon, William Watson—
L. T. (interrupting). Who always keeps one foot in Wordsworth’s grave. But all the men you mention, my dear Cullus, belong to the last century. They have done their best work. Hardy has become mummy, and Henry James is sold in Balham. Except Hardy, they have become unintelligible. The theory that ‘to be intelligible is to be found out’ seems to have frightened them. The
books they issue are a series of ‘not-at-home’ cards—sort of P.P.C.’s on posterity. And the younger poets, too, belong to the last century, or they stand in the same relation to their immediate predecessors, to borrow one of your metaphors, as l’art nouveau does to Chippendale. Oh, for the days of Byron, Keats, and Shelley!
L. C. All of whom died before they were matured. You seem to resent development. In literature I am a mere dilettante. A fastidious reader, but not an expert. I know what I don’t like; but I never know what I shall like. At least twice a year I come across a book which gives me much pleasure. As it comes from the lending library it is never quite new. That is an added charm. If it happens to have made a sensation, the sensation is all over by the time it reaches me. The book has matured. A quite new book is always a little crude. It suggests an evening paper. There at least you will agree. But to come across a work which Henry James published, say, last year, is, I assure you, like finding a Hubert Van Eyck in the Brompton Road.
L. T. I wish I could share your enthusiasm, or that I could change places with you. Every year the personality of a new artist is revealed to you. I know you only pretend not to admire the modern school of painting. You find it a convenient pose. Your flora and your fauna are always receiving additions; while my garden is withered; my zoo is out of repair. The bars are broken; the tanks have run dry. There is hardly a trace of life except in the snake-house, and, as I mentioned, the last giraffe is dead.
L. C. Our friend, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, is fortunately able to give us a different account of the institution in Regent’s Park. You are quite wrong about modern painting. None of the younger men can paint at all. A few of them can draw, I admit. It is all they can do. The death of Charles Furse blasted all my hopes of English art. Whistler is dead; Sargent is an American.
L. T. Well, so is Henry James, if it comes to that. And so was Whistler. But I have seen the works of several young artists who I understand are carrying out the great traditions of painting. Ricketts, Shannon, Wilson
Steer, Rothenstein, Orpen, Nicholson, Augustus John are surely worthy successors to Turner, Alfred Stevens, and the Pre-Raphaelites.
L. C. They are merely connoisseurs gifted with expressing their appreciation of the past in paint. They appeal to you as a literary man. You like to detect in every stroke of their brushes an echo of the past. Their pictures have been heard, not seen. All the younger artists are committing burglary on the old masters.
L. T. It is you who are a disappointed optimist.
L. C. Not about literature or the drama. I seem to hear, with Ibsen’s ‘Master Builder,’ the younger generation knocking at the door.
L. T. It comes in without knocking in my experience; and generally has fig-leaves in its hair—a decided advance on the coiffure of Hedda Gabler’s lover.
L. C. But look at Bernard Shaw.
L. T. Why should I look at Bernard Shaw? I read his plays and am more than ever convinced that he has gone on the wrong lines. His was the opportunity. He made il gran
refuto. Some one said that George Saintsbury never got over the first night of Hernani. Shaw never recovered the première of Ghosts. He roofed our Thespian temple with Irish slate. His disciples found English drama solid brick and leave it plaster of Paris. Yet Shaw might have been another Congreve.
L. C. Troja fuit. We do not want another. I am sure you never went to the Court at all.
L. T. Oh, yes, I attended the last levée. But the drama is too large a subject, or, in England, too small a subject to discuss. We live, as Professor Mahaffy has reminded us, in an Alexandrian age. We are wounded with archæology and exquisite scholarship, and must drag our slow length along . . . We were talking about literature. Where are the essayists, the Lambs, and the Hazlitts? I know you are going to say Andrew Lang; I say it every day; it is like an Amen in the Prayer-book; it occurs quite as frequently in periodical literature. He was my favourite essayist, during the last fifteen years of the last century. What is he now? An historian, a folk-lorist, an archæologist, a controversialist.
I believe he is an expert on portraits of Mary Stuart. You were going on to say G. K. Chesterton—
L. C. No. I was going to say Max Beerbohm. Some of his essays I put beside Lamb’s, and above Hazlitt’s. He has style; but then I am prejudiced because he is the only modern artist I really admire. He is a superb draughtsman and our only caricaturist. Then there is George Moore. I don’t care for his novels, but his essays are delightful. George Moore really counts. Few people know so little about art; yet how delightfully he writes about it. Everything comes to him as a surprise. He gives you the same sort of enjoyment as you would derive from hearing a nun preach on the sins of smart society.
L. T. Moore is one of many literary Acteons who have mistaken Diana for Aphrodite.
L. C. You mean he is great dear; but he gets hold of the right end of the stick.
L. T. And he generally soils it. But you know nothing about literature. The age requires blood and Kipling gave it Condy’s Fluid (drinks barley water). The age requires
life, and Moore gave us a gallantee show from Montmartre (drinks barley water). Even I require life. To-morrow I am off to Aix.
L. C.—les Bains?
L. T. No, la-Chapelle!
L. C. Oh, then we shall probably meet. Thanks. I can get on my own overcoat. I shall probably be there myself in a few weeks.
ABBEY THOUGHTS.
Shall some memorial of Herbert Spencer be erected in the Abbey, or rather in what journalists love to call the ‘National Valhalla,’ the ‘English Pantheon,’ or the ‘venerable edifice,’ where, as Macaulay says, the dust of the illustrious accusers, et cetera——? The question was once agitated in a daily paper. It seems that the Dean, when approached on the subject, acted like one of his predecessors in the case of Byron. The Dean is in a very difficult position, because any decision of his must be severely criticised from one quarter or another. The Abbey retains, I understand, some of its pre-Reformation privileges, and is not under the jurisdiction of Bishop or Archbishop. Yet no one who has ever visited the Chapel of St. Edward the Confessor on October 13th, the festival of his translation, can accuse the Abbey authorities of bigotry or narrow-mindedness. Only a few years ago I fought my way, with
other Popish pilgrims, to the shrine of our patron Saint (as he was, until superseded by Saint George in the thirteenth century), and there I indulged in overt acts of superstition violating Article XXII. of ‘the Church of England by law established.’ A verger, with some colonial tourists, arrived during our devotions, but his voice was lowered out of regard for our feelings. Indeed, both he and the tourists adopted towards us an attitude of respectful curiosity (not altogether unpleasant), which was in striking contrast to the methods of the continental Suisse routing out worshippers from a side chapel of a Catholic church in order to show Baedeker-ridden sightseers an altar-piece by Rotto Rotinelli.
Thoughts of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley irresistibly mingled with my devotions. What had the poor fellows burnt for, after all? Here we were ostentatiously ignoring English history and the adjacent Houses of Parliament; outraging the rubrics by ritual observations for which poor curates in the East End are often suspended, and before now have been imprisoned. I could not help thinking that the Archbishop of Westminster would hardly
care to return these hospitalities, by permitting, on August 24th, a memorial service for Admiral Coligny in Westminster Cathedral. . . . I rose from my knees a new Luther, with something like a Protestant feeling, and scrutinised severely the tombs in Poets’ Corner. Even there I found myself confronted with an almost irritating liberalism. Here was Alexander Pope, who rejected all the overtures of Swift and Atterbury to embrace the Protestant faith. And there was Dryden, not, perhaps, a great ornament to my persuasion, but still a Catholic at the last. Dean Panther had not grudged poet Hind his niche in the National Valhalla (I knew I should be reduced to that periphrasis). And here was the mighty Charles Darwin, about whose reception into the English Pantheon (I have fallen again) I remember there was some trouble. Well, if precedent embalms a principle, I venture to raise a thin small voice, and plead for Herbert Spencer. ‘The English people,’ said a friendly French critic, ‘do not admire their great men because they were great, but because they reflect credit on themselves.’ So on the score of national vanity
I claim space for Herbert Spencer. Very few Englishmen have exercised such extraordinary influence on continental opinion, which Beaconsfield said was the verdict of posterity. On the news of his death, the Italian Chamber passed a vote of condolence with the English people. I suppose that does not seem a great honour to Englishmen, but to me, an enemy of United Italy, it seemed a great honour, not only to the dead but to the English people. Can you imagine the Swiss Federal Council sending us a vote of condolence on the death of Mr. Hall Caine or Mr. Robert Hichens?
Again, though it is ungrateful of me to mention the fact after my experiences of October 13th, the Abbey was not built nor endowed by people who anticipated the Anglican form of worship being celebrated within its walls, though I admit it has been restored by the adherents of that communion. The image of Milton, to take only one instance, would have been quite as objectionable to Henry III. or Abbot Islip as those of Darwin or Spencer. The emoluments bequeathed by Henry VII. and others for requiem masses are now devoted to the education
of Deans’ daughters and Canons’ sons. Where incensed altars used to stand, hideous monuments of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries wound the Gothic air with their monstrous ornaments and inapposite epitaphs. St. Paul’s may fairly be held sacred to Anglicanism, and I do not think any one would claim sepulture within its precincts for one who was avowedly hostile to Christian or Anglican sentiment. But I think the Abbey has now passed into the category of museums, and might well be declared a national monument under control of the State. The choir, and possibly the nave, should, of course, be severely preserved for whatever the State religion might be at the time. Catholics need not mourn the secularisation of the transepts and chapels, because Leo XIII. renounced officially all claims on the ancient shrines of the Catholic faith, and High Churchmen might console themselves by recalling the fact that Abbots were originally laymen.
My whole scheme would be a return to the practice of the Primitive Church, when priests were only allowed on sufferance inside abbeys
at all. The Low Church party need not be considered, because they can have no sentiment about what they regard as relics of superstition and Broad Churchmen could hardly complain at the logical development of their own principle. The Nonconformists, the backbone of the nation, could not be otherwise than grateful. The decision about admitting busts, statues, or bodies into the national and sacred ‘musée des morts’ (as the anti-clerical French might call it under the new constitution) would rest with the Home Secretary. This would be an added interest to the duties of a painstaking official, forming pleasant interludes between considering the remission of sentences on popular criminals: it would relieve the Dean and Chapter at all events from grave responsibility. The Home Secretary would always be called the Abbot of Westminster. How picturesque at the formation of a new Cabinet—‘Home Secretary and Abbot of Westminster, the Right Hon. Mr. So-and-So.’ The first duty of the Abbot will be to appoint a Royal Commission to consider the removal of hideous monuments which disfigure the edifice: nothing prior to 1700 coming
under its consideration. A small tablet would recall what has been taken away. Herbert Spencer’s claim to a statue would be duly considered, and, I hope, by a unanimous vote some of the other glaring gaps would be filled up. If the Abbey is full of obscurities, very dim religious lights, many of the illustrious names in our literature have been omitted: Byron, Shelley, Keats—to mention only these. There is no monument to Chatterton, one of the more powerful influences in the romantic movement, nor to William Blake, whose boyish inspiration was actually nourished amid that ‘Gothic supineness,’ as Mr. MacColl has finely said of him. Of all our poets and painters Blake surely deserves a monument in the grey church which became to him what St. Mary Redcliffe was to Chatterton. A window adapted from the book of Job (with the marvellous design of the Morning Stars) was, I am told, actually offered to, and rejected by, the late Dean. To Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the wonderful movement of which he was the dynamic force there should also be a worthy memorial; to Water Pater, the superb aside of English prose; to Cardinal Manning,
the Ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century; and Professor Huxley, that master of dialectics.
A young actor of my acquaintance, who bore the honoured name of Siddons, was invited to take part in the funeral service of the late Sir Henry Irving. His step-father was connected by marriage with the great actress, and he was very proud of his physical resemblance to her portrait by Reynolds. He had played with great success the part of Fortinbras in the provinces, and Mr. Alexander has assured me that he was the ideal impersonator of Rosencrantz. It was an open secret that he had refused Mr. Arthur Bourchier’s offer of that rôle in a proposed revival of Hamlet at the Garrick. Since the burial of Sir Henry Irving in the Abbey, he has never been seen: though I saw him myself in the funeral cortége. All his friends remember the curious exaltation in his manner a few days before the ceremony, and I cannot help thinking that in a moment of enthusiasm, realising that this was his only chance of burial in the Abbey, he took advantage of the bowed unobservant heads during the prayer of Committal and crept beneath the pall into the great actor’s tomb. What his
feelings were at the time, or afterwards when the vault was bricked up, would require the introspective pen of Mr. Henry James and the curious imagination of Mr. H. G. Wells to describe. I have been assured by the vergers that mysterious sounds were heard for some days after this historical occasion. Distressed by the loss of my friend, I applied to the Dean of Westminster and finally to Scotland Yard. I need not say that I was met with sacerdotal indifference on the one hand and with callous officialism on the other. I hope that under the Royal Commission which I have appointed the mystery will be cleared up. Not that I begrudge poor Siddons a niche with Garrick and Irving.
(1906.)
To Professor James Mayor, Toronto University.
THE ELETHIAN MUSE.
After chaperoning into Fleet Street the eleventh Muse, the rather Batavian lady who is not to be found in that Greek peerage, Lempriere’s Dictionary, an obliging correspondent from Edinburgh (an eminent writer to the Signet in our northern Thebes) inquired if there were any more muses who had escaped the students of comparative mythology. It is in response to his letter that I now present, as Mr. Charles Frohman would say, the thirteenth, the Elethian Muse.
Yet I can fancy people asking, Where is the twelfth, and over what art or science does she preside? According to Apollodorus (in a recently recovered fragment from Oxyrynchus), Jupiter, suffering from the chronic headaches consequent on his acrimonious conversations with Athena, decided to consult Vulcan, Æsculapius having come to be regarded as a quack. Mulciber (as we must now call him,
having used the name Vulcan once), suggested an extraordinary remedy, one of the earliest records of a homœopathic expedient. He prescribed that the king of gods and men should keep his ambrosial tongue in the side of his cheek for half an hour three times a day. The operation produced violent retching in the Capitoline stomach. And on the ninth day, from his mouth, quite unarmed, sprang the twelfth muse. The other goddesses were very disgusted; and even the gods declined to have any communication with the new arrival. Apollo, however, was more tolerant, and offered her an asylum on the top shelf of the celestial library. Ever afterwards Musagetes used to be heard laughing immoderately, even for a librarian to the then House of Lords. Jupiter, incensed at this irregularity, paid him a surprise visit one day in order to discover the cause. He stayed, however, quite a long time; and the other deities soon contracted the habit of taking their nectar into the library. With the decline of manners, the twelfth muse began to be invited to dessert, after Juno and the more reputable goddesses had retired. To cut a long story short, when
Pan died, in the Olympian sense very shortly afterwards, all the gods, as we know, took refuge on earth. Jupiter retired to Iceland, Aphrodite to Germany, Apollo to Picardy, but the twelfth muse wandered all over Europe, and found that she was really more appreciated than her sisters. The castle, the abbey, the inn, the lone ale-house on the Berkshire moors, all made her welcome. Finally she settled in Ireland, where, according to a protestant libel, she took the black veil in a nunnery.
She is older than the chestnuts of Vallombrosa. Perhaps of all the ancient goddesses time has chilled her least. Her unfathomable smile wears a touch of something sinister in it, but she has a new meaning for every generation. And yet for Aretino there was some further magic of crimson on her lips and cheeks, lost for us. She is a solecism for the convalescent, and has given consolation to the brave. She has been a diver in rather deep seas and a climber in somewhat steep places. Her censers are the smoking-rooms of clubs; and her presence-lamps are schoolboys’ lanterns. Though held the friend of liars and
brutes, she has lived on the indelicacies of kings, and has made even pontiffs laugh. Her mysteries are told in the night-time, and in low whispers to the garish day. She lingers over the stable-yard (no doubt called mews for that reason). Her costly breviaries, embellished with strange illuminations, are prohibited under Lord Campbell’s Act. Stars mark the places where she has been. Sometimes a scholar’s fallacy, a sworn foe to Dr. Bowdler, she is Notre Dame de Milet, our Lady of Limerick.
* * * * *
But it is of her sister I would speak, the thirteenth sister, who was created to keep the eleventh in countenance. She presides over the absurdities of prose. She is responsible for the stylistic flights of Pegasus when, owing to the persuasive eloquence of the Hon. Stephen Coleridge, his bearing-rein has been abolished, and he kicks over the traces.
It was the Elethian Muse who inspired that Oxford undergraduate’s peroration to his essay on the Characteristics of St. John’s Gospel—
‘Furthermore, we may add that St. John’s Gospel is characterised by a tone of fervent piety which is totally wanting in those of the other Evangelists’—
and she hovered over the journalist who, writing for a paper which we need not name, referred to Bacchus as
‘that deity whose identity in Greek and Roman mythology is inseparably connected with the over-indulgence of intoxicating liquors.’
There are prose beauties, Elethian jewels, hidden away in Baedeker’s mines of pregnant information and barren fact. I know it is fashionable to sneer at Baedeker, especially when you are writing little rhapsodies about remoter parts of Italy, where you have found his knowledge indispensable, if exiguous. You must always kick away the ladder when you arrive at literary distinction. I, who am still climbing and still clinging, can afford to be more generous. Let me, therefore, crown Baedeker with an essayist’s parsley, or an academic laurel, ere I too become selfish, forgetful, egoistical, and famous.
In Southern France, 1891 edition, p. 137, you find—
To the Pic de Nere, 3¾ hrs. from Luz, there and back 6½ 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 passage. 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 passages 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 superstitious, a brute in appetite, 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 identity; 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 God be very angry if He knew the Italians worshipped idols and a piece of bread? A. God 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 pronounced 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 Othellos; 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 gratitude to the Times and the Daily Mail for bringing Encyclopædias 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 Encyclopædias, 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 assume 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 grassland 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 quantities 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 assert, there is no such thing as decay. Decay is an intellectual Mrs. Harris, a highly useful entity wherewith the journalistic Gamps try to frighten Betsy Prig. Of course an obvious objection to my assertion 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 illustrations 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 assertions 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 principal 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 Marseilles, 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 passage; 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 title, 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 asserting 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 Massaccio 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 debasement 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 classical ideals, paved the way for the naturalism of the misnamed Romantic school. We were told, a short time ago, that Sienese painting anticipated 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 Ptolemæan 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 attitude when the writer comes to a period which he dislikes. Restoration Comedy is often said to be a period of debasement, 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 noble 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. ‘Coarse animalism draped in the most seductive hues of art and romance, we will not analyse 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 Titian 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 assure you throughout that period they have always been quite as bad as they are now. But we do not want painters like Titian or Velasquez; we want something else. If painters were like Titian 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 noble 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 documents 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 æsthetic 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, assuming 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 mediævalism; 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. Dickens openly attacked them; Thackeray ridiculed the new tendencies; every one, great and small, spoke of decay and decline. The French word Décadence had not crept into use. However, the weary Titan 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 circumstances—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 competition 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 Glastonbury, 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 passed 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 assertion 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 hitherto 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:
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 ægrotat in botany instead of a pass 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 décadence 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 assertions 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, Shelley, 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 passed 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, assured 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 ‘Duchess 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. Dickens, 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 Dickens 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’école décadent’ 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 assured 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 Mallarmé, 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 sex—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 sex 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 emancipation of woman; and asserts 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 God 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 Parnassus 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 manuscript 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.