No, Chelsea is nowadays too successful to be a locality for artists. Cheyne Walk has become too famous and too rich, for artists cannot live together, unless it is in a sort of Alsatia where you must pay your footing in such coin as the keeper thinks fit. Nowadays, the arts tend to scatter. They can be found in Chalk Farm, even in Paddington, some say in Bayswater, though this is not likely. They tend to live more privately than they do in Paris, where half the day seems to be spent at the Lilas. (Oh, how I hate the Lilas! The last time I went there, there was an enormous crowd; a hairy Russian philosopher stood on my right foot while he read bad French translations from the Sanskrit; meanwhile, two young people stood on my left foot and made love.) In London the arts meet at their communal places, in certain restaurants which they discover and then forsake, at the Coq d’Or, at little dancing clubs. If only the Philistine hated them more, they might cling closer.
Still, the arts are not, in London, as absent and ignored as the foreigner likes to think. It is true, as Mr Nevinson says, that owing chiefly to our Press, to our loathsome, tradition-loving public schools and our antiquity-stinking universities, the average Englishman is not merely suspicious of the new in all intellectual and artistic experiment, but he is mentally trained to be so unsportsmanlike as to try to kill every new endeavour in embryo. It is true, but it does not matter. The arts are vigorous, and in the end, those who came to kill stay to buy. That will be seen as time goes on.
Is it, I wonder, a symptom of the English attitude to the arts, that the chapter which concerns them should, in the words of Mr Henry James, drag far in the dusty rear of this book? Perhaps, though London of to-day is so vivid and so eloquent, so full of sharp colour and true line that, when I consider her music, I am inclined to think that she would not have attained her crisp and harmonious form if some creative instinct within her humorous, pessimistic, and languid people had not presided over her birth, and favoured her composite life.
Transcriber’s Note
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unpaired quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unpaired.
Except for the cover and Frontispiece, all of the original images were shades of green. In other copies of the original book, those images were black/gray. The Transcriber believes the green was due to discoloration caused by ageing, so in this eBook, those images appear in black/gray.
Page [20]: “Somerset Maugham” was misprinted as “Somerset Maughan”; corrected here.
Page [114]: “s’embêter” was printed as “s’embèter”; corrected here.