Two interesting examples are Madame Catherine Breshkovskaya and Mr. Samuel Gompers. Time was, and not so many years ago, when both condoned violence—the violence of the Russian Nihilist, the violence of the American dynamiter—as a short road to justice. Their attitude was not unlike that of the first Southern lynchers: “We take the law into our own hands, because conditions are unbearable, and the State affords no adequate relief.” But Madame Breshkovskaya has seen the forces she helped to set in motion sweeping in unanticipated and shattering currents. She has seen a new terrorism arise and wield the weapons of the old to crush man’s sacred freedom. The peasants she loved have been beyond the reach of her help. The country for which she suffered thirty years of exile repudiated her. Radicals in Europe and in the United States mocked at her. The Grandmother of the Revolution has become a conservative old lady, concerned, as good grandmothers ought to be, with the welfare of little children, and pleading pitifully for order and education.
As for Mr. Gompers, his unswerving loyalty to the cause of the Allies, his unswerving rejection of Germany and all her works, will never be forgiven by pacifists, by the men and women who had no word of protest or of pity when Belgium was invaded, when the Lusitania was sunk, when towns were burned, civilians butchered, and girls deported; and who recovered their speech only to plead for the nation that had disregarded human sufferings and human rights. Mr. Gompers helped as much as any one man in the United States to win the war, and winning a war is very distasteful to those who do not want to fight. Therefore has he been relegated by international Socialists, who held hands for four years with Pan-German Socialists, to the ranks of the conservatives. When the “Nation,” speaking ex cathedra, says, “The authority of the old machine-type of labour leader like Mr. Gompers is impaired beyond help or hope,” we hear the echo of the voices which babbled about capitalism and profiteering in April, 1917. The Great War has made and unmade the friendships of the world. If the radicals propose it as a test, as a test the conservatives will accept it.
The successive revolutions which make the advance-guard of one movement the rear-guard of the next are as expeditious and as overwhelming in the field of art as in the fields of politics and sociology. In the spring of 1877 an exhibition of two hundred and forty pictures, the work of eighteen artists, was opened in the rue le Peletier, Paris. For some reason, never sufficiently explained, Parisians found in these canvases a source of infinite diversion. They went to the exhibition in a mood of obvious hilarity. They began to laugh while they were still in the street, they laughed as they climbed the stairs, they were convulsed with laughter when they looked at the pictures, they laughed every time they talked them over with their friends.
Now what were these mirth-provoking works of art? Not cubist diagrams, not geometrical charts of human anatomy, not reversible landscapes, not rainbow-tinted pigs. Such exhilarants lay in wait for another century and another generation. The pictures which so abundantly amused Paris in 1877 were painted by Claude Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir,—men of genius, who, having devised a new and brilliant technique, abandoned themselves with too little reserve to the veracities of impressionism. They were not doctrinaires. The peace they disturbed was only the peace of immobility. But they were drunk with new wine. Their strength lay in their courage and their candour; their weakness in the not unnatural assumption that they were expressing the finalities of art.
Defenders they had in plenty. No pioneer can escape from the hardship of vindication. Years before, Baudelaire had felt it incumbent upon himself, as a professional mutineer, to support the “fearless innovations” of Manet. Zola, always on the lookout for somebody to attack or to defend, was equally enthusiastic and equally choleric. Loud disputation rent the air while the world sped on its way, and lesser artists discovered, to their joy, what a facile thing it was to produce nerve-racking novelties. In 1892, John La Farge, wandering disconsolately through the exhibitions of Paris, wondered if there might not still be room for something simple in art.
Ever and always the reproach cast at the conservative is that he has been blind in the beginning to the beauty he has been eventually compelled to recognize; and ever and always he replies that, in the final issue, he is the guardian of all beauty. His are the imperishable standards, his is the love for a majestic past, his is the patience to wait until the wheat has been sorted from the chaff, and gathered into the granaries of the world. If he be hostile to the problematic, which is his weakness, he is passionately loyal to the tried and proven, which is his strength. He is as necessary to human sanity as the progressive is necessary to human hope.
Civilization and culture are very old and very beautiful. They imply refinement of humour, a disciplined taste, sensitiveness to noble impressions, and a wise acceptance of the laws of evidence. These things are not less valuable for being undervalued. “At the present time,” says the most acute of American critics, Mr. Brownell, “it is quite generally imagined that we should gain rather than lose by having Raphael without the Church, and Rembrandt without the Bible.” The same notion, less clearly defined, is prevalent concerning Milton and Dante. We had grown weary of large and compelling backgrounds until the Great War focussed our emotions. We are impatient still of large and compelling traditions. The tendency is to localization and analysis.
The new and facile experiments in verse, which have some notable exponents, are interesting and indecisive. Midway between the enthusiasm of the experimenters (which is not contagious) and the ribald gibes of the disaffected (which are not convincing) the conservative critic practises that watchful waiting, so safe in the world of art, so hazardous in the world of action. He cannot do as he has been bidden, and judge the novel product by its own standards, for that would be to exempt it from judgment. Nothing—not even a German—can be judged by his—or its—own standard. If there is to be any standard at all, it must be based on comparison. Keen thoughts and vivid words have their value, no matter in what form they are presented; but unless that form be poetical, the presentation is not poetry. There is a world of truth in Mr. Masters’s brief and bitter lines:
“Beware of the man who rises to power
From one suspender.”