And, indeed, what is this posterity that we should so appeal to it? Are we not ourselves fallible and imperfect mortals, posterity to the Victorians? I can see Browning walking with Tennyson in the Elysian Fields. They discuss the literary journalism of their day. “It was bad,” Browning mumbles into his beard,—“very bad indeed. There was a silly fellow called John Stuart Mill—what was it he said about that first book of mine? ‘Most self-conscious thing he’d ever read.’ But I didn’t worry. I looked ahead. I was content to let posterity decide; and I have my reward. I read last week such a charming thing about me by, let me see now, a very vigorous young person I thought—ah, yes, Miss Rebecca West....”
The other day I listened for upwards of a quarter of an hour to the complaint of a young poet whose works had been mishandled grievously in the London Mercury. Highly did he heap abuse on the heads of Mr J. C. Squire and Mr Edward Shanks; nor was he less generous to critics unconnected with that periodical: to Middleton Murry, and T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lynd; one by one they were presented to the lash of ridicule. Finally the injured poet turned a loving, a valedictory eye towards the great men of the past—Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Emerson, Carlyle. “There,” he said, “were critics for you.” And, after a pause: “Ah, well, in fifty years’ time....” And he shrugged his shoulders as one who can afford to ignore such triflings in the face of time.
I said nothing. I am a placid person; I dislike quarrels. This, though, is what, if I were fashioned differently, I might have said: “My good, my very good friend,” I would have said, “you despise your own generation. You are content to appeal to posterity. You place your faith in the traditions that have been handed down to you by great writers in the past. Very good, but let me remind you of this—that Matthew Arnold too despised his generation and made his appeal to posterity. It was his hope that in 1923 he would receive the commendation of Robert Lynd, of J. C. Squire, and of Edward Shanks. What was good enough for Matthew Arnold should be good enough for you. The judgments of posterity are likely to be no more profound than those of 1923. For one day this posterity that you so worship will be to-day, and in this club and in that armchair will be sitting a disgruntled poet telling an indifferent friend how much better things were done in 1923. We are no better and no worse than other generations. We are a little different, that is all. And, because we are a little different, what you, my friend, are writing now may be more readily understood in 1950 than it is to-day. But, for that reason, your work will be of no higher quality than that of Walter de la Mare, whose verses give us such pleasure now. If you are popular in 1950 you will be little read in 1980. For that is the way things happen, and your talk about Matthew Arnold is a mixture of vanity and of snobbishness; let me hear no more of it.”
I should like to believe that there is to be found somewhere a standard of literary criticism, but the power to appreciate beauty is a quality relative to ourselves: and there are times when it seems to me to be as vain to search for a standard of beauty in literature as it would be to search for one in woman. We respond to a certain type of beauty. And we say of other types: “I am sure, my dear fellow, that she is perfectly delightful. I am not in the least surprised that you are desperately enraptured. But, for myself, as I said, she leaves me cold.” We make no attempt to explain or adjudge a beauty in woman that we cannot understand. Why, then, should we speak so dogmatically of a beauty in literature that does not touch us; why should we deny the existence of a beauty to which we are insensible?
There was a painter once whose personality it would be discreet to hide under the pseudonym of Eric Walker. He had never seen the country. He did not know that trees existed outside the carefully tended borders of Burnden Park. The only other stretch of grass he had ever seen was from the terraces of a football ground. For him the sky had been always dim with smoke, cut by the outline of huge chimney stacks. The only beauty he could understand was the clean, hard efficiency of a machine. With eager eyes he had seen stones lifted into the air by iron arms; he had watched the glow of furnaces flickering on polished steel. For hours on end he had stood beneath the great factory at North Town, while the sunlight cut the wreathing smoke into hard, sharp angles. The noise and glare of machinery enchanted him, and when a discerning teacher had discovered that he could draw, it was only natural that he should try to interpret in terms of line and colour those particular sights and sounds that alone had for him an æsthetic value.
Success came to him easily and quickly. He was taken up by the right people, his pictures were discussed in the right circles, and when his exhibition came on the right critics said the right things in the right papers. Eric Walker suddenly found himself rich; he came up to London, was made much of, sold his pictures easily. For six months he was the adored child of Mayfair.
After a while, however, his welcome grew less warm. At the time of his reception Gerald Garstin wrote: “Here is a young man who has successfully interpreted the hard, calculating commercialism of the North. In a fury of indignation he has revealed the soullessness of modern conditions. All his life he has been surrounded by squalor and ugliness. What may he not do when he has seen more of life and has learnt to appreciate beauty in its fullest sense?” And Mayfair had endorsed this opinion. “Such a wonderful young man,” they would say to one another. “And to think that he spent all those years in that terrible place, nothing but smoke and chimneys. What a revelation it must be to him to come to London, and how beautifully he will be able to express it.” And the patrons of modern art waited for Eric’s delight to break forth in a riot of form and colour.
No such thing, however, happened. At the yearly exhibition of the Chelsea Group he was represented by a large picture of a train entering a tube station as it would be seen through the eyes of the driver. At the Florence Galleries he exhibited a picture called “Charing Cross Road,” in which a small boy stood watching the glowing furnaces of Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell, and to the New Movement Society he contributed “Liftman at Piccadilly Circus.” The announcement that he was at work on “Surrey and Middlesex at the Oval” gave promise of better things, but his followers were again disappointed. In a far corner of the canvas was a patch of green and one white figure, the remainder was occupied by the telegraph and the gasometers. It was generally agreed that Eric Walker had not fulfilled his promise.
“Interesting though this work may be,” wrote Gerald Garstin, “it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called beautiful, and without beauty where is art?” Once again Mayfair echoed the pronouncement of its trusted critic. “It’s not beautiful all that harping on machinery and ugliness. I am sure he can’t have a nice mind. Why doesn’t he look on the pleasant side of things?”
To Eric Walker this change of front came abruptly and incomprehensibly. “Beauty,” he said. “Beauty, what do they mean? Aren’t my pictures beautiful?” To him there was nothing in the world lovelier than the angles that sunshine cut in smoke, than the glow of a furnace on damp flesh, than the smooth, hard rhythm of a piston. “Beauty,” he said, “that’s the one thing I have really striven for, to get the full value of these things I have enjoyed, to interpret the magic of these sounds and colours, to make others realise the perfect form, poise, balance of a machine. What do they mean?”