That there are many English artists who are in a sense afraid of ugliness, in other words, who will only make pretty imitations of things recognised as beautiful, is not to be denied: it might almost be said that artists may be divided into those who have an unreasonable fear of ugliness and those who have a reprehensible love of it. Many difficult questions are involved in such a discussion: often two disputing parties will be found to be fundamentally in agreement. The Times critic was emphasising the truth that unoriginality is bad; Sir Sidney Colvin the equal truth that bogus originality is bad. But his remarks reminded us of a great many observations we have all recently heard with respect to certain tendencies to be observed in contemporary art or pseudo-art. The elderly and many of the soberer young are alarmed at much that they see painted or published. What does it all mean? they ask. Are the world's artists rushing over a steep place into the sea? Is there some new revelation in what looks at first sight like obscure rubbish? Are these noisy rioters really the young? Do they really hate everything that has ever been considered true? Will the whole of the coming generation be captured by them? Mingled with the dislike there is a great deal of bewilderment. Men doubt themselves. After all, new artistic developments have often been incomprehensible; these things are undeniably incomprehensible, so perhaps they are new artistic developments. Those who are tired of strife shiver, wrap their coats around them, prepare to retire into corners where the cold blast cannot reach them. But we really do not think that they should be so depressed, or that more vigorous men like Sir Sidney Colvin should be so alarmed: a rational diagnosis of the situation dissipates these apparent dangers.
Now we had better begin by premising that in the sphere of the fine arts we are not (these things are never taken for granted) denying the value of modern developments and the possibility of later ones. Not all the technical experiments of modern intellectual artists (akin to experiments in new media) may be fruitful, but at the centre of most movements, however extravagant, may be found an original artist who has either a peculiar way of looking at the world (El Greco is an example) or desires to experiment with some method in order to find out what results may accrue from it. But it is not a good thing to base a theory on the mannerisms of an original artist; it is still worse to build a convention on his unsuccessful experiments; and worst of all, perhaps, for an artist to paint not what he sees as he sees it through the medium of his temperament, but what some philosophical critic, with a distaste for both Nature and humanity, tells him to paint. A painter with intelligence, however, will soon tire of something which produces results which do not interest him; and the painting of foolish pictures by people who desire merely to attract attention is to some extent limited because anything that would deceive anybody involves a good deal of time and trouble. The fine arts will look after themselves; few members of the public will pay large sums for pictures that convey nothing to them. The printed word is in a rather different category. The world is always full of ineffective people who have a desire to write: a thing which can be done at any moment by anyone who has pen, ink, and paper. They also desire to attract attention by their writing. In our time "stunts" for their assistance have been discovered which have never been hit upon before.
The various stunts with which we are now familiar have spread over the whole world with a rapidity that no genuine spiritual movement or technical discovery has ever equalled. Just before the war that vivacious Southerner, Signor Marinetti, introduced us to the type-page, which consisted of capital letters and notes of exclamation tumbled about in apparent confusion. The first large English enterprise of the Futurist-Vorticist-Cubist kind was (though it contained normal patches) the magenta magazine Blast. It succumbed shortly after a hostile critic, consulting his Webster, had discovered the definition: "Blast:—a flatulent disease of sheep." But it died to give place to countless smaller magazines and books containing bewildering designs and extraordinary poems. The drawings and, to the eye which can take in only their typography, the poems are indistinguishable from others which are being published all over the world. The blagueurs attach themselves to anything which will give them publicity. There is something pathetic about the way in which, wherever the political Bolsheviks get into office, they print the verses and cartoons of the artistic anarchists. They don't understand them; all they know is that the bourgeois dislike them; so in Munich last Easter, and (we daresay) in Moscow now, there is an excellent opening for those who, for all anyone would be able to say to the contrary, have only to scratch out the old titles of their interlocked triangles and write underneath "Uprising of Proletariat," or some such thing. The Vorticists and verslibrists exist from Spain to Sweden. We saw this month a most beautifully produced volume from Tiflis. The words, scattered about in the Paris-and-London style, were in Georgian and Russian; but no translation was necessary; when one was supplied, the words and the lack of sense were precisely what we expected. They might have been Italian or English; and in the illustrations, mingled with the parallelograms, could be seen fragments of wasp-waisted "nuts" in opera-hats and shirt fronts, such as never were seen in Tiflis, where their heads are clad with fur. In a recent number of the Monthly Chapbook Mr. Flint, giving specimens of good and bad contemporary verse, quoted one gentleman who begins a poem with:
éo ié iu ié
é é ié io ié
ui ui io iè
aéoé iaoé.
And another poet who writes:
vrron—on—on—on—on—on
vrrr vrrr vrrr
hihihi.
It isn't really serious; but is any of this kind of thing serious? And is this mere noise at bottom sillier than much of the free verse to which some superficial meaning can be attached? We quote from an American review which, as a whole, is sensible and good these lines from a poem called Autumn Night: